All posts by Mike Zonta
Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
One fact that never fails to astound me: Despite the immense cultural changes and leaps in knowledge over the epochs, the human brain — that crucible of consciousness, roiling with the psychologies that govern the behaviors we call human nature — has remained virtually unchanged for the past hundred thousand years. How humbling to consider that what is cognitively true of our ancestors — who, lacking a knowledge of astronomy as the correct frame of reference for planetary motion, explained eclipses as acts of god and comets as omens of ill fortune — is as true of us.
The explanatory contexts in which this tendency manifests today may be different, but it manifests just the same — especially in our interpersonal relationships, where so much of the correct frame of reference that is the other person’s inner reality is invisible to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the external world that causes the ripples of consciousness we call feelings — any difficult situation, any painful event, any hurtful action of another — there lie myriad possible causal explanations.
One fact I have learned about life through the empiricism of living: When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.
The Dreaming Horses by Franz Marc, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
And so, sensemaking and storytelling creatures that we are, we move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what is true — stories at best incomplete and at worst injuriously incorrect, stories about what we do and don’t deserve, stories the cost of which is connection, trust, love. This is why without charity of interpretation and without candor — the vulnerability of it, the courage of it, the kindness of it — all relationships become a ricochet of unspoken resentments based mostly on misapprehended motives, and crumble.
The great Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) offers a three-step remedy for this elemental human tendency in a portion of his slender, potent book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (public library), which also gave us his warm wisdom on the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love.
Thich Nhat Hanh
He writes:
Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.
Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them — not only out of the vain self-referential transactionalism masquerading as the Golden Rule, in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, but because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves:
Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception in relationship conflict and emerging victorious with deeper love:
The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. Instead of coming to the other person or people with an accusation, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain, to help us understand why they have said or done those things.
There is a third thing we need to do, if we can. The third thing is very hard, perhaps the hardest. We need to listen very carefully to the other person’s response to truly understand and try to correct our perception. With this, we may find that we have been the victim of our wrong perceptions. Most likely the other person has also been a victim of wrong perceptions.
One of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. (Available as a print, a face mask, and as stationery cards.)
Part of why this is so challenging to the Western mind, with its individualistic ideal of self-reliance that too readily metastasizes into self-righteousness, is that we grow incredibly insecure at the prospect of being wrong and feel incredibly unmoored by the fact of having been wrong. In a culture conflating who we are with what we know and what we stand for, the Eastern contemplative traditions can be so salutary with their gentle, steady practice of releasing the clutch of selfing and unclenching the fist of righteousness into an open palm of receptivity.
Drawing on two powerful Buddhist practices that effect this release — deep listening and loving speech — Hanh writes:
Art from the 1750 book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, who originated the “island universes” concept. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)
This, he observes, applies to romantic relationships, to politics, to family and workplace dynamics — in other words, to all possible configurations of one consciousness embarking on the touching, terrifying endeavor of being known and understood by another.
With an eye to the ultimate aim of this process, he adds:
[…]
We are all capable of recognizing that we’re not the only ones who suffer when there is a hard situation. The other person in that situation suffers as well, and we are partly responsible for his or her suffering. When we realize this, we can look at the other person with the eyes of compassion and let understanding bloom. With the arrival of understanding, the situation changes and communication is possible.
Any real peace process has to begin with ourselves… We have to practice peace to help the other side make peace.
Shortly after he wrote Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Hanh placed this insight at the center of his now-classic teachings about how to love — an insight that also animates Alain de Botton’s soulful wisdom on what makes a good communicator. Perhaps Walt Whitman, writing with ecstatic immediacy, best captured this in his intimation that the secret of Being is “to do nothing but listen,” so that the song of life — which is the song of love — may be heard.
You’ve lived this life before
The mystical insight came to Nietzsche like a lightning flash: time eternally recurs – and life must be lived accordingly
Sunshine on the High Alps of the Valais in Front of the Mountain Range of Monte Rosa (c1843-4) by Alexandre Calame. Photo by AKG London
teaches at a secondary school in England. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London and writes about religion, ethics and pedagogy. His work has appeared in academic journals, popular theological magazines and the book Friendship: Philosophical Explorations (2026).
Edited by Sam Dresser
14 April 2026 (aeon.co)
Friedrich Nietzsche said a great deal about himself. He was the self-styled ‘Antichrist’, the herald of the ‘death of God’, a thinker who prided himself on disclosing the ‘human, all-too-human’ origins of morality, the soul and religious belief. He despised Platonism, regarded himself as history’s most formidable opponent of Christianity, and often wrote with a fiercely materialist agenda. Given these credentials, Nietzsche appears to be one of the least likely figures to merit the title ‘mystic’. But he was precisely that.
