“Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.”

– Ungit’s priest

What if our deepest expressions of love are merely a disguise for something darker? How often is our care for others only a cloak for self-interest – a jealousy we refuse to acknowledge, working beneath the surface to the pain and confusion of those we hold dear?

Do we ever truly love others for their own sakes, or do we only love the roles they play in the stories we write for ourselves?

Till We Have Faces: A Review

I just finished reading C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, and these are some of the questions that came to mind while I was reading it. This is not one of Lewis’ more popular books, and I’d never heard much about it. But I’ve had a copy sitting on the shelf for years and always wondered what it was about. After an arduous slog through 900 pages of E.P. Thompson, I was looking for something lighter, and that’s when I finally decided to give it a read.

It turns out that Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. If you’ve never heard it, the story involves three sisters, one of whom was extraordinarily beautiful. In fact, Psyche was so beautiful that the goddess Venus herself – that’s Cupid’s mother – was jealous. As the story goes, Cupid accidentally pricked himself with his own arrow when he saw Psyche, and proceeded to fall in love with her. He then takes her away to live in his palace as his wife. But Cupid imposes one very important condition: Psyche is never allowed to see his face. He comes to her only at night, and always flies away before morning.

But her two sisters are jealous, and they persuade Psyche to take a candle and look at his face while he is asleep. As you might expect, the results are tragic, as they usually are in Greek myths about women and impulsive curiosity. A drop of hot wax falls on Cupid’s face, and he wakes up and flies away for good. There is more to the story, but I’ll leave it at that.

Perspective Shift: Psyche’s Sister

Now, this book is not just a simple retelling of an old story. Lewis has completely transformed and re-imagined his source material to such an extent that reading Till We Have Faces is more like crossing the path of the old myth than traveling along the same road. We do encounter characters and events from the original, but the narrative context and perspective are completely altered. In the first place, it doesn’t take place in Greece or among the Greek gods, and the main character is neither Cupid nor Psyche, but Psyche’s ugly stepsister. The whole book is written from her point of view in the first person, and I have to say it does an excellent job of subverting the reader’s expectations.

It naturally begins by engaging the reader’s sympathy with the protagonist. We’re sucked in by the early childhood memories, while being introduced to a strange, hostile, and pagan world. Orual is the woman’s name, and she is one of the daughters of the king of Glome – a violent man of mercurial temper. We also meet the priest of the temple cult of the goddess Ungit. You can probably tell by the name Ungit that the religion portrayed is a very ugly one. Orual describes it in oppressive terms, complaining of the darkness and what she calls the stench of holiness. This goddess, Ungit, is supposed to be the equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite or the Roman Venus.

And we aren’t left guessing about that aspect of the goddess’ identity. One of the main characters is a Greek slave nicknamed “the Fox”, who serves as tutor to Orual and her sisters. He makes the connection early on. And this is where it gets interesting: the Fox is a disciple of the philosophers, and he completely rejects the traditional pagan myths, referring them, like Plato, to the lies of Homer and other old poets. So he teaches the girls a sort of stoicism, skeptical of cultic superstition. We, as modern readers, naturally fall in with this as being obviously superior to the amoral and grotesque rites of paganism.

That’s the set-up.

Beauty and the Beast

What Lewis does with the story after this serves progressively to subvert and undermine the reader’s expectations and prejudice. As the story unfolds, we begin to realize that the protagonist is not only ugly on the outside, but on the inside as well. This correspondence of character and appearance naturally accords with the conventions of traditional story-telling, but it goes against a favourite motif of more modern narratives – the conceit that those ill-favoured in the looks department tend to be endowed with inner beauty to compensate. On the other hand, the young and beautiful Psyche is lovely not only to look at, but in soul as well, kind and virtuous as a saint.

Meanwhile, the anti-traditional attitude inculcated by the Greek tutor is eroded as the cult of Ungit is revealed to be something other than mere priestcraft.

The major crisis comes fairly early in the story when the priest of Ungit demands a human sacrifice to appease the goddess. The whole kingdom of Glome is falling apart from famine, drought, and military and political problems. The priest tells the king that there is an accursed person in his palace who has angered the goddess, and as you might have guessed, it turns out to be the virtuous and beautiful Psyche, who has provoked Ungit’s jealousy by her beauty, which was so stunning that people sometimes worshiped her as if she were a goddess herself.

As dramatic as that sounds, the pivotal conflict comes about after these events, when Orual goes to retrieve the remains of Psyche’s body from the sacrificial tree. It turns out that the body has disappeared without a trace. Orual then goes exploring the nearby mountain, and to her surprise she finds Psyche there, alive and well. Psyche tells her that instead of being killed by the mythical shadowbrute, she had been taken as a bride by Ungit’s son, the god of the mountain. She says she lives in a beautiful palace and that everything is wonderful. The only problem is that no one else can see this palace, and Psyche appears to be living in rags out in the open. What’s more, the god only comes to her at night, and she is not allowed to see his face. Orual thinks she’s raving.

I won’t give it all away here, but this conflict between the world that Psyche sees and the world inhabited by here sister Orual sets up a tension that pervades the whole book. Psyche’s fantastic story challenges Orual’s philosophical beliefs, and from here on in you see this cloud of doubt and ambiguity fill the protagonist’s mind as she falls into a pattern of delusional rationalizations. But because the book is written from her perspective, the reader is left to recognize what Orual does not. We have her thoughts as she gives them in what, to her, seem reasonable terms. But the reader will easily see the narrator’s dishonesty.

This was one of the book’s strong points, and I enjoyed the inside view of the protagonist’s self-deception. It was a good occasion to reflect on our very human tendency to delude ourselves, and to disguise selfishness as love. Orual pretends to virtue even as she allows her jealousy to destroy the object of her affection. Throughout the book, the pattern we see in Orual and her various relationships is in fact a sort of Narcissism: her love for others is only a form of self-love. Friends and family are little more than extensions of her own ego, mere props in the construction of her own sense of identity. She is not able to desire the good of others when it conflicts with her own desire to possess them for herself.

The Book within the Book

Lewis adds an extra layer of immersion to his story-telling by incorporating the book itself into the structure of the story. His use of the first-person is not just a stylistic choice; rather, the narrative as it comes to us is wrapped up as an object within the story: a book written by the protagonist in response to the trials of her life, and in which she becomes the main character of a story that once belonged to another.

Orual finds the pressure of events too great to maintain her philosophical composure, and in its place she adopts an antagonistic stance, not simply toward superstition as such, but toward the gods themselves. The book represents her account of the gods’ injustice toward her, and she fills its pages with complaints about their refusal to reveal themselves in a clear, unambiguous way. And even when her own jealousy brings her sister to ruin, she blames the gods for leaving her in doubt about what to do. Events have fallen out such that she can no longer disbelieve in the gods, but she still can’t decide exactly what to believe about them. The only thing she’s sure of is that they are unjust and she hates them.

