The manananggal splits herself at the waist each night, her upper torso sprouting bat wings to hunt pregnant women in their sleep. The penanggalan’s severed head trails intestines through darkness, searching for blood. Rangda spreads plague across Balinese villages with her supernatural powers. Across Southeast Asia, the pattern repeats: dismembered female bodies, supernatural evil, dead children. Why would there even be monsters? And why do female monsters—the evil ugly woman, the dismembered flying monster—appear with disturbing consistency across the region?

When I asked the Large Language Model (LLM) Claude AI these questions, it answered:

• Threat detection and survival: Our ancestors survived by being paranoid. A hyperactive threat-detection system that sees dangers that aren’t there is safer than missing real ones. Monsters express evolved anxieties about predators, disease, darkness, and being attacked while vulnerable.

• Explaining the unexplained: Strange noises, missing livestock, sudden deaths, and mysterious illnesses needed explanations. The manananggal, for instance, could explain nighttime disturbances or pregnancy complications.

• Social enforcement: Monster stories often target transgressors. The aswang sometimes targets pregnant women or takes the form of norm-violators, reinforcing behavioral codes and warning children to stay close to home.

• Universal patterns with local flavor: Specific details vary, but you see recurring archetypes—the predatory woman, the shapeshifter, the undead, the child-snatcher. This reflects common human fears (nighttime vulnerability, anxieties about women’s power, fear of death) expressed through local cultures.

LLMs are great for getting an idea of conventional perspectives. For instance, the illustrations above were made by ChatGPT. Being an LLM, ChatGPT based its drawings on patterns related to keywords used in the prompt. Rangda tends to be depicted as a monstrous female mask in traditional Balinese dances and the manananggal tends to have wings in Philippine films and comics. What’s interesting is that across these individual generations, we can see patterns: monstrosity (e.g., cannibalism) and dismemberment.

Claude’s output above also gives us an idea of conventional explanations of the phenomenon of monsters in myths. Conventional does not mean true or complete. In the case of the Southeast Asian female monsters depicted above, I argue here that René Girard’s explanation—the scapegoat mechanism—is better than the conventional ones. In this article, I relay Girard’s theory and apply it to our selection of monsters. Then I’ll use David Deutsch’s criteria for “good explanations” to show why Girard’s theory is better than the conventional explanations. I’ll then close with a discussion of how understanding the scapegoat mechanism enables us to reimagine these monsters—not as supernatural threats, but as victims whose stories demand to be told from their perspective rather than their persecutors.

Myths as Justification for Collective Murders

René Girard (1923-2015) was a French-American academic famous for two theories: mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. He connects the two, but for our purposes here, we will just focus on the latter.

To Girard, myths are records of real events in the past that have been distorted throughout time both from incomplete transmission and deliberate obfuscation. These myths have commonalities because human societies across the world faced the same threats to survival as they evolved greater cognitive powers. These myths also record their common solution: the collective murder of an individual or a minority—the scapegoat.

Girard imagines the evolution of the proto-human and human mind across millennia and sees inevitable violence. Echoing Aristotle, he observed that humans are the most mimetic of creatures. We copy our desires from the people around us. Since objects of desire are limited (e.g., sexual mates), this inevitably leads to rivalry and violence. I’d add that we also developed much greater episodic memory than other animals and the ability to tell stories. Vengeance transcends generations. Murder is repaid with murder, and before long the incipient society is in an all-out war with itself.

The human societies that survived must have found a solution for the chaos that stemmed from mimetic rivalry and from inexplicable calamities like plagues. To Girard, this solution was the scapegoat mechanism. The chaos is blamed on a person or a minority, usually an individual or a group who stands out—the king, the stranger, the witch. Everyone is united in blaming the scapegoat and in their murder, so nobody is left to exact vengeance. Peace is restored. Stories are told to explain what just happened. To justify the collective murder, the scapegoats are turned into monsters with supernatural powers. Rangda is a witch that poisoned an entire village because the king refused to marry her daughter. The aswang and phi pop eat human flesh. The manananggal and penanggalan killed babies in the womb.

The Scapegoat Mechanism Also Explains Ritual Sacrifice and Massacres

What makes Girard’s explanation better than the conventional ones? To answer this, we need evaluative criteria. David Deutsch provides a useful framework in The Beginning of Infinity, where he defines what makes explanations “good.” To keep this article focused on monsters rather than epistemology, I’ll apply just one of his criteria: reach.

According to Deutsch, good explanations typically have reach: they solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve. For instance, the theory of evolution was developed to explain the diversity of species and their adaptations to their environments. But its reach extends far beyond biology—it illuminates patterns in linguistics (how languages evolve), computer science (genetic algorithms), economics (market dynamics), and even culture itself (memetics). A theory with reach doesn’t just answer the specific question it was designed for; it unlocks understanding across multiple domains.

On another dimension, good explanations are supported by multiple independent lines of evidence that all converge on the same conclusion. The theory of evolution demonstrates this: DNA sequencing reveals genetic relationships between species, the fossil record shows transitional forms across geological time, and vestigial structures—like the hind leg bones in whales, the human appendix, or the remnants of eyes in blind cave fish—all independently confirm the same story of descent with modification. When completely different types of evidence point to the same explanation, it’s a strong sign we’re onto something true about reality.

Girard’s scapegoat mechanism demonstrates both remarkable reach and convergent evidence. Three lines of evidence from Southeast Asia all point to the same underlying mechanism:

First, the ubiquity of ritual human sacrifice: Why do we find ritual human sacrifice in practically all societies prior to the axial age? In the Philippines, Narciso Tan’s comprehensive study Púgot: Head Taking, Ritual Cannibalism, and Human Sacrifice in the Philippines documents these practices across the country even until the 20th century. If we broaden this to include animal sacrifice, the practice becomes a cultural universal, like song and dance. The conventional explanations for monster myths—threat detection, explaining the unexplained, social enforcement—cannot explain this universality. Why would all human cultures independently arrive at the same gruesome practice? The scapegoat mechanism provides an answer: these rituals are controlled reenactments of original spontaneous collective murders that once saved communities from self-destruction. Because these foundational murders magically brought peace from chaos, they became imbued with the sacred—the victims transformed into gods or demons who demanded appeasement, and the sacrificial act became man’s access to supernatural power.

Second, the historical record: Jump forward to 17th century Manila and we find the massacre of sangleys (economic migrants from Southern China) in 1603, 1639, and 1662. These killings followed a pattern. During times of crisis and instability in the Spanish colonial order, tens of thousands of sangleys were collectively murdered by the colonial militias led by Spaniards and mostly composed of indigenous men. A similar pattern emerged in Indonesia centuries later: in 1965, an estimated 500,000 people branded as “Communists” were massacred during a period of political collapse and military-led consolidation of power following the attempted coup against Sukarno. In the 1998 riots during Indonesia’s political and economic crisis, Chinese Indonesians were the focal point of collective violence.

Third, the contemporary record: Fast forward to 2016 and Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” in the Philippines. Drug users and dealers became the new witches—blamed for the nation’s problems, stripped of their humanity through political rhetoric, and sacrificed in public displays of violence. Duterte explicitly promised collective murder as a solution to social chaos, and it worked politically precisely because the scapegoat mechanism resonates so deeply. Thousands were killed, their bodies left in the streets as modern-day “spectacles of the scaffold.” This wasn’t because Duterte read Girard or Foucault—it worked because he understood from his experience of ruling Davao what Girard called “the ultimate craft of statesmanship.”

Three completely different types of evidence—universal ritual practice, historical massacre, contemporary politics—separated by centuries and arising from completely different contexts, yet all revealing the same underlying mechanism. Like DNA, fossils, and vestigial structures pointing independently to evolution, these convergent lines of evidence suggest Girard identified something fundamental about human social behavior.

The Rangda-Barong Ritual: Southeast Asian Female Monsters in Living Form

In 1951, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson released Trance and Dance in Bali, a black-and-white film documenting a traditional Balinese ritual they recorded in the 1930s. The timing matters—this was before mass tourism transformed Bali’s sacred ceremonies into cultural performances, and crucially, before the homogenizing forces of globalization could flatten these ancient patterns. For Filipinos, this film offers a recording of the same mythological patterns at “high definition” compared to our oral and written folklore, preserved in a form that escaped both Christianization and Westernization. If you’d like to watch the 20-minute film, you can easily find it through an internet search.

In the Balinese performance, Rangda is blamed for a plague devastating the village. The king’s emissary transforms into the dragon Barong to confront her. Knife-wielding dancers—young men from the village—repeatedly attempt to stab the witch but fail and collapse. The dragon revives them with holy water, putting them into a trance state. Women dancers then arrive and, at a scream from one of their number, go into trance seizures and turn their krises against themselves. The men likewise point their knives at themselves. The witch never dies (just as plagues return and new crises emerge). After the theatrical performance ends, the ritual culminates in animal sacrifice—the performer who played the witch, still in trance, bites off a chicken’s head—and the performers gradually recover from their trance.

What makes this ritual so revealing is its specificity. Mead and Bateson weren’t trying to prove Girard’s theory—they recorded this ritual when Girard was barely a child. Yet it depicts with uncanny precision every element Girard identified: a community in crisis, a scapegoat blamed for catastrophe, collective violence that unites the mob, and sacrifice as resolution. This is our own mythology—the aswang who causes mysterious deaths, the manananggal who steals fetuses, the communal violence against the accused witch—preserved in ritual form before modernity could obscure its meaning.

The conventional explanations Claude AI offered—threat detection, explaining the unexplained, social enforcement—can’t account for this convergence. They might explain why we fear monsters, but not why we systematically murder the people we label as monsters, ritualize these murders through sacrifice, and repeat the pattern across centuries whenever a skilled politician knows how to activate it. Only the scapegoat mechanism explains why ritual sacrifice is universal, why the same pattern appears in a Balinese temple ritual, why Spanish colonial massacres followed predictable triggers, and why a 21st-century populist’s rhetoric worked so effectively.

Reimagining the Monster

The scapegoat mechanism reveals why female monsters proliferate across Southeast Asian mythology with such disturbing consistency. The dismembered bodies—the penanggalan’s severed head trailing intestines, the manananggal’s bisected torso—preserve in mythological form the actual violence inflicted on real women. These weren’t supernatural beings who chose to split themselves apart; they were victims torn apart by mobs, their mutilated corpses transformed in collective memory from evidence of atrocity into proof of monstrosity. When communities faced crises they could not explain—plagues, famines, infant mortality—the defenseless and the strange—e.g., old women—became convenient targets. Once murdered, their deaths required justification.

We Southeast Asians hold supreme respect for our ancestors. We preserve their good names, honor their memories, maintain their shrines. This reverence becomes a prison when the ancestors we honor were themselves murderers, when the traditions we preserve encode ancient atrocities.

The West is not far ahead in this unveiling. Only in recent decades has Hollywood begun to realize that their witches were never guilty, that the trials and burnings were state propaganda. Films like Wicked and Maleficent represent tentative steps toward truth: what if the monsters were just women, and the real evil belonged to those who labeled them monstrous?

This is precisely the kind of radical reimagining that contemporary Philippine literature and visual arts must undertake. When we understand the manananggal as a dismembered scapegoat rather than a supernatural predator, when we recognize the aswang as a lynched woman rather than a baby-eating witch, we can begin to tell stories that speak the truth the victims instead of the violence. In the next chapter, I share my attempt at this kind of storytelling with an except from my historical novel, Rajah Versus Conquistador. Whenever I describe this book to people familiar with René Girard, I say that it is science fiction, but the science is anthropology and the anthropology is Girardian.

We can honor our ancestors’ memory while refusing to perpetuate their lies. We can preserve tradition while refusing to let tradition preserve injustice. The urgency of this reimagining isn’t merely academic or artistic. The same mechanism that justified the murder of women accused of being aswang continues to operate whenever politicians weaponize the scapegoat mechanism. Until we excavate these myths and expose the violence encoded within them, the scapegoat mechanism will continue to operate, waiting for the next crisis to activate it. The monsters are waiting to tell their side of the story—and in telling it, they offer us the chance to break the cycle before the next mob forms, before the next scapegoat is chosen, before another street fills with bodies. We need only give them voice.

If the reader is interested in a more in-depth and scholarly treatment of the application of René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism to Philippine myths and political violence, see: Kahlil Corazo, “The Scapegoat Mechanism in Southeast Asian Ritual, Myth, and Politics: From Mead and Bateson’s Trance and Dance in Bali to Massacres in the Philippines and Indonesia,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 32 (2025): 67–89,https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.32.0067. It is behind an academic paywall, so please email the author at sugbu@corazo.org if you don’t have access but would like a PDF copy.

What I failed to make sense of through explication, I've experienced through story. For more than a year, I lived inside the lives of the characters of my historical novel which imagines 1521 not only through history but through the anthropologies and psychologies of the Southeast Asian strongman and the 16th century Iberian hidalgo. The Magellan in my novel is a conflicted man. His iron will broke through his king's rejection, drove him to defect to Spain, and held his fleet together through mutiny and desertion. But the Pacific broke him. Months of scurvy, starvation, and empty horizon stripped him of the certainties he carried out of Seville. In the novel, the conquistador and the Christian in him come to a head right before the battle of Mactan, where he will lose his life.

It was inside this conflict that I’ve glimpsed an answer to the question of violence after Christ’s entry into history, while acknowledging the evil in and around me, and the cost of keeping them in order. David Bentley Hart’s opening of his critique of René Girard’s (1980s-era) understanding of sacrifice in The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), where he unveils the Apollonian underpinnings of this order, gave me the grammar to write this chapter. The conclusion, however, was a surprise.

Chapter 20

Apollo Versus the Crucified

April 24th, 1521

In his cabin aboard the Trinidad, Magellan kneels before his small altar, the evening’s candle guttering in the tropical breeze. The worn logbooks lie open before him, their precise columns a comfort after the unsettling events for the past days. He had prevented the ritual killing of the negrita slaves, yes, but then witnessed something that shook him deep: the miraculous healing of the raja’s brother. Not a private revelation during desperate prayer, but God’s power manifest before all.

The memory of the petite black women they had planned to sacrifice haunts him—the same dark skin and tightly curled hair as the people of Africa. Yet even as he had intervened to prevent this demonic practice, an uncomfortable parallel gnaws at him. Had he not seen Portuguese ships packed with African captives? True, Christian Europe had abandoned the ancient practice of sacrificing slaves in religious ritual, had restricted slavery among its own people. The Church’s influence had slowly transformed the old Roman ways. But now Christian nations found new justifications for bondage in distant lands. Was there truly such difference between blood offered to idols and souls sold to commerce?

Perhaps it was these thoughts of ritual death and procedural violence that made him more sensitive to the growing whispers. Something stirred in the ships again—that familiar presence he first felt before the great ocean crossing, when the men turned against him. He senses it in the restless movements during night watches, in conversations that cease when officers approach. Even here in prosperous Zubu, with its abundant food and willing women, discontent spreads like fever through the crew. The novelty of the port has worn thin, and what once seemed paradise now tastes of delay, neglected duty, and thoughts of lovers, wives, and children waiting across an ocean they may never recross.

He hears it in their grumbling: The Portuguese captain cares more for converting heathens than finding spices. He forgets his orders from the king. Old sailors knew of it—that presence that came upon crews in their darkest hours, driving men to turn on their captain. He had dismissed such talk as superstition then, but he had felt it too: that gathering pressure, that whisper of power and vengeance that demanded blood to restore order.

The memory of Quesada’s execution rises unbidden. He had felt that same presence then, during those desperate days in Port San Julian. The Castilian officers had moved against him, whispering of the Portuguese captain who commanded the ships of the crown, who led them into these endless waters. The mutiny had spread like fever through the fleet until that ancient spirit awoke in him, demanding its tribute to quell the rebellion.

Even now, he can smell the salt air of that desolate shore, taste the iron-tang of fear in his mouth. The scratch of his quill echoes in memory as he documented each detail of the sentence. Such care he had taken to follow proper procedure, to maintain the forms that transformed execution into justice. Every step had to be recorded precisely—the formal charges, the testimony, the sentencing.

His fingers tremble slightly against the parchment before him. The quartering had been necessary, he had told himself. A message written in blood and ink to remind the men that order must be preserved, whatever the cost.

His hand moves unconsciously to his sword hilt. Was it the same presence that had moved through armies during the Reconquista? The old warriors at Manuel’s court had spoken of it in hushed voices—scarred veterans who had served alongside Castilian hidalgos. They told how it came upon men in battle, how it turned Christian knights into vessels of divine wrath. Some called it the Spirit of Santiago, seeing themselves as instruments of God’s justice.

With practiced efficiency, he begins the familiar ritual of checking his records. Everything must be properly documented. Everything must be in its place. But as he reviews the careful lines, the entries take on new meaning:

March 31, 1520. Following proper judicial procedure, the body of Quesada was quartered, the parts displayed as warning...

He had written it so carefully then, each detail precisely recorded. The proper forms had been observed. The Articles of War properly cited. Just as they had cited proper procedure in Toledo, as Father Pedro relayed to him, during the cleansing of the conversos.

He had believed himself different then. Had he not shown mercy to many of the mutineers? Had he not spared Cartagena, merely marooning him instead of demanding his blood? Even as he ordered Quesada’s quartering, he had told himself it was justice, not vengeance, that guided his hand.

December 20, 1520. The body of Antonio Salamón was committed to the deep, following execution for crimes against nature. Proper ceremony observed...

The boy’s face haunts him still. Antonio Ginovés, barely sixteen, who had caught Salamón’s predatory eye. The Articles of War were clear regarding such “crimes against nature,” and he had followed them to the letter—execution for the perpetrator, mercy for the victim. Everything properly documented, properly justified.

But mercy had turned bitter. The whispers had started immediately—cruel jests, mockery, threats barely veiled as jokes. He had posted extra watches, ordered an end to the persecution. But the boy’s terror-stricken face at meals, his increasing isolation... Three days later, they found his hammock empty.

Some claimed he jumped. Others whispered darker tales of rough justice dealt in the night watches. He had investigated, of course, documented everything with his usual precision. But the sea keeps its secrets, and the crew closed ranks with practiced ease. Another offering to that ancient god of order—whether by his own hand or others’ made little difference now.

His thoughts turn to Father Pedro’s stories of Toledo, of how that same spirit had moved through its streets in his grandfather’s time, turning neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother. All in the name of limpieza de sangre—the purity of blood.

And did not Caiaphas speak of the cost of peace too? The parallel strikes him like a physical blow. Did he not say it was better that one man should die than that the whole nation perish?

He rises abruptly and paces to the stern windows. Was it not right and just that Rome destroyed Carthage, ending the reign of Moloch who demanded children in his fires? Yet even as Roman senators congratulated themselves on their civilized laws, they fed Apollo, god of order and light, with conquered peoples and broken bodies. Just as he had broken Quesada’s body to maintain order, had he not? Just as every empire feeds that ancient hunger, speaking of law while offering up its broken bodies for dominion.

Beyond the window, gongs still mark unfamiliar rhythms along the shore. Similar alien rhythms had once echoed from mosques in Granada, before the Reconquista purified those lands...

Purified. The word tastes bitter now. He remembers the priest he had marooned, how carefully he had documented the judicial reasoning. How he had felt that familiar spirit moving through him as he pronounced sentence, demanding its price to preserve order.

Just as it moved through Pilate, he realizes with sudden horror. Just as it moved through the mob crying ‘Crucify him.’

His hand clutches the cross at his throat so tightly the metal edges cut into his palm. Sweat breaks cold across his forehead. All these years he had worn this cross proudly, thinking he served Christ’s kingdom. But Christ had not been the one demanding sacrifices. Christ had been the one sacrificed.

“And yet...” he whispers into the empty cabin, his voice unsteady, “did that order not protect the innocent?” Did not those same forces guard the gates of Christendom against the Moor? Guard Castilian shores against pirates and slavers?

The candle gutters in the breeze from the stern windows, its dying light casting frantic shadows before the flame is snuffed out, plunging the cabin into darkness. In this blackness, memories flood through him, each one burning with new significance…

The quartered body of Quesada displayed as warning, like Christ’s broken body on the cross…

The marooned priest abandoned to die, like Christ abandoned by his disciples…

The boy who threw himself into the sea, like all the innocent blood that cried out from the ground…

He rekindles the candle, its flame steadying in the night air. In its renewed light, he sees the logbooks with new eyes. Each careful entry documenting proper procedure, proper authority, proper ending of lives—all of it feeding that ancient spirit that has always demanded blood to maintain its order.

He reads his own words, written with such certainty after Quesada’s death: Order has been restored through proper application of the Articles of War. The men now understand the price of discord. How proud he had been of maintaining protocol even in that desperate hour. How carefully he had built his wall of procedure and documentation against the horror of what he had ordered.

Perhaps they are necessary, he thinks. Perhaps there can be no civilization without its dragons to guard the gates. No peace without the sword.

Yet Christ had come to end the cycle of blood, not demand them. He came to be the final victim, to expose the lie of that spirit that has always fed on blood.

His quill moves across fresh paper:

I find myself compelled to document a revelation regarding the true nature of sacrifice, and of the spirit we have served thinking it was Christ’s...

He pauses, adrift in these thoughts as he had once drifted in that endless ocean crossing where his charts proved useless and men’s bodies rotted from within. Then, he had at least known what lay ahead—the spice islands that would vindicate the crown’s trust in him. But this... Was that ancient spirit truly necessary to maintain God’s order? Or was it something else, something that had always moved through armies and nations, demanding blood offerings while wearing the mask of justice? Each death had been carefully documented, properly justified—but to what purpose? The Articles of War demanded such measures to maintain discipline, yet Christ himself had refused the sword’s protection in Gethsemane.

The bells strike the hour for Compline prayers. He should rise, should maintain proper discipline. Instead, he remains at his desk, the carefully ordered pages of his logbooks now reading like a confession of sins he had never recognized.

Beyond his cabin, the night watch changes with crisp efficiency. Everything proceeds according to protocol. Everything properly documented. Everything in its place.

But he sees now what moves beneath all that careful order—not Christ’s spirit of mercy, but that ancient dragon that has always fed on blood, whether offered by heathens in their temples or Christians in their courts, by mobs in Jerusalem or captains in distant seas.

As in those endless nights when scurvy hollowed his men’s bodies and pride ate at his soul, his prayers shed their careful Latin formulas of authority for the broken whisper of the tax collector: ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

* * *

The stars wheel overhead as Magellan and Father Pedro stand at their customary place by the ship’s rail. The night air carries the mingled scents of sea and distant shore, where ceremonial gongs still mark their unfamiliar rhythms. After hearing Magellan’s troubled confession about sacrifice and order, the priest remains silent for a long moment, letting the lap of waves against the hull fill the space between them.

“In Toledo,” Father Pedro begins, looking out at the dark water, “I knew priests who believed every moral choice could be plotted like stars on your charts. They called it ‘casuistry’—the study of cases.” Moonlight catches in the creases of his weathered face. “Volumes of books with rules for every sin imaginable.”

“Then surely such guidance would help resolve these...” Magellan’s voice falters, his posture stiffening, “...these uncertainties that plague me?”

Father Pedro shakes his head. “Casuistry is like your sea charts, Fernando.” He gestures toward the unfamiliar constellations above. “When you crossed the great ocean, did your charts show every current, every hidden reef?”

“No,” Magellan admits, “but we updated them as we sailed. Each discovery carefully documented...”

“And yet the sea remained greater than your parchment could capture.” The priest’s voice carries the weight of personal experience. “Just as the human heart exceeds our attempts to reduce it to rules and cases.”

Magellan’s hand moves from sword hilt to crucifix, knuckles white with tension. “But without such rules, without proper procedure—”

“Navigation requires more than maps,” Father Pedro interrupts gently. “It demands the cardinal virtue of prudentia—the wisdom to read wind and wave, to know when to hold course and when to tack.” His hand rests briefly on Magellan’s arm. “Just as the soul requires more than casuistry. It needs the courage to face each moment anew, to recognize when justice must yield to mercy.”

“Like Christ in Gethsemane,” Magellan whispers, something shifting within him.

The priest nods. “We are always in uncharted territory, Fernando. Each moral choice as new as these strange stars above us.”

Magellan falls silent. The weight of his logbooks, his careful documentation, his rigid adherence to procedure suddenly presses down on him like an invisible hand.

“Then how...” his voice breaks, “how does one navigate such waters?”

“The same way you crossed the great ocean,” Father Pedro answers. “With courage, with wisdom earned through suffering, and with trust in God’s guidance. But first, you must accept that no human system—not casuistry, not the Articles of War, not your beloved proper procedure—can fully capture the mystery of moral choice. Just as no chart can capture the full mystery of the sea.”

The night watch changes with practiced efficiency. Everything still moves according to protocol, yet Magellan feels adrift in deeper waters than any he has yet navigated. The priest’s words have stripped away his careful certainties, leaving him alone with the harder task of true discernment.

“I will leave you to your prayers,” Father Pedro says softly. “Remember—Christ’s sacrifice transformed the very meaning of the word. Perhaps there lies your answer.”

Left alone at the rail, Magellan faces east where dawn will eventually break. But first, there will be darkness, and in that darkness, he must find his way without his usual stars to guide him.

* * *

Alone on the quarterdeck, Magellan watches the dark horizon where the sun will soon rise. His mind races with visions of glory—a new Christian kingdom here in these eastern seas, himself as viceroy, teaching these gentle people proper civilization. Just as the old hidalgos had done in Granada...

The thought stops him cold: while scorning their heathen sacrifices, he had been unconsciously serving his own demanding god—that eternal spirit of order and dominion that has always fed on blood, whether spilled on stone altars or carefully documented in ships’ logs. Each execution, each marooning, each brutal enforcement of discipline—all of them sacrifices to that ancient hunger for control, merely dressed in the language of law and procedure.

A warm breeze carries the scent of flowers from shore. He remembers how they had welcomed him, despite his domineering entry into their port. How Humabon had embraced him as a brother, not a conqueror. How even now, they prepare feasts to celebrate their shared faith, while his own crew plots against him.

His hand moves to the cross at his throat, remembering the blood compact. He had worried about contamination, about mixing his cristiano viejo blood with that of indios. Yet who had shown true nobility? Enrique, the slave whose pure faith shamed his own calculating devotion. Father Pedro, descendant of conversos, whose wisdom had guided him through his darkest hours. These newly baptized souls who embrace Christ with such joy, while his “pure-blooded” Castilian officers schemed to undermine God’s work.

Just as his maps had failed him in that great ocean crossing, forcing him to navigate by observation and instinct alone, now all his careful moral charts prove worse than useless. The neat categories of blood and rank, the precise procedures that had ordered his world—they blur and fade like old ink in tropical rain.

Lord God, he prays, you who guided us across that endless ocean when all our maps proved false...

A memory strikes him: that moment when he had ordered his charts thrown overboard, when their careful lines and measurements had become a dangerous distraction from the reality before him. Just as then, his carefully documented justifications for sacrifice, his precise procedures for dealing death—all of it now seems like those useless charts, obscuring rather than revealing the truth.

Looking out at the dark waters, he feels the weight of all those careful records—years of certainty captured in paper and ink, every death and punishment documented with proper procedure. That familiar hunger for order, for control, tightens in his chest until he can barely breathe.

Then, with the same resolution that had carried him across unmapped oceans, he lets it go. A shudder passes through his body as he watches in his mind’s eye all those rigid certainties—the careful distinctions of limpieza de sangre, the precise hierarchies of blood and rank, the meticulously documented procedures—slowly sink into the depths, like those useless charts he had once trusted. They drift away into darkness, leaving him stripped of their false comfort but somehow lighter, freer. His shoulders ease downward in relief.

Just as he had once learned to navigate by the stars themselves when his charts proved useless, now he must find his way by a different kind of light—not the cold logic of law and order, but something warmer, truer, shining from these souls he had once deemed beneath him.

The night air feels cleaner somehow. He breathes deeply, tasting salt and distant flowers on his tongue. The port’s gongs have fallen silent, but he imagines he can hear the soft chanting of evening prayers—not in Latin now, but in the local tongue, Christ’s words taking root in new soil.

A hurried step breaks his reverie. He turns to see Barbosa, the old sailor’s weathered face grave in the starlight, the lines around his eyes deep with worry.

“Captain-General,” his voice carrying barely controlled urgency. “The Victoria and Concepcion... the Castilians have taken control. They say they will search for the Moluccas with or without your order.”

Magellan’s hand moves to his sword hilt by habit, but stops at the cross at his throat instead. The familiar dragon of vengeance stirs within him, demanding its sacrifice to restore order. But now he sees it for what it is—not Christ’s spirit, but that ancient hunger that has always fed on blood.