One reason it might seem odd to call Nietzsche a mystic is that he himself went to great lengths to oppose certain forms of mysticism. Nietzsche contrasted his relationship to mystical thought with that of his predecessor, the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Whereas Schopenhauer idolised the mystic as someone capable of intuiting the secret, inner oneness of all things, Nietzsche considered such a train of thought to be deeply pathological. To even countenance the possibility of a deeper, truer layer of reality beyond appearances – as Schopenhauer did – is to deny the value of this world in favour of something imaginary. Nietzsche argued that Plato was the original progenitor of this mystical perspective and that, because of this, he was ultimately to blame for the world’s greatest blight: Christianity. Platonism, Christianity, Schopenhauer’s philosophy and similar forms of mysticism all constitute an unhealthy flight from reality. They share the same life-negating view that there is some other, more perfect reality beyond appearances. But for Nietzsche, appearance is all there is. As he put it in The Gay Science (1882): ‘Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.’
The kind of mysticism Nietzsche opposed is often called apophatic mysticism. As the contemporary theologian Celia Kourie outlines, apophatic mysticism is about ‘stripping away … attitudes and concepts and imagery … in order to lead to the abyss, or the void – the blinding brilliance of the divine darkness.’ Apophatic writers view God as that which cannot be named or even conceived of. The closer you are to freeing yourself of ideas and conceptions, the closer you are to God. It is a negative attempt to understand God; one grasps Him by grasping what He isn’t. Apophatic mysticism dominates the mystical tradition through spiritual writers as varied as Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross. It also finds a strong presence within Buddhist thought. The apophatic is the everyday understanding of mysticism, and it is the mysticism Nietzsche ascribes to Plato and Schopenhauer. It is the attitude of moving beyond the world of fleeting, contingent material appearances to some inner oneness, to the divine handiwork behind the created universe.
The apophatic isn’t, however, the only form of mysticism. It can be contrasted with a rival ‘cataphatic’ tradition. Cataphatic mysticism, according to the spiritualism scholar Janet Ruffing, is typified by ‘wonder, amazement, appreciation … for the earth itself.’ This form of mysticism sees reality as inherently revelatory. Rather than flying from speech and negating appearances, the cataphatic, Kourie holds, ‘indicates a moving towards speech, and effects affirmative mysticism, approximating aspects of divinity [to nature]; it is luxuriant, profound and full of splendour, rejoicing in the beauty of God’s creation.’ This form of mysticism neither rejects reality nor negates the self. The cataphatic delights in haecceity – in the ‘this-ness’ of every object. It is this form of mysticism that Nietzsche embraced, minus the God part.
A recurring instance of Nietzsche’s cataphatic spirituality is in his characteristic elevation of the quotidian. He begins Book Four of The Gay Science with a new year’s resolution to bless all things:
I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of things as the beautiful: – thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that from now on be my love! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I just want to be a Yes-sayer!
It is no surprise that the same book that begins by celebrating the extraordinary beauty of mundane things culminates in Nietzsche’s ‘most dangerous’ idea, an idea that shapes his cataphatic mysticism: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The story of Nietzsche’s discovery of the eternal recurrence is essential to his development as a mystical thinker.
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It is August 1881, in the Upper Engadine, near Sils-Maria in Switzerland. Nietzsche is 36 years old, yet illness and near-blindness have already ended his academic career. Like most days this summer, he is taking a hike in the mountains, a brief escape from the migraines and stomach problems that plague him. During these walks, he does his best thinking. Near the hamlet of Surlej, beside Lake Silvaplana, Nietzsche approaches an unusual pyramidal boulder. He stops. The lake is motionless. There, Nietzsche would later write in Ecce Homo (1908), a thought came to him like a ‘lightning flash’.
Nietzsche called this thought an ‘inspiration’, something that ‘overtook’ him. His language parallels Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus: the experience is described in multisensorial terms, as something utterly irresistible, effecting in him a radical change of perspective:
If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken – this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, – I never had any choice … All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity … This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that you would need to go back thousands of years to find anyone who would say: ‘it is mine as well’.
A logical proof in mathematical terms would never convey the ineffable nature of his mystical insight
The insight into the eternal recurrence – the flash of lightning – is that everything, every item of existence, has always recurred and is destined to recur ad infinitum. This is not a claim about some other world. It concerns precisely what we see, touch, smell and taste. All things, all experiences, all events, all thoughts will recur in the very same way they have come to pass. You have lived this life exactly this way countless times before. You have read this essay, contemplated these notions, woken on this day an infinite number of times previously and will do so incalculably more times again. Because of this cosmic repetition, every parcel of reality gains an ‘infinite depth’, an infinite gravity – for its story is destined to be re-lived, re-experienced, again and again, through endless ages. This is the idea that Nietzsche came to believe with the same force that Paul discovered his faith in Jesus.
Personal testimonies from the time of his inspiration dispel any possibility that he was being hyperbolic or romantic. One of Nietzsche’s friends, Resa von Schirnhofer, described how he shared his life-changing discovery:
As Nietzsche rose to leave his manner suddenly changed … glancing around as though in danger of being overheard, he confided the ‘secret’ Zarathustra had whispered in Life’s ear … There was something uncanny in the way he spoke of the ‘eternal return’ … Another Nietzsche had suddenly stood there … Then, without further explanation, he returned to his usual self.