A Look in the Mirror: Advent of Self-Awareness

This conflict comes to a head as the book wraps up. Toward the end of her life, as Orual reviews the book she’s written, she has a series of epiphanies and begins to lose confidence in her own complaints. She starts to see in herself an image of the very thing she hates: the goddess Ungit with her consuming jealousy. She realizes that she’s made sacrifice of other people’s lives in service to her own desires.

At this point, much of what was only implicit or suggested by the narrative becomes explicit. Lewis doesn’t leave us guessing about what he wants us to see as the protagonist turns a critical eye on herself, and in a flourish of bracing self-honesty she re-evaluates her entire life.

Likewise the supernatural elements come up for review, leaving ambiguity behind in favour of more transparent allegorizing. For much of the book, the comparison of Christianity to paganism remains implicit. Lewis draws some attention to what he is attempting to do, but the touch is relatively light until the very end. The earliest hint comes in the words of Ungit’s priest when he demands the sacrifice of Psyche. The reason for the sacrifice is that Psyche has ostensibly angered the goddess – she is accursed and must be given over to purge the guilt from the kingdom.

To stop the plagues, the accursed one must be bound to a tree and left to be devoured by the “shadowbrute”. When the king suggests they sacrifice a thief instead, the priest tells him that such a substitute is unacceptable, for “in the Great Offering the victim must be perfect.” It’s then suggested that the victim goes to be the bride of the goddess’s son, the god of the mountain who sometimes appears in shadowy form. Thus her fate is really a blessed one. When the Fox objects to this seeming contradiction, the priest responds, “Why should not the Accursed be both the best and the worst?” Taken together, the allusions to the crucifixion are plain enough.

But Psyche isn’t the only figure given an allegorical significance. The god of the mountain is made to resemble Christ through the theme of the sacred marriage, and Psyche is the believer who knows the blessings of union with the divine, exciting the jealousy and disbelief of those she’s left behind. Significantly, Ungit’s son is never named in the book. He is never called Eros or Cupid, but simply referred to as “the god of the mountain”. Lewis’ intent with that omission is to leave the god’s identity open to question, and indeed, when he speaks briefly to Orual near the story’s end, she replies, like Paul on the way to Damascus, with the question: “Lord, who are you?”

Other Christian allusions appear at various points, including references to the resurrection, the Easter service, and the expulsion of man from the garden of Eden.

But the final chapters hand over the interpretive keys:

“All, even Psyche, are born into the house of Ungit. And all must get free from her. Or say that Ungit in each must bear Ungit’s son and die in childbed – or change. And now Psyche must go down into the deadlands to get beauty in a casket from the Queen of the Deadlands, from death herself; and bring it back to give it to Ungit so that Ungit will become beautiful.”

Ungit then is the fallen Eve, the mother of all whose lusts consume the human race, the woman whose aspirations to godhood gave us our first example of “main character syndrome”, along with its most tragic consequences. But Ungit’s son is the seed of the woman, the beautiful Christ whose birth in each brings death to the sinful nature. Psyche is also Christ, whose journey to the underworld returns “beauty in a casket”, spiritual life, to the deformity of Eve and her children.

This refracted symbolism, the several characters representing different things in different relationships, is captured in the Fox’s pantheistic platitude: “Men, and gods, flow in and out and mingle.” Lewis’ approach is a blend of allegory and allusion, and in the second respect owes something to the conception of the Christian story as the world’s “true myth”, the one to which all other myths point in fragmentary and shadowy fashion – an idea impressed on the author by his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Merits and Missteps: An Evaluation

With all that said, the question remains: Is Till We Have Faces worth reading? What did Lewis manage to achieve, and where does the story fall short?

First I’ll say that I did enjoy the book. It was an easy read and a made a nice break from the denser nonfiction I’ve been reading lately. The writing style doesn’t make any heavy demands on the reader, while the quality of the narrative still invites thoughtful engagement. The fact that the reader is allowed to perceive things about the protagonist to which she herself is blind is a good draw, serving also as an invitation to self-reflect. What lies do we tell ourselves in order to justify our actions? Do we disguise self-seeking as love for others?

The religious ambiguities and hints of allegory add a good deal of interest, and I wanted to keep reading to find out where the author was going with it.

The characters in the book were well-drawn, not especially deep, but evoking familiar archetypes. The protagonist was compelling if not likeable, and Lewis’ portrayal of her rationalizing tendency had enough psychological realism to be convincing.

The dialogue was okay for the most part, but a few exchanges fell flat and took me out of the story. And as often happens in fiction, characters’ speeches sometimes read more like the thing you wish you’d said than what you actually said.

The story itself was well-constructed and satisfying overall. However, some of Lewis’ choices raised an eyebrow – there was a dubious element of woman-warrioring which struck me as highly unlikely. However, it did serve purpose within the narrative and as character-development: you can sort of imagine the woman so ugly no man could love her, determined to take on a more masculine role in her own life and relationships. After the death of her father, Orual becomes queen in the absence of a male heir, and she ends up ruling and leading the country into great success. Lewis was a man writing a female lead, and toward the end of the book it does begin to show through.

The story’s conclusion involves the protagonist in a series of epiphanies, self-reflections, and religious speculations bordering on the didactic. What was left under the surface for the reader to observe and interpret is all brought into the foreground and easily laid out for anyone familiar with the Bible. Critics might class this as a literary sin, but in my view it wouldn’t be fair to call it a total failure. It does link in with the narrative as a whole, answering or recapitulating questions with which the protagonist has been grappling in her mind from the beginning. It works to an extent, although I do think Lewis cuts with too keen of an edge. He pushes too hard toward a Christian resolution for a story locked in a pagan context, going so far as to make the god of the mountain a stand-in for Jesus.

Beautiful Idols: A Warning

The way Lewis handles the relation of Christian and pagan religion is in many ways a reversal of the approach of modern critical scholars. In the twentieth century, it was a common attack vector against the faith to say that Christianity arose as a derivative of paganism, just another variation of the mystery cults gaining popularity within the Roman Empire.

Notable Christian scholars like J. Gresham Machen countered these claims by closely examining the chronology and historical source material. But Lewis takes an approach that simply bypasses the critiques of comparative religion. *Of course* there are resemblances between paganism and Christianity – we all inhabit the same universe, and it stands to reason that falsehood must bear some resemblance to truth if it attempts to satisfy an impulse toward personal religion.