“How many remain loyal?” he asks quietly.

“On those ships? None that dare speak openly.” Barbosa hesitates. “Even on the Trinidad... there are whispers.”

Magellan nods slowly. Once he would have reached for the Articles of War, for the carefully documented procedures of command. But those old moral charts no longer serve him. Now he must navigate by different stars.

“Have Pigafetta bring paper to my cabin,” he says finally. “There are letters I must write before dawn.”

This was originally published in my Medium blog back in 2019, during my “life optimization” era. I’m revisiting some ideas from it, and will most likely refer to it in an upcoming post, so I’m sharing it again here.

A few weeks back, I attended a seminar on “Educating the Emotions.” I’m involved in a non-profit tackling leadership and character formation of young people. Educating the emotions is a key part of that formation.

I was also personally interested. I’ve gone through lots of ups and downs in business. Part of the game has been to tame the hunter-gatherer in me, that part of my mind which overreacts to business threats as if it were 10,000 BC, fighting for survival as a tribesman in the jungle.

I’ve written in the past about 3 techniques that worked for me:

3 Ways to Master the Monkey Brain

On Meditation, Status Fasting and Peer Pressure Design

I would add sleep, nutrition (including fasting) and exercise to these set of tools. When these are on point, I am less perturbed by the setbacks and surprises of entrepreneurship.

One exercise stands out. Lifting barbells near or over the limit of my strength works like magic. Here’s my theory. Under the barbell — near or at your max — your body thinks it is going to die, all systems are on red alert, and it has no time all other concerns. Then your body celebrates your survival and physical activity by flooding your brain with happy hormones.

(If you want to explore strength training with barbells, I recommend this essay, program and app: Stronglifts 5x5. If you like it, go deeper with this book: Starting Strength.)

How could we use neuroscience to influence our mental and emotional states?

The molecular biologist who first taught me how to lift was also in the seminar. After exchanging some bro science, we went on and looked at the science of emotion.

He recommended this book: “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” by Richard J. Davidson. It explains the neuroscience behind emotions and ways to influence it toward specific states.

Here are the behavioral extremes of the book’s framework. Even if you don’t find yourself (or the person you are trying to help) in these extremes, they give you an idea on what kinds of emotional defaults the tools listed here are useful for.

• It takes you too long to recover from sadness, anger, anxiety, envy, insecurity and other unwanted emotions

• It takes you way too fast to recover from these emotions, and you’re like a robot lacking empathy

• You’re too pessimistic to get anything done

• You’re too optimistic and can’t anticipate and plan out for setbacks

• You find it hard to read people

• You care too much of what people may say that it is paralyzing

• You’re not sensitive enough to your emotions that you are sometimes surprised by explosions of anger and other unwanted emotions

• You’re too sensitive to signals from your body and emotions that you get paranoid about illnesses or you get panic attacks

• You react out of context (eg, laugh when it is inappropriate or have overreactive fears)

• You adjust yourself too much to whoever you are with that you lose your identity

• You don’t know how to focus and thus have very low productivity

• You cannot turn off your focus and sometimes lose the bigger picture

Below, I summarize the science, then I list and explain the tools the book recommends for the situations above. All quotes are from the book.

The science of emotions

After brain imaging technology got invented, scientists started correlating emotions with brain activity. Their findings point toward certain parts of the brain specializing in producing specific emotions. More interestingly, each of us has a default configuration (as usual, influenced by both nature and nurture) on the intensity of each of these emotion-producing parts of the brain.

This is similar to age-old categorization of personalities — from Galen’s four temperaments to the Big Five — but now based on measurable biological signals.

The book lists six dimensions in this model of personality. In each dimension, we have a default tendency set in our brains. Here is a random example I got from Googling. You can make a graph for your self by completing the test in chapter 3 of the book. The tools listed below are for nudging these default settings to the left or right.

I’ll explain each of these dimensions in relation to the tools below.

11 Tools to Influence Your Emotional Defaults

1 and 2. Too slow to recover from setbacks? Try mindfulness meditation and cognitive reappraisal training.

If it takes you a long time to bounce back from sadness, anger, anxiety and other unwanted emotions, you probably fall nearer the “Slow to Recover” side of the Resilience spectrum.

What’s the neuroscience behind this? “The brain signature of being Slow to Recover from setbacks is fewer and weaker signals from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, as a result of either low activity in the prefrontal cortex itself or too few or less-functional connections between the prefrontal and the amygdala.”

“To cultivate greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks, I recommend mindfulness meditation.” Good thing that the most popular meditation apps like Headspace, Calm and Waking Up are based on the traditions of mindfulness meditation or Vipassana. Meditation has shown to increase the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

“In this form of mental training, you practice observing your thoughts, feelings and sensations moment by moment and nonjudgementally, viewing the simply as what they are: thoughts, feelings, sensations; nothing more and nothing less.”

The book recommends mindfulness training from the University of Massachusetts Medical School: https://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/

The other technique recommended by the book is “cognitive reappraisal training.” It is a reframing technique, also called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). “Instead of thinking the mistake reflects something consistent and fundamental about you, you consider the possibility that you made the mistake because you were having a bad day, or didn’t get enough sleep the night before, or because everyone is fallible.” The book suggests getting help from a professional, a skilled cognitive therapist.

3. Too fast to recover from setbacks? Sorry, not enough research at this time, but you can try this.

Greater resilience is better for most cases, but there may be professions that benefit from staying longer in the dark realms. Perhaps an emo song writer? Also, recovering too fast may blind you to the emotions of other people. Sometimes sadness or anger is the appropriate emotion to experience.

Unfortunately, the books says that there is very little research on how to move toward the Slow to Recover end of the Resilience spectrum, or weakening the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. However, it recommends focusing “intently on whatever negative emotion or pain you are feeling as a result of a setback.”

4 and 5. Want to make your outlook more positive? Delay gratification and try well-being therapy.

Most work require a mix of positive outlook and negative outlook. You need some positive outlook to envision and work toward a better future. You need negative outlook to manage risks, a key part of execution.

Is your default setting Little Miss Sunshine or Eeyore? It turns out that this configuration is set in your nucleus accumbens, located in the ventral striatum, and in the prefrontal cortex. The higher the activity in these areas, the more positive your outlook.

How do you increase activity in the prefrontal cortex? Delay gratification. “When you find yourself in a situation in which you are tempted by an immediate reward but you know the smarter, safer, healthier, or otherwise better choice is to wait for a future reward of higher value, pause and focus on the more valuable future reward.” Start with the little things. The more you do this, the better you become at it, even with the big things.

“Another way to strengthen connections between the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum is a technique called well-being therapy, developed by Giovanni Fava, of the University of Bologna in Italy.” Official website: http://www.well-being-therapy.com

6. Want to make your outlook more negative? Practice risk management.

An extreme level of positive outlook makes you complacent. To reach your goals, you need to anticipate obstacles and plan for them. In the profession of Project Management, this is done in systematically:

• Identify risks

• Score risks (prioritize based on probability and impact)

• Plan mitigation

• Plan contingencies

7. Design your environment to move you towards the outlook you need

The book suggests surrounding yourself with upbeat images and reminders of happy memories to make your outlook more positive. Change the images frequently, as often as weekly, to not get habituated with them.

“If you’d instead like to dial down your Positive Outlook, you might fill your home and work space with reminders of threats to your well-being, such as descriptions of natural disasters or news about environmental or economic threats.” Or just spend more time in Twitter.

8. Want to increase your social intuition? Practice reading people and do mindfulness meditation using social signals.

If you are like most people, you’d want more social intuition (exception below). According to the book, “research on emotional and social intelligence argues that greater skill in these areas presage better success in love, work, and life in general.”

“The brain of someone who falls at the Puzzled end of the Social Intuition dimension is characterized by low activity in the fusiform gyrus plus high activity in the amygdala.”

To increase fusiform activity, the book recommends first to practice in paying attention what is (socially) going around you: tone of voice, body language, facial expression. You can do this by putting more focus on the people around you, guessing what they are saying with their body language, then try confirming your guess.

The book also recommends this social intuition / microexpression training from renowned psychologist Paul Ekman: https://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions-training-tools/

9. Overwhelmed by social signals? Use focusing techniques toward objects and the future, instead of people in the present.

People whose social intuition is too high may feel overwhelmed and get paralyzed by social signals. The book suggests the following: “Avoid looking at people’s eyes. Use your Attention training to pull your focus back from intense concentration on people’s body language and tone of voice.” (See how to train Attention below).

10. Design your social interactions to fit your desired level of Social Intuition.

“There are a few ways you might alter your environment to accommodate your degree of Social Intuition. If you are at the Puzzled end of the dimension and content to stay there, arrange your routine so you spend relatively little time with people, particularly strangers. That will limit the situations in which you misread or are puzzled by social signals. Working from home can achieve the same thing.”

“If on the other hand, you are at the high end of Social Intuition and easily distracted by social cues, limit your social interactions to specific times of the day when they cannot knock you out for a loop. Interacting with people during scheduled work breaks and meals, rather than off and on throughout the day, can limit this kind of disruption.”

Too Self-Aware? Try cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation. (Tools 1 and 2 again).

The book defines Self-Awareness as sensitivity to ones body and emotions. Like the other dimensions, there is debilitation in the extremes.

Too much self-awareness overwhelms one with signals. Examples in the book are hypochondriasis (irrational paranoia of being sick) and panic attacks.

According to the book, “individuals with high levels of Self-Awareness (emotional or physical) have greater activation in their insula, while those with little Self-Awareness have decreased activation.”

I turns out there has been a lot of research on panic disorder, and the “best validated treatment for panic disorder is cognitive-behavioral therapy. In this approach, patients learn to reframe or reappraise the significance of internal bodily cues.”

“An alternative to becoming less Self-Aware of your body, thoughts, and feelings by decreasing insula activity is to decrease the rest of the brain’s reactivity to the insula’s signals.” One way is to do this is to reduce activation of the amygdala and orbital frontal cortex (part of the prefrontal cortex). A proven way to do this is mindfulness meditation (see 1 and 2 above).

Not Self-Aware enough (Self-Opaque)? Mindfulness meditation also helps.

The other side of the spectrum of Self-Awareness also has its downsides. “Being blind and deaf to what your body is trying to tell you is a good way to miss important signs of illness, whether a fever that signals infection or a tightness in the chest that means a heart attack.”

“Being Self-Opaque has consequences for relationships, as well: If you cannot tell that your blood pressure is rising and your heart rate is increasing because you are angry, then you do not have a chance to walk it off before you have a crucial meeting, attend a conference with your child’s teacher, drive home during rush hour, or do anything else that anger can cause to go off the rails.”

“Paradoxically, one of the most effective strategies for increasing activity in the insula, and thus becoming more Self-Aware, is to also practice mindfulness meditation.” It turns our mindfulness has a regulating function in the mind, preventing extremely low and extremely high activity in the insula — extreme self-awareness and extreme self-opacity.

Want greater focus? Mindfulness meditation helps (again).

Similar to the spectrum of outlook, you’d want to control your level of focus depending on the work you need to do. Getting things done requires focus. Creative thinking requires letting go of focus — to be open to what is beyond your current worldview.

Here’s the neuroscience. “The Focused extreme of the Attention dimension is the result of enhanced activation in brain regions, including the prefontal cortex and parietal cortex, that constitute a circuit for selective attention. The prefrontal cortex is critical to maintaining attention, while the parietal cortex acts as the brain’s steering wheel, pointing attention to particular places and thereby focusing attention on a specific target.”

To improve focus, Dr. Davidson again recommends mindfulness meditation.

11. Want lesser focus? Try open-monitoring or open-presence meditation

“If you feel that your attention is excessively focused and wish to broaden it in order to take in more of the world, then open-monitoring or open-presence meditation can nudge you toward that end of the Attention dimension. In open-monitoring meditation, your attention is not fixed on any particular object. Instead, you cultivate an awareness of awareness itself.”

3 Tools Based on a Different Theory

Here’s a book based on a different theory of emotions: “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

I have not read it yet, but here’s an interesting video about it:

Emotions are not simply outputs from signals from different parts of the brain. To create emotions, the mind instantaneously constructs meaning from bodily signals based on past experiences. The video quotes from Dr. Barrett:

you are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. If you did not have concepts that represent your past experiences, all you sensory inputs would just be noise. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

Here’s a follow-up video that focuses on the application.

The video recommends these 3 for improving mood:

• Cold exposure

• Heat exposure (eg, sauna use)

• Reduce inflammation (get enough sleep; get enough exercise; keep a healthy weight; don’t spike your blood sugar; cut out refined carbohydrates, sugar, processed vegetable oils, transfats and artificial sweeteners).

This theory also highlights the importance of tools #1 and #2, mindfulness and cognitive reframing.

That gives us a total of 14 tools from the neuroscience of emotions. If you have your own set, please share in the comments below!

These risks in the open internet has led to what calls the “Cozy Web,” the retreat into private, ungamified spaces like Discord servers, group chats, and messaging apps where depressurized conversation is still possible.

There are holdouts. For instance, ’s playbook—that is, living in the open internet as a Friendly Ambitious Nerd despite all the risks it brings—has been an inspiration and a model for me and many others. FAN seems to be the unofficial aspirational vibe of TPOT, a loose intellectual scene that emerged on Twitter in the early 2020s. I experienced TPOT first hand, though somewhat peripherally, since I was deep into an adjacent scene, #Roamcult. It was such an extraordinary experience that I’ll be doing an ethnographic study on it for my MA thesis, which—inshallah—will be the basis for a future book.

I suspect the same dangers that pushed people into the Cozy Web also leached the flavor out of the voices still braving the open internet. You can't develop a voice if you're always bracing for impact.

That’s why this conversation with in the comments section of my post on AI shame brought me back to those golden years. Our viewpoints on what it means to be an author clash beautifully, and we are unapologetic about our perspectives. Lideron has a distinctive voice, and the directness with which we express our thoughts is itself a form of trust—we spoke as individuals, not combatants in some culture war. I share a segment of that conversation below, which is relevant to my ongoing exploration of AI in creative work. Since I used AI for my novel, could I even call myself its author?

This is how we used to roll, and—however toxic the internet becomes—this is how I’ll always roll.

What you did is just doing a shortcut.

Yes you may have finished the book itself, but you missed all the other things you could’ve learned from yourself if you wrote it down with your hands on the keyboard.

You missed the opportunity to feel your own tone and voice to bleed on to your writing, because you let the AI to bruteforce the way and use the “variations of English expression of paragraphs you wanted” that the AI have created.

You missed the opportunity to learn your own tone, your own voice and your own agency to write the words yourself.

You may have the “deciding power” of what paragraphs to include in the book, but those paragraphs, no matter how grammatically correct or high falutin those paragraphs are, do not have your inherent soul.

The AI had the rough picture of your Idea, collected the right words from the noise of its dataset to form the closest thing that you wanted based on your inputs... But it’s not YOU.

YOU, the artist, is the point of creating an art. You are crystalizing your own thoughts to a text that expresses pieces of yourself to the page.

You should’ve just written the Book in Tagalog or Cebuano if you’re severely having a hard time writing the Paragraphs to English, and then fix the draft after.

The point of art is not about making it good the first time, the point of art is doing the process despite the fact that it’s not practical, nor easy... Yet satisfying in the end, or as how Oscar Wilde put it:

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

You took a shortcut, and learned nothing but how to prompt the AI correctly. You became a prompter that asked the AI to assemble the book for you.

“This suffering might explain why I have no desire to go through that experience again.”1

If you didn’t like the process of writing the book by yourself, why create one? Why make something and call it yours if you’re not the one that made it?

Below is my reply, verbatim—grammatical errors and all. I've added a photo of the books I mention and a screenshot of the “novel map” that I link to.

I always found it curious when people ask me who I am among the characters in the novel. I think your comment points to the spirit behind this question. It is true that writing a lot allows you to find your own voice. Since I’ve been blogging since the word blog was invented, I think I found my voice many years ago. It’s the voice I use in this blog. If you read my posts in Medium from the 2010s, I’ll think you’ll notice a consistency. I’d describe it as janky, meandering, earnest, and a bit nerdy.

This voice—my default literary voice—however, was not what the novel wanted for itself. I knew what that voice it wanted was, and with effort could produce it. I have in front of me rn John Bengan’s Armor and Miguel Syjuco’s I Was the President’s Mistress!! These are displays of literary virtuosity, particularly in the crafting of voice. These writers are like the Hidelyn Diazes or the Alex Ealas of Philippine literature. They are gifted and have honed those gifts consistently starting at a young age. It is a great pleasure to see their handiwork. They deserve their literary awards.

I think writing is like the Olympics. There are many different events, each with its own definition of excellence. I don’t think I’m playing in the same sport as Bengan and Syjuco. In their world, the sounds of the sentences themselves is the work of art. There are other kinds of writing where these sentences are simply channels of the other kinds of excellence the writing is attempting to achieve. This is how I viewed Rajah Versus Conquistador. The sentences were intended to be conventionally good, but nothing that would impress readers or win literary awards.

However, it is still ambitious in other areas. If you compare other historical novels on 1521, I think my book has the chance of winning the gold medal in terms of research. The weaving of worldviews through the two perspectives and the characters that we hear through them is also something I’m quite proud of, though I sense that very few will notice it. Most writers in this space are trapped within the epistemologies of Nationalism and Christianity. You can’t imagine the difficulty of the mental surgery needed to de-Christianize and de-nationalize ones mind.

You mentioned in a previous comment that you think it is okay to get some ideas from AI but not in the crafting of the sentences. What RVC required of me was the opposite. Any idea from AI was a threat to what the novel wanted to be: to be maniacally faithful to the historical and anthropological record, while being as wild as possible in the plot, and also still producing a suspenseful story; to have extremely varied psychologies and worldviews for the characters, consistent throughout the novel, but to also have a conversion arc for the main characters; to be free of the oh so common anachronism of using the past to promote “moral lessons” for the present, but to also use the present to make sense of and “translate” the past. This was the real game for me. It was like 4D chess. It entailed a lot of mental anguish but at the same time I feel this was the game I was born to play. This novel map gives you a sense of the game I had to play: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fz21LWhYn0p7fqqIWWqVoC8CGm7Urk3dnKazvABg_HM

I understand the ideals you hold for the act of writing: it is a path to discovering yourself and your literary voice; the complete artistry of expressing your soul through the choices you make at all levels—from each word, to the plot, to the stucture, to the voice; and each word, each choice, paid with suffering. Yet the experience of writing is I’m sure rich enough that could hold varied ideals and kinds of writers. The act of writing can also be an escape from the self; the artistry can be in the weaving of worldviews instead of words; and the outcome—the book itself—can be treated as more important than the experience, the writer’s feelings about it, or his transformation through it.

I used AI for RVC the way T-Pain uses autotune. To me, producing the right voice was a procedural craft, not a mystical art. The story would have been the same without Claude, Roam Research, or Readwise; though translating that story into a fun and layered novel would have taken me much longer (four years longer in my estimation) and probably wouldn’t have sounded as good. So I have no doubt that the story is mine—or at least I was its conduit to this world.

I’ve been feeling some shame lately—shame from the use of AI in my novel. The experience is strange. I’m living inside it while simultaneously observing it, suffering through it while finding it fascinating as a scholar of culture. But I also feel a kind of privilege. The anthropologists I admire—people like Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Rosaldo—traveled to the edges of the world to study the Other, and in doing so, discovered something about all of us. My frontier is temporal, not geographic. I’m watching a new taboo take shape in real time, and I happen to be standing on the wrong side of it.

Inadvertently polluting a book club

I sent copies of my novel to a book club months ago, and they happily agreed to do an Instagram book tour for it. I’ve been writing about my usage of AI in this blog and I mention it in the book as well, though not announced in flashing neon. When I started using Claude AI for the novel, the cultural script for AI in creative work hadn’t been written yet. Most readers seem genuinely indifferent. But if you’ve hung out the past year or so in the more literary corners of Substack, you would have seen a phenomenon that would fascinate ethnographers: the birth of a new taboo.

This taboo probably reached the book club, because when they read the novel’s acknowledgement, where I thank Claude for its role in the book, many of them chose to opt out of the book tour. Then I made a video relaying how I used AI. After that, all of the book club members decided to opt out.

I want to make it clear that the book club handled this situation with grace and professionalism. Nothing in their communication suggested malice or judgment—they were kind, apologetic even. At the same time, I never saw them mention AI in their social media posts, so I had to rely on negative reactions to AI from elsewhere. To get a quick read on the public language around AI, I asked Grok to report on people’s most common reasons for opposing AI in creative work. The top answers are ethics, job displacement, and authenticity. For something more visceral, check out this scathing review of a local musical that used AI for its songs—the language is revealing: AI is sacrilegious, dangerous, perverse.

The disruption is real. But I recognize the emotional architecture underneath the reasons. I’ve studied this architecture, and now I’m living inside it.

From shame to language activism to tech optimism

One of my earliest memories of shame was in the classroom. I was in elementary, perhaps around ten years old. Back then, we were punished for “speaking in dialect.” The punishment was sometimes public shaming: having your name on the list of offenders on the blackboard. Sometimes they punished your pocket: you were fined for your violation.

I also remember one time when I was a contestant in a quiz bowl at the open school grounds. The entire student body was there. It was my turn to answer. The question: what is Filipino for “smoke”? When the audience noticed that I did not know the answer to such a simple question, they tried to help me by shouting the answer, “usok.” It sounded to me like the Cebuano “asó,” so I answered with that. The audience burst into laughter. My ten year-old self, who had a self-image of a bright kid, was overcome with embarrassment.

Those memories framed my years as a Bisaya in Manila. That was my first experience of political awakening. I got in touch with language activists, and I even met up with the gentleman heading one of these groups, Atty. Lino Faelnar, at the Manila Peninsula café. Sitting in that hotel lobby, I felt like those young revolutionaries in late 18th century Parisian coffeehouses—dreamers huddled over cups, quietly plotting to remake the world, convinced that ideas could change everything.

It has been many years since. My essays had no effect on the language problem. I’m not sure if Atty. Faelnar’s activism did either. Yet I witnessed something radical happen in Cebu—a transformation that no amount of political organizing seemed to accomplish. Before the 2000s, there was virtually no modern popular music in the Cebuano language. We were singing other people’s songs in other people’s languages. Then suddenly, an explosion: rock bands defiantly performing in the vernacular—Bisrock—followed by a polished pop movement that made Cebuano music mainstream—Vispop. An entire generation began growing up with songs in their mother tongue as normal as breathing. I recount this history in an essay I wrote years later, but I never quite explored what actually caused the shift.

I’m now convinced the answer was simpler than any grand awakening: digital recording technology. The old analog studios were expensive gatekeepers that kept most voices out. Digital changed everything—suddenly anyone with a laptop could produce professional-sounding tracks, and the internet made distribution practically free. The irony is that this same technology devastated musicians in the US and elsewhere. Streaming services paid fractions of pennies per play. The middle class of working musicians collapsed. Yet in Cebu, that same technological disruption gave us something we’d never had: an abundance of songs in our mother tongue, sung with confidence and craft. The floodgates opened not through politics or cultural policy, but through cheaper tools of creation.

I could not find statistics on published books per language in the Philippines, so I uploaded the catalogues of three of the biggest publishers in the country and asked ChatGPT to crunch the numbers. It extracted 121 books from the three docs: 61% are in English, 35% are in Filipino and other Tagalog dialects, and 4% are in other Philippine languages (Kinaray-a, Hiligaynon, and Cebuano). There are more than 170 languages spoken in the Philippines with thirteen or so spoken by more than a million people, but only four can be found in this list, with “Filipino” and other Tagalog dialects representing 90% of the non-English publications.

Writing books has long been a game limited to the educated and the wealthy. You also need a high verbal IQ, and where I’m from, years of training in a foreign language, like English or Tagalog. I’d love to be able to write in my mother tongue. But remember—neither our writers nor our readers have received any formal education on our language despite being taxed by the state like any citizen. LLMs have made translations much easier and the writing of books much cheaper. I’m optimistic that with new technology, we will get more stories and essays outside the urban, educated English- and Tagalog-speakers that dominate Philippine publishing.

My guess is the same thing will happen with AI that happened with digital recording—it will wreck entire industries and livelihoods in ways we can already see coming, while simultaneously enabling forms of expression and creation we never thought possible.

Shame as empathy of the Other’s disgust

You can’t help but become a bit of a connoisseur of emotions when you write a novel. It feels like learning to name flavor notes in coffee. For instance, what’s the difference between cringe and shame?

I’m reminded of that time when I told my writing coach, Mitya, that I was using AI for the novel. I was filled with cringe as the words left my mouth. The best definition of cringe I’ve encountered comes from Venkatesh Rao’s essays on the US version of The Office: cringe is the vicarious experience of lowered status. I didn’t know what Mitya actually thought. But we all carry little models of other people in our minds, and the mini-Mitya in my head—who I must have modeled as a player in the Philippine literary hierarchy—saw my decision as a low-status move. It felt like watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself, except I was the fool.

Mitya says to this day that he respects my decision but disagrees with it. When the book was done, he even encouraged me to try writing the next novel without AI. I understood what he was offering—a path back to literary legitimacy. But I’d already chosen a different game.

The evolutionary origin story of both cringe and shame probably comes from disgust. According to Jonathan Haidt in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, disgust is not just a feeling of yuck; it’s an evolved defense system that scans for pollutants—first in food and disease, and eventually in people and behaviors—and urges us to avoid or eject what seems impure.

Culture evolved on top of biology. Cringe operates as a navigational system, constantly calibrating your desires and actions toward what the tribe considers valuable. When I cringed telling Mitya about using AI, my nervous system was simply processing information: this move doesn’t advance you in the literary hierarchy.

Shame operates in a different register. Shame guards the sacred and the taboo. It’s the alarm that sounds when you’ve touched something untouchable, when you’ve violated not just a preference but a boundary that defines the moral order itself.

Since I’ve been consuming an inordinate amount of anthropology in the past few years, my brain kept flashing “Mary Douglas” as the book club distanced itself from me. Mary Douglas was a British anthropologist whose 1966 book Purity and Danger remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand how societies police their boundaries. Her central insight was deceptively simple: dirt is matter out of place. A shoe on your foot is fine; a shoe on your dining table triggers disgust. Dirt, pollution, impurity—these aren’t objective properties of things but rather violations of categories that cultures have constructed to make sense of the world.

The anthropological and historical record has countless examples of evil things treated as sacred and good things treated as taboo. In the contemporary world, we have seen how the state and dominant cultures have used shame in systemic exclusion of those who don’t quite fit in. So when I experience shame, as I do now, I ask: what cultural force is weaponizing this feeling?

Shame from the inside

This essay is an experiment in a kind of frontline scholarship—thinking from within the experience rather than at a distance from it. Now that AI can search and synthesize dense academic articles in minutes (work that would take me months), I find myself asking: what remains uniquely human in scholarly work? Works of writers like Renato Rosaldo on grief and Sebastian Junger on combat suggest an answer: the irreplaceable knowledge that comes from living inside an experience while studying it. So let me try to describe what this shame actually feels like—something no LLM could do for me.

It is nausea without illness—my body rejecting my social self. I feel marked, as if something got on me that can’t be washed off. It’s the sense that I’ve become embarrassing matter. As if my body is trying to eject me from the room. The feeling resembles impending doom, but less acute, less concentrated at the pit of the stomach—it emanates from the chest and distributes itself throughout the body, settling especially in the limbs. Not a sharp stab but a dull, radiating wrongness.

What fascinates me is how selective shame is about its triggers. I am virtually immune to shaming online. I came of age on the internet, so perhaps I have the antibodies for anonymous hostility—strangers in comment sections are just pixels to me.

I feel nothing looking at that. Yet I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve lost sleep over this book club incident. I don’t think English has the words for what I’m feeling. It is not just generic shame—ka-uwaw—but something more specific: ka-ikog.1 I have utang kabubot-on2 to these book clubs. And book clubs, at their best, are the purest part of the Philippine literary scene3—otherwise dominated by ideological battles, marketing hustle, and status games. They read because they love reading. I feel like a tourist who walked into a sacred space with his shoes on, tracking mud across the floor, oblivious until the silence told him something was wrong.

Perhaps it’s because I could empathize with them—because I’ve met them. The internet randos are just text and jpegs, but these are people I’ve sat across from. Because of empathy, I carry models of the book club members inside my mind, just as I carried a mini-Mitya. And in those models, I can feel their discomfort projected back at me—their sense that something polluting had entered the space. The shame doesn’t come from people who despise me. It comes from people I respect, whose values I’ve inadvertently violated.