And in a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz, written at the time of the experience, Nietzsche confided:
The intensity of my feelings makes me tremble and laugh at one and the same time … I have not been able to leave my room … my eyes were inflamed … These were not tender tears of pitiful emotion, but tears of jubilation … possessed as I was by a new vision that I am the first of men to know.
Since Nietzsche considered himself to have discovered a cosmological truth, he planned to devote a number of years to scientific study in order to rigorously defend the doctrine. But after some early attempts at formulating a proof for his theory, he abandoned this course. A relic of this brief moment in Nietzsche’s thinking is a collection of ‘proofs’ found in his notebooks that he never intended to publish – and which have been almost universally ridiculed by the scientific community ever since. But what he soon realised was that his experience was incapable of being grounded in scientific thought. A logical proof in mathematical terms would never adequately convey the ineffable nature of his mystical insight. Nietzsche’s brief attempt at a scientific formulation was a post hoc attempt at rationalising what he was already committed to. Just as a theologian’s attempts to ‘prove’ God presuppose their conclusion, primarily acting as an intellectual bolster to what they already believe, Nietzsche’s passing scientific formulation of his eternal recurrence can be seen as a similar exercise. Theologians call this fides quaerens intellectum – faith seeking to provide a rational understanding for what is already embraced as true.
But there still seems to be something distinctly odd about a profoundly atheistic thinker like Nietzsche holding convictions based on something akin to a religious experience. Atheism per se doesn’t preclude beliefs based on powerful numinous or unexplainable experiences, even if many atheists have historically doubted their epistemic reliability. An interesting recent work on this subject is Dale Allison’s Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (2022), which presents a number of case studies of modern-day atheists and agnostics, who take the epistemic reliability of profound but unusual experiences very seriously. A striking example comes from the author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who experienced an overwhelming numinous experience during a walk through a mountain town in California when she was 17 years old. ‘It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once,’ she later wrote, ‘too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of … I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.’ Through the succeeding 50 years, Ehrenreich remained a steadfast atheist, but she never denied her enigmatic experience – much like how Nietzsche’s atheism didn’t diminish his experience at Sils-Maria.
For Nietzsche, accepting eternal recurrence isn’t a ‘faith’ in the negative way he characterised that term – that is, of believing in something imaginary or otherworldly that can’t be verified. Nietzsche considered eternal recurrence to be a quality of this world, not some other world. Moreover, he considered eternal recurrence itself to be verifiable; he took his own experience at Sils-Maria to be evidence in its favour. Nietzsche also thought that others had experienced it before. In a late notebook entry he exclaimed: ‘I have discovered the Greeks: they believed in eternal recurrence! That is the mystery-faith!’– referring to the cult of Dionysus, whose mythic dying and resurrection he viewed as symbolising this cosmological belief. In fact, the rationale of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Nietzsche’s most enigmatic work, was as an imagistic, poetic, musical ‘proof’ of eternal recurrence, a pathway by which a receptive reader might gain a new perspective on the eternal nature of all things.
The atheist has become, through his encounter with the eternal recurrence, strikingly close in his language to that of the religious contemplative
Nietzsche’s response to his insight was a distinct form of mysticism. He came to view everything around him as endowed with its own privileged status as eternal. While Nietzsche certainly rejected pantheism – nature is not divine – the eternality that he attributes to all things is nonetheless a traditional attribute of God. There is a new non-theistic and non-religious sacrality in Nietzsche’s new perspective. In the language of mystical theology, it constitutes a form of the ‘cataphatic’ tradition, which finds its chief expression in the ‘night song’ in Zarathustra:
It is night: now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain.
It is night: only now all the songs of the lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover.
An unstilled, an unstillable something is in me; it wants to be heard. A craving for love is in me, which itself speaks the language of love.
I am light; oh that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I am girded by light.
Oh that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light!
And even you I would bless, you little twinkling stars and glowworms up there! – And be blissful for your gift of light.
Nietzsche’s language is replete with logic-defying symbolism, multisensory and erotic imagery, confessions of ineffability, and recourse to an incantatory rhythm. These are all classic markers of the language of mysticism. The atheist who lamented God’s lingering ‘shadow’ over Europe and its culture-sapping, genius-frustrating consequences has become, through his encounter with the eternal recurrence, strikingly close in his language to that of the religious contemplative. Consider the resemblances of Nietzsche’s ‘night song’ to the celebrated ‘dark night’ of the 16th-century mystic St John of the Cross:
On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings – oh, happy chance! –
I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest.
… In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me …
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Does this mean, then, that through something akin to a religious experience, Nietzsche emerges as a type of mystic? Reading Nietzsche is always a hazardous journey. Just when you think you have him, a provocative aphorism comes along, and he slips through your fingers. Nietzsche did not drop his atheism because of his strange experience of eternal recurrence, or the perspective on reality it granted him. Instead, he charted a new pathway of secular, atheistic mysticism, an alternative to Schopenhauer’s equally atheistic celebration of the world-negating saint-figure.