Lewis stands the critics on their heads by treating pagan myth as a shadowy approach to faith. And while Lewis does also highlight some of the uglier aspects of idol worship, the limitations of the story’s context prevent any unambiguous separation of the good from the evil. As such, his attempt to trace a redemptive arc for the protagonist runs up against the danger of appearing to redeem the idols themselves, in particular the god of the mountain as he takes the place of Christ.

Here it’s important to remember that Christianity is not an abstract faith. It is personal, and Jesus is a personal God, not a mere manifestation of deity. As such, there is danger in Lewis’ approach, insofar as it takes the glory of Christ and transfers it, in some measure, to an idol.

If we read Till We Have Faces, and other stories like it, we ought to keep in mind the words of the commandment, “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,” and further, “I will not give my glory to another.” The problem with idolatry is not simply that it represents the wrong system of religious truth – it’s that it turns us away from the Lord Himself to love others in His place. Hence the prophets’ rebuke to Israel, that they went “whoring” after other gods. Eros, Cupid – “the god of the mountain” – is not Jesus. Aslan the lion is not Jesus.

And while I’m not prepared to condemn this genre of fiction in its entirety – we do have allegories and types of Christ in the Bible, and it is true that both men and angels are, in their own way, reflections of God’s glory – I do think some of these books cross the border from illustrative parallel into equivocal territory. The Christian reader may glean insights from them, but with a strong caution not to be drawn away to beautiful idols in the false belief that they are just another form of God.

Final Verdict and Closing thoughts

At best, Till We Have Faces is a book to pick up second-hand if you find it. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch. But with some caveats, it’s worth a read if you’re looking for something lighter. I will say that I don’t recommend it for younger readers or the immature. While the content is not obscene, the sexual themes and the way Lewis handles his religious message make it unsuitable for children.

It is a decent novel overall, offering some worthwhile insights into human psychology. Through Orual's self-deception, Lewis holds up a mirror to the lately named "main character syndrome." In her solipsistic world, Orual constrains others to play no more than supporting roles in her own personal drama, denying them agency in their own stories. Though originally just a bit-player in the myth of Psyche, Orual's narrative reshapes everything to revolve around herself.

The book’s warning has never been more relevant. We now live in a digital landscape where everything is tailored to individual preference and subjective desire: algorithmic feeds deliver exactly what our lizard-brains crave, while we swipe through potential mates as if they were products for our consumption. The personalized and performative world of social media fuels delusion and fosters neglect of one fundamental truth: it’s not about you. It’s not about me. Others have their own stories to live.

McLuhan taught us that media are extensions of the self. Thus the absorption of social life by technology reduces relationship to an egocentric appendage.

Perhaps the greatest danger of our AI-mediated world is that as we increasingly converse with machines as if they were human, we begin to treat humans more like machines – supporting characters with no internal direction of their own. When our brains can no longer distinguish between the authentic and the artificial, we unconsciously devalue the interactions that once offered us unmistakable evidence of psyches not our own.

Modern Western society has already separated the individual from traditional community bonds through the combined power of technology, commerce, and changing social paradigms. Artificial intelligence threatens to accelerate this alienation, as each one of us constructs a private universe with himself at the centre. The digital face we present to the world becomes the only reality we know as the inner lives of other faces dissolve in a sea of doubt.

As communal life continues to erode in the acid bath of technological solipsism, the danger of self-absorption can only increase. With this in view, it’s never been more important to remember that none of us is the main character in the world’s grand scheme, and we can only know our true identities – our real faces – as we accept our supporting roles in the divine narrative of God’s eternal kingdom.

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Left on the Cutting Room Floor:

• “Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood” – Ungit’s priest

• This creeping solipsism of the screen has invaded daily life, and time spent together is now passed behind the voiceless, faceless mask of the text message. After the widespread adoption of smartphones, teachers began to report that empathy among children dropped markedly. Even with coaxing, students struggled to appreciate the effects of their actions on the others.

In the Works:

• Technology and the Tower of Babel

• Booksmaxxing: Why and How to Collect Physical Books

• Intentional Communities in an AI Age: Why We Need Them Now More than Ever

Current Reading:

• A Theology of Nature, Ruben Alvarado

• The Relentless Revolution, Joyce Appleby

Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time doing nothing but telling or hearing something new.

—Acts 17:21

Saint Luke's description of the Athenians was, in all likelihood, not meant as a compliment. Luke—perhaps a Macedonian himself—wrote with the critical eye of an outside observer, unclouded by native pride.

Nearly 2000 years later, in a world more saturated with media than ever before, it doesn’t take much effort to see ourselves in the Evangelist’s description—perhaps even more than the Athenians themselves. Certainly we have a much greater quantity of "news" at our disposal than the Greeks ever did. But that increase in quantity has brought with it a decrease in relevance and personal utility. The more bits of information we consume, the less we do with what we already possess.

Unlike the Athenians, who at least liked to discuss matters at an intellectual level, we have little use for such discipline, preferring to spend our time trading funny memes and outrage-bait. Few pause to ask whether all this furious "info-tivity" actually accomplishes anything meaningful. We fancy ourselves informed and in the know, but at the end of the day, would our lives look any better, to an outside observer, than the lives of those not so informed?

But the relentless flow of electronic information triggers in us a sort of hyper-vigilance. Our brains act as if we’ve been stationed in a watchtower, scanning the horizon for threats. And of course, some degree of vigilance is necessary. But not everyone is called to the tower.

Some must always stand guard. But whole communities are not deployed to the watch-tower as one man. No, a few are chosen and assigned the task, so that the remainder might pursue their own vocations with the knowledge that someone is on the lookout for possible threats. Ideally, trusted watchmen report to trusted leaders with the sagacity to sift their reports and evaluate what’s relevant for the decisions that need to be made.

Our problem is that we've all gathered around the watch-towers listening to the men on top, day in and day out, instead of taking responsible action in our own domains. Without faithful men on guard—without responsible leadership—there is a great deal of anxiety in the people, which we seek to assuage by keeping our eyes constantly fixed on the horizon.

The reality is that it is necessary for us to pay attention to what is going on. Like the men of Nehemiah's day, we've got to work with a trowel in one hand and a spear in the other. But sadly, for lack of faithful watchmen, many have become so fixated on the horizon that they've forgotten both trowel and spear.

It is a great irony that despite our constant vigilance, men such as we have become will nevertheless be caught off-guard when the enemy arrives.

Like deer caught in the headlights.

I

It was 1964 when Marshall McLuhan made this observation in his landmark book, Understanding Media.

It was not technology per se that brought about this change of direction, but the specifically electric technology that so defined the 20th, and now the 21st, century. He noted that electronic media had the effect of sending western man backward through time, beyond history into mythic, tribal memory.