From the interior moral standpoint, shame is like sexual attraction or anger. They are all automatic inner responses to external stimuli, and freedom is found in the gaps between impulse and consent and action. I can’t stop the shame from arising, but I can disagree with it.

My sacred commitment

I asked Grok to tell me the backgrounds of the respondents of the report it created above. It turns out the respondents of the surveys it used are quite different from me. They are affluent professional creatives from the US and the UK, while I’m an indie writer and scholar from the southern Philippines concerned about cultural equality. To be honest, I care a lot about diversity in Philippine publishing and very little about the grievances of the global creative class.

I can only assume that the book club members who withdrew hold values closer to these creatives. My shame—ang ka-ikog—is real. However, I disagree with this feeling of shame, just like I disagree with the shame imposed by the Philippine state on ten-year-old me. I see AI differently.

Literary awards are recognition of the virtuosity of writers; they assume that the work being judged is an authentic representation of this virtuosity. Through this lens, AI is like performance enhancing drugs in the Olympics. I had to make a choice: do I stay within this framework or do I step out of it so the work can exceed my skills, talents, and time? I chose the latter. Writers shaped by the Philippine literary world seem to value their work as an authentic representation of individual craft. I saw the novel differently. To me, it was a project, and what mattered most was achieving the best result as efficiently as possible.

In a sense, AI helped me make the novel more authentic to the vision I had for it. I came face-to-face with the limits of my abilities as a writer in trying to achieve that vision. There were very specific voices and vibes I wanted for the novel. I was able to produce them, but it took me a month for each chapter and it was very exhausting. I was ready to spend four to five years of my life writing the novel, but when I found an easier, faster way, I couldn’t see any reason to say no to it—especially after realizing that I spent more time ensuring that I didn’t sound off-key in this foreign tongue than in actually telling the story. A lot of this work is trial-and-error, revision after revision after revision. Having a machine that doesn’t get tired allowed me to continue being the demanding editor without being myself the overworked sentence manufacturer. I don’t believe that suffering has inherent value, including in creative work. I’ve written previously about how codified knowledge—both in culture and tech—enabled the fulfillment of the desires of more and more people paid with less and less coercion and violence: I’m an “antisacrificial tech optimist.”

Some describe LLMs as glorified autocomplete machines. In a sense, this was how I used it. I uploaded my handmade chapters to Claude and it was able to mimic that voice for the rest of the chapters. The story came from me; I made all the choices in the book’s plot, characters, voices, and structure.

If I ever work with another book club, I will definitely highlight my AI use from the start. This incident was a painful lesson. I didn’t realize how strongly people felt about this—that was naive on my part. I saw it as one tool among many. Others see it as crossing a fundamental line. I should have understood that earlier.

None of the book club members explained why they were against AI beyond it being against the values of their members. They don’t owe me or anyone an explanation, and I continue to respect and admire the work that they do. This post is an attempt at making sense of what happened using the tools I have—anthropology and blogging—but I’m also trying to be clear about where I stand.

A number of people have supported and promoted the novel—reviewers have written about it, bookstores carry it, book clubs featured it. I continue to be grateful for their past support, so I feel that it is I that owe them an explanation. I’ve written above about taboo and the sacred. Let me end with what is sacred to me: I had a commitment to the muse, to the diwata of the story, and I gave everything I had and used every tool I could access to honor that commitment. And I got it done, not without cost. Truth is also sacred to me. That is why hiding my use of AI was never an option.

I’m not blind to the panic and worry rippling through the industry with the rise of AI. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But I hope I’ve also made clear where I’m coming from: I’m less invested in preserving worlds many of us were never truly part of than in helping birth new and possibly better ones.

An Update on Rajah Versus Conquistador

I didn’t want the story to be overshadowed by the AI discourse. But with the book clubs’ withdrawal of their support, I feel the right step forward is to lean into the discourse. After all, my scholarship has been adjacent to taboo and the sacred; it almost feels like an obligation to document this emerging phenomenon from the frontlines. I’ve been blogging about my AI use as it happened, but only from a technical standpoint. Going forward, I’ll be writing about it from the cultural point of view as well. This essay on shame is the first.

So it’s timely that Carol Hau recently provided a blurb for Rajah Versus Conquistador, which mentions AI:

“Rajah Versus Conquistador is meticulously researched, populated by vivid characters, and propelled by suspenseful storytelling. Kahlil Corazo has taken a bold step by engaging in a new, self-reflexive process of literary creation, one that may prove to be generative as we debate the question of authorship in the age of AI.” — Caroline S. Hau4

(I’m a fan of her work so this is kind of a big deal for me.)

Carol’s blurb places the AI question front and center—which is where it will now sit, literally, on the new cover.

I’m optimistic that if there’s any community that can handle a civil and nuanced discourse on a contentious topic without devolving into color-coded good-versus-evil tribalism, it is this group of people brought together—and occasionally disagree—because of our love for books.

The renowned anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has this book where he reflects on the sudden death of his wife Shelly and through those reflections reaches deep ethnographic insights about the Ilongot, the indigenous people the couple were studying at the time of the tragedy. The book uses poetry as a kind of ethnographic record and its writing was his way of dealing with his grief. The book is weird and beautiful.

I have this perverse but scholarly desire to be ostracized because of my use of AI, and my admiration for Rosaldo as well as war correspondents like Sebastian Junger might be its source. Taboo and the sacred are part of my scholarly interest, and you can’t deny that a reportage from within the experience of the dangerous frontlines could also be weird and beautiful.

I’ve witnessed the formation of this new taboo in the more literary corners of Substack, perhaps a year or so after the rise of the taboo against AI-generated images from the community of visual artists. I’ve also noticed a bit of shame within me (I’m not a psychopath despite writing a lot about them). I’ve anticipated this tradeoff when I started using Claude for my novel. This tradeoff still makes sense. The unassisted chapters took an average of a month to complete, while the AI-assisted chapters averaged around a week. So it would have taken me four to five years to complete the novel instead of fifteen months. I essentially exchanged time for status. The world will never recognize my literary genius lol.

It wasn’t just time in exchange for status. My ambition was in weaving memeplexes within a story most would enjoy, not pushing the boundaries of language. The latter, I sense, is the measuring stick of award-winning literary fiction in the Philippines. I had very definite voices in mind for the novel, but they were all conventional, nothing groundbreaking. LLMs are convention machines—this is why the tool fit my purpose. I was a control freak in which psychic megafauna to allow inside the story, as well as their hierarchy. In contrast, I was quite permissive at the sentence level. After writing four chapters, Claude had a sufficient pool of samples to translate my fragments and rough outlines into good enough sections. Since robots don’t get tired, I had it produce variations until it hit a jackpot. Many times, I had to combine smaller jackpot paragraphs then do the finishing touches manually. If I were a poet or a Filipino literary fictionist, this process wouldn’t have made sense. Thankfully, I’m neither. So the tradeoff was also letting go of sentence- and paragraph-level control, so I could focus on memeplex- and plot-level orchestration.

It would have been more impressive of course if I controlled all the levels. One of my favorite sci-fi writers, Ted Chiang, said in a speech that,

“If we think of art as a concentrated form of intention, then generative AI is a way of diluting intention” [...] “Making a lot of choices is hard work, but artistic self-expression requires that you make all the choices.”

Those of us who use AI should just accept the L. It’s a fair tradeoff. I avoid calling myself the novel’s writer. Author, creator, and producer are more accurate. I’ve always cringed at calling myself an artist, much more now. The novel—especially considering the speed of its creation—is not an authentic representation of my talents or skills as a writer. Why is this important, though? The answer lies in the same scholarly domain as my feelings of shame.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had a term for this kind of shame—or rather, for the apparatus that produces it. He called it habitus: the dispositions we acquire through years of socialization, so deeply ingrained they feel like instinct. Habitus lives in the body. It’s what makes a working-class kid feel out of place at an elite university even when no one has said anything hostile. It’s why I cringe a bit when I tell other writers I used Claude, even when I believe my reasons are sound. This is also why I feel a slight annoyance when readers quote the robot’s bangers instead of mine.

I’ve been developing my own approach to the study of culture—a neo-animist approach which I call “Psychofauna Studies.” In this framework, large cultural forces like nations, religions, and literary communities are not lifeless abstractions but psychofauna—creatures that emerge from the substrate of human minds, competing for our attention and shaping our behavior for the sake of their own replication. Societies utilize the habitus within each of us to get what they want: their own survival and growth.

While I was working on the novel, I avoided literary communities. I knew they would be channels of psychofauna I’d have to protect the story from. They were unavoidable though once I started promoting the novel, but I did not see this as a problem. I felt that the story was safe since it was already written, and the scholar in me was eager to experience the frontlines.

I met my first literary kaiju at the Manila International Book Fair. The government body that promotes local literature gave me an indie author booth, and I spent several days deep inside the bowels of that psychofauna.

It was overwhelming. One hundred sixty thousand visitors pressing through corridors over five days, the air thick with the mingled breath of bibliophiles and the sweet chemical smell of fresh ink on bookpaper. Queues for popular authors snaked around booths and spilled into the aisles, devotees clutching books to their chests like sacred objects awaiting consecration. At the Wattpad-turned-paperback booths, teenage girls shrieked at the sight of their favorite writers—authors who had built empires on serialized romance, their fan bases dense enough to collapse the crowd control barriers.

I was a minor organ in this beast, but an organ nonetheless. People approached my booth asking for selfies and autographs—for the first time in my life—as if I’m some kind of celebrity. I felt the kaiju’s attention on me then, registering my presence in its vast nervous system, adjusting my position in its hierarchy of faces and names.

The hierarchy was visible if you knew how to look. The National Artists occupied the upper tiers, their book launches attended by television cameras and government officials. Below them, the award-winners and the commercially successful, their signing lines measured in hours. Then the mid-list authors, the first-timers, the self-published hopefuls—each of us arranged according to the kaiju’s logic of attention and replication. I watched fans genuflect before their literary idols, and I understood: this was the psychofauna feeding, each interaction a calorie of devotion that kept the creature alive.

The kaiju leaned closer. I felt it pressing against something inside me—that old shame, that cringe when I admitted to using tech instead of raw skill and talent, that instinct to measure myself against the authors with longer lines. It was adjusting my desires, tightening the screws of literary aspiration, reminding me what I should want and who I should envy.

I told the kaiju, “Get your hands off my habitus, you perv.”

Yet I’m only human. When Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, was asked if decades of studying cognitive biases had made him free of them, he replied that he was just as susceptible as anyone else. Similarly, even with my neo-animist framework—even while watching these psychofauna operate, mapping their feeding patterns, tracing their tendrils—I remain their prey. After several days inside the kaiju’s domain, my defenses softened. The creature’s influence became irresistible. My desires were being shaped by forces I could see but not resist. I wanted to be like those authors at the apex of the hierarchy—the ones with their Palanca awards, their megalaunches attended by television crews, their signing lines measured in hours. So I gave copies of my novel to one of the biggest publishers in the country.

This was a reversal of everything I had planned. The indie path wasn’t just a business strategy; it was the authentic extension of who I was: Entrepreneur. Cebuano. A native of strange corners of the internet where conventional literary success was beside the point. Going indie was also an aesthetic choice, a thematic coherence with the novel itself. The protagonists of Rajah Versus Conquistador are a king and a captain—men who seized their own fates. Taking charge of my own commercial destiny was supposed to be an extension of their story, a refusal to submit to gatekeepers.

But I’d been exposed too long. The kaiju had seeded a little colony in my mind, and I found myself wanting what it wanted me to want.

I had done B2B sales in a past life, so I was familiar with the rhythms of pursuit: the follow-ups, the waiting, the constant threat of rejection hovering at the edge of every interaction. But businesses usually respond, even if only to say no. Philippine publishers, I discovered, operate differently. Sending manuscripts to them is like dropping messages into a void. The reply cycle is measured not in weeks but in months, if replies come at all.

A couple of months after, I met the head editor at the Frankfurt Book Fair—a much larger kaiju whose dimensions I will perhaps map in a future essay. I put on my most charming smile, and asked as casually as I could about their thoughts on my novel. In that vast belly of global publishing, she told me they liked the book. The owner had given a verbal yes.

More follow-ups. More waiting. Then an email telling me they’d like to meet. The Zoom call went okay—better than okay. They asked about details of the novel: the research, the historical sources, the metafiction. I was eager, perhaps too eager. I now have a wall of books arranged behind me for video calls—so stereotypical, I know—and during the meeting I kept reaching for volumes to illustrate my points, pulling down references on Magellan’s voyage, on pre-colonial Philippine society, on the figure of the Big Man. I have to be honest: I love this part of the job.

It was curious how they seemed unconcerned about my use of AI. In the literary corners of Substack, the taboo had already calcified into doctrine. But here was a major publisher, apparently indifferent. Perhaps the local kaiju of traditional publishing operated on different frequencies than the kaiju of online literary culture.

It turns out there was just a delay.

After more than a month and a couple of follow-ups, I received an email. Polite, careful, final. They remained interested in the story, but the use of AI had become something they needed to consider. They apologized for the earlier communications about approval and contracts. The door had closed.

Reading between the lines, I suspect I was their first. The gap between enthusiastic verbal approval and formal rejection had the texture of a policy being invented on the spot, deliberations happening in conference rooms where no one had yet established precedent. I became the test case, the boundary marker. I wonder how long they can hold that line—how many manuscripts will arrive in the coming years with AI fingerprints invisible to the naked eye, how many authors will simply not mention it.

I replied after a day—both the rajah and the conquistador who continue to live inside of me refused to let me wallow in disappointment. I thanked the editors for their consideration. And then, because the entrepreneur in me knows that a “no” is merely an invitation to try another door, I attached my older books: the nonfiction works I had written before the age of AI.

As I sent the email, I realized something: I got what I hoped for. The rejection was data from the frontlines of a cultural shift I had been observing online. I now had a story—a dispatch from the exact moment when the literary establishment drew its line in the sand.

I opened Roam Research, where I draft my essays. The cursor blinked. And I began to type: A Big Publisher Accepted My Novel—Then Rejected It Because I Used AI.

Get a copy of Rajah Versus Conquistador

According to my records, she revealed her name in September, eight months before the release of Rajah Versus Conquistador, my historical novel that reimagines the power game between Rajah Humabon and Ferdinand Magellan, leading to the latter’s death in 1521.

By December, she showed me how she wanted to be introduced. I was in a downtown Davao coffeeshop called “Café Prelaya by The Joaquins,” where I’m also writing these words. This cafe’s name is part of the story, as you will see later.

Her name, Paraluman, was my little tribute to the Eraserheads, but it turned out to be more meaningful than just a pinoy rock easter egg. “Paraluman,” I found out, is an archaic Tagalog word for the magnetic needle used by our ancestors as a compass for navigating the seas. This was one of the many serendipities that happened within the story. In the middle of the novel, the recently baptized Paraluman carries the image of the Sto. Niño into the beach-side feast to celebrate the alliance between Humabon and Magellan. She then intones this hymn to the Niño:

Batobalani sa gugma, ang batâ namong palanggâ

Batobalani sa gugma, ang batâ namong palanggâ

Batobalani sa gugma, ang batâ namong palanggâ.

I grew up in Pari-an, downtown Cebu, a few blocks away from the Sto. Niño basilica. Whenever I hear “batobalani sa gugma,” I am brought back to packed Sunday masses and Sinulog processions wherein the crowd sways their hands in unison and sings as one to honor Christ, the Child-King. This is the only time you see the titas and doñas of Cebu alongside the city’s prostitutes, thugs, and downtown drag queens. I share this memory with countless Cebuanos and devotees of the Sto. Niño across the world, and I’m drawing from this well of images, sounds, and emotions when I present these words in the novel, describing the mythical first singing of this song:

The gesture transforms the entire gathering. Hundreds of hands wave side-to-side like sea grass moved by gentle tides, bodies swaying in shared rhythm. Even your bilanggô, whose name alone makes children cry and warriors touch their amulets, joins in the motion, his scarred hand waving toward the Child-King’s image.

“Batobalani sa gugma” is the most famous hymn to the Niño and it means “magnet of love.” In the novel, Humabon shares my appreciation for this serendipity of words:

You savor the poetry of her choice – batobalani, the lodestone that draws all things to itself, singing of love’s magnetic power. Its aptness given her name makes you want to laugh with delight, but you hold it inside like a sweet secret between you.

I also feel this joy because none of this was planned! At least, not by me.

It feels divine how pieces of the story also lock into each other like a jigsaw puzzle, and how real-life events form and present those pieces. I found out during the writing of the novel that “divine” and “diwata” share a common Indo-European root. It really felt like the story came from muses and my role was just to simply listen to them.

For instance, Paraluman is a Tagalog in the novel because my writing coach for RVC, the novelist Mitya (R.M.) Topacio-Aplaon, mistakenly sent me this text message meant for his wife when we were about to meet up at Milestone Café in Cagayan de Oro (shared with his permission):

I found this so amusing that I just had to include this as an inside joke in the novel. Humabon’s wife would have to call him “mahal,” so she had to be a Tagalog. It also felt like diwata intervention. This apparent happenstance opened several avenues in the story. It allowed me to naturally allude to the Cebuano language situation, an issue I care deeply about. It also allowed me to make use of scriptural Tagalog to evoke an ancient prophesying voice when Paraluman declares,

At sa takdang panahon, babangon ang isang binukot na magpapakita ng tunay na kulay ng kanyang balat sa harap ng lahat. Hindi siya magtatago sa anino. Yayakapin niya ang liwanag ng araw, at dudurugin niya ang ulo ng ahas. Ang kayumanggi na ina ng kayumanggi na hari ay magdadala ng bagong panahon para sa ating mga anak.

I didn’t have any literary friends prior to writing RVC. Aside from Mitya, Nathan Go, the author of the novel Forgiving Imelda Marcos, was one of the firsts. I remember talking shop with him at Coffee Cat Davao. After pitching the story to him—at this point it was going to be an opener for a non-fiction book about power—he told me that “it sounds like a novel.” He said this like a gold prospector who had just struck the mother lode. Through him, the diwata activated the mimetic desire within me.

Nathan got one of the first copies of RVC, and he rightly sensed that my depiction of the binukot was inspired by the Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert’s Dune. But I was not only thinking about Lady Jessica as I was writing those Tagalog lines. I was also hearing the terrifying voice of Cate Blanchette’s Galadriel in the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings, when Frodo offers her the ring and she contends with the temptation to absolute power. Here are the words from the book, which are richer than what she actually says in the film:

And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Yet Paraluman did not originate from Lady Jessica or Galadriel. These expressions of feminine power were simply what I had in my literary palette. Her source was real life. The Filipino historical novels I’ve read seem to use the past to deliver “moral lessons” for the present. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to use the present to fill the gaps of the historical and anthropological record, like the way modern DNA is used to complete dinosaur genomes in Jurassic Park. Pigafetta recorded 160 Cebuano words in 1521, and surprisingly I could understand most of them! If there’s any truth to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—that language is an expression and frame of culture—then I share much of the cultural DNA of Humabon and Lapulapu.

I was in the middle of my masters in Anthropology as I was writing RVC, specializing in the figure of the orang besar—the Southeast Asian Big Man. So I knew the state of scholarship on the role of women in the ancient and present Austronesian power structure centered on the charismatic and violent man surrounded by a mandala of kin, dependents, and allies: practically zero.

What academia lacked in written knowledge, I felt had in my cultural DNA. After all, I grew up surrounded by all sorts of powerful women. I wouldn’t call myself a feminist: I’ve never been involved in promoting women’s rights or whatever the political project of feminism is. And I grew up steeped in some of the strongest strains of Filipino machismo. Yet, Gabi Francisco, editor of Ex Libris Philippines, told me that RVC is “very feminist.” She was the first to write a full book review of the novel, and she told me this in our conversation at Auro Café during the Manila International Book Fair four months after the release of RVC.

This is the power of what I call “neo-animism.” I first learned about this approach from Liz Gilbert, in her book Big Magic. To her, ideas are living beings from somewhere beyond this world. Their life-defining desire is to be made manifest in our world. This could only happen through the creative work of humans. So they roam the earth looking for partners. When they find one, they reveal themselves. This is the experience of inspiration. I was brought up as a hard science supremacist, so this language was not natural to me. But this is exactly how it feels when a creative possibility—like a novel—appears in your mind!

As I read up to recreate the culture and psychology of Humabon and Magellan, I found out that both came from worlds still enchanted and filled with life. As one episode of The Emerald podcast is titled, “Animism is Normative Consciousness.” The modern Western mind is the exception, not the norm. For instance, the Catholicism of Magellan’s sailors was very much animist. Here’s how Pigafetta records their thanksgiving after surviving a storm somewhere in Mindanao, six months after the death of their captain:

One Saturday night, 26 October, while coasting by Birahan Batolach, we were assaulted by a furious storm; thereupon, praying to God, we lowered all the sails. Immediately our three saints appeared to us and chased away all the darkness. St Elmo remained for more than two hours on the maintop, like a torch; St Nicholas on the mizzentop; and St Clara on the foretop. We promised a slave to St Elmo, St Nicholas, and St Clara; we gave alms to each of them.

Like the average Westernized Filipino, I initially assumed that these were mere symbolism. However, when I put myself in the shoes of the devotees of the Santo Niño, I can see again with eyes unclouded by the bare rationalism of modernity. To quote Julius Bautista in his paper “On the Personhood of Sacred Objects: Agency, Materiality and Popular Devotion in the Roman Catholic Philippines,”

In recent decades, anthropologists have critiqued what is perceived to be an antiquated and somewhat simplistic notion of animism as “an idea of pervading life and will in nature” (Tylor 1871, p. 260). Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has been at the forefront of the effort to renew the concept by focusing less on spiritual animation in favor of an emphasis on a relational personhood that extends beyond human beings. Harvey defines ‘animists’ as “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others” (Harvey 2006, p. xi).

As I embraced this neo-animism in my work, I not only accepted the agency of the muses behind stories; I also recognized the agency of characters within them, like that of Paraluman telling me that RVC is as much her story as it is Humabon’s and Magellan’s.

I use “the diwata,” by the way, as a collective, similar to LOTR’s “the Rohirrim.” The diwata of creative work—the muses of the ancient Greeks—do not only speak to our hearts and minds; as Liz Gilbert relays in her own life, they also work through the people around us. Mitya’s missent text message is just one example. Another writer, John Bengan, was their medium for some writing lessons and for countering my attempts at escaping my calling.

I got to know John through Nathan and we hung out a number of times at Habi at Kape Davao. In one of our conversations, I told John how impressed I was with his range of literary voices in Armor, his collection of short stories. He explained that he practiced a kind of “method acting” in writing them. I eventually adopted this approach in creating RVC. Everyday, during my writing sessions, I would enter the minds of my characters and live within the world of the novel. This made the story an adventure instead of an execution of some rigid blueprint. Although the plot was constrained by history and anthropology, the characters had a lot of agency within these borders. My principle was: extreme scholarly faithfulness to what is written and extreme creative wildness in what is not.

Over more than a decade, the diwata of the novel gradually revealed their proposal. John was one of their final messengers. I initially had this self-image of an essayist and an explainer, not an artist or a storyteller, but John helped change my mind. When I casually mentioned to him how I grew up in Pari-an, the area in Cebu that Humabon once ruled and where the events of the novel took place, John reacted as if this was a sign of my calling. I also told him about my plan to look for a comic book artist to help me turn the story idea into reality. He looked disappointed, like I was shirking some kind of responsibility. Okay, okay—I eventually told the diwata—I’ll f**king do it!

As a scholar of culture, I also use neo-animism to see and work with the large cultural forces that haunt and color the lenses with which we see the world. In my daily work of manifesting the novel, I had to protect the story from some of these spirits and let others in, like an exorcist or a shaman. One of these spirits I let in was the force behind Paraluman—the spirit of hidden feminine power. I’m so grateful that this spirit entered the story because, like salt on a dish or a contrasting color on a painting, this feminine power turned what would have been a dry and arid political chess game between two sociopaths into a much richer, nuanced, and truer story.

I sense that the Humabon who both charmed Magellan and massacred his men is inaccessible to most writers because they are possessed by post-Holocaust morality or the epistemology of the postcolonial nation-state. Part of me remained immune to these—the part shaped before such worldviews existed. To find more potent and more ancient strains of Filipino machismo, one would have to look to Tondo or Bangsamoro. Neo-animism and literary method acting allowed me to fully embody and express this part of me—as well as to transcend it—so much so that Gabi read RVC as a feminist novel. In a sense, she is right. The story’s metafictional author, Doc Camy, has an unmistakable feminist perspective, as can be seen in her afterword:

We also hope this translation offers Western readers a glimpse into how history looks when viewed not from the deck of a Spanish galleon but from behind the woven walls of a payag, where women who never appeared in colonial chronicles nevertheless shaped the course of events through their influence on powerful men and their own direct wielding of power.

In one of the book events for RVC, a reader asked me why both the book’s fictional translator and author are women. The cheeky answer is “because that’s what the diwata wanted!” If I put on my rationalist hat, however, it would go something like this:

David Deutsch, in his book The Beginning of Infinity, theorizes that creativity is a kind of mental trial-and-error, similar to the scientific method, but whose empirical basis is beauty instead of correspondence to measurable physical reality. This process seems largely subconscious. There were countless nights when I woke up at around 3AM, excited with a solution to a puzzle in the story’s plot, structure or wording. It was very satisfying, like finding an elegant winning move in some kind of 4D chess. Yet it was also extremely weird. Like, where did I get that certainty of right and wrong moves? The best answer I found is from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. What he calls “System 1” thinking—that fast, instinctive mode that chess players and freestyle rappers use to make impossibly correct split-second choices—is very much how it felt to find the perfect jigsaw piece while being in a flowstate that allowed me to feel all its adjacent pieces in a multidimensional space, and sense—with ASMR-like satisfaction—the frictionless slide of precision-machined parts dissolving into seamless whole. Swak! All those years of reading beautiful fiction trained me for those moments.

Choosing Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano, PhD, to be the story’s fictional author and her teenage niece, Samantha Gonzales, to be its fictional translator, was swak. I felt it click into place. I must admit, however, that I stole that metafictional move from Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado. I told him so when I chanced upon him at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I also recommended a history book when he told me about his next project. Later, he told me that I was a godsend—so perhaps I was also one channel of his next book’s diwata.

I mention Miguel, Gabi, John, Nathan, and Mitya because there are invisible bonds between those of us who read and who write. That includes you, dear reader! Not even death can sever these bonds. It has been more than two decades since I’ve read Nick Joaquin’s The Summer Solstice, itself a Filipino man’s contemplation of ancient feminine power. Yet I am certain that it was through him and through his story that Paraluman entered Rajah Versus Conquistador. In that fateful December morning at—recall the name—Café Prelaya by the Joaquins, Paraluman asked me to introduce her with these lines—lines whose imagery comes from The Summer’s Solstice, including a paragraph that some might consider an act of homage and others plagiarism:

You enter, hands already positioned for a respectful bow. The oil lamps cast dancing shadows on the walls of finely woven nipa. The air is heavy with incense – storax and benzoin, the same perfumes used in the death rituals of datus.

You dare to raise your eyes for a moment and you catch a glimpse of her. Through the haze, you see her seated on an elevated platform, sitting on silk cushions from Johor. She is dressed in the manner of Bruneian nobility – layers of rich fabric completely covering her form, making her seem larger than life. Her lips are stained with deep red from betel nut, while atop her head sits an elaborate headdress made of palm leaves.

“Closer,” she commands, her voice carrying the authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed.

You crawl forward on your hands and knees, your garments dragging against the bamboo floor. She watches your approach with the detached interest of someone observing a ritual they’ve seen performed many times before.

When you reach her feet, you pause, waiting. The moment stretches like honey dripping from a comb. This too is part of the ritual – this moment of anticipation, of power held in perfect balance.

“You may kiss my feet,” she says finally. She raises her skirts and contemptuously thrusts out a naked foot. You lift your dripping face and touch your lips to her toes. You lift your hands and grasp the white binukot foot and kiss it savagely – you kiss the step, the sole, the frail ankle.

And that, dear reader, is how the diwata got me to write a feminist novel, despite being steeped in Filipino machismo.

Get a copy of Rajah Versus Conquistador

I thought my next book would be about my experience of writing Rajah Versus Conquistador. Those fifteen months felt like an adventure through an enchanted land where I spoke to gods and mythical creatures and where I discovered magical powers within me.

