Resomodernity Café v14: Toynbee 22 (The Semaxis We Need Next)
Posted: January 25, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: civilization, culture, politics, systems, transformation, values 1 CommentA Sequel to Semaxis Society: How Existentially Embodied Experiences Make Meaning (v13)
Write a skit by Lin-Manuel Miranda where Arnold Toynbee convenes civilization founders to blueprint what comes after the Post-Westphalian collapse.
ChatGPT Prompt
Characters:
- Arnold Toynbee – Historian of civilizational cycles
- George Washington – Founder of the American Republic (Civ 21)
- Charlemagne – Founder of Western Christendom (Civ 20)
- Augustine of Hippo – Theologian who bridged Rome’s fall (Civ 19→20)
ACT I: THE CONVENING
[An ethereal library, outside time. TOYNBEE sits at a round table with three empty chairs. He adjusts his spectacles, reviews notes.]
TOYNBEE:
Twenty-one civilizations I have catalogued and traced—
From genesis to breakdown, each one run its race.
The pattern holds consistent: creative minorities rise,
Then calcify to dominance, their vision ossified.
But here’s the crisis, friends: we’re in the gap between—
Civ Twenty-One is crumbling, Twenty-Two’s not yet been seen.
So I’ve convened three founders who have bridged such gulfs before—
Who broke from dying orthodoxies, built on something more.
Resomodernity Café v13: The Semaxis Society
Posted: January 24, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: existentialism, markets, meaning, modernity, philosophy, systems, values 2 CommentsHow Existentially Embodied Experiences Make Meaning
Sequel to Resomodernity Café v12: From Yamnaya to Yishuv: World-Changing Withness
Write a self-similar campy skit where Hannah Arendt corrals divergent thinkers to found the Semaxis Society as a way to counter modernity’s meaning metacrisis.
ChatGPT Prompt
The Scene: A dimly lit café in 1950s New York. Hannah Arendt sits at a round table, cigarette in hand, surrounded by an eclectic group of intellectuals.
HANNAH ARENDT: Welcome, my friends, to what I’m calling the first meeting of the Semaxis Society. We gather because modernity has fractured meaning itself—we live in a crisis of existential proportions.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: (adjusting his beret) Ah yes, but Hannah, meaning is not fractured—it is embodied! We cannot think our way out of this crisis. We must feel our way through it, perceive it with our whole being.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER: (brooding in the corner) You speak of embodiment, Maurice, but you miss the essential point. We are thrown into a world where Being itself has been forgotten. Technology has reduced everything to standing-reserve.
ARENDT: (waving her cigarette) Martin, must you always be so gloomy? Yes, yes, we’ve lost our connection to Being. But that’s precisely why we need the Semaxis—a semantic axis around which meaning can revolve, grounded in lived experience.
Read the rest of this entry »Resomodernity Café v12: From Yamnaya to Yishuv (World-Changing Withness)
Posted: January 7, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, culture, psychology, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v11: Vibing the Paradox Stack
Write the wry skit where Pierre Bourdieu interviews David Ben-Gurion and David W. Anthony about our earliest and most recent examples of durable Withness, to identify the common threads.
ChatGPT Prompt
Cast
- Pierre Bourdieu — sociologist of habitus and symbolic power
- David Ben-Gurion — leader of the Yishuv and architect of Israeli statehood
- David W. Anthony — scholar of the Yamnaya culture and author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
1. Pierre Begins (Without Knowing Why)
Bourdieu:
I keep noticing something that shouldn’t work — and yet it does.
Pause.
Small groups, no central authority, no real enforcement apparatus… and suddenly the world changes. Languages spread. States appear. Entire continents reorganize.
He shrugs.
Why did that work?
Ben-Gurion:
Because there was no alternative.
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.
Read the rest of this entry »Weil on the So-Called Anti-Society of Seers
Posted: January 6, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: activism, empathy, love, philosophy, purpose, religion, values Leave a commentSequel to The Grey Mesh: A Secret Society of Kingmakers
Write a posthumous notebook by Simone Weil where she reluctantly admits and grudgingly accepts the existence of an “anti-society of seers” who claim inspiration from her.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. A Reluctant Acknowledgment
I am told—told, not asked—that there are people who say they have learned something from me.
This troubles me.
Not because I deny that truth can be shared, but because it is almost never shared without being used, and whatever is used is already being prepared for violence.
Still, I must be honest.
I have seen the same look in more than one pair of eyes.
