Culture

For We Are One On The Journey

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When it comes to religious and spiritual interactions, we’ve all experienced both deep connection and deep conflict. I’d like to talk about the connection, specifically how is it that we can connect with people on seemingly different spiritual paths? I’m sure we’ve all experienced something like that, where there’s a theological disconnect, but a deeper connection anyway.

In 2026, I find this question even more relevant. I find myself in agreement with the Pope despite being neither a Christian and having some problems with the Catholic Church. I find myself in sync with Christians sincerely protesting monstrous behavior. I am, as noted, a theist in my own way, but also have many friends who are atheists and we think a lot alike.

I mean I’m a Taoist and syncretic neo-pagan, so my beliefs are inclusive, but still, it’s interesting to see people I feel accord with in a time where religious conflict is oft present. It’s also nice to feel that accord.

So I find myself asking why we have this sense of sibling-hood. I mean I’m glad for it but why does it exist?

I think it’s a question of the sincerity of the journey.

Whatever your spiritual starting point, some people are on the quest. They want to figure out what’s going on. They want to be better people. They want to tune in to the Big Picture. There is something bigger than them, and they are going to do their best to find it.

This also means they start by taking their spiritual path seriously – and that’s actually a good starting point. You have to start somewhere and give it a try, you have to hold to your principles to find out what they mean and ask really hard questions. We’re often asking the same questions on the journey, and facing stark reality.

There’s a camaraderie in this, of all we people on the journey. We don’t start from the same place, we aren’t necessarily in the same place, but we’re all trying to figure “it” out. We can all relate to the journey. We can appreciate that someone cares.

But also everyone on that journey also have places of similarities. We ask the same or similar questions. We’ve faced the same or similar spiritual crises. We’ve probably had similar experiences in spiritual readings and research, even if we’re not necessarily in agreement.

Almost certainly out of these we’re going to find similar values. We’ve asked the questions, done the research, and in many cases come to the same conclusions. I don’t believe there’s some secret perennial philosophy created by an ancient civilization waiting to be rediscovered – but I believe there are similar conclusions we always keep coming to. Also maybe we should listen to those conclusions, because we keep forgetting them.

We’re all on a journey, all trying to figure it out, and our conclusions are often hard-won and surprisingly similar.


There’s a camaraderie in all of this. A similarity because we’re all on a journey.

I keep thinking of the TV series Babylon 5, a show I was a deep fan of back when it first ran. The Episode “Grail” in Season 1 sees a religious seeker come to this space station in the far future, seeking the Holy Grail. An alien ambassador notes her respect for a person on a mission that others may see as mad – a sincere seeker hoping for healing and regeneration for people. I appreciate that message, and I think it illustrated what I found.

Who is my sibling? Someone else on a journey like me.

–Xenofact

But What If We’re No One?

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In 2026 there are two trends that I think threaten people’s sense of identity. I mean there’s a lot of bad trends in 2026, so I need to be clear. If you’re reading this in another decade, I hope things are less terrible.

The trends specifically are AI and Prediction Markets (ie gambling). Both trends are destructive. AI is over-rated, over-exposed use of statistical tools to assemble language that overshadows actual useful technology. Prediction Markets are just gambling, only gambling on anything, and gambling has gotten pretty terrible with Sports Betting. They’re wrecking the economy, used to funnel money to the grotesquely rich, and so on – but also they destroy identity by destroying personhood.

Let’s take a look at AI. AI is pitched as a replacement for not just people but for thinking. You can get rid of workers and then they don’t do what they do, what they do as part of their lives and careers. You also can not need to know anything, just prompt an AI and then get Slop you can pass off as something valuable. AI is about degrading knowledge and degrading thought.

You have to learn something, do something, make something to achieve results. AI replaces that, AI means you’re nothing but a prompt-enterer at best. AI replaces people with something that can’t truly do their job as it’s not about being a kind of person. It also replaces being the kind of person that knows and does things with typing a prompt.