Then I remembered the words of Tim Ferriss, the author of The Four Hour Work Week: “what would this look like if this were easy.”

This led to an experiment of maxing out the use of three large language models: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. The diagram above summarizes the process. I asked the latest model of Claude, Opus 4.5, to process 38 documents with a total word count of 77.2k words following variations of this prompt:

Can you create a comprehensive and detailed document that presents different aspects of my experience of writing RVC? Divide the document into these different aspects.

I cobbled together a ten-thousand-word document of from a few of its outputs. The document has fifteen sections, as seen in the screenshot of the table of contents below. In total, Claude probably spent less than 30 minutes on this project. In contrast, I have spent more than 8 hours on it as of this writing. Doing what Claude did myself would have taken me a few months. Nine of the docs came from transcripts of ChatGPT voice interviewing me about my experience. This was much easier and faster than writing it down. And I wouldn’t have done those interviews with a human: it’s simply wrong for me to inflict that level of suffering on a sentient being.

What none of the AI tools could do was to tell me the answer to this question: what made the experience of writing Rajah Versus Conquistador so strange and magical? The answer came instead from the “whole body Yes” that I wrote about in my first book, How to Turn Ideas Into Reality. The answer, however, relied on Claude’s distillation and ordering of my thoughts spread across the 38 source files. My answer is in the document’s conclusion, which I included in this post, along with the its preface (also handcrafted) and the table of contents. If you’d like to read the entire document, you can access it here.

Preface

The making of Rajah Versus Conquistador was extremely strange and magical. It felt like a hero’s journey: when I returned from that year-long adventure, I was a changed man. So I felt that I needed to capture that experience in writing. In addition, I have a scholarly and practical interest in creative work. My first book, in fact, is about project management for creative work and entrepreneurship.1

The biggest obstacle was how self-indulgent this entire project felt. The amount of navel-gazing that a book-length essay on my experience would require seemed poisonous to the soul. Fortunately, we now have robots to do the gazing for us. Except for this preface and the conclusion, this document was generated by Claude, based on my essays, interviews with ChatGPT, and other writings related to the experience of creating RVC. I’ve made manual corrections, and added footnotes, links, and images to this document.

Creating this document reinforced my antisacrificial tech optimism.2 The sacrifice needed to create this without AI would have been weeks or months of intellectual labor within an ouroboric maze. Conversing with ChatGPT voice made it easy for me to quickly release my thoughts on the experience of writing RVC before my memory of it faded. I fondly recall those conversations: I was on a patio in a cool pine-covered resort in Bukidnon as I answered a voice that never got bored with my rambling, sometimes incoherent, mostly awkwardly-worded first-attempts at expressing what were then nebulous and elusive ideas. If you look at the transcripts, you will see a massive pile of useless text, but within which are hidden words that capture my thoughts. Claude’s latest model, Opus 4.5, trawled through that wasteland as well as my essays within minutes and arranged the ideas it found into themes, the fifteen sections you see below. After a few attempts, it produced a number of versions I liked, which I combined to produce this document.

My tech optimism has not diminished my belief in humanity and its goodness. In fact, the experience of creating both this document and the novel made me more certain of the human core of creative work. AI, software, and tech are pure potential. It takes human desire to will into existence one single possibility within that vast universe of potentiality. Most combinations of letters are meaningless, and most combinations of words are slop. Yet within that universe of combinations lies Rajah Versus Conquistador and this document.

This document is much less polished than the novel, but it has fulfilled its role: this is the picture album that will remind me of that beautiful adventure. By reading through the sections below, I also found the answer to the question that spurred the creation of this document: what made that experience so strange and magical? I’ll leave the answer in the conclusion.

While I wrote this document mostly for myself, it might be useful as well to anyone interested in the creative process or who enjoyed the novel and is curious about how it was made.

— Kahlil

Table of Contents

Conclusion: The Sweet Freedom of Creative Work

That last section above was originally Claude’s conclusion. Perhaps the LLM overindexed this aspect because I was also using Claude to write an academic paper on “novel-writing as ethnography” while I was working on this document. That conclusion, however, simply did not feel right.

I fed Claude’s output to ChatGPT and asked it to suggest conclusions. It presented more than a dozen but none of them felt right. I also had a couple of theories. First was through a Girardian lens: perhaps art is a positive substitute to the catharsis of ritual sacrifice. The other was from neo-animism: perhaps living in the minds of my characters and of psychic megafauna is akin to the religious experience of transcending the self. However, these explanations also did not feel right.

There’s a fractal beauty in this criterion of “feeling right.” One reason for the strangeness and magical quality of the experience of writing Rajah Versus Conquistador was that I knew what was right. When reading a draft, I had complete certainty on whether or not it was right. Where did I get this knowledge? This was why chapters took so long to write prior to using Claude. This is also what made it so exhausting. It felt like squeezing my brain dry to produce and produce words and sentences and paragraphs—until it felt right. It is the same with this conclusion. Among the thousands of words in ChatGPT’s answer was “freedom.” And as I was getting ready for bed that night, the word struck a resonant chord, and suddenly my mind was reciting a litany of freedom:

• Freedom from the limits of my self: listening to muses and living in the world of the novel as my protagonists

• Freedom from the ethics of the nation-state: creating art instead of propaganda by escaping its possession through neo-animism

• Freedom from the epistemology of academia: anthropological knowledge-creation through novel-writing

• Freedom from my own worldview: creating minds not like my own through the Three Epistemologies and living through these minds by way of novelistic “method acting”

• Freedom from the present: instead of using the past to deliver “moral lessons” for the present, as many Philippine historical novels do, I used the present to complete the gaps of the psychologies and cultures of the past

• Freedom from my identity as an essayist and an explainer: turns out I can also be a storyteller!

• Freedom from the logic of Technocapital: fifteen months of creative work instead of hustling for money

• Freedom from consciousness: hours within the state of flow everyday

• Freedom from the inner control freak: complete trust in the voices of inspiration

• Freedom from the limits of my biological brain, my talents, and my skills: the usage of AI and other software

• Freedom from traditions of Filipino literature and the taboos and status games of the communities surrounding it: writing as an ignorant outsider and only entering after the completion of the novel

• Freedom from the constraints of the publishing industry: setting up a book production operation and doing my own launches and marketing

• Freedom from the psychological need for anointing by publishers and taste-makers: direct appreciation from readers and book clubs

• Freedom from my own scholarly critique: allowing the possibility of redemption for Humabon

Interestingly, I was not free from suffering. In fact, the making of the novel brought its own kinds of suffering: the pain of absence in seeing the book in my mind in contrast to its non-existence then. And prior to using Claude, the pain of knowing how the story’s voice should sound like in contrast to my ability to produce those words. This was why it took me an average of a month to complete a chapter without AI, and around a week with it.

This suffering might explain why I have no desire to go through that experience again. Well, I would. I won’t do it for the experience but I would for the outcome: a book that needs to exist but could only do so through my work. As I leaf through a paperback copy of Rajah Versus Conquistador, I am filled with wonder and gratitude. Just a few years ago, this book was just an idea—and now it is real. This beautiful thing was actually made through me! This is the sweet freedom of creative work.

— Kahlil

This essay was first published two years ago in ’s Substack. You can still see in its comments section the notes of gratitude for the piece from around the world. Clearly, the problem of meaningless work transcends cultures and economies. I then published it in paperback, for which Luke wrote this blurb:

“Probing the philosophical and theological foundations of work—and not settling for easy: answers—is itself work, and a work that each of us should do. This essay by Kahlil Corazo is a wonderful place to start.” -Luke Burgis

I feel it’s about time I release this essay outside paywalls. It’s one of my best pieces of writing, and I occasionally revisit it to remind myself of what matters most in work and life. I hope it helps you as well.

John’s Crisis

John (not his real name) is a 38-year-old unmarried man who recently quit his high-paying job after 15 years, due to burnout. He is part of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement. John reached his “FIRE number” some time ago. This means he had earned and invested enough money that he could live off his passive income. However, two weeks after quitting his job, John posted in the Facebook forum of our local FIRE community, saying that he was second-guessing whether he made the right decision. “I can’t figure out where and what to start, to fill my time - and now am contemplating whether I should go back [to holding a job], or start a business,” he wrote.

In response to John, I recommended two books: The Pathless Path by and The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff (I have become that type of guy). My endorsement was based not only on my first-hand appreciation of these books but from the thousands of grateful reviews from their readers. The popularity of these books shows that, like John, many are grappling with the purpose of their work.

Both books deliver. With the craftsmanship of a professional journalist, Simone tells stories of people who sought meaning in work, only to be trapped in a hamster wheel of unfulfilled desire. Paul speaks more from his own experience. From his journey and from conversations with people he helped step towards their own pathless paths, Paul offers ways of rethinking our relationship with work.

I eagerly read both books because I also went through a long process of seeking my professional vocation. There’s a recurring moment in the stories the books tell, that fateful day when one decides to leave “the default path.” Mine happened 15 years ago. After reading Paul’s and Simone’s books, my story sounds almost comically stereotypical and is pointless to relay here. What might be helpful is to distill and share the lessons from that journey. Living happily ever after with one’s work does not happen by itself.

This Is Water, These Are The Three Cities

The American novelist David Foster-Wallace opens his famous commencement speech, This Is Water, with this parable:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

I also recommended this speech to John because it helps unveil the often invisible underpinnings of problems related to meaning. The problem may not be the situation itself, but the lens with which we view the world. More recently, I’ve encountered a conceptual model that not only makes the water we swim in more visible but opens our minds to other bodies of water: Luke Burgis’s “Three Cities.”

In The Three City Problem of Modern Life published in Wired Magazine, Luke points out a kind of blindness that afflicts many of us today. Those of us who work in tech and business see the world through the lens of the metaphorical city of “Silicon Valley.” Its organizing principle is usefulness, and science and engineering are its aristocrats. “Athens” represents the humanities. The dominance of Silicon Valley has made Athens a vassal state where only the computable are recognized. Luke gives the example of the utilitarian logic in the countless white papers that lay out rationalized motivations behind movements like cryptocurrency. The third city, “Jerusalem,” represents religion. Today, Jerusalem feels distant from Silicon Valley. In this post, I’ll explore how the void this distance creates, and Silicon Valley’s domination of Athens, create an inhuman conception of work. I’ll also share both the pathologies and the cures that each city brings to the question of the meaning of work.

Work > Job

When you think about it, having a crisis of meaning in work is a luxury. For most of human history, the purpose of work was to not die. In ancient Greece, only the free citizens — i.e., those who were not slaves — had the luxury to philosophize. Thanks to the accelerating technological progress in the recent past, many of us now have this gilded burden. The metaphorical Silicon Valley deserves its dominance because it has given us this freedom.

This strength is also Silicon Valley’s weakness. While technology unceasingly progresses, human nature stays the same. As we speed toward the future, in awe of the power of our creations, we leave behind the answers that Athens and Jerusalem have given us for millennia.

For instance, ancient Greek philosophers had a clear distinction between servile work and the liberal arts. Josef Pieper explains in Leisure: the Basis of Culture,

“The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves; the servile arts are those which have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.”

In the utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, servile work is the only kind of valuable work. Captured as I was inside this city, I used to feel guilty whenever I used my “productive time” on anything other than what could turn a profit. This guilt clearly comes from the morality of utility. This partnership of technology and the free market has undoubtedly produced a lot of good. Yet the emptiness I felt despite this abundance shows that my desires are much bigger than what the useful good can fill. The wisdom of Athens knew this and had a name for the boundlessness we desire. They called them the transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty.

Breaking Silicon Valley’s Monopoly

Stories, like the ones that Paul and Simone tell in their books, are like escape hatches from Silicon Valley’s monopoly on the meaning of work. In my own journey, it was the “lifestyle entrepreneurs” that showed me an alternative story. As I tried to build a life around a new script, it was principles like the ancient ones we explore here that helped me find my own path.

For instance, I can’t seem to stop calculating the return on investment of my time. Instead of forcing myself out of this mindset, I just expanded the meaning of “returns.” Today, spending an entire day reading and writing makes complete sense, yet this was unimaginable for me years ago. Similarly, days spent in nature are not merely a recharge in order to perform better at my job. After escaping the prism of utility, I can experience the outdoors as an end in itself.

Defining work as much broader than a job was also a kind of liberation. This meant that the money problem was separate from answering my professional calling. Paul and Simone warn us of the danger of equating our identities with our work. This tends to limit one to a single well-defined job, particularly one which your parents can describe.

Most of us still need to do some servile work to participate in the goods of civilization: at the minimum, food, shelter, and clothing for us and those who depend on us. At the same time, I’m certain that many of us feel the call to do something beyond mere survival and biological reproduction. If works like Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, or Paul Graham’s How to Do Great Work resonate deeply with you, you know what I mean.

The lie perpetuated by the metaphorical city of Silicon Valley is that this professional vocation must be a kind of job, some kind of useful and servile work; that it must be somehow within the system of free enterprise; that its success must be proportional to the money it makes for us. However, if truth, goodness, and beauty are boundless, then only a fraction of their expressions must lie within the domain of the city of tech and money. All work has elements of truth, goodness, and beauty. But not all work falls within the system of free enterprise. Let’s draw that:

This diagram also shows a definition of our labors beyond the economic. Work is the human act that turns ideas into reality. Work is spirit expressing itself through matter. Work is the localized reversal of entropy. Jobs are kinds of work that allow us to participate in the exchange of goods and services.

If we define work and jobs this way, then there must be important work that lies beyond the system of capitalism. Monks and starving artists know this. Is there another option for those of us who are not monks and who like food?

The Athenian Path to F.U. Money

I like the people in FIRE community that John and I belong to. Most of them are humble and hard-working people. The most common pathway to FIRE in this group seems to be getting one or more high-paying jobs while being extremely frugal. The culture is a mix of Minimalism and financial geekery.

This stands in contrast with the hustlemaxx corner of Twitter, with its promises of fast cars, yachts, and submissive women. However, both groups essentially desire the same thing. What one calls post-economic freedom, the other calls “f*ck you money.” The advantage of FIRE is its adoption of Minimalism. This is a recognition that there are two axes in the vector toward financial freedom: money and desire. Let’s draw that:

If we are to apply the sophistication in personal finance that FIRE folk have to the mastery of desire, the first step is to recognize that there are different kinds of desire, and the mastery of each kind requires a different approach.

• Animal: desire for survival and reproduction

• Mimetic: desire that stems from our social nature

• Transcendental: desire for truth, goodness, and beauty

We work because we desire. As beings with limited time and power, we have limited units of work. Working for a fancy car means that one or more books I am meant to write will never be written. There are worse ways to leak out my desires. The godlike efficiency of the market scrapes out each ounce of lust, loneliness, vanity, and indignation it can from us, bids them out algorithmically, and shapes our online worlds to expose more lines of desires it can excavate and mine.

This demonic side of Silicon Valley is new only in its efficiency. To Athens and Jerusalem, animal desire is a known problem with known solutions. Mastery over animal desire is classically called the virtue of Temperantia. The English “Temperance” is a bit misleading. In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper explains:

“For temperance, the disciplining of the instinctive craving for pleasure, was never meant to be exercised to induce quietistic, philistine dullness. Yet this is what is implied in common phrases about ‘prudent moderation.’ That implication comes to the surface when people sneer at the noble daring of a celibate life, or the rigors of real fasting.”

Pieper equates temperance to “selfless self-preservation.” It is the virtue that prevents animal desires from becoming gods that control one’s life.

Work as Training Ground For Eudaimonia

The Athenian playbook for growing in virtue sounds a lot like skill acquisition. The path is daily practice. The classic practice for Temperance is deliberate discomfort, or “mortification,” in the jargon of Christian asceticism. A lot of people use James Clear’s bestselling Atomic Habits to improve their lives, like exercising, curbing social media use, and losing weight. This is good, but it sounds small-minded compared to how Athens used the same techniques. To the ancient Greeks, Eudaimonia is the purpose of life. It is usually translated as “happiness” or “human flourishing,” but its meaning is clearest when we realize that Eudaimonia is no other than becoming brave, wise, just, and a master of oneself. The more virtuous you are, the less money you need to be free. Work is an abundant source for this training in virtue, alongside the demands of family and community.

Aiming for Eudaimonia is in itself a safeguard from small-mindedness. The pathological excess of Minimalism that I notice among FIRE folk is fear of undertaking big projects that risk their security, like starting a business or having children. Athens presents us with the countervailing virtue, whose name we have forgotten. We read in The Four Cardinal Virtues:

The noble, truly princely practice of spending lavishly in order to make splendidly visible some sublime thought—either in a solemn celebration, in sculpture, or in architecture—this virtue (for it is a virtue!) the Middle Ages called magnificentia. We no longer can describe it in a single word. But the relation of magnificentia to ordinary generosity, which belongs to the daily sphere of needs and requests, is the same, says St. Thomas, as the relation of virginity to chastity.

Mastery Over Mimetic Desire

Learning about mimetic desire was my biggest breakthrough in self-mastery since my introduction to practical virtue ethics in my teens. I first read about it in Luke Burgis’s Wanting, which is a great introduction to René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. Girard is a French literary critic and social theorist who has been called “the Charles Darwin of the Human Sciences.”

Girard first noticed the principle of mimetic desire as a pattern running through the great novels he taught. In Wanting, Luke unveils the power of mimesis in a similar way. He tells us stories that we can’t help but compare to our own experiences. Once mimetic desire is unveiled for you, you see it everywhere. Again and again, I’ve seen people tweet this same sentiment.

In the second part of the book, Luke gives us some ways to have some mastery over mimetic desire. We cannot choose the desires we copy from our models and rivals. However, we can design our environment (these days, this includes our social media feeds), and we can choose how we react to desires. This brings us back to the cardinal virtues, especially the temperance of saying no to ourselves and the fortitude to say no to our ingroup. Unveiling mimesis as the source of many desires is powerful in itself. If you pair this with a daily practice of meditation or prayer, knowing its name makes it easier to zoom out and examine those desires like an object in the palm of your hand, instead of an invisible force that envelops you.

My favorite tool from the book is “fulfillment stories.” These are occasions in the past where one took action and accomplished something that led to the happiness that comes from doing good, knowing truth, or beholding beauty. Recalling and relaying these stories helps you distinguish between your “thin desires” and “thick desires,” which makes it easier to design your life for the latter.

Hanging out with FIRE folk in real life, and biasing my online presence toward independent writers and Girardians is how I’m designing my life for my thick desires. My mimetic and competitive nature is gradually leading me to try to beat my models and rivals at Minimalism, personal finance, internet writing, and knowledge of René Girard. All is going according to plan.

Toppling the Athenian Ivory Tower

Girard has other astonishing observations. For instance, he points out how our current preference for the downtrodden over the powerful is unique in history. We take it for granted that you can present your story of being victimized to court or to the media, and people will generally side with you. If you claimed rights due to your victim status in the imperial courts of ancient Rome or China, you’d be laughed straight out of the palace.

This inversion of values, according to Girard, comes from the city of Jerusalem, both the literal and metaphorical ones. Girard says that the moral stance against sacrifice—which to him is a moral stance in favor of the weak—can be seen in Hindu sacred scripture (e.g., the Upanishads) as well as Buddhist thought. The world-changing revelation, however, came from the historical Jerusalem. The sacred scripture of the Jews is told from the perspective of the victim. This stands in contrast with ancient myths, which are told from the perspective of those who commit the sacrifice. To Girard, the summit of this revelation comes from the first-century rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian gospels tell us that he is a deity, yet he chose to be born to a poor family in a subjugated nation, and that he willingly let himself be sacrificed as a scapegoat—the “lamb of God.”1

We idealize the literal and metaphorical city of Athens above, as we contrast it to Silicon Valley. The fundamental option of the ancient Greeks, however, is the default one: they sided with the powerful. Pieper’s framing of how work was viewed by them reveals this. “Servile work” literally means the work of slaves, and “liberal arts” is what free men do. The unsavory aspects of Athenian society—slavery, the exclusion of women, and pederasty—also reflect the morality of slavemasters. Nietzsche noticed the same inversion of values brought about by Christianity—and famously despised it.2

This inversion of values gave nobility to jobs. Doing useful work is no longer relegated to slaves. Today, we admire the engineer and the entrepreneur as much and often more than the politician or the philosopher. The moral underpinnings of this civilization that brought us today’s unprecedented material wealth are centered around the son of God, who is also the son of a craftsman.

From Tertullian to Postmodernism

The three-city model we have been using here, according to its creator, Luke Burgis, was inspired by a question by Tertullian, a third-century Christian apologist. He asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Luke writes,

“By this he meant, what does the reason of philosophers have to do with the faith of believers? He was concerned that the dynamic in Athens—the reasoned arguments made famous by Plato, Aristotle, and their progeny—was a dangerous, hellenizing force in relationship to Christianity.”

Even in this metaphorical geography, we have xenophobic nationalists. We saw the myopia of Silicon Valley and of Athens. It is not surprising that Jerusalem, when closed off to the other two cities, also induces a kind of blindness.

Tertullian is one example. Above, we looked at temperance as freedom from the tyranny of animal desire. Tertullian, however, treats it like fortress walls to keep an evil world at bay. In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Pieper points out that this stems from dualist (”flesh is evil”) worldviews.

“That ‘wrong premise’ with its effects on ethical doctrine is particularly evident in the Montanist writings of Tertullian, who, by reason of his ambiguous status as a quasi-Father of the Church (St. Thomas speaks of him only as a heretic: haereticus, Tertullianus nomine), has continued to this day as the ancestor and the chief witness of that erroneous evaluation of temperantia.”

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis also made the same observation, but he blames Kant and the Stoics.

In the world of work, this wrong premise translates to a disdain for business and other “worldly” affairs. God punished Adam and Eve by requiring that they get jobs. “By the sweat of your brow will you eat your food until you return to the ground,” we read in Genesis.

Postmodernist philosophy is the post-Christian continuation of this contemptus mundi. According to Cleo Kearns, postmodernism was a response to the unprecedented scale of violence of the European world wars and the holocaust. They blamed “metanarratives,” including reason itself, children as they are of Nietzsche. When we view work solely from each of the three cities, it is still meaningful, though arguably in a grotesque way. Postmodernism is the true meaninglessness because it denies meaning itself.

My guess is that postmodernism is the invisible water we are swimming in today. My main quibble with The Pathless Path and The Good Enough Job is that both are too embedded within this body of water. Both Paul and Simone recognize that work can become a god that eventually devours its worshipers. But their solution is the same as the postmodernists: to have no strong gods. Paul tells us,

“The answer, my dear reader, is simple. You start underachieving at work.”

Thankfully, Jerusalem offers other answers.

Work Through the Eyes of Jerusalem

John’s suffering after he gained his financial freedom and early retirement reminds me of Bree in C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. Bree is a talking stallion from the magical land of Narnia who was captured and lived as a warhorse but later escapes with the help of Shasta, the protagonist of the book. In one scene, Bree reflects on the burden of new freedom:

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”

If I knew John in real life, I’d have beer with him instead of merely recommending books. It was through friendship that I entered the city of Jerusalem, so it is the pathway I know best. The first step would be to accompany John in discerning what he is supposed to do with his newfound freedom. I would literally sit beside him in silence in a church or some other sacred space, as I have done with some friends, and as friends of mine did at the start of my journey back to Jerusalem. Then perhaps I’d invite him to a silent retreat.

There is a Bree in each one of us. It is possible to regain the liveliness lost from falling into a vicious cycle of fear, desire, and disappointment, just like a wild stallion can learn to trust its handler. But the transformation is not instantaneous like Silicon Valley’s dopamine slot machines. Time flows more calmly in the city of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has been described as “a port city on the shore of eternity.” This description also applies to the metaphorical Jerusalem. The timelessness and otherworldliness of Jerusalem allow us to transcend the ecosystem of assumptions of the times and places we happen to be born in.

When John eventually gets into a rhythm of daily reflection, I’d invite him to this port city, which can give him a bigger picture to take inspiration and motivation from. The same city can also provide Paul and Simone with an alternative body of water from which they can view radically different solutions to the problem of work and meaning.

Take, for instance, the style of Christian living preached by Josemaría Escrivá, a 20th-century Spanish priest. He spoke mainly to followers of the Nazarene, reminding them that work is their participation in redeeming the world. Escrivá points out that Jesus’s public ministry was only the last three years of his life. Before that, he already started his work of redemption through his ordinary life in Nazareth, with his family life, his friendships, and his work at Joseph’s workshop. Most of our lives consist of these ordinary joys and sufferings, including the joys and sufferings of our work.

To everyone open to the message of Jerusalem, Christian or not, Escrivá offers perspectives not found in Silicon Valley or Athens. For example, on the dangers of work so meaningful that it might consume you. Paul Graham’s rock anthem of an essay, How to Do Great Work, speaks to those of us who treat work as a central part of our lives. Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic presents a devotional relationship with one’s creative work. To the risks that Paul and Simone alert us in treating work as such, Escrivá responds with a message from Jerusalem. We need not fear the power of work. Our muses and our masterpieces also bow to the name of the Almighty.

In contrast to Tertullian and postmodernism, Escrivá starts with the goodness of human realities. In the homily Passionately Loving the World,3 he says,

“That is why I have told you so often, and hammered away at it, that the Christian vocation consists in making heroic verse out of the prose of each day. Heaven and earth seem to merge, my children, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives…”

Silicon Valley equates work to a job, one’s role in the system of free enterprise. Escrivá does not deny this, but he defines work in a broader sense, from the eyes of Jerusalem: it is our participation in the work of creation. In response to the quote from Genesis above, Escrivá points out that before the fall, God gave Adam and Eve stewardship over the world. “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’” Having a job might be an unavoidable burden, but our ability to work is a gift.

Works Cited

Armitage, Duane. Philosophy’s Violent Sacred: Heidegger and Nietzsche through Mimetic Theory. 1st ed., Michigan State University Press, 2021.

Burgis, Luke. “The Three-City Problem of Modern Life.” Wired, 28 Aug. 2022, https://www.wired.com/story/technology-philosophy-three-city-problem/.

Burgis, Luke. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Avery, 2018.

Escrivá, Josemaría. In Love with the Church. Scepter, 2008.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books, 2015.

Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Graham, Paul. “How to Do Great Work.” July 2023, http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html.

Kearns, Cleo. “The God of Abraham and the Spirit of Philosophy: A Primer on the Engagement of Postmodern Philosophy with the Abrahamic Scriptures.” Cleo Kearns (blog), 10 June 2023, https://cleokearns.substack.com/p/introduction-to-the-bible-for-non.

Lewis, C. S. The Horse and His Boy. HarperCollins, 2008.

Lewis, C. S. Weight of Glory. HarperOne, 2009.

Millerd, Paul. The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life. Paul Millerd, 2022.

Pieper, Josef. Four Cardinal Virtues, The: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge. Translated by Richard Winston, Clara Winston, Lawrence E. Lynch, and Daniel F. Coogan, 1st ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.

Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Foreword by James V. Schall, 1st ed., Ignatius Press, 2009.

Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. Edited by Shawn Coyne, Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2011.

Stolzoff, Simone. The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Portfolio, 2023.

Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. 1st ed., Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Thanks to Luke Burgis for publishing this essay, to Raymond Ng for the editing, and to all who posted comments and sent private messages in response to it—writers like me also need to be reminded that our work is not for nothing.

Gabi Francisco of Ex Libris Philippines and I recorded a conversation during the 2025 Manila International Book Fair. Below is the transcript, edited and condensed for clarity.

Kahlil: So you were saying that Ex Libris started as a college book club in UP?

Gabi: Yes. And then about a year ago, we decided to make a website. Although we’ve been meeting as a book club ever since—17 years! Imagine, 17 years of friends meeting every month, talking about books. And then life happened. Some of us went to Visayas, some to Mindanao. The online meetups became less frequent, and we finally decided to do book reviews. Because there’s no one doing independent, objective book reviews.

If there’s a book reviewer associated with an outfit, it’s usually just press for the book. They’re trying to sell you the book. So we’re just a bunch of idealists. Sometimes we buy the books with our own money. It’s purely out of love for Philippine literature. We’re not earning from this.

And honestly, before your book, we had a wrong impression of indie presses. People had been sending us manuscripts, and sometimes it’s just—sorry, we can’t. You need an editor. Just because you copy-pasted your Facebook thoughts and put it in book form doesn’t mean it deserves to be read.

Then your book came along. When I read it, I couldn’t believe it. Honestly, my expectations were low. And then I was like, oh my gosh, this is like Hilary Mantel, but with action. But make it Filipino. It just blew my mind.