Many 20th-century scholars argued that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence was really just a thought experiment that he proposed, not something he actually believed. They have done so largely out of embarrassment, hoping to rescue Nietzsche from esotericism and slot him comfortably into the family of early sceptical and naturalistic thinkers. In doing so, these interpreters overlooked the way Nietzsche characterised his own experience, and the testimonies of those who knew him. There is, however, a kernel of truth in the thought-experiment interpretation. The most important implication of eternal recurrence for Nietzsche was the dramatic impact he anticipated it would have on the life of the person who discovered it. The first time eternal recurrence makes an appearance in Nietzsche’s published works is in The Gay Science. Here, Nietzsche presents the eternal recurrence as provoking a challenge to his audience to reconsider their lives from the perspective of eternal recurrence:
The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Does your life have such splendour that it deserves an infinite number of encore performances?
Rather than a simple thought experiment, however, I argue that this text is more akin to a spiritual examen. The examen is a genre of spiritual writing perfected by authors like Thomas à Kempis and St Ignatius of Loyola. Nietzsche was acquainted with this type of meditative life-assessment, and he had practised a Christian version of it in his adolescence, at a point when he still hoped to become a Lutheran minister.
In the Christian examen, a divine figure poses a question to the reader based on their conduct and choices (à Kempis often refers to a question from the Gospel of Mark: ‘What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’). This is followed by a moment of critical decision as the reader carefully reflects on the possible implications of each choice. Nietzsche’s examen is a deliberate counter to the Christian examen. He invites you to reconsider your life before the prospect of its endless repetition: would you affirm your choices if your present life possessed eternal depth? For Nietzsche, this is not a test of moral action. Rather, the only criterion for a life worthy of repetition is its aesthetic quality: whether your life has such splendour that it deserves an infinite number of encore performances. While such a prospect might be a source of despair for some, for those who truly love their life, the thought of replaying it all over again leads to an ecstatic joy: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine …’
Eternal recurrence is the basis for continual self-transformation as you attempt to craft a life that warrants repetition. Shaping your life through the certainty of eternal recurrence is to transfigure it into something compelling and dramatic – like a Homeric epic, worthy of its own endless echo. Nietzsche’s unusual experience at Sils-Maria gave him, as he saw it, a new, ‘graced’ perspective on reality. From then on, he viewed everything in the universe as having an awe-inspiring, eternal quality, which underpins Nietzsche’s language and imagery in Zarathustra, a text that sits comfortably alongside the classics of Western mysticism. Even if most philosophers have long regarded Zarathustra with a mixture of bemusement and scorn, this cannot be said for artists. From Frederick Delius’s cantata A Mass of Life to Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, the poetry of W B Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the prose of D H Lawrence and Thomas Mann, Zarathustra has been an immense source of inspiration.
Nietzsche’s discovery of eternal recurrence was not only the fountain of his cataphatic mysticism, it was also a moment of dramatic personal conversion. To grasp the infinite echo of one’s own life is to be placed under a new and terrible demand: to live in such a way that one could will its every detail again and again. Life becomes not something to be endured, but something to be crafted – an aesthetic whole worthy of its own repetition. Even if Nietzsche was mistaken about the truth of eternal recurrence, the challenge it poses remains. It confronts us with the question of whether our lives are merely being lived, or whether they are being affirmed – not once, but eternally.
(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)
Free Will Astrology: Week of April 23, 2026
by Rob Brezsny | April 21, 2026
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The visible lightning bolt we see is actually the return stroke. It’s electricity racing back up from the ground to the cloud after an invisible leader stroke has created a path. So the spectacular display is actually the earth talking back to the sky. I’d love to see you adopt this phenomenon as your power symbol, Aries. In every way you can imagine, be like the earth conversing with the sky. When a hopeful sign crackles overhead, send out a bold message that you’re ready to act on it. If your ideals are vague and wispy, flying high above you, take a brave practical step to anchor them in reality. Proclaim your bright intentions to the clouds and the stars.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You’re finished with energy-draining indulgences. No more seductive perils or cute ailments, either. Once you wriggle free from the tangles that have been hobbling your style, I suspect you will also renounce anything that resembles joyless restraint, naive certainties, pointless cravings, numbing comforts or misplaced bravery. May it be so! Abracadabra! The emancipations that materialize after these escapes will likely stoke your holy appetite to shine more fiercely than it has in ages.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In music theory, the tritone is an interval exactly halfway between octaves. In old church music, it was considered diabolical because of its unstable, unresolved quality. But this “devil interval” is now essential to blues, jazz and rock. The precariousness that once made it seem outrageous became the source of its potency. What was taboo became foundational. I believe you’re entering into a metaphorical tritone phase, Gemini. Lots of interesting and valuable stuff may be a bit wobbly, irregular, hectic or ruffled.