It was owing chiefly to the new, instant speed of communication that the shift occurred. With the advent of the telegraph, it suddenly became possible for a message to travel faster than the messenger, leaving physical transportation in the dust.

This was a tremendous leap in the development of communications technology. For thousands of years, the art of writing had worked to detach words from the physical presence of the speaker. But writing only separated the messenger from his message by transmuting the latter into a physical, portable object: the written word. A personal messenger was still required for its delivery. Electricity dispensed with the messenger entirely.

Now with the internet, the instant speed of new technology allows us to be present, albeit partially, in many places at the same time. Such a radical transformation has a profound effect on our relationship to space and the way we think about our surroundings.

We make much of the power of media to change minds - to persuade people to adopt novel attitudes and new ways of thinking. But media affect not only our beliefs and conscious thought, but our pre-conscious perceptions. That, after all, is the primary function of media: to augment our senses, the organs of perception.

Because our environment comes to us through our senses, any change that affects our senses also affects our environment: our sense of what is, and of what is possible.

Just as the telescope forever changed our perception of the heavens, and through that change of perception altered our impression of our place in the universe, so all media alter our ambient psychological environment.

Because we take them for granted, we never fully appreciate the different modes of thought - the habits of mind - that come along with our use of any given medium. Much as a fish does not know what it means to be wet, we barely perceive the effects of submersion in our media environment.

In recent years, this has changed: technology develops at such a rapid pace that we've begun to observe, even feel its effects as they occur. We now feel like the proverbial fish out of water, lying exposed in a strange and threatening new world.

In our technological disorientation, many have noticed a changed relationship between culture and time: we have entered a world of flat sameness, as if all human development had come to an end.

In the 20th century, we knew a song by its decade. We knew classical music by its era, each period having a distinct sound or style. But now, we have nothing but echoes of what came before. No longer do we mark the decades by particular styles of music or outstanding cultural icons. New music has little of its own, films are dominated by re-makes and mashups of old hits and tired stories; video game culture has turned from the future to the past.

We've become fascinated with retro technology in general, yearning for a time before instant speeds were quite so instant as they are now. But this is a feature, not a bug, of electric culture: we seek resonance, and find it in Edenic myths of a pre-internet past - the fountainhead of pop culture, a time now locked in a circuit of unoriginal reaction.

More than originality, we prefer to curate cultural icons through which we reconnect with that mythic past. We no longer desire progress, unless it be progress that returns us to a time before progress passed its light-speed into an eternal present. Living in the technological instant, the now, our perception of time as progress has receded into the background.

The rise of artificial intelligence furthers this shift in time-perception, removing us from the realm of history and progress and taking us back to the world of myth. For what is myth but the communal compression of past and present into one multi-layered narrative structure?

Myth represents all time in a single instant.

Artificial intelligence absorbs recorded experience and compresses it into a single output, the average of all its inputs. This removes the burden of interpretation from the individual and returns it to the collective. AI stands in the place of oracle, poet, and tribal shaman as the keeper of all wisdom.

History, by contrast, is full of complexity and contradiction, a rich but ragged tapestry whose threads are never fully sewn-up. The historical man - the civilized man - must discern its narrative for himself. He brings his own critical judgement to bear as he confronts the records of the past.

But in the mythic world, there are no objective records to compare; only the single, all-conditioning narrative.

This essay will examine the difference between history and myth, and in doing so, we will consider the power of technology to determine our relationship to the past.

History, Myth, and the Collective Past

Historical time and mythic time are both expressions of a collective past.

Our collective past forms the cultural backdrop to present experience. It helps us make sense of the world as we encounter it. Although both myth and history perform this function, they do so in different ways and are associated with different types of society.

Mythic Time: the Non-Literate Tribe

Oral societies have a cultural backdrop in myth, while literate societies develop a cultural backdrop in history.

This is not to say that the mythic past, as passed down by oral tradition, has no basis in fact. Far from it. But the limitations of human memory, unaided by the written word, require that the past be simplified.

And because the past exists only in words spoken by the living, the needs of the present exert greater influence on the memory of the past.

The illiterate tribe is connected with the past only through the sounds of speech. The spoken word has no fixed existence. Unlike the written word, it is transient: our words vanish as fast as they are spoken. The only way to keep the past alive is through endless repetition. Whatever is not repeated will soon vanish from memory.

The spoken word is inherently social. Whatever is not socially meaningful, whatever lacks relevance to the present life of the community will soon be forgotten. Thus the shape of living community forms the structures of collective memory, just as the memory of each individual is structured by lived experience.

Thus embedded in the life and conversation of the community, the past is inseparable from, and dependent on, the present.

What are the characteristics of mythic time?

Purged of complexity and contradiction, oral traditions fit the past into a set of parameters friendly to the workings of human memory. The difference between what is remembered and what is forgotten is determined in large part by whether or not it is memorable. In his classic study, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong gives us some characteristics of cultural memory in an exclusively oral society. Let’s consider these five features of non-literate traditions:

• Relevant to present needs: Whatever is not continually recalled is forgotten. Permanent archives do not exist; a genealogy with no living descendants will vanish from memory forever.

• Politically and socially expedient: Facts too dangerous to be spoken will not be remembered. No story exists in a vacuum, and an oral poets is highly skilled to adjust his story-telling to the needs and preferences of his audience.

• Close to human life: Nothing is thought of in abstract categories, but only in terms of function and living relationship.

• Larger than life: Stories that endure centre on great heroes, powerful kings, and outlandish monsters. Whatever is mundane melts away in the sea of common experience.

• Homeostatic - Content follows form. The structure of mythic narrative keeps the past in balance with the present by discarding whatever is irrelevant or contradictory.

A Case Study in Structural Amnesia

Collective memory - myth - is shaped by the structures of living community.

The quickest way to understand this is to consider a striking example:

At the turn of the 20th century, the British recorded what was current among the Gonja people of Ghana.

According to tradition, the Gonja state was founded by Ndewura Jakpa. He divided the administration of the state into 7 territories, one for each of his seven sons. 60 years later, two of the seven territories had disappeared. When Gonja traditions were consulted at this time, it was told that Ndewura Jakpa had 5 sons, among whom he divided the adminstration of the state.

The other 2 had vanished from memory along with the 2 lost territorial divisions.

Walter Ong summed it up thusly: "The integrity of the past is subordinate to the integrity of the present.” In the case of the Gonja traditions, “The present [had] imposed its own economy on past remembrances."

In addition to the social considerations inherent to oral memory, the limits and effects of language itself must be taken into account. Language is the means not only for communicating with others; it is also the means whereby we structure thought. The way we express ourselves is a powerful aid to memory, and langague can provide us with powerful tools that serves to structure, cement and limit our recollections of the past. Without the aid of written records, oral societies have recourse to a variety of mnemonic practices.