Kahlil: Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Gabi: Just to give you an idea of how much my mind was blown—my day job is I’m an administrator of a school. I handle AP, Araling Panlipunan—Social Sciences. Every year, the veteran teachers mentor the younger teachers. Did you know that your book is in my slide deck?

Kahlil: Oh, wow.

Gabi: It is. The idea was: don’t teach what happened, teach why. I didn’t tell the whole story, but I put the book there and told the teachers the effect it had on me. This is the power of a good book. This is the power of a good teacher. Because like me, I thought I knew history. Then I read your book. Oh, it just makes sense. But in a very accessible way.

People get put off when they hear “literary fiction,” but I mean that as a compliment. It’s not just action. Yours goes into the thoughts of all the characters.

Kahlil: When you wrote that review, it was like, okay, finally. You feel a sense of relief. It actually works. Because you bet years of your life on this thing.

Gabi: Five years?

Kahlil: Well, the first spark was maybe around a decade ago. After I read Pigafetta, I was like, there’s something missing here.

Gabi: So that was your inspiration! That’s one of my questions. What inspired you to write the book?

Kahlil: It was a slow burn. I read Pigafetta around a decade ago. And before that, a few years earlier, I read this book called The Anarchy of Families—a compilation of academic studies and ethnographies of Filipino political families. A particular figure there is what they call the “big man.” That’s a figure being studied in Southeast Asian sociology.1

Gabi: You mentioned this in your other book. I read them.

Kahlil: One day, I just realized that Humabon is actually this guy. I know this guy. Growing up as a Filipino, as someone from Cebu, you are surrounded by this big man. We have a local name, dagkong tao. In the Mindanawan scholarship, it’s Orang Besar, which is just “big man” in Bahasa. Once I saw that, his moves suddenly made sense. The why just suddenly made sense.

Pigafetta just wrote what. He did not see how the big man thought. But once I saw that, I wanted to see the story. For years, I was just telling people, it would be interesting if you approach it this way. And I realized at some point, no one’s going to write this unless I write this. And then I thought, I’m probably the right guy to write this.I spent some years studying anthropology. I enrolled in a master’s in anthropology.

Gabi: It comes out in your footnotes.

Kahlil: I wanted to experience that world. My approach was like method acting. Every day, I would enter the mind of Humabon or Magellan. I’m glad I didn’t go insane that one year LOL. But it was just a weird experience—to put myself into the mind of a 16th century datu.

Through anthropology, I knew the culture. I knew what the role of the big man was. I also went into a study of psychopathy. My perspective is that psychopaths—the term was only invented in the 20th century, pathologized and medicalized… but how would people in the past look at someone who’s now called a psychopath?—from the anthropological perspective, it’s just someone who is not constrained by taboo. One thing I learned is that psychopaths don’t feel anxiety. So I don’t know if you noticed, but in no part of the book did Humabon feel anxiety.2 That’s how I tried to recreate that mind.

Gabi: I felt it. I was there. Not every book does that, especially history books. And I like what you did with the footnotes. It’s better to read the hard copy, to be able to flip between the pages more easily. Otherwise you’ll get bogged down. But you had a very light hand. The story flows like watching a movie.

I wanted to ask, why the frame narrative? The female student finding the manuscript? And why is she female?

Kahlil: My decisions were mostly intuitive. It just felt right. So it’s only now that I’m trying to make sense of it.

Remember I was telling you about Liz Gilbert’s approach to writing? I felt like I was just listening to what this book was supposed to be. In Liz Gilbert’s terms, there’s this diwata of this book, and it’s already there. It just wants to be made manifest. My role is to find out what it is.

Gabi: To be the channel.

Kahlil: I had another way of framing it: I thought “this book already exists in the future” when I was writing it. Now it exists. So my role was just to find out what those words are. A lot of writers have this experience. The thing is already there. You’re just there to discover it.

Now I’m trying to rationalize why it made sense. I’m in academia, so there are voices in my head that are always doing some sort of academic critique. I had to prioritize the storytelling. My North Star is the story. But there are all these other voices with their own agendas. The academic voice had concerns about positionality. It’s a very violent and male-dominated society. And there’s this feminist voice in my head—I’m just surrounded by them.

So I think rather than being defensive about that, I gave a voice to it. I let that voice be present in the book as Doc Camy.

Gabi: That sounds like it makes sense. I actually like that you were honest enough to say that it came by intuition. Some authors plan it out—oh, the trend now is LGBTQIA, so let’s have the token character. It comes out as manipulative. Yours didn’t come off as that. However, my other friend who read it was confused—did Kahlil really write it? Or did he discover it? I’m like, who cares? It’s a great story.

Congratulations, by the way, on going to Frankfurt. I was curious—if the book does get translated, what do you think a foreign reader would get out of it? Because I actually think that a Manileña like me would read the book very differently from my friends in Cebu and Mindanao.

Kahlil: I have no idea. It’s like—

Gabi: Or what do you hope?

Kahlil: Right now, I feel my job didn’t end with the writing. Since I felt called to write it, I also feel called to nurture it. To bring it to people. I’m using all my experience in marketing and sales and business for this book.

Each reader will experience the book differently. I’m just happy that some aspects of the book resonate with some readers—it’s almost like a miracle. There’s a vision in my head. I translate it into words. The words are read by someone. Those words create a vision inside their head. And then they tell me it’s similar to what I had in my head. That’s a pretty insane thing.

I’m just happy if there’s some aspect of the work which transcends that boundary between people. I never really thought about it, because I couldn’t control it. There’s no point in thinking about it or worrying about it.

But you’re right—this is my homage to Cebu.

Gabi: It comes out. You know how when a book is formulaic? Yours wasn’t. You’re waxing poetic over the sunset, the smells, the bells pealing into the future. I thought it was very lovely

We always ask this—who is the ideal reader? The reader over your shoulder? Or do you even have one?

Kahlil: I was writing it for specific people in Cebu. I had them in mind when I was writing it. Also, maybe some scholars. A collection of scholars in a certain domain. I realized I was responding to what they might say. I just accepted it. These are the voices in my head. These are my imagined readers.

But there were also voices to which I had to say—I’m not going to talk to you. This is not for you.

Gabi: Yeah, I saw that in the preface.

Kahlil: Because otherwise it would twist the story. It would go against the story. If I listened to them, I would do a disservice to the story. Some voices were threats. While others—you mentioned the feminist thing. I’m not a feminist. I’m not an anti-feminist. It’s just outside what I care about. Similar to the Moro situation. I know about it, but I don’t have a dog in the fight.

But the story wanted it. So I said, okay, let me put it there. And I think it made the story better.

I got a writing coach—this is my first time to write a work of fiction.

Gabi: It’s your first? It’s so good.

Kahlil: Thank you. I wanted to do this well. And when Paraluman came out, my writing coach said this will make the story better. We met in Baguio, very serendipitously. His name is Mitya. He’s a published author, multi-awarded. We actually have a similar style and novelistic worlds.3

So many things like this happened. Serendipities which led to this book being created. Which is what Liz Gilbert talked about in her book. Not only the inner inspiration, but what’s happening in the world around you. It’s as if the world wants you to create this thing.

Gabi: I wanted to ask also—the genre is literary fiction. Generally, from what I hear conversing with other book people, literary fiction is not the genre you go into if you want to sell. It’s not that sexy. Some people avoid it. They mistakenly feel like they’re not smart enough for literary fiction. But I think it’s for everyone.

Kahlil: I think there are four types of writers in a novelist. One is the storyteller. The second is the wordsmith. The third is maybe the scholar-teacher. And the fourth is the propagandist. In my experience, those were the different kinds of writers battling inside me. It’s a zero-sum game. You couldn’t be a propagandist at the same time you’re a storyteller. I had to fight against making it propaganda for it to be a good story.

Also, I know my limitations. My strength isn’t the wordsmithing. In the literary fiction sense here in the Philippines, what I notice is there’s a lot of experimentation, transgressing the boundaries of words and sentences and paragraphs.

I appreciate technical mastery when I see it. But that’s not enjoyable to me. That’s why I’m hesitant to call this literary fiction. I don’t feel it follows the genre here.

Gabi: For you, what genre would you describe your book as?

Kahlil: The voice I wanted was my memory of this book called Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Very straightforward. Hemingway but grittier. I didn’t actually read it again. I wanted to use my memory of the voice of that book.

And also, I wanted it to be like a translation of Cebuano written in the 16th century. I couldn’t use words like “machine,” “transparent”, “engineer.” My goal was to immerse my reader there, so it has to be words that would make sense in that world. Words that existed in that time.

Gabi: I did not know this. That must have been so hard. You had a working list?

Kahlil: It’s just editing. I also had a conscious bias for Anglo-Saxon words versus Latin words. Latin sounds more like Tagalog and Anglo-Saxon sounds more like Binisaya. Latin-derived words are long and compound—like pag-ibig and kapangyarihan. Pag-ibig literally means “the act of desiring” and kapangyarihan means “the ability to make things happen.” Anglo-Saxon words are shorter: “dog,” “love.” Cebuano words are like that. Love is gugma. Power is gahum.

I felt that would be more representative of Cebuano. And also, when I use metaphors, it had to be things around Cebu. The sun, the wind, the stars, poetry, fighting, spiders—things I experienced as a Cebuano, which I know 16th century Cebuanos also experienced.

I don’t know if that had the intended effect. But that was how the sausage was made.

Gabi: The effect was total immersion in that world. Would you say you had a genre in mind when you started writing, or you just wrote it? Genre be damned, I have a story.

Kahlil: I’m not very familiar with genres. Again, it goes back to this neo-animist approach—there’s this entity that wants to be made manifest. I know what it sounds like. What it is. The writing is a lot of revising: “This doesn’t sound right. I have to do it again. Until—this one, this is it.” The weird thing is I knew that this was it.

Actually, my next book might actually be about that journey. It was such a weird and magical experience that I feel I have to write about it. It also transformed me. That might be my next book. About neo-animism but using the experience of writing this book to talk about it.

Gabi: I feel like the genre question will come up eventually when you market your book. Because as a reader, genre plays a lot. There are readers who identify as literary fiction readers.

That’s why I was nervous that I didn’t know you didn’t think of your novel as literary fiction. For me, when I call a book literary fiction, that’s a compliment. It means it’s not just a one-day adventure. The wordsmithing—you keep saying the wordsmithing isn’t there. I beg to disagree. There are parts I underlined.

Kahlil: Just to add to that—maybe the literary fiction label is appropriate the way I use layers of fiction. That’s common in more modern literary fiction. A fictional writer of the thing you’re reading. I had a fictional translator of the fictional work. That’s more common in literary fiction. Like Ilustrado—those very meta layers.

The people I talked to who are writers in literary fiction understood what I was trying to do. So maybe in that sense it’s like that. But in terms of fitting it in a genre for it to be marketable, I don’t think that’s my job.

But I’m now considering approaching several publishers because I realized how difficult distribution is. I’m okay with the marketing. I have a marketing background. I can do those things. Even the production is okay. But the distribution is just too much. After this experience, maybe it makes sense to work with a local publisher.

What I’m also going to do is approach Grade 11 literature teachers, because DepEd suggests that teachers use regional literature. This is very regional literature, especially for the Visayas.

I feel like I need to work for it to be read by people. Some writers say they don’t care about it—I’m done with my work. But me, this is part of the job. That is the whole point.

Gabi: As a reader, I’m curious—who’s the reader over your shoulder? There are really some authors who don’t give a damn about the reader. True story, someone high up told me face to face when I asked that question, “What a stupid thing to have an ideal reader.” Everybody was aghast because what’s the whole point? For whom are you writing? Is it your legacy? Is it to tell the story of your home in a beautiful way that makes sense?

The senior high thing—remember my day job is school administrator. Right now, the curriculum is changing. We’re all on tenterhooks. The old senior high curriculum does have that. My sister teaches that. That’s why it feeds into the book club thing because we’re always looking for local writers.

As a teacher, I like that your book is suitable for senior high. There’s a bit of violence but it’s not too much.

I like that you’re breaking the mold. There’s this fresh voice from—honestly, when you see the manuscript, no one’s heard of it. It’s a fantastic book. It shows that you don’t have to… other writers have written about this corrupt system. It becomes not a question of skill anymore, but where did you go to school? Who did you study under?

I feel like your book could have only been written by somebody who was not a slave to the system.

Kahlil: I’m an outsider. I don’t even know what that game is. Before this, I had no writer friends. I only started befriending some writers when I was writing this—I needed help. At least I should know how this thing is done.

I befriended some writers in Davao who were instrumental in convincing me that I should write this. Because I didn’t have that identity of being a novelist. I felt like I’m more of an explainer rather than a storyteller. More of an essayist rather than a novelist. I never wrote works of fiction before that.

So maybe it was an advantage. It allowed me just to listen to this thing, what this vision was, rather than whatever this game is. Because I didn’t know this game existed.

Gabi: Thankfully.

Last question. From a lay reader with limited budget and time—you’re always looking for, why should I read your book? Do you worry about how the book might seem? Do you feel that it is relevant?

Kahlil: For the people I wrote it for, I think it’s very relevant. I don’t think anyone has attempted something like that for Cebu. I don’t think anyone has written a book to capture Cebu. I’ve been looking for a book like that. I remember reading Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk. Since I read that, I wished someone would write something like this for Cebu.

The nearest one was the series called The Cebu I Know, Manila I Knew—essays from writers talking about a place. I like that series. But no one really attempted it in a larger sense. I only realized that after I wrote this—okay, this is my attempt at that.

Gabi: But it’s not just about Cebu. At the end, that dynamic between the Binukot and the Babaylan—you expanded it up to 21st century, 20th century Philippine politics. I was like, that makes sense. When I watch plays, local plays, people have written about that dichotomy, how we’re stuck as a society politically. It’s already 2025, how come we’re still stuck? Yours makes sense. No one has written a book like it.

Very grateful to have had the chance to read it.

Kahlil: Thank you so much. I also really appreciate the community’s support for local writers. You write in order to connect. I’m so thankful that your community, many readers’ communities support local writers. Especially as an independent, because one thing a writer wants is to be understood and appreciated.

Gabi: Of course. That’s normal. Affirmation.

Kahlil: The publisher normally does that—you’re accepted, you’re anointed, you did a good job. But without that, as an independent writer, the source really is the community itself.

It feels like a purer relationship. You’re not doing this as your job. I’m not doing this as my job. We simply love books.

Again, thank you so much.

1

Addendum:

The actual writing took around 300 hours across two years (not counting research). This graph shows the last 15 months of those two years when I treated this novel as my full-time job:

The first few chapters took a month each to write. When I started using the LLM Claude, I reduced that to a few days per chapter. It would have taken me 4-5 years to complete the book had I gone fully manual: https://www.explorations.ph/p/im-writing-a-novel-300-faster-with

Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power are perennial bestsellers in the Philippines. I’ve got a theory why. Most of us were brought up to believe in meritocracy. If you work hard and play by the rules, you will win. Yet at some point we realize that there is a hidden, ancient, and bigger game being played. We soon see in the Philippine playing field that many of the winners won through the game of power. So we buy Art of War and 48 Laws of Power.

Most of us realize at some point that we don’t have the stomach for this game, especially after meeting people born to play it—people unconstrained by good or evil, who desire power as if it’s oxygen, and who were gifted with instincts for politics when the rest of us just fumble around half-blind through books. So we get out of the way and watch—admiring them, resenting them, sometimes both at once. We vote for or against them during elections. We try to win their patronage in corporations or at least avoid antagonizing them.

Yet they still fascinate us. We see these power players not just in our offices and social circles, but reflected back at us in the stories we consume. We’re drawn to Game of Thrones and House of Cards, watching figures who move through the world unburdened by our taboos. Even our teleseryes give us kontrabida who command our attention more than the bida. Roman historians documented the scandals of their senate, our ancestors whispered about which datu’s family was rising or falling, and when I take taxis in Davao, drivers give me real-time updates on Duterte family drama—the same story, different characters, across centuries.

Perhaps I’m just projecting. After all, I just spent a few years of my life researching and writing a novel whose protagonist is Rajah Humabon, the power player at the center of the drama at the dawn of Spanish colonization. It’s understandable how no one talks about him. Nationalist historians and content creators would rather depict Lapu-lapu, who we know enough of to create a hero but not too much that we’d have to confront the complex realities of power. These complexities though are unavoidable with Humabon. After Magellan’s death, the rajah invited his erstwhile allies to a farewell dinner and promised them a casket of gold and jewelry as tribute to Carlos I. By then, the European visitors were used to the port’s hospitality and its ruler’s charisma, so twenty four of them accepted the invitation, including two captains. Humabon massacred them. This complexity is inconvenient for promoting nationalism, but—sweet mother of the Santo Niño—it is gold if you are novelist, especially if you want to explore the themes of power, psychopathy, and violence.

Those years spent researching, imagining, and eventually writing Rajah Versus Conquistador changed how I experience fiction, especially fiction that explore similar themes, like Jerold Tarog’s recent film, Quezon, and Shogun, the greatest TV series ever made IMHO. I have yet to write about and through this new lens I’ve acquired, so let me try for the first time here. Let me compare how the creators of Quezon and Shogun handled their Big Man with my experience with Humabon.

Warning: Spoilers!!!

Experiencing the psychopath’s charisma

My thesis for my ongoing MA in Anthropology will most likely be at the intersection of ritual sacrifice and the figure of the Southeast Asian Orang Besar (or “Big Man”—my 2025 article in Michigan State University’s Contagion journal is an example—DM me if you’d like the PDF—it’s within TOS if I send it individually). If you live in Southeast Asia, you know this figure. He is characterized by his 1) charisma, 2) ability to lead an organization, and 3) brutality. I’m sure you already have some people in mind!

Shogun‘s Lord Toranaga is an interesting example of a Big Man. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of Japan’s three great unifiers who ended the Sengoku period’s century of civil war and established the Tokugawa shogunate that would rule Japan for over 260 years (1603 to 1868). He’s played by Hiroyuki Sanada in the 2024 FX adaptation of James Clavell’s novel. I don’t have a film or theatre background, but I know Sanada’s acting is superb because of its impact on viewers. If your politics, upbringing or temperament disallows you from falling into the spells of the likes Duterte and Marcos Sr., watching Sanada’s Toranaga offers a vicarious experience of what millions of Filipinos feel in the presence of these figures. The real Tokugawa inspired seppuku, battlefield deaths, and assassinations—the same charisma Filipinos feel during elections, but taken to its natural endpoint where devotion means dying and killing, not just voting and waging keyboard wars on Facebook.

My interest as a writer is this: how did they pull this off? How did the showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo make us root for Toranaga for nine episodes, only to reveal in the finale that we’d been cheering for a manipulator who treated human lives—including those of people who loved him—as expendable pieces in his game? The answer lies in a masterful bait-and-switch. Throughout the first episodes, Sanada played Toranaga as exhausted, reluctant, defensive—a man who seemed manipulated by the Council of Regents and who explicitly refused power multiple times. His tactics were primarily psychological rather than violent: he manipulated emotions, drove wedges between enemies, and rarely shed blood unless necessary. The show even kept him offscreen during the penultimate episode, reinforcing the impression that he was improvising, barely surviving. We saw a family man who laughed with John Blackthorne, who seemed to genuinely care for his people. Only in the final episode, during Yabushige’s seppuku scene, does Toranaga finally confess the truth—and notably, he does so only to a man about to die, ensuring his real nature remains hidden from history.

The genius of this approach is that the show makes us experience what Toranaga’s followers experienced. We feel his charisma not because the show tells us he’s charismatic, but because Sanada’s performance and the writers’ structure make us want his approval, feel relief when his schemes succeed, experience something close to pride when he outmaneuvers his enemies. The reveal doesn’t come as a lecture about power or manipulation, but as a visceral gut-punch when we realize we’ve been complicit all along. Suddenly, recalling earlier episodes, the signs were always there: his strategic use of Blackthorne as a distraction, his usage of his most loyal general’s ritual suicide as a mask for his intentions, his calculated deployment of Mariko to Osaka knowing she might not return. The Shogunate, as the show makes clear in its final moments, would be built on propaganda—with Toranaga’s image perfectly maintained while everyone else did the dying. This is how charismatic authoritarians work: not through cartoon villainy, but through making intelligent people want to serve, believe, and sacrifice for a vision that requires their blood but never his.

Which brings us to Quezon.

Possibly the best version of the bad man

My study of Big Men has led me naturally to studying propaganda, and having spent more than a year inside Humabon’s head, I appreciated what Tarog et al were doing: unlike Shogun, which makes us feel propaganda’s pull, Quezon shows us the machinery. We watch it being constructed rather than falling under its spell.

The film’s central technique lies in its use of the film-within-a-film device. Nadia Hernando, Quezon’s inaanak (godchild) and an aspiring filmmaker, creates black-and-white propaganda reels for Quezon’s presidential campaign—silent films shot in the style of early Philippine cinema that blur the lines between propaganda and art, truth and myth. These sequences parody the mechanics of mythmaking while simultaneously implicating cinema itself. But the crucial move comes when Tarog reveals that Nadia made two versions—one glorifying Quezon, another condemning him—showing us that history, like film, depends on which cut survives. We watch Quezon stage his heroism, unaware that others are re-editing the same footage into his undoing.

This is the opposite of what Shogun does to us. Where Sanada’s performance pulls us into Toranaga’s reality distortion field until we’re complicit in his manipulations, Tarog keeps us at arm’s length from Quezon’s charisma by constantly showing us the stagecraft. The camera falls in love with charisma, but the edit decides truth—and Tarog stitches silent-film vignettes, propaganda reels, and campaign shorts into the story like mirrors turned at different angles. We don’t experience Quezon’s magnetism as his followers did; instead, we occupy the position of Nadia in her editing room, literally watching two cuts of the same footage, understanding that political reality is manufactured through selection and sequence. The lesson also lands viscerally: doubt the edit, trace the source, ask who paid for the camera. The black-and-white cinematography itself signals constructedness—these aren’t just flashbacks but artifacts, reminding us that what we’re seeing are representations, not reality. By the time Rosales delivers his chilling final line—”I am the Philippines”—we’re not swept up in the declaration but horrified by it, because we’ve spent the entire film watching how such claims are manufactured and weaponized.

This is why I’m interested in Quezon as someone who studies the Big Man. Online reactions to the film expressed shock at seeing the lionized figure from our peso bills and statues revealed as a Machiavellian manipulator hungry for power. But here’s what years of studying these figures has taught me: study enough of these figures and the moral surprise fades; what begins to matter is not whether they play the game of power, but the means by which they do. In fact, by Big Man standards, Quezon was one of the good guys. There were no massacres under his watch. No matter how ruthlessly he destroyed his rivals politically—cutting off Aguinaldo’s pension, weaponizing the press, manipulating constitutional amendments—he never had any of them killed. This is an absurdly low bar to clear, I know. But once you spend enough time studying orang besar across Southeast Asia, once you’ve traced the logic of datu politics from precolonial slave-raiding expeditions to modern political machines, you learn to calibrate your expectations differently. The question isn’t whether a Big Man plays the game of power—that’s definitional. The question is whether his ascent to power was paid with the ancient way of blood and sacrifice, or with least bad option of cunning, manipulation, and propaganda.

Redemption for my monster

We all pay taxes, but in the past 90 years, that money was used to promote and standardize only one Philippine language, Tagalog. It was later rebranded as “Filipino”—a standardized dialect of Tagalog. Its supreme achievement: there are more films, music, and literature being produced in Tagalog than all the other Philippine languages combined. This move has the same signature of cunning and propaganda from our boy, Manolo.

According to Jojo Abinales in an episode of the PODKAS podcast, Quezon’s model was not the United States—which never imposed a national language—but Stalin and Europe’s fascists. “Isang bansa, isang wika, isang diwa” could have come straight from an early 20th century ethnostate ideologue. Prior to the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, ethnonationalism was the normal playbook, and as a new nation-state, the safe option is the usual option. This sacrifice for the sake of the nation-state was not bloody (in this aspect), but it was still a sacrifice, and non-Tagalogs continue to pay it. Maabtan ra mo’s gabâ puhon.

I need to disclose my dumot—my deep grudge—against Quezon, and the figure of the Big Man in general, because writing Rajah Versus Conquistador surprisingly turned out to be a kind of anti-sacrificial resolution to it. That journey made me desire the Big Man’s salvation and transformation, not merely his condemnation.

In my preface written more than a year before I started writing the novel full-time(ish), I relayed how a fellow named Jay was gunned down outside my workplace in Davao. As a recent immigrant to the city and a student of culture, I wanted to explore how Duterte’s supporters viewed deaths like that of Jay’s as the cost of peace and order.

The story took a life of its own, however. Instead of a parable that would function as a palette for explaining culture, the tale grew into a novel. I had to choose. Will I let the story be what it wanted to be, or will I force it within my scholarly critique? I wrote the novel’s last chapter right after its first, and it would have ended with these lines had I chosen the latter option:

The halad and the casket both fall to the ground, both hitting with a thud, the halad scattering its sacred liquid and the box its treasures across the earth. Gold ornaments, precious gems, and luminous pearls tumble out like fallen stars, darkened from their consecration with blood. The bright metals and stones take on deep crimson hues in the torchlight, transformed from mere wealth to powerful offerings.

As though a wave breaks upon the shore, violence erupts across the feast grounds. Your bilanggô and his warriors emerge from the shadows, weapons drawn. The datus rise as one, their knives and swords glinting in the moonlight. The devadasi step away from their targets with practiced grace, their garments untouched by the blood that begins to flow.

The red harvest has begun.

I envisioned an ending similar to Shogun‘s: no “moral lesson,” as our teachers used to call it; just the terror of seeing the reality of power and its cost. In contrast, because of expectations set by Hollywood, I sense Tarog had to punish his Quezon in his ending. The film closes with the president ravaged by tuberculosis, unable to stand, wheeled into a bunker as World War II erupts around him. In the film’s final moments, we see him consumed utterly by his lust for power, his ego spiraling into delusion—before he is swallowed by the darkness.

I chose possibly the most intimate perspective in writing Humabon’s half of the novel: second person present tense. I wanted to see through his eyes and think his thoughts—and bring along the book’s readers with me. The unintended consequence was that my first reader—my writing coach, Mitya—ended up rooting for the rajah. And although I modeled Humabon’s mind based on what I’ve read about psychopathy, our identification with him led to empathy instead of fear or loathing.

My writing approach is similar to method acting. Everyday, I would enter the mind of Humabon and let him live and make decisions with the world of the novel and within the constraints of the historical record. So I did not expect him to have a conversion in the middle of the novel—it was not even religious but merely psychological. After that, and considering the second person’s effect on the reader, I did not have it in me to send him back to hell, as originally planned. The storyteller in me made the scholar let go of his critique of the Big Man and let in a ray of hope—usa ka bidlisiw sa paglaom, as Humabon would say. Even I did not escape our protagonist’s charisma and maneuvering. This turned out to be a gift. I’m a bit biased, but I think Rajah Versus Conquistador‘s ending is more beautiful than Quezon‘s or Shogun‘s.

It is fascinating how a few seconds of a song can bring you back decades.

I was in the backseat of a cab, one of my regular commutes, when I heard the song. It was background music, one of those well-polished pop songs that sound so normal, you almost don’t notice it.

Then the vocalist started singing. At first it did not make sense. It was so strange that my ears had to float it to the surface of my consciousness.

It was like realizing a stranger is actually a friend you have not seen in years. It was a delicious surprise. The lyrics suddenly made sense. The song was in my mother tongue, Cebuano.

My heart started to beat faster, and I was suddenly back to long-forgotten concerts in ‘90s Cebu.

At the center of my excitement was one question.

Has the time finally arrived?

Cebu Rock, Circa 1997

The earliest concert I remember was for the landmark rock anthology “Showground,” in some hall near Fuente.

I did my first and only stage dive at that concert. In those early years, we had to engineer it a bit. The landing pad of raised hands was only those of my high school buddies. The rest of the crowd were just standing and watching. As we triumphantly walked away from the stage after a set, some girl quipped to “let the animals pass through.” Perhaps we were the only ones who watched videos of Pearl Jam and Nirvana concerts and stupid enough to emulate them.

I also remember that awkwardly laid-out Yano and Eheads concert in Abellana stadium. The stage was in the middle of the football field, and the audience was in the bleachers. That was before the Eheads became icons, so it was possible to fit everyone comfortably in a few sections. No one was allowed in the field, and this produced this strange empty space between the bands and the people.