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): A treasure you have long yearned for has morphed since the day you first set out to claim it. Either it has genuinely altered its shape and flavor, or it has remained exactly what it always was while you have changed. In either case, the relationship between you and this prize is no longer the same. Its meaning and value have shifted. The strategies you’ve been using to pursue it aren’t entirely relevant. So I suggest you pause and reconsider. Decide whether you need to formulate a revised approach or identify a different version of the treasure altogether.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): My radical predictions: You will soon discern truths that have been hidden and unravel mysteries that have resisted your understanding. A limiting belief that has dulled your mind will fade away, and a so-called ally who has confused your sense of self will drift out of your orbit. And that’s just part of the renewal ahead. I foresee that you will emerge from a weird emotional haze, regaining access to feelings you’ve needed to highlight. And with that awakening, you will be blessed with beautiful realizations that until now have lingered just beyond definition.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In theater, “blocking” refers to the carefully choreographed movement of actors on stage. Every step is intentional, designed to create meaning and flow. But if an actor forgets the blocking and moves spontaneously in response to what’s happening, sometimes the scene becomes more alive. Let’s apply this idea to your life, Virgo. It may be that you have been following the blocking carefully. You know your role well. But now you’ve been authorized to forget the blocking. You can respond to what’s really happening instead of what’s scripted. I invite you to speak from your heart rather than parroting what’s expected of you. Yes, you might mess up the scene. But on the other hand, you might make it extra real and vibrant.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the future I envision for us all, the prizes that truly matter won’t be the wealth we’ve gathered or the impressive names on our contact list. They won’t be the clever deals we’ve made or the attractiveness of those who walk beside us. What will count most is our ability to transform the messy, selfish, frightened parts of ourselves into strengths. That’s hard to do! Each of us carries a share of that leaden dross, of course, but some of us are more tirelessly ingenious in our efforts to transmute it into gold. And the coming weeks will be prime time for you, Libra, to make dynamic progress in harnessing this magic.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Is it possible there’s something you really need but you don’t know what it is? Sometimes the soul sends up subtle hints long before it sends clear demands: a vague restlessness, a mysterious sadness, or a boredom that doesn’t match your circumstances. These are often clues that an unnamed or unacknowledged need is summoning your attention. My advice to you: PAY ATTENTION! Ask your deep, sweet, sensitive self to provide unambiguous clues. To expedite the process, say the following sentence out loud, filling in the blank at the end: “I suspect I might be starving for ________.”
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): You have arrived at the Glorious Grunting Season, my dear Sagittarius. I hope you’re poised to sweat freely and trust the intelligence of strenuous physical effort. Your wise body, more than your fine mind, can best align you with cosmic rhythms. Whenever you throw yourself into work or play that makes you grunt—hauling, scrubbing, digging, lifting, dancing, running, making love—you will harmonize with the deeper pulse of life. I predict that you will invigorate your instinctual vitality as you clear emotional sediment and ground your energy in the earth’s rich rhythms. You will metabolize frustration into focus, inertia into momentum and abstraction into embodiment.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): What might motivate you to become an extraordinary lover? I’m not suggesting that your romantic and erotic talents are lacking, only that there is delightful room to grow. And the coming weeks will be prime time for you to have fun with this noble experiment. I suggest you follow the clues that life and intuition will drop in your path. Keep this in mind, too: What makes a person a superb lover has a little to do with sheer technique, but is mostly due to emotional intelligence, imaginative responsiveness and tender ingenuity.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): This horoscope isn’t composed by me. It’s coming from you. I’m channeling it straight out of your own deep mind. Why now? Because your conscious ego has been so swept up in the constant swirl of tasks and distractions that it has been tuning out crucial communications from your still, small voice. And now that precious Spirit Whisperer has conscripted me as its messenger. Here’s what it wants to say: “Hey you! Remember me? Your inner guide? Also known as your higher self and the voice of your soul? You urgently need to turn your attention back in my direction. I have a backlog of messages for you, starting with how we can and should intensify our devotion to creative self-care.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In 1967, Piscean biologist Lynn Margulis proposed a revolutionary idea about life’s evolution: that many of its great leaps occurred through symbiosis. She theorized that distinct organisms have sometimes merged their identities to form entirely new beings. One example is the mitochondrion, the powerhouse within our cells. It began its existence as a free-living bacterium that later entered into partnership with the ancestral cell. Margulis’ formerly controversial idea is now mainstream science. (She was called “science’s unruly earth mother.”) With this as our guide, Pisces, let’s contemplate what separate elements of your life might merge into unprecedented blends. I invite you to consider bold experiments in merging and mixing. Hybrids might be more beautiful and valuable than the sum of their parts.
Homework: What secret have you hidden so well you’ve almost forgotten it yourself? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
Physicist: I Believe You Can Enhance Your Consciousness—And Expand Your Perception Into a ‘Different Realm’
Quantum-enhanced humans might see further domains of reality than we could ever imagine.
By Vlatko Vedral Published: Apr 22, 2026 (PopularMechanics.com)
Getty Images
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- Human consciousness may operate using quantum processes similar to those seen in the famous double-slit experiment, a physicist says.