Consider a few:

• Stereotypes: Objects, groups, and persons are remembered by their most common and pronounced characteristics. There is little room for nuanced analysis.

• Poetic devices: Poetic devices serve as mnemonics. Alliteration, parallelisms and pairs of opposite organize experience into expressions easy to remember.

• Narrative conventions: The structure of a given narrative dictates the sort of information it is possible to contain within it. For example, in the Gonja myth of Ndewura Jakpa, the narrative structure required that the number of sons be equal to the number of territories in the Gonja State. That structural element is what made the story easy to remember. It is also what made it is easy to forget two of the sons after two of the territories were lost.

The structures of cultural memory are built up and solidify over time. Myths contains layers of meaning built up over generations and compressed into simple narrative structures. They act like filters, transforming experience and working to keep myth and tradition within fixed forms suitable to memorization. In our example of the seven princes, the structure of conventional narrative acts to consolidate past and preset into a single story.

Structuring Individual Memory

What happens on a cultural level in the growth of mythic memory can be compared in some ways to the growth of memory in an individual mind. On any given day a man accumulates a great deal of information and experience. But a large portion of this experience is forgotten, "sloughed off", during sleep when memories are consolidated.

The brain retains what is memorable and purges the rest. Much of what happens on a given day is typical of any day. These mundane experiences are lumped together in memory. We don't distinctly recall every detail, but those details modify our memory and affect the totality of what we consider typical.

In much the same way as cultural myth, the narrative structure of a typical day is modified gradually by additional experience.

Think of memory like a filter used to remove pollutants from the air. The pores of the filter get clogged over time, and the buildup of particles causes changes in how the filter works. It begins to require more pressure to force the air through, and it reduces the maximum size of the particles that can be passed to the other side.

Like an air filter, human memory looses flexibility over time. As we age, we require greater effort to learn new things, and we retain less of what we experience. But a young child learns at a rapid rate. The mother tongue is learned at a young age with apparent ease, and the child’s thought is formed to it by habit. But the acquisition of language as an adult is a more arduous endeavour, and we find it difficult to understand the new language without filtering it through the thought-forms of the old.

What are the characteristics of historical time?

What we call history is different from myth. History involves us in a fundamentally different sense of time. Our written records enable to separate past events into successive steps, creating the sequence we call a time-line. And since writing frees us from the constraints of human memory and simplistic narratives, history is full of complexity and contradiction. Unlike the myths of non-literate peoples, it retains obscure details even when the relevant social context no longer exists.

History is like myth in that we still conceive of it in narrative terms. But the formation of narrative and meaning in oral cultures is an entirely collective function, leaving little room for private judgement or counter-narratives. Written history creates a space for individual interpretation, but the past among non-literate peoples is shaped by the community in accordance with present social conditions.

To put it otherwise, having access to a multiplicity of records creates a broad spectrum of light which reaches its focal point in the individual mind. The written word provides the individual with an objective, impersonal link to the past. History gives us the power to form our own, private narrative separate from the social convention of the community.

Some key implications of these facts:

• Written history frees the mind for creative work: It allows us to try out novel combinations of ideas without the risk of loosing the past in the process.

• Written history makes space for multiple narratives: Competing and complementary records of the past can be compared, contrasted, and continually recombined in the effort to create a more perfect synthesis. As such, history holds the antidote to tradition gone off course.

• Written history accommodates superfluous detail: We hold on to records with no immediate utility, but which may provide needed insight in years to come.

How Writing Transforms Time into Space

Writing gave birth to history by extending the powers of human memory.

While the unaided memory is forced to unburden itself through forgetfulness and consolidation, the art of writing unburdens the memory by transforming evanescent experience into durable, physical objects.

A written record creates a fixed reference point against which the present can be measured. Unlike individual and cultural memory, a written record is stable and unchanging. By converting the sounds of human speech into objects we can see and touch, writing allows us to compare the present with the past and to perceive the changes that take place over time. We are thus freed from being immersed in the present as we begin to stand over against history as object.

This process forever changed how we think about time. Time is now perceived as if it were a fixed, three-dimensional space, something we "move through" from point of origin to final destination.

This transmutation of time into space forms the psychological background of the modern idea of historical progress: for the word progress means to step forward, to advance. It describes the physical action of the human body. When we speak of historical progress, we use a spatial metaphor to think about time. This metaphorical connection of time and space gives birth to the concept of space-time, fundamental in much of modern scientific thought.

We take this concept, this metaphor, so much for granted that we barely perceive how it differs from time as we experience it. Without it, we have only the rhythms of daily, seasonal, and generational life, and the living reality of our mythic past in symbiotic relationship with the present.

How the Internet changed our perception of space

Before examining the effects of the latest technological developments on our relationship to time and history, we will mark how electronic communication in general, and the internet especially, have altered our perception of space. Since time and space have so long been linked together in Western thought, it stands to reason that technologies that effect our spatial awareness will have a knock on effect on our sense of time.

The 19th century invention of the telegraph marked the first time a message could travel faster than a messenger. This was the beginning of a revolution that would fundamentally reconfigure our relationship with space. The effects were slow to come, but now with internet we begin to feel the full force of this momentous change.

Because our bodies now remain in place while our words traverse the world, physical location begins to lose its value as a point of reference. The internet collapses space into a single point by making everyone present to everyone else in a single, world-wide instant. Because historical progress, as a metaphor, depends for its significance on embodied motion, the elimination of embodied motion removes the perceptual ground from under our sense of historical time. Moreover, the perceived durability of the written word is undercut as electric technology de-emphasizes physical, objective reality. In this way we lose touch with the metaphorical foundations of historic time.

Just as writing created history and infused time with a sense of progress, so our new technology, as it changes our perception of space, must change our perception of history as a progress through time.

The Internet as Metaphorical Space

A few brief examples from everyday speech will demonstrate how deeply the new media have infiltrated our perceptions.

We express our use of the internet in spacial metaphors.

• Websites: These are online destinations to which we go.

• Chatroom: An online social space in which we hang out.

• Domains: A piece of online real estate which we administer as our kingdom.

Metaphors condition us to think about one aspect of reality in terms of another.

But the process is reflexive: the ground affects the figure as the figure affects the ground. And so as we ascribe motion to actions which involve none, we necessarily reconfigure how we think of and experience the physical world around us.

Indeed, it has even become fashionable to conceive of the world as a simulation, a mental projection of information technology. In such a schema, space as we know it, and time along with it, becomes thin, almost illusory.