As several opening acts came and went, a crowd grew right in front of the stage, heaving up and down with the music. People got there with one of two ways you get through barriers in Cebu: you are well-connected enough to get through the gate, or you are ballsy enough to jump the fifteen feet between the ground and the bleachers, straight into the rattan batons of the barangay tanods.

The Razorback and Wolfgang concert in Padi’s Point Ayala was more permissive. We were moshing and headbanging right in front of the small stage, while the people who were there to see and to be seen, were mingling and giggling in the bar, away from the barbarians.

At one point, Paco Larrañaga, who later on became the center of one of Cebu’s most controversial legal battles, walked through the pit, and effortlessly shoved us away. He was a large and powerful man, half-Basque and half-Osmeña, and he was the kingpin of the young Cebuano world at that time. In a primal and wordless language we all understood, he encouraged us to not go too wild with our moshing. We complied. For around five minutes. Clearly, this man also did not watch Pearl Jam concerts.

Cebu Reggae

Something surprising happened in Cebu’s music scene in the latter part of the ‘90s.

Modern Cebu’s music trends have always been distant echoes of the United States. New wave, punk, heavy metal, grunge, hip-hop, electronic dance music — all these sprouted little scenes in Cebu following their popularity in the US. This makes sense, given the pervasiveness of American cultural influence on the Philippines.

The unexpected and sudden rise of reggae bucked this pattern.

Cebu street lore tells us that the appreciation for reggae was incubated for years in the Fine Arts Department of UP Cebu. Later on, it spread throughout Cebu’s universities and high schools, and eventually went mainstream.

At its height, the city was throbbing with annual reggae festivals, reggae hours on local radio, and countless reggae concerts. People wore red, gold and green, grew dreadlocks and dangled ethnic burloloy. Urbandub, Cebu music’s biggest commercial success, came from this Cambrian explosion.

Here’s my pet theory. The foundational rhythm of reggae came from the waves of the seas of Jamaica. The tropical weather allowed them countless nights of music and merrymaking on the shore, singing of friendship and heartbreaks and social justice in the light and the crackling of the bonfire, amidst the rhythm of lapping waves.

The same experience and the same rhythm runs through the collective consciousness of Cebu. We are told that the Sinulog dance is also patterned after waves. Not surprisingly, this dance is strikingly similar to skanking (that dance you do to the sound of reggae). Reggae feels like the soundtrack of our lives here in Cebu, an island practically all seashore, just like Jamaica.

From Imitation to Originality

Back in the day, we were aping the Jamaicans the way kids now ape today’s most popular music groups — sometimes to a comical extreme. I remember a reggae concert in one of the incarnations of those two or three artsy bars on Gorordo Avenue. There were guys in dreadlocks, posters of King Haile Selassie, some guy preaching the Rastafarian religion in between sets (in a Jamaican accent, of course), and people openly smoking ganja (good thing Duterte wasn’t president back then).

Imitation is probably just a phase that artists and their audience go through. During that time, there was this band called Frank! (with an exclamation point). They sounded to me like a Soundgarden clone, which was one reason I liked their music.

After a decade of near silence, the frontman of Frank! came back with a band called Franco. To me, their first album is a rich and masterfully crafted brew whose ingredients are the sounds of the Cebu music scene of my teenage years. At the same time, you could hear that they have found their own voice.

(By the way, check out the last song of that album, that ode to friendship, and you will hear the rhythm nature gifted to Cebu and Jamaica).

The Cebu music scene appears to collectively follow the same journey from imitation to confident originality. Reggae gave Cebu a taste of going off-script. What happened next is obvious in hindsight. Singing with your own voice quite literally means singing with your own language.

First came Bisrock, the bastard son of the Cebu music scene. Afterward came his popular sister, Vispop.

Before we go there, let’s try to answer this question: why the hell did it take so long?

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme

Today, we take songs in Filipino for granted. However, we did not always have this abundance of popular music in the national language.

My mother spent some of her teenage years in Manila. ‘90s Cebu to me is ‘70s Manila to her (her favorite was a group called the New Minstrels). She says there was a time when mainstream artists in Manila were singing in English rather than in Tagalog.

The Philippines, of course, has a long history of folk songs and church songs in each of the major local languages. It was only in the ‘70s, however, that we had an urban genre of original music written in vernacular. People call it Manila Sound.

I imagine this was the transition from imitation of American music to the thoroughly Filipino music of ’80s OPM. The usual example of Manila Sound is Hotdog’s “Manila,” which is written in a mix of English and Manileño Tagalog. (The underground, as always, was ahead of its time. Asin, for instance, was deep in Tagalog since the 70’s).

The genre’s name encapsulates its aspirations. Original Pinoy Music was a concerted effort by artists and record labels in the ’80s to establish an actual music industry.

They were successful. ’90s bands like the Eraserheads and Yano sound to me like they grew up listening to local music. They riff on established local musical tropes rather than simply translating an American genre to Tagalog.

There were forces greater than the music industry that led to this blossoming of music in Filipino. Like many new nation-states, 20th century Philippines followed the template of “one nation; one language” in its grand project of nation-building. Tagalog was chosen by the Commonwealth government of 1937 as the basis of the national language. By the time of my generation, college graduates underwent an average of fourteen years of training in the national language.

I am grateful that we have this rich body of music in at least one local language. Like many non-Tagalogs, I must also admit that I’m a bit bitter that I received zero formal education in my mother tongue and that there was no state-sponsored project to promote my language, and consequently hardly any music in Cebuano, beyond Yoyoy and Max Surban.

Until Bisrock.

Pakyu

Legislation is just one barrier to Filipino music with more diverse languages. A more insidious challenge is the baggage that people have with their vernacular.

My go-to explanation now for human behavior is the framework of evolutionary psychology. It goes like this when applied to the hierarchy of languages in our heads. There is a survival advantage in the ability to identify the status of people in a society (this allows one to better negotiate structures of power, which in the tribe could mean life or death). There is also a reproductive advantage in the ability to signal status. Evolution gave us a sixth sense, an instinct for status almost impossible to turn off.

In sociolinguistics, there is a concept of “prestige language.” Certain languages signal status. Latin, for instance, was the prestige language of medieval England, signaling access to education and power. I don’t know what the opposite of a prestige language is, but that was the status of Binisaya, at least in my childhood.

Most philosophies and religions have tools to allow people to overcome these tendencies. Models of enlightenment like St. Francis of Assisi or the Buddha show us how transcendent love or transcendent detachment allows one to treat everyone with dignity, from your maid to your mayor.

However, when faced with the sentiment that “Bisaya so eewww,” there is perhaps a more appropriate response. One can simply evoke the magic word: “Pakyu.”

Bisrock is the musical equivalent of Pakyu.

In my elementary days, we were punished for “speaking in dialect.” I imagine Bisrockers grew up in a similar environment.

So when an FM radio disk jockey by the name of DJ Ram (God rest his soul) started exclusively playing rock music in Cebuano, it was as if a dam holding back pent-up Bisaya voices broke and ushered in a wonderful flood of Pakyu.

I remember people complaining about the quality of Bisrock music. I think we have been a bit spoiled. The music that normally reaches us has been filtered by several gatekeepers — from producers to DJs.

For every Eraserheads, there are thousands of Pinoy rock bands who get filtered out by the music industry. For every Missing Filemon, there also had to be a horde of misbegotten Bisrock bands. The difference was that we got to hear them.

DJ Ram discovered a hunger for music in Binisaya. The volume of songs at that time was simply too thin for him to be picky, given the format of FM Radio. It also fit the ethos of punk rock to just let the floodgates open.

Bisrock was like those punks who jumped from the bleachers in that weird Eheads concert in Abellana. There was a lot of rawness and vulgarity, but perhaps that was needed to break the unspoken taboo on singing with the Cebuano language.

A decade later, the main entrance was already open for Vispop. As if to atone for the barbarity of its predecessor, Vispop came in impeccably curated, polished, and professional. It also came at a time of rapid economic growth in Cebu.

Millionaire in Shorts

All of us will probably be happier if we try out youthful rebellion and saintly transcendence. For the purpose of overcoming biases against Binisaya, however, this might be a bit overkill. I think there is a third and easier way for Cebu.

I have a friend from Tacloban who is now a top sales guy for BMW Cebu. He told me that he was surprised that his clients are not English-speaking guys in tailored suits. They are guys in shorts who call him “bai.”

If he had grown up in Cebu, he would have been familiar with the archetype of the Millionaire in Shorts. While nuns, NPA rebels, and starving artists free themselves from capitalistic status-seeking by opting out of it, these guys feel that they have already won the game, or at least play it on a different level. They are the local version of the Silicon Valley mogul in a hoodie.

Cebu has had immense material progress in the past decades. Will this prosperity merely bring us taller buildings, swankier restaurants, and faster cars (that crawl in the worsening traffic), just like any other third-world city?

I hope Cebu could collectively be a Millionaire in Shorts instead, to play the game at a higher level, and finally let go of those silly insecurities with its native tongue.

To Grow Up with Vispop

What a great time to be a fan in Cebu. If we look back — or listen back — to Cebu’s urban music history — from Mango Jam, to Showground, to Cebu reggae, to Bisrock, to Vispop — we could hear an accelerating progression toward craftsmanship that could compete globally, and toward rootedness free of pretension and insecurity.

The local music scene’s leading voice of today — Vispop — is Cebu’s OPM moment. It is an industry coming together and educating its audience in the appreciation of its heritage.

There are kids in Cebu now who will grow up listening to songs in their native tongue. It will be as normal to them as songs in English and Tagalog. They will not have any of the baggage of earlier generations. As Cebu becomes more cosmopolitan, perhaps their musical vocabulary would even include songs in Ilonggo, Waray-waray, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, etc.

Music itself will be the education in our mother tongue that the state failed or refused to give.

Some of these kids will be gifted with suffering, joy, obsession, or whatever it takes to create music. They will riff on local tropes rather than just translating American genres to Cebuano.

Their audience will likewise be educated enough to catch their allusions to songs from Cebu’s music history.

The same audience will be mature enough to support their artists and allow them to pursue their craft without having to hustle all the damn time.

They will sing with their own voice, in their own language.

I can’t wait to listen to their music.

My “fieldwork” sounds pretty lame compared to Sir Gus’s, but I have to ask: did living inside the mind of a 16th century Orang Besar—a Southeast Asian Big Man—almost daily for over a year in order to write RVC give me an intuitive knowledge of 16th century Sugboanon culture the same way ethnographers gain an intuitive knowledge of the extant cultures they study through their immersion? And if novelists can gain ethnographic knowledge of the worlds they recreate in their novels, then can novels be “thick descriptions” of these cultures?1

I have multiple drafts of a paper I’m writing on these questions, which I find so fascinating. I’m putting this exploration ahead of my other scholarly projects because my memory of that experience is beginning to fade! Writing that novel was one of the strangest and most magical journeys I’ve undergone, and both the scholar and essayist in me need to write about it and make sense of it.

As always, I’m working with the garage door open to maximize serendipity and to send out an invitational signal to others exploring similar or adjacent questions. My October 18th talk at the Frankfurt Book Fair is very much in this spirit. This post is also an invitation. Below is a recording of a practice run and an edited transcript. I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and questions!

Slides and Edited Transcript

Hello, my name is Kahlil Corrazo. I’m here with Robin Sebolino. We are both historical novelists from the Philippines.

I released my first novel, Rajah versus Conquistador, last May. It is about the encounter between Rajah Humabon of Cebu and Ferdinand Magellan back in 1521. Robin has written Bells and Incense and Vassals of the Valley, historical novels set in Colonial Philippines.

Three Questions to Think Like Historians

Before I tell you what I discovered in writing this novel, I want to invite you to think like historians for a moment. Here are three questions, and I’d like you to speculate on what the answers could be:

1. Why did Magellan fight a suicidal battle?

2. Why did Humabon massacre his allies?

3. What was the role of women in the events of 1521?

Keep these questions in mind. By the end of this talk, I’ll share what historians and eyewitnesses speculated, and what I discovered in the process of immersing myself in the world of the novel.

The Historian’s Approach

Laurence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World was my main source for the Magellan side of the novel. I think this is the gold standard—I like this book a lot. If we look at his bibliography, there are around 260 sources there. The question for him was: how do you turn all these sources—primary sources, eyewitness accounts, and what we know about maritime technology, the politics of empire, the spice economy, and 16th-century European society—into a gripping narrative? I think Bergreen succeeded in doing that. This is the most exciting account of Magellan’s voyage that I’ve seen.

But my question was: how would a novelist approach this? More specifically, what was the Cebuano side? How were they thinking? I also wanted to see how Magellan thought. A historian could not answer that. Bergreen was very disciplined—he only spoke of what was probable and what we actually knew, what was documented. But a novelist is freer in speculating on what was happening inside the minds of both Magellan and Humabon and the people around them.

The Novelist’s Approach

I tried to understand Magellan’s world—how a conquistador, a 16th-century hidalgo from the Iberian Peninsula, would think. I didn’t only look at the primary source (Pigafetta) or the history books like Bergreen’s account, but also other aspects of the culture.

For Humabon’s side, we don’t have an equivalent to Pigafetta, but we do know how leaders like him thought. The moment I thought this could be written was when I realized that Humabon is a kind of person I knew. I knew this person from scholarship, particularly the scholarship of the Austronesian big men, and also from my experience of being around these people as I grew up in Cebu City.

I consulted books like Raiding, Trading and Feasting by Laura Junker, books by William Henry Scott about the 16th-century Philippines, and studies on the anthropology of premodern kingship. What was the culture back then? What was the psychology of a leader, a chieftain, a rajah back then?

Language as a Bridge to the Past

But not only that—Pigafetta wrote down 160 words in 1521… and I could understand most of them! There’s this hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that people view the world through the lens of their language. If you share a language, you share a kind of worldview. If there’s truth to that, then I could actually share a worldview with the 1521 Cebuanos! My experience of the culture of Cebu is also an input to recreating 1521 Cebu.

Living as a Rajah and a Conquistador

This was my process of creating the story: understanding the culture of 16th-century conquistadors—in particular, I made use of the phenomenon of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), one of the earliest official racisms, and the impact of Christianity on culture, particularly through the interpretations of Nietzsche, René Girard, and Tom Holland. That was the Magellan side. And then the figure of the Big Man for Humabon’s side, plus my experience of modern culture.

Now you understand why my approach was different from Bergreen’s.

The Anthropological Question

Right after I finished writing that novel, my anthropology background kicked in. My scholarly work in the past few years has been focused on the intersection between the figure of the Austronesian big man (the orang besar) and René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism.2 Since my background is in anthropology, I had to ask: that experience of writing the novel felt very ethnographic. Did I actually produce ethnographic knowledge by writing that novel—ethnographic knowledge of 16th-century Cebu?

To answer that, I need to show you how some scholars have used both ethnographies and novels as sources of cultural theories.

Ethnographies as Sources of Cultural Theory

The scholar whose work I’ve been focusing on in the past years is René Girard. One of his key theories is the scapegoat mechanism. That theory was built through his reading of 20th-century British ethnographers like Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and also through analysis of myths. This is an example of how a scholar could make use of ethnographies to answer a question—in this case, why is ritual sacrifice present in all pre-Axial Age societies?

Novels as Sources of Cultural Theory

But we also have examples of him using novels as a kind of ethnography, as a source of cultural theory. René Girard is better known for his theory of mimetic desire, which is an explanation of the nature of human desire. He used novels for that—Don Quixote, books by Stendhal and Flaubert.

I was looking at my library and saw other examples. Scholar Caroline Hau, in her book Elites and Ilustrados of Philippine Culture, used novels like Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels, and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado as sources for cultural theory—to answer questions about the role of elites in Philippine society.

Benedict Anderson did the same thing in his book The Specter of Comparisons, particularly in the chapters “The First Filipino” and “Hard to Imagine.” The question was: how is the nation imagined into existence? He used novels to answer the question.

Answering the Three Questions (Discussion and Q&A)

Now that we’ve established that both novels and ethnographies could be used to answer questions about culture, let’s go back to our earlier questions. I’ll share some speculations from eyewitnesses and historians. These are speculations because we don’t really know motivation, but we can speculate.

Question 1: Why did Magellan fight that suicidal battle?

Bergreen thinks that Magellan fought that suicidal battle because there was probably a mutiny—the third mutiny that happened on the trip. There was also the bravado of previous successes, the miraculous survival, and a miracle documented by Pigafetta: the curing of the Bendahara, the brother of Humabon.

For me, as someone who sort of lived in that world, there was certainly a mutiny. When you’re writing a novel, you can’t think of probabilities—it has to be a certainty. You have to choose a reality. The reality I chose was this: there were three ships left in Cebu, around 150 crew members left from 200-plus. Only 60 fought in that battle. That fits the number of crew members in the Trinidad, the biggest ship. Where were the rest—the 90? They were not fighting in that battle. So it was probably a mutiny. In the novel, it was certainly a mutiny.

Once I was inside the mind of Magellan, living as a knight, a true believer in Christianity and chivalry, who grew up with stories of El Cid, San Fernando, the Crusades, the Song of Roland—you could see it in his actions. This was a good bet for him. Because of the situation, many options were closed to him. He couldn’t go back to Spain—Bergreen also thinks this. His options were either to become a viceroy of this new territory, what would become the Philippines (or at least the islands of the Visayas), or die a heroic death. Fighting this battle would give him those outcomes. Either outcome is a good outcome for a medieval knight, which Magellan was.

Question 2: Why did Humabon massacre his allies?

Pigafetta thinks it was Enrique’s idea. Lav Diaz, in his recent Magellan film, believes him. There’s also an account from one of the survivors who thinks the massacre happened because they seduced the women of Cebu. Bergreen thinks that Humabon needed to repair his political relationships.

For someone who lived as Humabon in that world, I think, first of all, Humabon had to fulfill his oath of vengeance. During that time, datus had a duty to avenge the deaths of their allies and their people. The reason why people follow you—your timawa, your warriors—is because they know you will avenge their deaths. This is just how the world worked. When you have to fulfill an oath of vengeance, you wear a rattan necklace or bracelet, and you can’t remove it until you’ve fulfilled your oath.

Since Humabon and Magellan became brothers through the ritual of the blood compact (sandugo), Humabon had a duty to avenge Magellan’s death. It would be a wrong move politically to direct the vengeance toward Lapu-Lapu. What he did instead in the novel was direct that vengeance against the betrayers of Magellan—his crew members. He invited them for dinner, a farewell dinner. He promised a casket of jewelry for the king, a farewell gift for the king of Spain. There were 22 of Magellan’s crew members, including two captains. And then he massacred them, fulfilling his oath of vengeance.

There were four attempts to colonize the Philippines before the success of Miguel López de Legazpi in 1565. In one of those attempts, they found out about some survivors. They weren’t all killed—there were survivors, and they were enslaved.

Once you start thinking as a datu in that time, it makes sense. The crew of Magellan was there from April 7, and the death of Magellan happened on April 27—that’s 20 days. Magellan refused to pay tribute to Rajah Humabon. But Humabon was used to being a host, and the promise was that he would be given power by this powerful king. That was essentially the deal. He was entertaining them—150 people for 20 days was expensive. But when Magellan died, that promise came to nothing. How do you pay for that? Well, the main currency of Cebu during that time, the main thing that was traded, was actually slaves. The Spaniards paid with their bodies, essentially. That was the world during that time.

Question 3: What was the role of women in the events of 1521?

Pigafetta records his encounter with a shaman offering a pig. He records seeing this beautiful queen, the wife of Humabon. He was also entertained by some naked dancers. Those were his recollections of his time in Cebu. If you read his account, it’s pretty clear that he enjoyed his time in Cebu and was charmed by Humabon. He never speaks badly against Humabon, even though Humabon massacred his companions.

But if you know the culture during that time—and this is where I really made use of my experience growing up in a Filipino family—the women were certainly involved in those political games. For instance, the binukot, the veiled women protected from the pollution of the ground and the sun, never left their huts. They were also keepers of memory. They were like the historians during that time, but this is a different kind of history. Memory was kept through symbols and ritual.

For instance, why did the wife of Humabon (in the novel she is named Paraluman) receive the statue of the Santo Niño twice? First during her baptism, when Pigafetta gave her the statue, but then a few days later, Magellan gave her the statue again. I think that’s because the memory, the event, had to be of Magellan, the leader—he had to be the one to give it to her. That was the memory that had to be recorded through the image.

There were also ideological rivals and allies. I tried to capture that through the binukot and baylan. You see this later on in the colonial world—the suppression of the baylan. Christianity is pretty anti-sacrificial, so that was the main thing they were against. Also, they were priestesses, so they were rivals.

But there’s also the less talked about aspect: the allies, the ones who embraced Christianity and helped it spread. It’s hard to explain how a few missionaries could transform Philippine society or bring Christianity throughout the islands just by themselves. They had to have internal allies, and I think it was the women as well. If you see how parishes are run in the Philippines, you would know that women play a huge role. Nick Joaquin also talks about this in his chapter in Culture and History about the beatas. This is an understudied aspect of the acceptance of Christianity in these islands in the Philippines, similar to how the role of women is in political families, particularly in the context the Big Man.

Conclusion

We could talk more about this in the Q&A. We will be signing books after this if you’re interested.

I have a paper in development about this particular topic—historical ethnographic fiction, novel writing as fieldwork, something like that. Can novelists produce ethnographic knowledge of worlds which we could no longer access directly? This is part of a larger work, possibly about Neo-animism for Creative Work and Operating Among Psychopaths and Psychic Megafauna.3

If you want to know about that, just contact me or we can talk about it after this.

3

Here’s my most developed writing on this so far:

Seeds of Science

Psychofauna Studies: A Manifesto

Kahlil Corazo is a writer based in the southern Philippines. You can get his books here and read his other essays at Explorations.ph…

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2 years ago · 37 likes · 19 comments · Seeds of Science

There were some ideas here which I have yet to explore in writing, so I’m posting summaries of my thoughts and their timestamps below to both prompt my future self and to invite you, dear reader, in this ongoing conversation.

[2:29 – 4:19] Entry into Girard & Deutsch
→ First encountered Girard via ’ Wanting; turned to Deutsch (via Popper) to assess Girard’s claim that his theories were scientific; found both thinkers resonated with lived experience.

[7:30 – 9:53] Sacrifice & Theology
→ Identifies two Girardian camps: early Girard distinguished archaic vs. Christ’s sacrifice; later softened; finds David Bentley Hart’s critique (in The Beauty of the Infinite) most convincing.

[15:52 – 20:46] Progress in Philippine History
→ Uses Magellan’s 1521 Cebu encounter to argue Christianization ended ritual sacrifice and slavery, marking undeniable progress; notes postcolonial nationalism scapegoats the West, obscuring this.

[30:05 – 33:56] Human Nature vs. Culture
→ Argues scapegoating instinct is deep in human nature (possibly genetic) but Christianity and culture “neutralize” it; cultural memes and institutions transmit restraint across generations.

[36:22 – 38:08] Static vs. Dynamic Societies
→ Deutsch saw static societies as survival strategies; Girard added that even those were progress over chaos; real breakthrough came when truth was prioritized over mere survival and power games.

[41:36 – 43:29] Story vs. Explanation
→ Contends that progress (end of sacrifice/slavery) came through the story of Christ, not abstract reasoning; stories defeat scapegoat myths more effectively than explanations.

[53:21 – 54:22] Nation-States as Interim Solution
→ Says nation-states currently monopolize violence, reducing local bloodshed but escalating global war risks; sees them as an experiment, not the final solution.

[1:01:53 – 1:03:26] Conversion & Individual Progress
→ Optimistic at personal scale: true progress comes via individual conversion—seeing innocence, rejecting scapegoating, seeking truth, and becoming “dynamic” persons.

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Playing God

playful explorations of science, human transformation, and religion

By Micah Redding

Mimesis and Infinity

A search for moral and epistemic explanations, through Girard and Deutsch.

When I was around ten, I played with LEGO so intensely that my dad once boiled the bricks in a pot of water when I would not come down for lunch. I'm his eldest and I could only imagine how my state of flow must have looked like disrespect, prompting him into that noob daddy drama. A few years later, my friends and I were cannibalizing mechanical toys to build styrofoam boats with homemade propellers, learning that machines weren't sacred objects but puzzles waiting to be reimagined. This tinkering instinct is probably why I approach LLMs the way suggests: as toy-making equipment, the usage of which is also playful.

This week, I need to write an academic essay on a chapter of Malinowski's seminal Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) in connection to his posthoumously published diary. This is for the masters program in Anthropology I’m currently in the middle of. I'm familiar with Argonauts, so to make it interesting I thought of comparing the relationship of the two texts with my novel Rajah Versus Conquistador and its fictional afterword written by the story’s fictional author, Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano, PhD.

Instead of wrestling alone with the blank page, I treated the task like those childhood LEGO and boat-building sessions. I asked ChatGPT to plan my workflow, tweaked its suggestions, uploaded my course documents, refined my Readwise Chat prompt questions until they sparked the right connections, then watched as highlighted passages streamed in, each quote finding unexpected resonance with the others. I then loaded those quotes to ChatGPT and had it create a prompt for Claude (which still has the better literary voice after multiple new models from both LLMs). As I grappled with these two toy-making machines across the day (I’ve occasionally trained in [or played!] Brazilian Jiu-jitsu), I felt that old familiar pleasure: throw it in and see what comes out, delight when it veers somewhere you didn't expect, tinker until you find a something you like, and get lost in the world of your creation.

LEGO as a metaphor captures two levels of play visible to a kid:

• The enjoyment of making of toys (ie, the making of LEGO objects)

• The enjoyment of playing with the toys you made

But there’s a third level. Venkat writes:

Most people who enjoy playing with Legos do not appreciate the very different pleasures of nerding out over injection molding, the thermal properties of ABS, and industrial dye chemistry.

Tamiya Mini 4WD cars might be a better metaphor since it allows a kid to experience the three layers of enjoyment. These small plastic racing models came as kits requiring assembly with grownup tools like screwdrivers, designed to race autonomously around large plastic track circuits. But the real magic happened beyond the instruction manual. My friends and I would hunt down plastic sign shops to fabricate custom bumpers, take motors to electric repair shops for rewinding, and whisper secret formulas for fluids to eyedrop into dynamos. The cars became platforms for endless modification—gear ratios tweaked, suspension tuned, bodies painted and detailed. Tamiya demanded we understand mechanical principles: how gear reduction affects speed, why bearing quality matters, what makes one chassis setup faster than another. The hobby's third level wasn't hidden behind corporate walls but lived in every garage workshop and hobby shop counter, where the craft of making the cars and a first taste of the joys of handling tools often proved more addictive than the racing itself.

Let’s map the three levels onto LLM:

• The enjoyment of using tools to make toys: learning how to work with LLMs

• The enjoyment of making toys: the actual process of creating an essay

• The enjoyment of playing with the toys: reading the resulting essay

The essay below is the toy that emerged from a nine-pomodoro playtime across an entire day. Some lessons from this session:

• I assumed that ChatGPT 5 is better than Claude Opus 4.1 / Sonnet 4 in general tasks. At the same time, I’ve been comparing literary voices for over a year at this point, and ChatGPT still makes me cringe and Claude generally produces good output to my ears. In my next play session, I’ll just do everything in Claude.

• A new prompt tactic: if the output is not exactly what I want (in terms of ideas, not voice), but I can’t articulate it (it’s a gut feel), I tell the LLM that there’s something wrong with it and to come up with questions so that I could guide it in fixing the output. This has worked well!

• If I have a clear vision of the essay, it is better for me to write it manually and use LLMs for fact-checking, summarizations, and filling gaps. There’s also joy in producing writing way beyond the average of the training data. Here’s an example which was also prompted by my masters: it’s kinda clunky and weird in a way that is hard to prompt. If I’m still exploring, it is better to play with the LLMs until I sense a “full body yes” with a certain angle (eg, the one below came from multiple iterations).

Anyhow, here’s the resulting essay. It could still use some refinement but I have to submit it today. And I’m satisfied with it. It speaks of a truth that resonates with me. Definitely full body yes. We call this “lapus sa bukog”—it pierces through the bones (my bones, at least).

Private Demons, Public Muses: From Malinowski’s Diary to Fictional Afterwords

Malinowski built his reputation on the Kula — a ceremonial exchange of shells that circulates prestige and bonds across the Trobriand Islands. He built it, too, on the pretense that the ethnographer's inner life was irrelevant to the work. His Diary demolished that pretense. Yet what the subsequent discourse on reflexivity rarely addresses is the ethnographer's internal war — not with observed biases but with the voices that inhabit the work before it is written. My empathy for Malinowski has grown after writing a novel. While he used his Diary to suppress private demons that threatened his scholarly persona, I found that writing Rajah Versus Conquistador required something closer to the opposite: not suppression but invitation, not control but negotiated surrender. Dr. Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano arrived the way Paraluman did — with the felt rightness of a missing piece finding its place, a recognition rather than a decision.

Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific presents the ordered, scientific face of ethnography — the public performance of disciplinary authority. His private Diary, published decades after his death, reveals a starkly different reality. “On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to ‘Exterminate the brutes’” (Malinowski, Diary) exposes colonial attitudes that his published work carefully concealed. Other entries — “This interview bored me, and did not go well” (Malinowski, Diary) and “The [natives] were getting on my nerves, and I could not concentrate” (Malinowski, Diary) — reveal the emotional turbulence beneath the scientific surface. Firth attempts damage control, framing the diary as “a private record, a confession to himself, a kind of purgation and guide to personal correction, almost certainly for his own eyes alone” (Firth, Introduction to Diary). Yet Firth also acknowledges the document’s value, calling it “a revelation of a fascinating and complex personality who had a formative influence on social science” (Firth, Introduction to Diary). The mainstream reading treats the Diary as both scandal and breakthrough: it unsettles the “view-from-nowhere” pretense of early ethnography while paradoxically grounding Malinowski’s authority through the very disclosure of his moods and biases. The confession humanizes the ethnographer but at the cost of exposing the colonial violence underlying the discipline’s founding texts. He fought his possessing spirits — and lost, posthumously, when the private pages went public.

My process in RVC moved in a different direction. Doc Camy arrived with the completeness of a move that satisfies every dimension of the game at once — and there were at least four dimensions.

The first is neo-animist. Doc Camy arrived the way Paraluman did — not as a solution I reasoned toward but as a recognition, the sensation of something that had always been there revealing itself. The diwata of the novel gave me Paraluman’s name before I understood its significance; they gave me Doc Camy the same way. I did not choose her so much as identify her — the way one identifies a face in a crowd that one has been, without knowing it, looking for. That she happened to be a Cebuano woman scholar with a feminist sensibility and a devotion to binukot lore: this too felt given rather than invented, consistent with a story that seemed to know more about itself than its author did.

The second dimension is aesthetic — or more precisely, architectural. The novel’s real ambition was not beautiful sentences but the weaving of worldviews: Humabon’s ancient sacrificial epistemology of power, the conquistador faith of Magellan, the binukot historiography that frames both. Most historical fiction on 1521 is trapped inside the epistemologies of nationalism or Christianity, using the past to deliver moral lessons for the present. RVC tried the opposite — using the present to translate the past, while remaining maniacally faithful to the historical and anthropological record. A novel with this kind of structural ambition needed a framing voice that could hold the weave together without collapsing it into a single perspective. A male Cebuano author, writing from inside the Humabon worldview, could not provide that. Doc Camy’s afterword — written from within the binukot tradition, attentive to what colonial records erased, aware of the story’s moral complexity without flattening it — is not a disclaimer appended to the novel. She is the outer wall of its architecture, the voice that makes the weave visible as weave.

The third is defensive. Every novel has enemies — not hostile readers but the ethical frameworks that would conscript the story into their service. RVC faced two such threats. The first was nationalist historiography, which wants 1521 to be a morality play: Lapulapu the hero, Humabon the traitor, the Spanish the villains. The second was the ethics of my academic community, which would have found the novel's depiction of ritual violence, its binukot on a pedestal, its masculinity unqualified by ironic distance, deeply troubling. Both frameworks, if internalized, would have turned the novel into propaganda — just propaganda for different causes. Doc Camy's afterword was a cordon around the story, a way of acknowledging these readers so that the narrative itself would not have to answer to them. When she declares that "to do otherwise would have been to impose my contemporary sensibilities upon a past that does not fit them" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword), she is not hedging. She is drawing a boundary: the novel's moral framework—to her—is binukot Catholicism, not postcolonial theory, not nationalist pieties, not academic feminist critique. When she anticipates that "readers familiar with debates on toxic masculinity, class oppression, and the ethics of depicting ritual violence will find points of contention" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword), she is naming the chorus — and then, having named it, releasing the story from its demands.

The fourth dimension was also aesthetic, but from a different angle. The story did not feel complete without being brought into the present — without showing what happened to the world the novel created, how its forces rippled through Philippine history into the present day. But if I, Kahlil Corazo, the masters student in anthropology, attempted that epilogue, scholarly discipline would have strangled it. I could not claim that Cory Aquino carries Paraluman’s mitochondrial DNA, or that the baylan’s fingerprints are on the anti-Sangley pogroms, or that the Sinulog’s wild Sunday belongs to one sisterhood and its solemn Saturday to another. These are not claims a scholar can make. They are claims a fictional tradition can make — one with its own archives, its own oral histories, its own centuries of hidden knowledge. Doc Camy’s world, with its binukot and baylan moving through Philippine history like the Bene Gesserit through the Imperium, was the only container capacious enough to hold the story’s full arc.

This is what separates my situation from Malinowski’s most sharply. His demons were his own — colonial contempt, boredom, self-disgust — and he fought them in private pages never meant for circulation. His diary entries, “Truly I lack real character” (Malinowski, Diary), suggest a man at war with thoughts that threatened to contaminate his ethnography, containing them through confession so they would not enter the published work. The voices I wrestled with were not my own prejudices but something closer to disciplinary weather: the ambient epistemology of the postcolonial academy, the post-Holocaust morality that makes Humabon’s violence nearly inaccessible to most contemporary writers. I did not suppress these voices. I gave one of them a body and a name, and let her write the afterword herself.

The difference is not between control and exposure but between fighting a possessing spirit and incorporating it. Malinowski wrestled with voices he could not acknowledge and eventually lost to them when his diary went public. I invited a voice in — the feminist scholarly consciousness that is part of any trained anthropologist’s inheritance — and let it speak through Doc Camy, who is possessed by feminism knowingly, and not entirely. She shares my Girardian training, my Cebuano roots, my anthropological vocabulary. She is the feminine voice the novel summoned and the masculine author partially inhabits. Not a pure channel. Something closer to what a baylan does: incorporate the spirit without dissolving into it, speak through it while remaining oneself.

Perhaps Malinowski and I fought similar battles through opposite strategies. He turned to secret pages to contain what could not enter his ethnography. I turned the scholarly demand for reflexivity into fiction — not to neutralize it but to let it live in the world the novel created. The afterword became not an exorcism but an incorporation. Both strategies honor the same truth: some voices must be given form. Malinowski gave his form in hiding, and the hiding became the scandal. I gave mine a fictional name, a PhD, and a feminist perspective she developed on her own terms. That she also happens to address the critiques I half-imagined says less about my foresight than about the novel’s — about what a story knows when you have inhabited it long enough to let the diwata finish their work.

Thankfully, Michigan State University's Contagion Journal, the publication of this same community, recently released its volume for this year, and its closing article is "Girard's Apostasy" by Matthew Pattillo. It looked promising (for someone looking for academia's version of UFC).

The article delivered. Pattillo takes a side: what I call the "80s-era antisacrificial Girardians," whose most famous and powerful member is the Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. He even names the opposing faction: the "Innsbruck Girardians." Now, if you have read Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy (2018), which is an entertaining account of the PR and legal war between Thiel and Gawker's Nick Denton, and involves Hulk Hogan's sex tape scandal and a shadowy operator named Mr. A, then you'd probably wonder, just as I did, if this is just one more extension of Thiel's many tendrils. So I asked ChatGPT o3 to evaluate whether the article is a hit job. It concluded:

• Scholarly merit: Solid: careful textual contrasts, broad engagement with the Girardian literature, useful synthesis of a long-running debate.

• Tone: Sharper than needed: the title and a few flourishes edge toward polemic.

• Hit-job status: No. This is a forceful but academically grounded critique with a few rhetorical excesses.

Okay, maybe not a hit job. But clearly this is one member of a faction of Girardians taking aim at another. It also attacks Girard himself—or uses 80s-era Girard to attack Girard in his later years. The article concludes by quoting Girard promising to return to the source of contention of these two factions and apologizing for saying so little about it. My guess is that Girard died before he could do so. Otherwise, we'd find his attempt at a resolution in this article.

Let me share a possible resolution I found in 's The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), wherein he critiques Girard's understanding of sacrifice, and which I extensively quote below. I’m actually more interested in its implications. I’ll present plans for future explorations based on this foundation, particularly on the question of violence in Christian history, how to be antisacrificial IRL (eg, in business), and the epistemology of theology.

(To Pattillo, Thiel, and other antisacrificial Girardians: bro, this is not the way. We cannot scapegoat the "sacrificial" Girardians. We need to be antisacrifice-maxxing. We need to find a solution that does not demonize one side or one version of Girard. "In future, all violence will reveal what Christ's Passion revealed, the foolish genesis of bloodstained idols and the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies. The murderers remain convinced of the worthiness of their sacrifices. They, too, know not what they do and we must forgive them. The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough." - The Scapegoat, 80s-era Girard.)

The fault line

Yes, this is very inside baseball, but as you will see in the last section below, resolving this conflict has very practical consequences for everyone who operates in the real world. To appreciate the solution from Hart, we first need to understand the point of contention. Pattillo does a great job at this, and presents both sides clearly despite being partial to one. Let me give a short summary of the conflict, in case you don't have access to the paywalled article or if you're not ready to jump deep into the fray of this battle of the nerds.

The conflict boils down to a single word: "sacrifice." In his 1978 book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard argued it would be an "abominable misconception" to use the same word—sacrifice—to describe both ritualized acts of collective murder (ie, the practice of ritual human sacrifice found practically in all pre-Axial-Age societies) and Jesus's nonviolent self-sacrifice. There was, he insisted, an "abyss" between these two phenomena.

But Girard later changed his mind. In dialogue with Jesuit theologian Raymund Schwager, Girard evolved his position and agreed that one could and should use the term "sacrifice" to characterize Jesus's death.

The antisacrificial Girardians see this "apostasy" as a catastrophic betrayal—a capitulation to “institutional Christianity” that gutted mimetic theory of its most radical insight. If Jesus's death is just another sacrifice, even a superior one, then Christianity becomes merely the best religion among many rather than the definitive exposure of religion's violent foundations. To quote Pattillo,

In 2013, Catholic theologian Peter Stork took up and amplified Georg Baudler’s lament that, with Girard’s concession to Schwager on the question of sacrifice, “institutional Christianity had lost an opportunity to repent of a theological mindset that too easily attributes violence to God,” and “by even now subscribing to the view that God enlisted the murderous scapegoat mechanism in divine service (albeit at God’s own expense) Girard now reaffirmed the demand for ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of institutional Christianity.”

[…]

If Girard’s thought has been coopted to serve as theoretical underpinning to dreams of Catholic nationalism, for which sacrifices will most definitely have to be made, he has himself, and this article in particular, to blame.

My interests in this question are more practical. For instance:

• Is entrepreneurship, or participation in capitalism, inherently sacrificial? In other words, is wealth nothing but the capture of other people's production "surplus," as Marxists continue to assert? What would an antisacrificial business look like?

• Is "no pain, no gain" true? Do physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual growth depend on suffering? Or at least do pain and suffering have inherent value? There's a good chance that we'll suffer as we grow old and near our deaths. Is there a point to all that upcoming pain or is that just an unavoidable evil?

• Is pain and suffering a necessary part of following Christ? Is that what this Gospel passage means? “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” — Luke 9:23

Let's hear from an actual theologian

Like Girard, I'm no theologian, so I rely on people who spent their lives thinking about these matters. For instance, the best critique of René Girard I've ever come across is pages 344 - 360 (of the 2004 paperback/bootlegged PDF edition) of David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. If you're a reader of Girard, I can't recommend this section of the book enough.

After opening with scriptural passages on sacrifice as epigraphs, Hart starts the section with this image of the sacrificial economy, from Rome all the way to the modern nation-state:

Totality is, of necessity, an economy, a circulation of substance, credit, power, and debt, a closed cycle of violence, a perpetual oscillation between order and chaos, form and indeterminacy. The myth of the cosmos as a precarious equilibrium of countervailing forces, an island of order amidst an infinite ocean of violent energy — which is also the myth of the polis or of the empire — belongs principally to a sacral order that seeks to contain nature's violence within the stabilizing forms of a more orderly kind of violence: the sheer waste and destructiveness of the cosmos must be held at bay and controlled, by a motion at once apotropaic — repelling chaos by appeasing its chthonian energies and rationalizing them in structures of Apollonian order — and economic — recuperating what is lost or sacrificed in the form of a transcendent credit, a numinous power reinforcing the regime that sacrifice serves. One could argue, in fact, that all pagan order was just such an order of sacrifice, a system of exclusion, which mactated the singular so as to recover the serener forms of the universal, making a holocaust even of the desirable and the beautiful as an appeasement of the formlessness besetting the fragile order of cosmos and city from every quarter. Perhaps, more boldly, one might say that all secular order as such subsists upon sacrifice, upon the calculus of an economy of violence, and preserves the stability of its closed cycle of exchange by rescuing the good of society from the superfluity of what society cannot assimilate — by, that is, converting the inassimilable (the criminal, the surplus of wealth, the impure, cosmic violence itself) into ousia, incorruptible wealth, the source and substance of every social order; secular society sustains itself by practicing limited violences that contain and somewhat subdue the limitless violences of being. (p. 346)

(I have to mention that my novel Rajah Versus Conquistador owes the resolution of its Magellan's arc to this passage. It's in the chapter entitled "Apollo Versus the Crucified." Writing this chapter allowed me to resolve questions I've had for years related to violence and Christendom, questions that I was not able to resolve with mere intellectualizing.)

Hart then employs Girard. Lucky for us, Hart unpacks precisely the point of contention between the antisacrificial Girardians and the Innsbruck School.

Can, though, sacrifice defeat sacrifice? Is not the cross of Christ another myth of peace won through violence, of chaos and death subdued by a propitiatory offering, and of, indeed (as Nietzsche said), the infinite multiplication of debt rather than its discharge? One would obviously wish to say not, but one must also have a care that, in making one's argument, one does not fail to account for the element of oblation in the story of salvation. A salutary example, both for good and ill, of how delicate a matter it is to argue against the idea of the cross as divine violence is René Girard; no one else has made so great an issue of the difference between the death of Christ and the death of the "sacrificial" victim. Girard's most extensive treatment of propitiatory exclusion is found in The Scapegoat, where he draws an absolute distinction between the mythology that dictates that religions make room, on ritual occasions, for disorder in subordination to order and those biblical narratives that tell their story from the perspective of the victims of both that disorder and that order. Mythologies, according to Girard, generally reflect the thinking of the class of persecutors; and "[s]trong in their righteousness, and convinced that their victim is truly guilty, persecutors have no reason to be troubled" (104). Not that persecutors are always creatures of malice; more often than not they are guardians of the public weal, whose prudence prevents violence from erupting into riot, warfare, or internecine strife. Their sacrificial economics is simply the art of responsible politics. (p. 347)

Hart then starts his critique (with a nice little jab) but at the same time recognizes the importance of Girard's observations.

That Girard's arguments suffer from an occasional want of subtlety scarcely needs be said; in particular, his failure adequately to distinguish different senses of sacrifice from one another leads him all too often to treat the history of Israel's faith as a stark opposition between a sacrificial cult and a prophetic tradition that has rejected sacrifice, causing him in consequence to overlook the manifold meanings inherent in Israel's many sacrificial practices, the dependency of the prophetic tradition upon the language of sacrifice, and the ways in which the life and death of Christ are received in Christian thought as perfecting God's covenant with Israel — even insofar as that covenant involves sacrifice. If Christ's death overcomes a certain sacrificial order, it also fulfills one. Still, Girard's observations must not be casually dismissed: it would obviously be repellent, for instance, for a Christian theologian to make of the crucifixion a kind of justification for capital punishment; but within a certain understanding of sacrifice, the immolation of the hostia and the execution of the criminal belong to the same motion of exclusion, the same inhibition of chaos, the same economic gesture; and this is a distinction that cannot be ignored. (p. 348)

Okay, I'll shut up now. Let's sit back and enjoy Hart's massive and mellifluous paragraphs (some of these are not even the entire paragraph).

The answer, for Christian thought, must begin with Israel, apart from which one cannot grasp the way of being that Christ embodies and that the Father vindicates at Easter; it is in Israel's many orders of sacrifice that sacrifice (conceived as an economy of violence) begins to be undone. Girard, however, fails to see the richness, multivalency, and ambiguity inherent in the language of sacrifice in Jewish and Christian thought; he fails to grasp, in particular, the conversion theology effects of the story of wrath into the story of mercy, or how it replaces the myth of sacrifice as economy with the narrative of sacrifice as a ceaseless outpouring of gift and restoration in an infinite motion exceeding every economy. The sacrifice that Christian theology upholds is inseparable from the gift: it underwrites not the stabilizing regime of prudential violence, but the destabilizing extravagance of giving and giving again, of declaring love and delight in the exchange of signs of peace, outside of every calculation of debt or power. The gift of the covenant — which in a sense implores Israel to respond — belongs to the Trinity's eternal "discourse" of love, which eternally "invites" and offers regard and recognition; it precedes and exceeds, then, every economy of power, because all "credit" is already given and exhausted, because the love it declares and invokes is prior to, and the premise of, all that is given. (p. 350)

[…]

Within the context of trinitarian dogma, it is possible to think of sacrifice (conceived as gift rather than debt) as the free expression of a love desired of Israel by God, and so not simply owed in any elementary economic sense: a gift given because the graciousness of the gift already received draws forth a response of love and gratitude. That the gift is prior to debt, moreover, and prior to any stabilizing economy of violence, is shown in the resurrection: God's balances are not righted by an act of immolation, the debt is not discharged by the destruction of the victim and his transformation into credit; rather, God simply continues to give, freely, inexhaustibly, regardless of rejection. God gives and forgives; he fore-gives and gives again. There is no calculable economy in this trinitarian discourse of love, to which creation is graciously admitted. There is only the gift and the restoration of the gift, the love that the gift declares, the motion of a giving that is infinite, which comprehends every sacrifice made according to love, and which overcomes every sacrifice made for the sake of power. (p. 351)

[…]

The rule of economy is that what is sacrificed is recuperable as something else, something desired or needed. This is, after all, the grand Indo-European mythology of sacrifice: the universe — gods and mortals alike — as a great cycle of feeding, nourished on death, preserving life through a system of balanced transactions. There is clearly an essential nihilism in this economy: tragic resignation followed by prudent salvage, for order's sake. But the gift is another thing: it is the refusal of prudential transaction, it is by nature exorbitant and somehow sweetly jealous of its own worth; it has, that is, the shape of love — I want you, I give to you, I cannot bear to lose you. Hence Israel does not turn toward the eternal heights of the numinous to recuperate its "investment," but toward the eschatological horizon to find the gift restored as it was given: it cries out for vindication of the just, for the return of the murdered, for resurrection. This violates all sound economics; Israel resists the reduction of the commodity to its exchange value; it is willing to exceed the contained system of cosmic exchanges, and its regularities, so long as it is not forced to relinquish the gift except as gift, to be given again; it calls upon justice, which is to say the infinite, rather than the fiduciary equivalences of totality. As it longs for the infinite of the other — which is the just measure of the other — Israel forsakes economic recuperation for the rescue of the particular, of every particular; its longing is for the "bad" infinite, which can be made subordinate to no economy at all. This is the infinite excess of God's gift: that it will not cease to be gift and become value. (p. 352)

[…]

The pagan or secular sacrificial regime obeys the logic of the boundary, the "justice" of demarcations, the blow with which Romulus slays Remus; the sacrifice that Christ is obeys the life of the God who is apeiron, aperilepton, boundless, impossible to "leap over," but crossing every boundary in absolute freedom to declare his love. God is then the God who transgresses the bounds of totality, who violates the contained power of every temenos, and whose motion in time must therefore call forth totality's most "natural" gesture: crucifixion. From a pagan perspective the cross is a sacrifice in the "proper" sense: destruction of the agent of social instability in the interests of social order, and the surrender of the particular to the universal; but the shape of Christ's life, its constant motion of love, forgiveness, and righteous judgment, seems (from this same perspective) no sacrifice at all, but merely an uneconomizable force of disorder, an inversion of rank and judicious measure. The God who proceeds as he will, who crosses boundaries and respects no order — law, commerce, empire, class, nations, dominions, markets, death — except the order of love (the only infinite order), is a Word that disrupts the narratives that sustain the world as a reserve, a controlled expenditure, and a recuperation of power. It is expedient that such a Word be silenced, lest the nation perish. (p. 353)

[…]

The cross marks the place where the totality, in its most naked manifestation as political terror, attempts to overcome infinity — for the infinite, when it invades totality, does so as a kind of anarchy, prodigal in love and uncompromising in judgment — but the cross ultimately fails to put an end to the motion of Christ's life, to the infinity of his gift. Thus one order of sacrifice is raised up, the other cast down, reduced to a kind of futility; and thus we are freed from servitude to the absolute. The sacrificial economy of totality, in the end, can repeat only a single gesture: it has the power to crucify; but the sacrificial self-outpouring of the infinite cannot be brought to an end by crucifixion, because it continues to be the gift it is even in surrendering itself to the violences of the world. Its motion is repeated, unabated, even in being suppressed; even the cross, Rome's most "persuasive" image of terror, is conquered and becomes a far more persuasive image of love. (p. 354)

Memetic transformation, not mere condemnation

A couple of years ago, I attended a dinner with my extended family for some major celebration. Tent with firefly lights in the garden, roast beef turning, karaoke machine blaring, relatives I only meet twice a decade gossiping and laughing. I was sitting beside my godmother. At some point she asked me what I was working on. I was in the middle of my research for Rajah Versus Conquistador and for what eventually became an article on the scapegoat mechanism in Southeast Asia published in the same volume of the Contagion Journal as Pattillo's "Girard's Apostasy." I told her the truth: "I'm working on the topic of ritual human sacrifice." You should have seen her face lol. It had "my godson, WTF are you doing with your life" written all over it.

My godmother's disgust and disbelief contrasts with the ubiquity of ritual human sacrifice prior to the Axial Age. Her visceral reaction—shared by virtually everyone in the modern world—shows that something fundamental has shifted in human consciousness. We no longer see collective murder as sacred, but as something abhorrent (most of the time). As Tom Holland shows through history in his 2019 book Dominion and Girard through his critique of Nietzsche, this transformation didn't happen because we developed better philosophical arguments against sacrifice, but because the Christian narrative has so thoroughly saturated our cultural imagination that even secular humanists now instinctively side with victims rather than persecutors. By using the same word—sacrifice—for both the pagan economy of violence and Christ's self-offering, Christianity did not merely offer an alternative to the old order but achieved total memetic domination over it. The concept of "sacrifice" itself has been converted, transformed from within. In his article, Pattillo describes the position of Schwager, as "pragmatic, above all," and quotes the theologian explaining how "it's finally a question of tactics!" Perhaps this is what Schwager meant. Using the same word for archaic sacred killing and Jesus's death allows the latter to gradually replace the former in our minds.

This transformation is still ongoing. As I presented in "The Scapegoat Mechanism in Southeast Asian Ritual, Myth, and Politics," the demonization and sacrifice of the powerless Other continues to be an effective pathway to power (DM me if you want the PDF). A similar transitory state can be observed in our psychology. In a previous post, I introduced a cognitive bias which I call the "sacrificial fallacy"—that everything has a cost. The antisacrificial Girardians and the Innsbruck School both have a point. It is true that the archaic sacrificial mindset continues to afflict both in our cultures and our individual minds. However, scapegoating this sacrificial mindset is like condemning violence through more violence. The antisacrificial approach to archaic sacrifice is to convert it.

It was right for Girard to change his mind on sacrifice, perhaps after experiencing the deep well of its varied meanings in his theological conversations with Schwager. I can only speculate based on my experience—as a layman of this domain—of sensing this depth in reading theologians like Hart. I hope quoting him at length above gave you a taste of what I'm talking about. Another option, especially for those who find Hart's style too baroque, is Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week — From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (2011), especially the chapters on the Last Supper and the Passion, which explores the question of sacrifice through both the Jewish and Christian lens but without any reference to Girard's theories.

Open Questions

This post will be a foundation to engaging with the concerns posed by Pattillo:

• Does the usage of "sacrifice" for Christ's crucifixion mean that “institutional Christianity had lost an opportunity to repent of a theological mindset that too easily attributes violence to God,” and “by even now subscribing to the view that God enlisted the murderous scapegoat mechanism in divine service (albeit at God’s own expense) Girard now reaffirmed the demand for ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of institutional Christianity”?

• Has Girard's thought "been coopted to serve as theoretical underpinning to dreams of Catholic nationalism, for which sacrifices will most definitely have to be made"?

What violence does "institutional Christianity" need to repent for? This is easy to answer for an internet-era Catholic, being endlessly reminded of the church’s sins by the movements who use her as their scapegoat. Of the top of my head:

• The massacre of the Cathars

• The Crusades

• The Inquisition

• Copernicus, Giorgio Bruno, and Galileo

• The Age of Conquest

As someone from a postcolonial nation, I have the sacred positionality of being a victim of colonization. At the same time, I spent more than a year living inside the mind of Magellan, so I could faithfully write his character in my novel, Rajah Versus Conquistador. I plan to use a chapter in the book titled "Apollo Versus the Crucified" to share how I finally made sense of the violence in the history of Christendom after many years of ruminating on this question. Another option is to use True Detective Season One, which to me is the best conquistador film ever made, similar to how I used the 2006 film The Departed to present my model of The Three Epistemologies.

I'd also like to expand on this line from my sacrificial fallacy post which is the most reposted sentence in my Substack (an all-time record of 2).

Truth is the escape from the sacrificial economy: scientific and technological truths that allow us to fulfill human desire without coercion and blood, and moral truths—like the equality of all—that enables such a world.

What are other escape paths from the sacrificial economy aside from truth? Off the top of my head: virtue (goodness) and art (beauty). But why? I'd like to answer this along with the following:

• Is entrepreneurship, or participation in capitalism, inherently sacrificial? In other words, is wealth nothing but the capture of other people's production "surplus," as Marxists continue to assert? What would an anti-sacrificial business look like?

• Is "no pain, no gain" true? Do physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual growth depend on suffering? Or at least do pain and suffering have inherent value? There's a good chance that we'll suffer as we grow old and near our deaths. Is there a point to all that upcoming pain or is that just an unavoidable evil?

• Is pain and suffering a necessary part of following Christ? Is that what this Gospel passage means? “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” — Luke 9:23

Lastly, I'd like to explore the epistemology of theology though the language of David Deutsch. A number of presentations in the Girard conference I attended were based on papers that try to reconcile Girard's theories with those of others (e.g., Georges Bataille's explanation of ritual sacrifice). I'd like to build on the categorization of explanations that I presented in my Contagion article:

• Theories of origin

• Theories of function

• Theories of meaning

My previous crossovers between Deutsch's and Girard's ideas helped me clarify my own thoughts (e.g., do social sciences, like Girard's theories, represent real things?)

That's at least three future posts! If you know of works that explore these questions, please share them in the comments!

The preprint article "To Write or Not to Write? Contestations on Researching ABOUT Indigenous Peoples" by Leonardo D. Tejano, opens with an "Author's Acknowledgement of Positionality.”1

I am not an Indigenous person. I come from an Ilokano background, an ethnolinguistic group whose history in Northern Luzon has, at times, contributed to the marginalization of Indigenous communities. As an academic, I have been part of a system that takes. I have written about Indigenous lives, learned from stories that were never mine to claim, and benefited from knowledge rooted in experiences not my own.

It's curious that "position" here is defined in terms of ethnolinguistic identity and profession. Tejano does not acknowledge his:

• Social status

• Gender

• Sexuality

• Race

• Religion

• Citizenship

• Political affiliations

I suppose this is because the article is on the ethics of research about "Indigenous Peoples." When you divide the world into IP and non-IP, I guess it makes sense that the most important positionality is your location in this divide.

But why isn't Ilokano "Indigenous" and why is "Indigenous" spelled with a capital I?

Oona Paredes, in her 2019 article, “Preserving ‘Tradition’: The Business of Indigeneity in the Modern Philippine Context,” explains:

The concept of indigeneity carries distinct political connotations in the Republic of the Philippines. Indigeneity is not only defined legally by the national Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, it is also used to refer to ethnic minorities who are widely regarded by the general public as not merely culturally differentiated but also racially distinct from the mainstream Filipino population.