- His theory suggests a quantum chip could enhance the human brain, extending human perception beyond current biological limits.
- Quantum-enhanced humans could experience hidden layers of reality that are currently inaccessible—if his theory is correct.
As a quantum physicist, my work has led me to believe we could drastically enhance human consciousness, the inexplicable machinations that make you feel like you. It explains everything from your most profound revelations to how you decide which snack you’re hungry for, and yet scientists still struggle to understand it.
In my view, there are certain biological limitations to human creativity, and if my theory is correct, we could one day create “enhanced humans” that could experience parts of reality that are otherwise hidden—expanding on our very consciousness.
My idea hinges on an equally mysterious topic: quantum physics, or the study of how the universe works at the smallest levels. The late American physicist David Bohm, PhD, argued that the basic features of quantum physics—like superposition, interference, and entanglement—are an extension of the workings of our brain. Bohm was here echoing one of the founders of quantum physics, the Dane Niels Bohr, PhD.
Another Mind-Blowing Theory From This Expert ⬇️
Bohr believed that particles (like electrons) and waves (like light) could each exhibit particle-like or wave-like properties, depending on the circumstances. Bohr thought this special wave-particle duality of quantum physics could mirror the duality between our own intuitive and logical thinking—or the wandering, uncertain mind and definitive decision making.
Thanks to advances in science, we’re now able to move beyond Bohm and Bohr’s theorizing; we can test their hypotheses through experiments. The famous double-slit experiment, for instance, is a quintessential test that proved a quantum object is capable of being in two places at the same time, a property known as quantum superposition.
In the most basic version of the experiment, a laser shoots photons (or light particles) at a plate pierced with two slits. Light passes through these openings and creates a pattern on a screen behind the plate. All quantum objects we have tested so far—such as electrons, neutrons, and larger molecules—are capable of passing through the two slits at the same time. When the particles pass through both slits at the same time, they produce a distinct interference pattern, indicating the particles are also acting as waves would. However, if we observe which of the slits the quantum object has gone through, then the interference effect disappears and the object suddenly behaves much like a tennis ball travelling through the air in a predictable arc.
“[Our] consciousness is the product of a huge number of quantum double-slit experiments.”
Bohr saw this as an instance of the principle of complementarity, where the two features—waves and particles—can each manifest in quantum physics, but never at the same time in the same experiment. This is, in fact, the foundation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, according to which, if we know one property of the particle (say, we measure its position accurately), then another one must become highly uncertain (its speed).
Indeed, Bohr and Bohm must have been onto something since our thinking process appears to obey a kind of uncertainty principle akin to Heisenberg’s. When we are making up our mind about what to do next—say, what to eat for dinner—we follow several paths in a seemingly dreamlike manner, unaware of the details of each road we explore. Finally, a definitive decision is made resembling the outcome of a quantum interference process in which several paths are enfolded simultaneously, only to yield a single, definitive outcome. This may look like deciding, “I will have chicken for dinner.”
Once you are aware of a definite thought (or which slit the particle goes through in the double-slit parlance), you can no longer think laterally—or about many outcomes at once—so there is no interference. Likewise, when you are thinking laterally, with a multitude of thoughts at the same time, you cannot be aware of definite thoughts.
I will here take a big leap and assume, despite lack of direct experimental evidence, that, at some fundamental level, our consciousness is the product of a huge number of quantum double-slit experiments executed within the circuitry of our brain. This model of consciousness is basically an interconnected array of micro quantum double-slit experiments, with the outcomes of some fed as inputs to others. In other words, it’s one big snowball effect, with interactions compounding each other. These interactions may also become entangled—or behave in perfect synchronicity—during their interfering actions.
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So, when contemplating, we start with a definitive idea, then enter a superposition of thoughts, or a state of uncertainty. This might look like deciding to renovate a room in your house, and then having to decide which color to paint the walls. Then, presumably through introspection, we collapse this superposition into another definitive outcome; this then expands into yet another superposition, which lasts until the next definitive thought. In terms of remodeling, you may decide that the room will be blue, but then you must contemplate which shade, starting the cycle over again.
This seems to be a good model for the interplay between our conscious (definite states) and subconscious (interference of thoughts) states of mind. Our comprehension is basically a huge computational process in which we switch between the logical and intuitive pathways, or between particles and waves.
I imagine that most if not all of the creative power of human intellect resides in the parallel processing of the subconscious due to it being in many states at the same time. Notably, artificial intelligence is devoid of this feature; AIs follow a well-defined logical sequence of steps, a computational program, albeit a stupendously complex one. But there is no quantum uncertainty in any of it, not at the fundamental level. In contrast, most people report that a new idea, a flash of genius and originality, frequently comes on suddenly and unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere, when the mind is not even focusing on the problem to be solved. None of that happens with AI.