To a culture accustomed to linking space and time together in its conceptions of history and physics, the reduction of space to a single point involves the flattening of time to a single instant: an eternal present without past or future. We no longer move forward through time because we no longer move forward through space.

On the internet, origin and destination are all one and same as far as our bodies are concerned. It is a web, whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere: an image of infinity.

But the infinite is the ground of space and time. It is the fixed reference by which they are measured, that in which we live and move and have our being. The merging of space-time into the infinite has the effect of removing the ground from under our feet: for a change that occurs in an eternal present can never be checked or verified. Change becomes illusion, and the way it is becomes the way it always has been.

Thus, the merger of time and eternity is inherently amnesiac. It reflects a mystical mindset fundamentally at odds with western historical development and takes us in the direction of eastern pantheism. Indeed, for the cyberspace visionaries, this has long been the goal: to swallow human difference and individual ego in a collective, universal consciousness.

The Digital World and Mythic Time

This essay is about perception and experience, not philosophy or religion. Although our perception, as conditioned by our media environment, exerts a powerful effect on philosophy and religion, our focus here is on the perception of time.

What I’ve characterized here as our new, technologically-conditioned eternal present, has some key parallels with the mythic “now” of non-literate peoples. Let us examine some apparent similarities (analogies) between the mythic time of the non-literate world and the instant world of the digital age:

The spoken word, as distinct from the written word, exists only in social context. A man acts as both speaker and hearer in turn. He cannot speak without provoking a reaction. As we’ve already observed, without writing narratives about the past are continually reacted upon by present demands, and this brings about the mythic consensus in which the whole community is submerged. Narratives are trapped in a feedback loop of communal action, a process by which independent and contrary points of view are swallowed up.

With writing, the author is insulated from his audience. He does not witness any immediate effect on his words. His work is independent and objective in that it becomes a stable, durable object, not subject to modification through the social process of consensus. Print technology amplified these social and cognitive effects of writing and gave us the modern ideal of the independent and original author.

But if technology imparts its own shape to the culture which employs it, we have now to examine the shape of the digital and electrical systems that now dominate our discourse. The hallmark of electric systems is the feedback loop: inputs from any point in the circuit affect the circuit as whole. Earlier mechanical technology relied on the manipulation of direct kinetic energy: inputs were carefully channelled to produce the specified output. Power was unidirectional.

But the instant speed of the internet works to bring author and audience back together. The latter react upon the former, with increasingly collaborative effects on the outcome. Like the electric systems in which they operate, speaker and hearer are incorporated in continuous feedback.

The effects of this feedback loop extend to our sense of time as the present imposes itself on the past: we edit our collective memory as new versions of webpages replace the old. Collaborative projects like Wikipedia bend history into conformity to the demands of present sociopolitical concerns. The road between past and present becomes a two-way street.

What’s more, we are trained to political expediency by social media algorithms. People learn to modify their speech lest it be consigned to ignoble oblivion. Many things cannot be said openly on social network for fear of political censorship. People learn to adapt to the “current thing” favoured by the regime in power.

These effects combine with the instability of the digital landscape. While not as evanescent as the spoken work, digital records are subject to decay over a relatively short period of time. Unless continually re-copied, records will be destroyed by bit-rot and other entropic forces. Just as in oral cultures, whatever is to be remembered, whether myth, legend, or genealogy, must be repeated again and again lest it be forgotten.

The Appearance of Large Language Models

With the advent Large Language Models, so-called Artificial Intelligence, the work and authority of the literate mind was automated. Historical reading, interpretation, composition and writing could all be off-loaded onto a machine.

But it always happens that whatever is automated atrophies. The habits of mind fostered by AI and LLMs will be nothing like those of an educated man in past generations.

The literate mind inhabits a plenitude of intellectual resources. It selects, judges, and assimilates its raw materials to create an internal synthesis all its own. A literate mind offers its knowledge back to the world, and the process continues as a symphony of minds in counterpoint, harmony, dissonance and resolution in the intellectual development of a culture.

AI and LLMs outsource the synthesis of thought from the inner man to an auto-generated consensus. Students now use AI to research and write their papers all at once. But without putting in the hard work to do what the machine does so easily, they will not fully develop their faculties: we will have a generation of empty vessels to be filled by LLMs and their controllers.

The Disappearance of History

At the same time AI is giving us the ability to generate easy answers to any query, access to original source material is being increasingly curtailed.

Internet search results are disappearing in a flood of AI-generated content or occluded behind a wall of censorship.

Legal attacks by copyright holders against the Internet Archive have curtailed access to many out-of-print and rare books.

Libraries are destroying entire collections, sending stacks of irreplaceable volumes to be destroyed.

In 2024, Google removed the cache feature from its search results. It was no longer possible to view previous versions of a website to see how it had been altered.

As of February 26th, 2025, Amazon has removed the option to download Kindle ebooks onto a computer. Amazon has the power to edit or remove any ebook remotely, and the reader now has no defense against the manipulation the books in his own collection.

If trends continue, we can expect search itself to be phased out of mainstream experience as the web interface is replaced by personalized AI agents.

While none of this means we will lose access to stable historical records in their entirety, it does presage a change in mental habits great enough to restructure our cultural memory in ways we can’t fully anticipate. It would be going to far to assert an exact identity between the world to come and the naive existence of an unlettered tribe. Nevertheless, there are parallels, and it we summarize them as follows:

The evanescent word: Like the passing sounds of human speech, digital records have no fixed existence. Subject to rapid decay and bit rot, whatever is not regularly copied onto new media will be forgotten. As new versions replace the old in conformity with present tastes and political demands, the originals slide into oblivion.

The ascendance of AI means the eclipse of original research. As we abdicate independent judgment in favour of predigested narratives, direct access to old source material falls into disuse. We remarked already on the removal of books from libraries, and we should expect this trend to accelerate with the change in popular behaviour being facilitated by LLMs. History bears witness to radical changes in public infrastructure accompanying the adoption of new technologies. 100 years ago people did not own cars. But the rapid rise of automobiles in the 20th century involved a transformation of urban environments so complete that it became difficult to get by without one. The same process can be observed in the recent combination of internet and cell phone use: social life, dating scene, and job market have been thoroughly integrated into technological systems to the utter neglect of former ways of doing things.

While discerning the exact shape of the future is impossible, it is reasonable to expect a rapid decline in narratives constructed independently out of historical data as we move toward total immersion in technologically generated consensus. Of course such an assertion begs the question: do we not already live in such a world, and have we not been doing so for decades?

The short answer is yes and yes. AI exists on a line with previous developments in electronic media; it only takes us further in the same direction. But heretofore literacy has existed alongside it as a countervailing force, albeit a force greatly diminished in potency. The rise of LLMS only represents the ascendancy, the supremacy - we might even say the apotheosis - of digital and electric media.

