Homo Abidus: Music Beneath Measure
Posted: January 6, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: history, humanity, technology, values Leave a commentSequel to Homo Abidus — The Harbingers of Modernity’s End
The first one learned to hold.
He did not know himself as human, only as warm and breathing and alive in a world that resisted him.
Stone cut skin. Bone splintered.
But one day the stone cut something else instead, and the pain moved outward.
That was enough.
He held the tool, and the world answered—just a little.
He slept.
Much later, another learned to walk.
He discovered that the world could be crossed—not by force, but by pace.
Breath fell into step.
Step fell into distance.
Distance ceased to terrify.
He owned a rhythm now—an inner loop carried outward.
Fire waited for timing.
The land yielded to endurance.
He did not conquer the world.
He kept time with it.
Then came the one who named.
She pointed at the stars and said again.
She watched the seasons turn and said always.
Rhythm became story.
Story became law.
What was heard became remembered,
and what was remembered became shared.
The world acquired meaning,
and meaning began—quietly—to feel like ownership.
It was a small mistake.
A generous one.
Ages passed.
Hands grew clever.
Workshops multiplied.
The rhythm left the body and entered the tool.
Craft hardened into system.
System became production.
The world began to hum—
not with celestial music,
but with machinery that never tired.
The old rhythms were still there.
They were simply no longer listened to.
They were used.
Then measure arrived.
Time broke into units.
Pace froze into schedule.
Variance became inefficiency.
What did not fit the meter was called noise.
Noise was removed.
The world became clean, predictable, and increasingly silent.
At the end of this road stood one who believed nothing lay beyond the model.
If reality did not conform,
reality must be wrong.
Silence, at last, was complete.
And yet—
At the furthest point outward,
the surface bent.
One stepped aside.
Not backward.
Not in rebellion.
Simply sideways—
where the equations thinned
and the hum softened.
He did not discard tools.
He did not deny measure.
He stopped believing they were final.
At first, he heard chaos.
Then—slowly—he understood:
What had been suppressed was not disorder,
but polyphony.
Rhythms layered beyond counting.
Harmonies too deep to be optimized
because they were never problems to solve.
The world had never gone silent.
It had been singing underneath.
He did not master it.
He did not name it.
He did not impose it.
He listened.
And in that listening, something loosened.
The need to justify.
The need to control.
The need to be right.
He discovered, at last,
that the deepest order does not make us powerful.
It unmakes us—
and leaves us free.
Radical Centrism 