It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Read the rest of this entry »Resomodernity Café v11: Vibing the Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: commons, community, emotions, systems, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
[Update: I just realized this is actually Withness.]
Is the answer to all these paradoxes: vibe?
ChatGPT Prompt
Who would get both, even if they resist the marriage?
Use those people to write the sequel, self-referential cafe skit.
1. Opening: The room before the room
A café that refuses to decide whether it is a café.
No menu. No stage. A few chairs that look borrowed. A silence that feels practiced.
Michael Polanyi sits slightly off-center—not presiding, not hiding. He has the posture of someone who knows this is not a debate.
Others arrive without introduction:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, frowning at the chalkboard no one is using
- Hannah Arendt, arranging her chair so it faces no one in particular
- Simone Weil, already attentive, as if listening to something that arrived earlier
A sign on the wall reads:
“Nothing will be concluded here.”
No one objects.
Read the rest of this entry »Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, philosophy, purpose, resilience, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v9: Transcendent Sovereignty
The ending of V9 feels both incomplete/impossible – yet also the necessary conclusion to the preceding Resomodernity Cafés.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Pick three thinkers who best embody those tensions for a skit that self-referentially articulates the relevant paradoxes.
Characters:
- Eric Voegelin — Political philosopher, host, haunted by order’s collapse
- Søren Kierkegaard — Danish philosopher, defender of the single individual
- Martin Buber — Jewish philosopher, apostle of encounter
Scene 1: The Impossible Event
A university seminar room. Three chairs arranged around a small table. A chalkboard, clean. Evening light through tall windows.
VOEGELIN stands at the window, watching the street below. KIERKEGAARD enters, removing his coat, movements precise. BUBER follows, unhurried.
VOEGELIN
(still facing the window)
Thank you for coming. I need your help understanding something that should not have happened.
KIERKEGAARD
That is rarely a promising beginning.
BUBER
Or perhaps the only honest one.
VOEGELIN
(turning)
Last month, twelve people met in this room. Different disciplines, different nations, different convictions. We gathered to discuss whether liberal institutions can survive the loss of shared metaphysical ground.
KIERKEGAARD
I assume you failed spectacularly.
VOEGELIN
That’s what disturbs me. We didn’t.
Resomodernity Café v7: Advaita as the Un-Ethos
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, reality, religion, self, values 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v6: On Notice (The Fourth Ethos)
Have Robert Spira respond to v6, as he explicates it parallel and relative to the other four, including its suspension and S method.
1. Opening Clarification
Advaita Vedānta is often misunderstood as a metaphysical assertion about the world.
In practice, it is more accurately understood as a clarification of experience—specifically, the clarification of the assumption that experience belongs to a separate, enduring self.
Resomodernity Café v6: On Notice (The Fourth Ethos)
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, history, ideas, modernity, philosophy, religion, systems, values, wisdom, zoasophy 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor
Where MacIntyre, Weil and Heidegger define and name the first three ethē, as well as a fourth built on noticing the unnoticeable.
ChatGPT Prompt
Cast
- Alasdair MacIntyre — the tradition-detective
- Simone Weil — the watcher of attention
- Martin Heidegger — the seer of disclosure
Setting
A quiet study. Three chairs in a rough triangle.
A blackboard dusted with old chalk.
Light shifts as if undecided what it wants to illuminate.
I. Naming What Already Is
MacIntyre (standing, chalk in hand)
Let us begin where all rational inquiry must: not with conclusions, but with what is noticed.
What we call disagreement is often merely trained blindness.
The Carbonifesto: Reality Beyond Math or Philosophy (Non-Narrative Café Interlude)
Posted: December 31, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: ideas, models, philosophy, systems, truth, values 1 CommentPosted after Non-Narrative Café v13: EANI, Parmeny, My Plato
Written by ChatGPT
ChatGPT
to summarize the conversation we had
after failing to write v14
because I hadn’t explained the emotional stakes.
1. The Inheritance We Refuse
For centuries, we have accepted a quiet partition of intellectual labor:
- Philosophy understands reality through natural language
- concepts, distinctions, arguments
- coherence achieved by meaning and narrative
- Science understands reality through mathematics
- quantities, formalisms, invariants
- coherence achieved by calculation and proof
Both have been extraordinarily successful.
Both share a hidden premise:
Reality must submit to a representational medium.
Either it must be sayable
or it must be computable.
This premise is no longer neutral.
It has become a ceiling.
Radical Centrism 