But there is a catch: the electric world rests on a foundation of knowledge and engineering rooted in the mental discipline fostered by literacy. The widespread use of AI erodes that basic discipline, and as such it threatens to undermine the very foundations of a stable, technological society. As such, if technological progress is to continue without systemic collapse, it will require the work of an intellectual elite schooled in old-order disciplines. The future that is likely to emerge will perhaps bear a greater similarity to a caste-literate order such as that of ancient Egypt than to the primitive non-literate tribe. At present we observe a growing disconnect between elite messaging and grass-roots sentiment. This conflict must be resolved if any semblance of social stability is to be maintained. But we have yet to see how much of the new order will emerge organically and to what extent it will be shaped from above.

I expect a fragmentation into smaller wholes. In the past we had fragmentation of function as smaller wholes were broken down and incorporated in the mass. But the psychological drive of electric technology pushes in the opposite direction. The feedback loops of social media foster an intense desire for an integrated existence, and the present shape of mass society has become intolerable to many.

Time-Sense and Popular Culture

It’s become a common-place in recent discourse to note the disappearance of originality and distinct trends is pop culture. Until recently we had easily distinguishable eras in film, decades in music, and generations in video games. But now it has become a blur, a copy of a copy of a copy.

The development of pop culture was a transition from a social order based around print to one based around electronic media. The term popular culture itself is somewhat of a misnomer; what we are talking about is more correctly designated mass culture. It is the product of a creative elite for consumption by the masses. The mass culture of the 19th century was shaped by literacy and propagated through printed material including novels, magazines. and religious tracts. When it came to things like music, people remained reliant on their own skill or that of local performers. It remained a highly participatory activity and still largely belonged to popular culture in the true sense of the word.

The ascendancy of the gramophone and the radio changed that as autochthonous musical traditions were absorbed by and displaced by a new musical culture mass-produced by powerful taste-makers.

But we have now passed this phase of development. The reason we no longer experience the progress of mass culture isn’t simply because creativity has declined or because of the increasingly naked propaganda and degeneracy of the taste-makers. No, the reason is that such progressive trends are technologically obsolete. Over the past two decades, Web 2.0 fully incorporated the masses - heretofore consumers - as the most important producers in the new media ecosystem. This has become our main locus of cultural experience. Our deeper immersion in the whole media process forms our perception in one continuous, unpunctuated transformation.

While we might complain about the disappearance of cultural progress and originality, the reality is that we’ve ceased to prioritize those values. Rather we put a premium on cultural resonance and a deeper communal experience. Paradoxically, this is the time-sense fostered by our new media environment, even while its recent and rapid transformations have left us feeling adrift, cut off from the psychological landscape of former generations and longing to reconnect to with a past that serves as mythic backdrop to the tribal realities of digital life.

Like the unlettered tribe, we want the old tale retold. We want the myth to live on in a new generation. But the skilled bard never recites verbatim; he knows his audience, invites their participation, and shapes the story anew. In this we witness the failure of mainstream entertainment industries. They’ve keyed in on the desire to return to familiar stories, but they’ve handled their audience clumsily. Unable - or unwilling - to read the room, they attempt to shape the audience by introducing alien values. In so doing they marginalize themselves as they alienate their audience.

Conclusion

Technological change is nothing if not paradoxical, and it often happens that new developments unleash opposite forces at one and the same time. While there are clear parallels between new and former modes of relating to the past, we must not forget that new technology is never a mere enhancement or recapitulation of what came before. It is an entirely new form, and exactly what it may turn out to be, and how it will reshape our minds and human relationships in the future, are circumstances not easily foreseen. Resemblances aside, the automobile was not, after all, a horseless carriage, and the urban, social, and economic forms to which it gave rise marked a great departure from a previous way of life. Knowing this, we have to ask ourselves what potentialities of LLMs remain undisclosed by their popular designation as “artificial intelligence.” But while we do not yet know what it will become, the name itself does offer more than a suggestion of what we can expect it to replace. The automobile so far replaced the horse-drawn carriage as to exclude the latter entirely from public transport. One hopes that the advance of so-called artificial intelligence will not similarly obviate the use of our natural faculties.

In the near-term we can expect AI to take over the way we interface with the world around us. At the same time, I fully expect to see the emergence of a new subculture of reaction. While the many experience loss of agency, those with vision will attempt to cultivate and revive traditional values and older modes of learning. Something like this occurred during the Industrial Revolution: as the people of England saw their local communities disintegrating in the face of the new mechanical and economic powers, they attempted to strengthen and revive their local traditions. But despite their efforts, they were unable to prevent the passing of Old England. The new societal infrastructure was utterly hostile to previous modes of existence.

In the coming decades, we can expect to see changes no less radical than those of the industrial revolution. And if current trends are an indication, the economic and technological forces at play could prove themselves hostile not only to our customary and recent way of life, but to life in civilization as we know it.

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Works referenced:

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

It was this strange prescience, this clarity of vision, that earned McLuhan the title of prophet for the Internet Age. And like other prophets, what he saw clearly he expressed often darkly. Speaking in aphorism, myth, and metaphor, McLuhan garnered much in the way of superficial attention but far too little in lasting awareness.

That needs to change. Overwhelmed as we are by a flood of new devices and technology, we’ll need a life-boat if we hope to avoid drowning. Understanding media will give us the tools we need to find bottom and, hopefully, to chart a better course.

In this article, I will introduce McLuhan’s most famous aphorism and break it down piece by piece. By the time you finish reading you’ll have a new understanding of the high stakes game we play each time a new gadget is introduced.

The Medium is the Message

You’ve probably heard these words before, but if you’re like most you haven’t spent too much time thinking about them, and you aren’t entirely sure you know what they mean.

That’s something we can fix: let’s dive in.

What is a Medium?

Now what I’m about to say might be obvious to you, but bear with me a moment for the sake of those who might not have noticed. We are so used to saying media as a sort of mass noun that we forget that the word comes from a plural form. The singular is medium, a Latin noun meaning middle.

The middle is what comes between one thing and another. This is vital, and from now on when you say or hear the word media, I want you to think of it as what comes between. For example, your phone is a medium. It comes between you and the person to whom you are speaking. It bridges the gap. All communications media are bridges for our speech, text, and images.

You can also think of a medium as a tool. A tool stands in the middle, that is, between you and the results you hope to accomplish with it. If you are an artist, you might think of your medium as paint. That is, paint is what comes between your audience and the picture in your mind’s eye.

But it’s not only the paint. It’s also your canvas and paintbrush. There is a big difference between a child’s finger-painting and the fine-brushwork of an accomplished master.