AI removes identity from the equation. AI is about not being anything, just weak connective tissue between pretend intelligence. You’re not a person, you’re not anyone.

The Prediction Markets are about bets, periods. There might be some skill involved, but the core skill is to be able to make bets and predict things. That kind of skill isn’t necessarily being used anywhere else, just to try to get a cash payout. Also some people are just placing bets and seeing whatever happens.

And that’s not including market manipulation, which is an important subject as of this writing. What if you’re placing bets then just manipulating what goes on – playing on insider information, making deals, threatening people? Are you building anything? Making anything? Being anyone?

It’s all odds and odds manipulation. There’s no one home, just desires for payoffs. Nothing is coming of it. No one is being anything, just gut bacteria in the odds market.

AI and Prediction Markets are all about poking buttons, statistics, odds, and not building skills, or relations, or learning things that make you someone. It’s a world of emptiness and voidness. It’s techno-economic trends that dehumanize people in many ways.

Do I have any solutions? Well, yes, be skeptical of these things and work to build yourself and others as people – folks with knowledge and skills, and roles, and citizenship. Be sure to keep people skeptical and aware.

But also as I expect both of these to go very wrong, you can also promote regulation, limitations, community opposition, and of course witty “I told you so’s”.

–Xenofact

Cultural Cargo Cults Ethics and Taoism

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I was reading the Tao Te Ching lately, and Chapter 18 struck me. Let me paraphrase (from Red Pine and a few other translations):

When the Great Way is left, kindness and justice arise

When reason arises, we encounter deceit.

When the six relations fail, we encounter obedience and love.

When the country is in chaos, we acknowledge honest officials.

I take this chapter to be one of failure. If people hold to the Tao, the Great Way, that connectedness-of-reality, you can have an orderly life. When you loose it things fall apart – even if we think we’re being virtuous.

The arising of kindness and justice sounds like a good thing. Reason is a good thing, correct? Yet the entire chapter is one of decline, ending with one of my favorite lines, the acknowledgement of honest officials – when shouldn’t they all be honest?

It’s a curious chapter indeed. Some things we’d think of are good are sneered at. When contemplating it, I had a useful insight relevant to political and social conversations of the day.

The way I read the chapter is the sense of the Tao, that unity, leads to harmony. There are kindness and justice, reason, good relations, and so on, but they are part of a “unified” worldview that is both mystical bust also practical. There may be kindness, honesty, and so on, but they are the result of holding to the Tao – not separate and distinct from it. “True” virtuous things, as it were, things that have a foundation.

But when you loose that sense of unity, everything is broken, out, separate, a substitute. That’s when I thought of the term bandied about these days (in 2026) – “Cargo Cults.”

The term “Cargo Cult Fascism” arose to describe certain would-be strongmen of our age who seemed to think that if they acted like fascist leaders, they’d have automatic compliance. The term spread to other areas of political and social discussion, noting just how much of our society was people acting out things but not actually doing them or caring about them or understanding them. Such people and their actions often failed and fell apart – bad but also dysfunctional.

But if you have “bad” Cargo Cults, that also means you can have ones of people trying to be “good.”

Suddenly, I understood this chapter of the Tao Te Ching better (especially considering the times of Taoist-versus-Confucian). It was about fragmented things, divided from a larger reality, imitative but with no foundation. Past a point you’re just going through the motions and not being anything, and not connected to the Way, the foundation of things, the depth of it all. Your kindness, your morality, no matter how hard you try, is going to be a bit hollow, a bit of an act, without that foundation.

I think that’s also why the last line hits me hard. Imagine a society in so much chaos that saying someone is an “honest minister” is a compliment as opposed to indicating that if that’s exceptional your government sucks. Also maybe that person is just a poser anyway.

Regularly reading great spiritual and philosophical works is good not just for your own spiritual “ecosystem” but for reviewing and thinking over modern and past times. This was a useful insight, helping me understand both past writings and our current situations.

(I mean the situations are both terrible but I understand them better)

–Xenofact