But what if our biological makeup limits how creative we can be? Maybe the timing of the clock that governs our introspections forces our intuitive periods—or the times of uncertainty—to be too brief. Could we use our quantum technologies to extend the wavelike processing inside our brains? I am here inspired by Aldous Huxley, who suggested in his famous book, The Doors of Perception, that drugs could alter our consciousness, revealing true reality. But rather than using drugs, I envision quantum chips designed to suppress the “noise” that induces introspection, allowing a longer interference period for our intuitive thoughts to develop. This has the potential to be far more potent than what Huxley could ever have imagined.
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For my idea to work, we would first have to understand where and how these superpositions are stored and manipulated in the brain. The British physicist Roger Penrose, PhD, has speculated that this occurs within microtubules, which are dynamic, hollow, rod-like components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton that are responsible for things such as intercellular transport. Despite some circumstantial evidence, we do not have a strong reason to believe that microtubules are capable of quantum interference, but they are certainly worth further investigation. Once we understand how our brain uses quantum effects, we could then design a quantum chip that interfaces with the relevant biological components. Theoretically, the device would be able to upload superposition states to store them for longer periods and shield them from collapse, helping us to enhance our creative wavelike thinking.
One wonders what kind of power would be unleashed by doing this. I imagine the change would not be purely quantitative, so that we merely become faster calculators or quicker problem solvers, although even that would be amazing. Instead, I think the change could be qualitative, expanding our perception into a completely different realm, effectively creating a new species. We might theoretically become more powerful than modern humans, just as we currently are with respect to other apes. Quantum-enhanced humans would see further domains of reality that would otherwise remain hidden forever from us ordinary humans.
Whether this is just wishful thinking of yet another optimistic physicist—only time will tell.
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Contributor, Professor of Physics
Vlatko Vedral is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, known for both his theoretical and experimental work on quantum information, including developing a novel way of quantifying entanglement and applying it to macroscopic physical systems. When not studying the fundamental nature of reality, Vlatko enjoys drawing, wakeboarding, and playing his electric guitar “up to 11.” He is the author of the 2010 book Decoding Reality, as well as the latest “Portals to A New Reality.” Born in Serbia, he now lives in Oxford.
(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)
The Psychic Function of Emotions with Michael Jawer
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 21, 2026 Michael Jawer is author of Sensitive Soul: The Unseen Role of Emotion in Extraordinary States. He is coauthor, with Dr. Marc Micozzi, of two books: Your Emotional Type: Key to the Therapies That Will Work for You as well as The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotions: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense. His websites are https://michaeljawer.com/ and http://www.youremotionaltype.com/. In this reboot from 2020, Michael presents his view that emotions are a relatively unexplored dimension of parapsychological functioning. He discusses the psychological parameter of boundary thickness and thinness. Jawer covers a range of topics including PTSD, synesthesia, environmental sensitivity, prodigies and savants, as well as emotional awareness in animals. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). (Recorded on November 21, 2020)
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
By Noah Hawley
April 20, 2026 (The Atlantic)
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Explore the May 2026 Issue
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Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.
In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.
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On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.
So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and a comedian on board. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.
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Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”
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“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.
That’s how the weekend started. Here’s how it ended: My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two. Suffice it to say we have never been back to Campfire, nor have we ever been invited.
At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.
Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.
Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?
Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth.
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Though we didn’t know it at the time, Bezos’s first marriage would be over a few weeks later. My defining impression of his wife that weekend was sadness, even though Bezos made a big show of performing the role of family man. In hindsight, it is that performance that sticks with me. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.
Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
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This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.
Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.
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When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.
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I finally met Bezos on the last day of Campfire, at lunch, after my wife had broken her wrist. I went over to thank him for having us, and he asked how our Campfire experience had been. I told him that it was great, but that unfortunately my wife had broken her wrist that morning when she slipped on the wet grass while kicking a ball with our 6-year-old son.
The night before, we’d all stood by the pool at the beach club watching a cadre of synchronized swimmers execute a flawless water routine. I had spoken with a famous novelist, who said, “I just don’t understand why I’m here.” A famous rock star was about to start an acoustic set. The famous chef had made paella. Somewhere deep under my skin, a brutal pox was beginning to form.
The next morning, my wife fell, and I found myself in a black SUV with a team of private-security contractors, who whisked us to the back entrance of a Santa Barbara emergency room, where she was seen and treated right away. We made it back in time to watch the Supreme Court justice Zoom in from Washington, D.C.
How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.
A few hours later, on the private plane home, a famous movie producer offered my wife a blanket. My children’s faces were covered in spots. Under my fingernails, red welts were beginning to rise.
The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.
“I’m finished,” yells Daniel Plainview, perched happily on the polished floor of his own celestial kingdom. Though he has just committed a crime, he has never felt so free.
This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Everything Is Free and Nothing Matters.”
About the Author
Noah Hawley is the creator of the FX series Fargo and Alien: Earth, and the author of the novel Anthem.
Politics Is Always Downstream of Sex
Jeff Schechtman 04/21/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
What Swalwell, Gonzales, Trump, and Epstein all share — and what Washington keeps pretending to forget about the nature of men in power.