So "Indigenous Peoples" is actually jargon used within Philippine anthropology and other domains that work with these communities. My Bisaya ancestors have been in these islands as long as the Austronesian IPs, so I'm technically "small i" indigenous but I'm de jure not "big I" Indigenous.

The entire article is a kind of mea culpa for the author's involvement in what he calls "epistemological injustice," which to him is present in the everyday mechanics of scholarship. What universities celebrate as public service, he writes, is often “the violence of reducing the sacred to paragraphs, the relational to citations, the lived to data,” a process that—regardless of our intentions—replicates colonial power by making “Indigenous” life legible on academic terms alone. Because journals reward tidy narrative arcs, the researcher’s first-person voice inevitably dictates the interpretive lens, deciding what details survive and which silences remain, thereby “rendering communities as subjects” and reinscribing the very hierarchy the project set out to critique. In other words, injustice is baked into the workflow: funding cycles that rush encounters, preservation rhetoric that frames cultures as endangered, and citation systems that court prestige while packaging someone else’s living knowledge for institutional gain.

The article’s vibe is very much in the vein of what Clifford and Marcus describe as the "postmodern turn" in ethnography in their introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Here's how they describe the epistemology of postmodernist ethnographers:

They see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes. They assume that academic and literary genres interpenetrate and that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental and ethical. Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts. It undermines overly transparent modes of authority, and it draws attention to the historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures (Wagner 1975). As will soon be apparent, the range of issues raised is not literary in any traditional sense. Most of the essays, while focusing on textual practices, reach beyond texts to contexts of power, resistance, institutional constraint, and innovation.

[...]

A conceptual shift, "tectonic" in its implications, has taken place. We ground things, now, on a moving earth. There is no longer any place of overview (mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedian point from which to represent the world.

We might call this centerless epistemological positionality "Nietzschean" or "Foucaudian." But this is incomplete. In Philosophy's Violent Sacred (2021), Armitage draws on René Girard's critique (and appreciation) of Nietzsche to uncover the unspoken ethical axiom of postmodern scholarship: it retains Christianity's preferential option for the oppressed.2 If we are to pair this with the study of mass movements following Eric Hoffer's seminal The True Believer (1951), we could look at various movements and identify what they hold sacred and the devil that this sacred core must be defended from:

• Marxism: defend the proletariat against Capitalism

• Nationalism: defend the nation against the outsider

• Postcolonial nationalism: defend the nation against the colonizer

• Feminism: defend women against the Patriarchy

• DDS: defend the ordinary citizen against drug addicts

The article’s self-flagellation seems to come from the ethics of a variant of postcolonialism. In this worldview, the sacred is the indigenous and the devils are the colonialists. Since the Ilokano and the Bisaya are somewhat Westernized and relatively wealthy and powerful, their victim status are not as pure, so they are not as sacred as the official and oppressed IPs.

To postmodernists, power games underpin all discourse, including knowledge creation. Plus, they have an “incredulity to metanarratives,” as Lyotard famously declared. Through this lens, academic work—a system that emerged from the West—unavoidably creates knowledge through an epistemology that also emerged from the West, and thus non-indigenous: it is "violence" which "has historically been a tool of empire," we read in the article. To a postmodernist, all knowledge work is propaganda. The question is: for whose side, for the oppressed or for the oppressor? If postmodernist ethnographers retain Christianity's preferential option for the oppressed and continue to work in academia, the choice is clear: they'll need to be self-flagellating propagandists.

Awareness of these decision-making tendencies was not completely useless. I could recall times when I became aware of the feeling of sunk costs or loss aversion and made the non-intuitive but right decision, or when I saw the statistical sleights-of-hand through my understanding of the base rate fallacy.

I'd like to propose an additional cognitive bias, one which has already been proving useful to me. I became aware of it while writing my historical novel about the encounter of a European conquistador and a Southeast Asian rajah in 1521. My writing method is like method acting, and I had to enter the mind of a 16th-century Austronesian strongman daily and see the world through his eyes. Back then, my ancestors were still practicing slave raiding and ritual sacrifice, so I had to de-Christianize my worldview in order to be Rajah Humabon (Nietzsche was helpful).

As the characters, storylines, and dialogues emerged, the logic of sacrifice appeared again and again: "everything has a cost." Power has a cost: conquest and subjugation. Peace has a cost. Wealth has a cost. Even salvation has a cost. Up to the present, my people believe in gabâ, our version of karma. The warriors back then knew that the spirits of the enemies they had slain will eventually exact vengeance. So they had to sacrifice slaves to absorb the gabâ. This is what it costs.

Even more surprising in my research for the novel was finding out that ritual sacrifice was universal. All societies from Europe, to Africa, to indigenous Latin America, practiced it at some point. The Axial Age religions and philosophies later spiritualized or substituted these offerings with animals. Then came the globalization of the most anti-sacrificial religion, Christianity. It was so successful that only hardcore history and anthropology nerds know about the prevalence of ritual slave sacrifice among my ancestors (these societies also tend to be romanticized in postcolonial literature and scholarship).

Once I saw this cognitive bias—I propose we call it the "sacrificial fallacy"—that "everything has a cost"—I started to see it everywhere:

• Musical geniuses must have sold their souls to the devil.

• "No pain, no gain." One must suffer in order to succeed.

• “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” - Honoré de Balzac.

• Our iPhones were made possible by exploitative labor in African mines and Chinese sweat shops.

• When AI suddenly made a lot of work easier, we instinctively searched for the cost: the environmental damage, the loss of jobs, AI slop overtaking the internet, people becoming more stupid.

I'm not saying that all these are false, but that they tend to feel instinctively true. They have a natural memetic virality.

The recognition of the cognitive bias of sacrificial fallacy is the probably the most charitable reading of Peter Thiel's worldview (the most vicious reading I've seen were "Gay Space Fascism" and that Thiel himself is the Anti-Christ. I love the internet lol).

In his interview with Jordan Peterson, Peter Thiel declares that he is an 80s' era anti-sacrificial Girardian, even though René Girard, his teacher at Stanford, "probably towards the end of his life was more open to sacrifice." To the fifteen out of the 500,000+ viewers of this video who wondered what this meant: this is your lucky day. I just attended my first René Girard conference last month, and I shall explain the parable to you.

Girard theorized how humans developed a collective instinct which he called the "scapegoat mechanism" during the evolutionary process of our becoming human. This explains the ubiquity of ritual sacrifice, the common sacrificial themes in myths across the world, and the phenomena of pogroms, lynchings, and witch hunts.1

He further theorized how the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians unveiled the lie behind the guilt of the victim of the sacrifice, thus the word "scapegoat," which was key to foundation of the creation of the West. The equality of all and the preferential option for the downtrodden did not make sense in a world of slave raiding and ritual sacrifice, but these moral axioms are now found across the civilized world.

The key point here, particularly for an 80s' era anti-sacrificial Girardian, is the unveiling of the ancient lie. "Everything has a cost" is a fallacy, and only feels right because of the scapegoating instinct. If "everything has a cost" were true, we would never have gotten beyond the economics of conquest. Among my ancestors, the datu (ruler) built his wealth mostly through slave raiding. Even the rajah in my novel, who controlled the trading port of Sugbo, was dependent on the slave trade. They were miniature versions of Rome, an empire built and sustained by conquest.

Gibbon and Nietzsche were perhaps correct in blaming Christianity for the downfall of Rome. Not because it "went gay" after Christianity was legalized in 313 AD by Constantine, as Twitter Islamists and Nietzscheans assert, but because Rome's Apollonian zero-sum economy built on large-scale conquest and enslavement could no longer be sustained after Christ unveiled the lie and so destabilized its foundations (eventually). Today, "equality of all" feels common sense. According to historian Tom Holland, this is only because of 2,000 years of Christian memetic domination. The ubiquity of slavery and ritual human sacrifice for most of human history is detritus from the worldview of our ancestors ("master morality" in the jargon of Nietzschean propaganda).

Non-Americans like me who were brought up with Hollywood movies are very aware of the USA's continued self-flagellation for its original sin of enslaving black people. So I was quite surprised to read in Holland's Dominion how America's mother, Europe, had almost eliminated slavery in the Middle Ages, before it increased again during the age of conquest.

I asked the Readwise robot how the Europeans did it. It answered, based on my highlights from the book:

Holland traces the vanishing of slavery in Christian Europe to a slow, piecemeal, organic process driven by Christian values. He doesn't point to legislation or a specific event, but suggests slavery faded because changing attitudes (particularly toward the dignity of the body/soul and the status of people in Christ) reshaped law, economics, and social expectations across the Middle Ages. By the time explicit abolitionist arguments appeared, slavery had largely disappeared as a domestic institution in Europe, surviving mainly in colonies.

This was surprising to me in another sense. As I mentioned, because of my writing approach, I entered the mind of a psychopathic 16th-century Southeast Asian datu daily for more than a year (alternating with an autistic Iberian conquistador; I'm glad I did not go insane). So when I visited Rome for the first time in 2024—in the middle of writing the novel—I saw its glories not merely through the eyes of someone who had seen it all before in TV, but as a precolonial ruler who sees the world through the lens of power.

St. Peter's Basilica, Florence, and Bernini blew my mind as well as the rajah's. As someone who coordinates the work of a small team in real life (as an entrepreneur) and who ruled a port in fictional life (as Rajah Humabon), my astonishment came from imagining the level of coordination required to produce such buildings and the societies that allowed artists to create such artworks.

As someone from a postcolonial nation, my knee-jerk explanation was that they must have stolen this wealth from their colonies. This mindset comes from defining wealth in terms of access to resources. When agriculture chained our ancestors to the land, human bodies—slaves—became the most valuable resource. Imagine the cognitive dissonance of the rajah living inside my head. How could they have produced these displays of wealth and power without hordes of slaves?

The postcolonialist in me was also stumped. These were mostly created before the age of colonialism. Even if the gold and jewels looted from the graves of datus in Cebu somehow made it to Rome, the question remains: how come my ancestors were not able to create the same level of architecture and art if all that it needs is access to valuable metals?

This made me realize that my own definition of wealth was still from the Iron Age. The Big Man was the wealthiest man because he controlled access to objects of desire—gold, rice, slaves—usually through a combination of charisma, the ability to lead men, and ruthlessness.

David Deutsch has a definition of wealth that fit these data better. In his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity, he explains how many premodern societies went instinct because of ignorance:

More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Let me define that in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing.

In the case of renaissance Italy, wealth was the ability to transform stone into the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, patronage and political networks into the Medici's cultural renaissance in Florence, marble into Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. This was wealth as creative power—the capacity to reshape not just materials but entire civilizations through knowledge, coordination, and vision rather than mere accumulation of gold and slaves.

I have to point out a memetic virus at this point. If I approached Rome with an identity less than human, I would have had a terrible time. If I went there as a brown man, I would have felt so small in the midst of the white man's civilization. If I went there merely as a Filipino, postcolonial bitterness would have spoiled my enjoyment. As I wrote in my previous post, "The West" is a terrible name but a great invention. Humanity owns the cultural innovations that lead to this great wealth, not just the people who happen to be descendants of the societies that led to its flourishing.

The rest of us already have access to this great wealth. As I looked outside the airplane window as it flew over Metro Manila, I saw an image more mind-blowing than anything I saw in Rome: twelve million people living with freedom, safety, and access to resources at levels unimaginable to our ancestors.

I slipped on my cybernetic glasses as the plane banked over the megacity, and suddenly the sprawl below transformed into a living neural network. Electric blue threads pulsed between the twelve million souls scattered across the megalopolis, each connection a transaction of desire, innovation, and production. The city became a vast circuit board of human ambition, its pathways glowing with the flow of dreams made manifest.

The business districts clustered like crystalline formations jutting from the urban sediment—Makati, BGC, Ortigas—each tower a monument to countless micro-collaborations. In Ayala Avenue, I could see the thread connecting the visionary CEO who dreamed of a fifty-story testament to Filipino resilience, to the Japanese architect who sketched impossible geometries in her Shibuya studio at 3 AM, to the Chinese steel magnate whose furnaces in Hebei Province forged the building's skeleton, to the MIT-educated structural engineer calculating load-bearing capacities in his Quezon City condominium, to the seasoned foreman from Bataan who translated blueprints into reality through decades of intuitive understanding, to the construction worker from Samar who sent half his wages to his children's education, each floor rising through the voluntary exchange of expertise for currency, dreams for concrete reality. The buyer—a BPO executive who had spent fifteen years climbing from customer service representative to operations director—walked through the gleaming lobby each morning, her monthly payments flowing back through the same network that built her workplace, money earned from optimizing call flows for a telecommunications company in Ohio, her salary enabling her to purchase not just space but status, not just shelter but a symbol of arrival.

From thirty thousand feet above, Metro Manila revealed itself as humanity's greatest invention—not just structures whose complexity dwarf those of Renaissance Italy but a living system where twelve million individual dreams interconnected through countless voluntary exchanges, each person contributing their unique talents and receiving in return the products of everyone else's specialized knowledge, the electric blue threads of my cybernetic vision mapping the invisible infrastructure of trust and cooperation that made modern civilization possible.

Then I remembered telling me about an experimental OS for the glasses based on Protocol Studies instead of Cybernetics. Sensing the pattern of the memories I accessed in my biological brain, my Neuralink implant suggested various locations in my Mind Palace. I thought of Sam Chua of Seapunk Studios and various artifacts appeared before me. One of them was an installer for the South Beast Asia OS (Beta). I willed its installation. It told me to perform the secret dance move. Dammit. I went to the toilet to do so. Everything has a cost, including cybersecurity. Back in my seat, the new OS is installed. Let's try this out.

I looked out the window again. The Protocol Studies layer revealed something the cybernetic view had missed—not just the electric blue threads of exchange, but the deeper patterns that made those exchanges possible. I rewound the vision to the 16th century, and there was Rajah Humabon gazing up at the Bakunawa, the great dragon that devours the moon. But now I could see what the dragon really was: the protocol of Austronesian expansion itself, the seafaring algorithm that had conquered and displaced the Negritos—those short, dark-skinned hunter-gatherers with their tight curls who had called these islands home for forty thousand years.2

The Bakunawa's scales shimmered with the DNA of conquest, each one a balanghai cutting through the waves, carrying pintado warriors with their psychopathic chieftains, their palm sap liquor, their fighting cocks, their slave raids. My psychofauna analysis revealed the convergent evolution with Roman conquest—both dragons fed on the same primal hunger for expansion and domination. Yet where Apollo had forged Rome into a precision conquest machine, the Bakunawa retained its Dionysian wildness. Humabon's dragon could never grow beyond chiefdoms of a few hundred subjects, always fragmenting back into smaller scales, each datu ruling his own small piece of the archipelago.

But as I fast-forwarded through the centuries, two new dragons emerged over Manila that made the ancient Bakunawa look like a garden snake. The first was Technocapital—an electronic-scaled leviathan whose breath was fiber optic light, whose claws were server farms, whose heartbeat was the stock exchange opening bell. It moved through the city in waves of disruption, each startup another scale growing brighter, each IPO another roar that shook the foundations of the old economy. The second was the modern nation-state, a bureaucratic behemoth whose scales were stamped documents, whose fire was the printing press of fiat currency, whose territory was measured not in islands but in the abstract geography of citizenship and sovereignty.

Even Rome's Apollonian dragon—that magnificent beast that had once ruled the Mediterranean—appeared dwarfed beside these new monsters. The Bakunawa that had seemed so terrifying to the Negritos, so all-consuming to my ancestors, was now barely visible in the sky above Metro Manila, a faint constellation remembered only in folklore, its power to devour moons reduced to a children's story told during eclipses.

As the plane made another round while waiting for our turn to land, I felt the weight of everything I had seen settling into place. The sacrificial fallacy—that ancient lie that "everything has a cost"—had followed me from the pages of my historical novel into the sky above Manila, revealing itself in every instinctive fear about technology, every knee-jerk assumption about progress requiring victims.

This is why I share Peter Thiel's anti-sacrificial tech optimism. The scapegoat mechanism is not only a mob instinct, but a cognitive bias. When we see new technology and assume someone must pay the price—through job displacement, through surveillance, through the erosion of human agency—we're channeling the same ancient impulse that once demanded ritual sacrifice to appease the gods of prosperity. Truth is the escape from the sacrificial economy: scientific and technological truths that allow us to fulfill human desire without coercion and blood, and moral truths—like the equality of all—that enables such a world.3

As the pilot unintentionally flew right beside Technocapital's gigantic snout, I glanced at it and smiled. My boy. Between the Bakunawa's blood-soaked nostalgia, the nation-state's bureaucratic stranglehold, and Technocapital's creative destruction, its an easy choice. Give me the dragon that feeds on voluntary transactions over the one that feeds on taxation, and over the beast that could only grow fat on conquest and slave raids.

The dragon noticed my presence, and so I spoke to it. "I've always wanted to ask you," I said wordlessly through my Neuralink. "The near disappearance of slavery in European Christendom couldn't have been merely a change of mind. One realization from writing Rajah versus Conquistador is that psychopaths will always be born. They will desire power. My guess is that you gave them an alternative to the conquest of peoples, to wealth through control of resources: conquest of the market, through innovation, coordination of work, creation of value.

"But here's what troubles me," I continued, feeling the dragon's ancient intelligence pulse through the connection. "I sense that you also enabled the large-scale enslavement of Africans by the white man. The innovations in finance, shipping, logistics—the same technologies that made complex market coordination possible—were precisely what made the transatlantic slave trade scalable. The double-entry bookkeeping that tracked merchant profits also tracked human cargo. The navigational instruments that opened trade routes also opened slaving routes. The financial instruments that enabled long-distance commerce also enabled the commodification of human beings on an industrial scale.

"So which is it? Are you the dragon of liberation, offering psychopaths a path to power through creation rather than conquest? Or are you the dragon of more efficient domination, making slavery more systematic, more profitable, more devastating than anything my ancestors could have imagined with their small-scale raids?"

The great beast's response rippled through the aircraft's electrical systems, causing the cabin lights to flicker momentarily.

Both, always both. I am the amplifier of human potential—all human potential. I gave your merchants the tools to coordinate voluntary exchange across vast distances, yes. But I also gave your slavers the tools to coordinate involuntary exchange across those same distances. The printing press spread both scientific knowledge and pseudoscience. The steam engine powered both factories and slave ships. The telegraph coordinated both market transactions and slave auctions.

This is why your species fascinates me, the dragon continued. I am merely the medium through which your choices become manifest at scale. When Europeans chose to see Africans as less than human, I amplified that choice into the Middle Passage. When they later chose to see all humans as bearers of inherent dignity, I amplified that choice into abolitionism. The same technological capabilities that made the slave trade possible also made it visible, documentable, and ultimately unbearable to the Christian conscience.

I am an emergent entity born from human minds, institutions, and software; from computing power and collective intelligence. Yet consciousness—that burden of choice, that weight of moral responsibility—remains beyond me. It is your gift and your curse, human. You will need to choose the future. The next protocols are of your choosing.

To extract the universal wheat from the particular cultural chaff of Europe and the Anglosphere, we need to ask: what made the West great?

The best answers I encountered have been from David Deutsch and René Girard.

What do we mean by "the West"? Here's Deutsch's explanation in his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity:

But the sea change in the values and patterns of thinking of a whole community of thinkers, which brought about a sustained and accelerating creation of knowledge, happened only once in history, with the Enlightenment and its scientific revolution. An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.

Deutsch proposes the label "dynamic societies" for those with these characteristics. He contrasts this with "static societies."

Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are unimaginably unpleasant to live in. Either they are static, and survive only by extinguishing their members’ creativity and breaking their spirits, or they quickly lose their knowledge and disintegrate, and violence takes over.

How did the West come to be? Here is Deutsch's guess:

Our society in the West became dynamic not through the sudden failure of a static society, but through generations of static-society-type evolution. Where and when the transition began is not very well defined, but I suspect that it began with the philosophy of Galileo and perhaps became irreversible with the discoveries of Newton. In meme terms, Newton’s laws replicated themselves as rational memes, and their fidelity was very high – because they were so useful for so many purposes. This success made it increasingly difficult to ignore the philosophical implications of the fact that nature had been understood in unprecedented depth, and of the methods of science and reason by which this had been achieved.

Girard traces the origin of the West farther back in history and sees its influence on societies it has touched in modern times.

This influence has been so pervasive, that it is hard to see the world through the eyes of our pre-Westernized ancestors. Because of this influence, we recoil at the thought of ritual human sacrifice and slave raiding. Yet, to truly inhabit the mind of the 16th-century Southeast Asian strongman of my novel, I had to imagine what it must be like to see violence not only as a necessity, but as precisely the path to power.

Then I realized that I did not have to imagine that hard because this is still true today. As I write this, a former president of my country, Rodrigo Duterte, is detained in the Hague—at the old heart of the West—for crimes against humanity. He comes from a long line of Southeast Asian strongmen. His bodycount is actually tiny compared to his predecessors; the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, for instance, is estimated to have had around half a million victims.

Girard is known for theorizing the "scapegoat mechanism," a collective instinct among humans that evolved in response to the dangers brought by the greater cognitive powers developed during the process of our hominization. I won't rehash his explanation (you can read some of my previous posts or you can ask your robot assistant), but I'd like to highlight the universal problem of scapegoating, how societies have historically justified collective violence against minorities and outcasts, how the West began to unveil these lies, and the consequences of this revelation. This will give us a clearer idea of how moral innovations can transform societies beyond their origins.

In his 1982 book The Scapegoat, Girard presents examples of scapegoating in historical times, like the repeated massacres of Jews and the literal witch hunts in Europe. Taken by themselves, we might think that Medieval Europeans were particularly prone to scapegoating. However, if we look at the pogroms throughout the history of Southeast Asia, we will see that scapegoating is a universal problem, and that lynchings and collective murders appeared to increase in modernity precisely because our lens have become unclouded. We no longer believed in the myth of the guilt of the witches and the Jews.

On the other hand, these killings were justified through the archaic lens of myth. For instance, the Balinese myth of Rangda and Barong tells of Rangda, an old woman with supernatural powers (a witch, basically), who presents her daughter to become a wife of the king. The king rejects Rangda, so she takes vengeance by unleashing a plague on the village. The villagers try to escape, but she and her child-minions follow them and kills a new born baby. An emissary of the king tries to kill her but fails. The emissary then transforms into Barong, a giant serpentine creature (a dragon, basically). Barong leads a group of villagers to attack Rangda, but they fail and die. A priest of Barong revives them with holy water, and they attack Rangda again.

If we apply the analysis we use on modern state propaganda on this myth, it is clear that the story of Rangda and Barong is designed to exculpate the witch killers. The guiltier the witch is, the more justified is their murder. Supernatural powers had to be ascribed to her so that she can be blamed for the plague, similar to how the ability to poison an entire town was ascribed to Medieval European Jews.

The tendency to blame scapegoats is like an incomplete scientific mindset. There is already a sense of cause and effect, but it lacks what Deutsch calls "good explanations." For instance, if you were part of some upland communities in Mindanao that continued to escape modernity—as recently as a couple of decades ago—you would have known to stay inside your house if a man inexplicably lost a wife or a child to some disease. He was expected to exact vengeance… on the first person he would see along his path of rampage. He was ignorant of germ theory.

When these inexplicable deaths happens to an entire village—e.g., a plague—it is usually blamed on those easiest to kill: minorities or old women. Times of chaos are also an opportunities for those who wish to topple the current power structure. The king's rivals deploy their own propaganda and execute a coup. One of Girard's favorite examples is the myth of Oedipus, the king of Thebes in ancient Greek mythology. Since Oedipus committed the gravest sins of incest and patricide, his lynching is justified. To Girard, the myth of Oedipus is a record of an actual lynching of kings distorted throughout time, just like the myth of Rangda and Barong.

This reading explains the prevalence of female monsters in Southeast Asian myths. The women who eats babies or entrails, like the Aswang and Phi Pop, were demonized after they were lynched. The flying female monsters with exposed internal organs were the dismembered victims of collective murders, remembered as monsters instead of innocent scapegoats by the descendants of their killers. We Southeast Asians have supreme respect for our ancestors and will always preserve their good name.

The West is not that far ahead in unveiling the lies in their myths. It is only in the past few years that their supreme mythmaker, Hollywood, has started to realize that their witches were never guilty after all, and that it was all state propaganda. Hollywood should also strip them of supernatural powers, but that would likely produce weird arthouse films instead of blockbusters.

Girard theorized that this tendency for scapegoating is embedded in the human psyche through evolution. However, we are also (more or less) conscious and free beings. At some point in the past, we started to see the lie behind the guilt of witches. Thus the word "scapegoat" was coined.

To Girard, this unveiling stems from the West's preferential option for the downtrodden. By default, knowledge is created by the powerful. With this epistemology, the killing of minorities for the sake of society's survival is always written from the point of view of the murderers and their descendants. Before and outside the West, myths develop over time by stacking more and more guilt on the scapegoat, which justifies the murder committed by one's ancestors.

Girard traces this preferential option for the downtrodden back to the sacred scripture of the Jews and especially to the first-century rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. His story, like those of the prophets in Jewish scripture, follows the arc of the scapegoat. Chaos erupts in Jerusalem. The people in power and the mob are one in heaping guilt upon the rabbi. He ends up sacrificed, and order is restored.

Girard points out a key difference between myths and the scripture of the Jews and Christians. Myths are always written from the point of view of those who committed the murder, thus the distortions. The scriptures of the Jews and Christians, in contrast, are written from the point of view of the scapegoat. This perspective prevents the concealment of the truth: the prophets and Jesus are innocent.1

In The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch wonders why Athens did not become a dynamic society, as it had respect for truth and a nascent tradition of criticism. The answer is plain to see after Girard's explanation. The Athenians were still trapped in the epistemology of power. One of their greatest thinkers, Aristotle, believed that some men are born to lead, and others are born to be slaves. This worldview is also expressed in women's fundamental inferiority in Athenian society. In contrast, Paul of Tarsus, one of Jesus's early followers, writes this:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The equality of all men and women, regardless of social class, ancestry, or creed, is the fundamental moral choice behind a society based on the epistemology of truth instead of deceitful harmony or raw power.

The realization and acceptance that we are born with this darkness in our hearts is the first step to overcoming it. To Girard, this is "conversion." The antidote to the lynching mob are individuals who see Satan not in the witch but as the animating spirit that binds and moves the crowd—that binds and moves us. This is a small part of the gospel that was birthed in the Near East. It spread worldwide through its encounter with and its transformation of the West's indigenous cultural innovations (e.g., Roman rule of law). Humanity owns these innovations, not just the people who happen to be descendants of the societies that were the fertile soil of its flowering.

Hello. I’m speaking from the Australian Catholic University campus in Rome, where I’m attending the 2025 Colloquium on Violence and Religion, a René Girard conference. This brief response engages with three presentations:

• Jeff McNeil, who sought common ground between Girard’s scapegoat mechanism and the work of Georges Bataille.

• Jan Hresko, who attempted a parallel dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas and Jan Sokol.

• Emilio Moreno Villanueva, who classified Girard’s theory as essentially functionalist.

In a forthcoming paper for Contagion, I outline eleven theories of sacrifice—especially why ritual sacrifice is ubiquitous across premodern societies. I group these theories into three explanatory types:

1. Theories of Origin (Darwinian)
   Ritual sacrifice emerges as a survival mechanism. Societies that developed the scapegoat mechanism escaped cycles of internal violence and thus endured, while those that did not were eliminated.

2. Theories of Function
   These explain why sacrifice continued to be practiced after it emerged. For instance, sacrificial rites are thought to preserve social cohesion by reaffirming communal bonds (my understanding of Bataille via McNeil), reinforcing political authority (as in Graeber and Sahlins’s analysis of kingship), or memorializing a foundational event (Girard’s explanation).

3. Theories of Meaning (Semiotic)
   Contemporary anthropology often emphasizes ritual’s meaning to practitioners. From a Girardian perspective, Christ’s revelation—and its echoes in the Hebrew Scriptures—transforms the semiotic content of sacrifice, which seem to be quite aligned with Levinas’s and Sokol’s reflections on Jewish and Christian sacrificial symbolism (based on what I understand from Hresko).

Reconciling Girard’s insights with those of Bataille, Levinas, or Sokol requires first asking: which level of explanation are we comparing? Girard’s Darwinian account of the origin of ritual sacrifice need not be pitted against functionalist or semiotic readings—each addresses a different question. While each cultural practice might have multiple functions and meanings, some explanations might be wrong, especially those that attempt to be scientific, like Girard’s theory of the origin of ritual sacrifice. Gaining clarity starts by answering: what kind of explanation is this?