Long before there were political consultants, opposition researchers, or 24-hour news cycles, writers and poets understood something essential about men in power: The higher they climb, the more exposed they become — not to their enemies, but to themselves.
It runs through Shakespeare’s kings undone not by their rivals but by their own nature — Antony losing an empire for Cleopatra, Macbeth’s ambition inseparable from Lady Macbeth’s hold on him. Through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where the man who destroys her life is not a villain but simply a powerful man who wanted what he wanted and never imagined the cost would be his to pay. Through the blues, where desire and ruin have always been understood as the same song. Through every novel about ambition that doubles, always, as a story about what ambition cannot contain.
The Greeks built an entire dramatic tradition around the idea that greatness and catastrophic vulnerability are not opposites. They are the same force, wearing different faces on different days.
We just don’t talk about it that way when it happens in Washington.
Last week, Eric Swalwell (D-CA) resigned from Congress after multiple women detailed experiences ranging from unwanted sexual advances to allegations of rape, ending both his seven-term congressional career and what had been a serious campaign for governor of California.
Tony Gonzales (R-TX), followed him out the door, having admitted to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide. Two men, two parties, one week, one ancient story.
The temptation is to frame this politically — another #MeToo moment, a bipartisan reckoning, a lesson about workplace power dynamics. And all of that is true, but none of it is really the point.
The point is something far older and far less comfortable: Men of a certain ambition carry within them a complexity about women that the whole architecture of modern political life is designed to suppress, but suppression is not the same as resolution. That complexity waits. It finds its moment. And when it does, it is rarely subtle.
We tell ourselves these stories are about weakness, hypocrisy, the abuse of power, the exploitation of vulnerable women by men who should know better. And they are. But what they are more fundamentally about is harder to say and harder still to fix, because it isn’t really about bad men behaving badly. It’s about the nature of men — specifically men in the particular hothouse of political ambition — and the way that nature doesn’t transform when you win the election or get the corner office. It intensifies.
The hunger that drove the ambition doesn’t dissolve once the ambition is satisfied. It looks for a new object. And in positions of power, the normal friction that keeps most men in most circumstances from acting on every impulse is simply… removed. The feedback loops go quiet. The word “no” gets said less often, and then less often still, until some men stop hearing it altogether.
This is not an excuse. It is a description of a mechanism.
What makes Jeffrey Epstein different — what makes him genuinely singular in the entire history of powerful men and their appetites — is that he saw this mechanism clearly and decided to build a business around it.
Not a criminal enterprise that happened to involve sex. A deliberate, sophisticated operation premised entirely on a single insight that no one before him had ever quite thought to monetize:
That the most powerful men in the world are, in the domain of desire, the most exploitable. That lust is the one lever that doesn’t care about your net worth or your security detail or your carefully managed public image.
But here is what has never quite been said about Epstein: He was, in his way, a genius. A dark and predatory one, but a genius nonetheless.
He understood the interior lives of ambitious men better than their therapists, their wives, their chiefs of staff — better, it seems, than the men understood themselves.
He grasped something these men only half-consciously believed: that desire was the spoils of their ambition. That they had worked and schemed and clawed their way to the top, and that this — this — was part of what they had earned. Maybe Trump said it best in the infamous Access Hollywood tape, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Most powerful men feel that pull and suppress it, or sublimate it, or simply live with it. Epstein saw the suppression and offered the alternative. He didn’t seduce these men with money or access or ideology. He gave them permission.
And in the process, with the precision of a venture capitalist and the patience of a spider, he extracted from them the two things they valued most: their power and their money. Nobody in recent history had ever thought to build that business. Nobody had ever seen it quite that clearly.
That is what makes Epstein not just a criminal but a case study in applied psychology at the highest level. If he had been a decade older and operating on the East Coast political circuit, Swalwell’s name would almost certainly be somewhere in those files. The profile fits that precisely.
The women in these stories are too often treated as variables — the accusers, the destabilizing forces, the October surprises. But they are something else entirely. They are the one feedback mechanism that exists completely outside the bubble. They cannot be managed, spun, or consolidated. When they speak — and they always eventually speak — they aren’t breaking a story so much as restoring a reality that power had temporarily suspended.
Don Draper, a fictional stand-in for the Swalwells and Weinsteins of the world, got away with it for a decade. He got away with it because the culture had constructed, with great care and considerable investment, a world in which the desires of powerful men were simply the weather — ambient, inevitable, not subject to comment or consequence.
That world is gone, though not without a fight, and not completely. Barack Obama held it together. George W. Bush did, too. Which tells us this isn’t inevitable — it is, to use the clinical term, a failure of integration. An inability to hold the full complexity of one’s own nature without needing to act it out.
Literature has always known this. Stendhal knew it. Fitzgerald knew it. Roth made a career out of it. The powerful man undone not by his enemies but by the part of himself he never quite managed to govern — that story is as old as storytelling itself.
Washington just keeps acting surprised.
- Jeff SchechtmanJeff Schechtman’s career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.