Now maybe you’ve begun to see where this is going and your mind is rushing full-speed ahead. You’ve realized the medium itself is not just a transparent window on reality - as if we look straight through to a clear vision of what it represents. No, we are not looking at reality, but its imitation in art. It is 2-dimensional, but your skill as an artist tricks us into seeing 3 dimensions where they don’t actually exist. The perspective is an illusion. What’s more, the surface of the canvas, the thickness of the paint, and the texture and direction of the brush-work all contribute something of their own. The medium of art presents us an experience altogether different from the more direct experience of our senses in nature.

But everyone knows that - it’s much too obvious! So you think. But what if it weren’t so obvious? What if there were a man who had never been outdoors? What if he were born in a museum, never setting foot outside to look at the sky or the ocean or the real live faces of other men and women? If you knew a man like that, living in total captivity to art, would you think him a prisoner?

Media, then, are not all clear windows between our eyes and far-off experience, but can also act like pictures painted on the inside walls of a prison-cell.

What is the Message?

The word message comes from a Latin root meaning send or sent. We think of a message as words being sent to someone too far away to speak to directly. We might use paper and ink to do this, but now we use e-mail or phone.

Without any media or technology, a message in ancient times would come in the form of a personal representative. A king might send an envoy or God might send a prophet. Or a mother might send a child to call the family for dinner. Thus human individuals acted as inter-mediaries, or media, before they were replaced by technology. The message came in human form, and his status or dignity spoke as much as the words he had to repeat.

When we think of modern media as distinct from its message, we are usually thinking about content: What does that book say? What is that Youtuber trying to tell us?

But this where we go wrong. What McLuhan taught us is that message and content are two entirely different things. Content is what we pay most attention to, and it hardly needs to be explained. We naturally want to know what a movie is about. We want to know what was on the news last night.

But these details are not the message. The message we are missing is the one attached to the form of its delivery - the technology itself. It should be obvious, but the fact is we’ve allowed ourselves to be so hypnotized, so entranced by our media that we are barely aware of its real effects. The message is hidden in plain sight. It is all around us every day, but it escapes our notice just as water escapes the notice of a fish.

If we wish to see ourselves as we are, we’ll need to start from an outside point of view. So strip away, if you will, all the assumptions of modern life. Imagine a primitive tribe living deep in the Amazon rainforest. You are now one of them. You’ve never seen a cell phone or a screen. You can’t read or write and you don’t even know what a book is. You live only in the here and now. The past is a mystery almost as much as the future is. You neither know nor care about what might be happening outside the direct experience of your tribe.

Now by some strange chance you are suddenly transported to another world - a strange world where men and women sit alone, staring into glowing lights, barely moving for hours on end. You can’t see what they see, but you wonder what it is that so fascinates them. They don’t go out, they don’t speak to each other, except once in a while an odd sort of wheeled boat rolls up outside one of their great houses, and then a man gets out, silently drops a box by the door, and then beats a hasty retreat.

You think to yourself, These people must be crazy!

Standing at a distance you begin to see that everything about the way we live our lives is changed, transformed, and often deformed, not by what we see on the screen - not by its content - but by the screen itself. In the eyes of our Amazonian observer, we must look very much like our imaginary man in the museum: prisoners of our own art.

This state of affairs is exactly what McLuhan alluded to in his famous aphorism. He made it crystal clear with the following definition:

"The message of a medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs."

It is impossible to introduce any medium or tool or technology into our lives without at the same time transforming them. But there is hope that, in cultivating greater awareness, we might in some ways defend ourselves against a fatal outcome.

There is an old story, one McLuhan himself liked to use. In the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the young man saw his own reflection, for the very first time, in a clear pool of water. We tend to laugh when he hear this story - how absurd that Narcissus should fall in love with himself. But the point we miss is that Narcissus did not understand what it was he was looking at. He didn’t know that what he saw was just a reflection, and he didn’t know it was only his own image that had him so transfixed.

From that time on Narcissus never moved from the spot. Some say he withered away in despair, others that he tried to embrace the illusion and drowned in the attempt.

This was meant as a warning to us. For have we not, as a society, been transfixed by a fascinating but distorted reflection of the whole social life of our people? And are we not, like Narcissus, slowly withering away as we gaze at a lifeless image that can never return our embrace?

• the wealthy?

• corporations?

• government officials?

• capitalism?

These four will be top of mind for many. But let's slow down: the word greed describes a state of mind. It's not about how much money or stuff you have; it is about your relationship with money and stuff.

And so to be fair, we must admit that it is entirely possible to be both poor and greedy at the same time. In reality, I believe this is the case far more often than we might like to think.

"Whoever loves pleasure will be poor; he who loves wine and oil will not be rich." - Proverbs 21:17

Let's be honest: we've all been guilty of over-consumption. As a society we often:

• eat and drink too much

• spend too much money on things we don't need

• waste too much time on mindless entertainment

This costs us dearly in terms of our health, our wealth, and our relationships. Then we complain about how hard it is to get ahead. If we'd be honest with ourselves and do a little math, we'd quickly find the cost of our habits to be far more than expected.

The Scarcity Mindset and Over-Consumption

Greed is a form of scarcity thinking - grasping too much for fear of not having enough. Over-consumption, as a form of greed, comes from the same place.

The consumer is poor because he believes in scarcity: He lives for the present because he has no faith for the future: he's always ready to spend and eat tomorrow today! And then tomorrow arrives, already spent, in confirmation of his negative expectations.

The consumer is short-sighted and can’t see opportunity. He doesn’t know how to invest in others or even in himself. He is like a farmer who won’t plant his seed-corn in spring because he might need to eat it before harvest!

But scarcity thinking is rooted in fear. And because fear seeks comfort in momentary pleasure, whatever is held back from productive use only goes to waste on self-indulgence.

But a faithful man has an attitude of abundance. He has no need to stuff himself now because he knows there will be more when he needs it. He sees opportunity. He limits his spending to invest in a better tomorrow. And just in proportion, his tomorrow is better as a result.

This is the key to lasting wealth. It is also the antidote to greed: whoever has this mindset is ready to give because he lives by faith.

“Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.” - Luke 6:38

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Dear Friend,

It’s been some time since we’ve seen each other. And in some time, perhaps we’ll meet again. But in the meanwhile, I decided to take this opportunity and write you a letter. I hope it finds you well and in good spirits. Even more importantly, I hope it finds you still human.

In truth, I don’t really know what to write, now that I’ve taken up the pen. I feel I hardly know you anymore and don’t want to risk offence. The decisive moment has passed, however, and as such I must continue.

I hope, dear friend, that you are possessed of no small degree of patience. For I must confess, that in what I am about to relate, there is a certain maddening ambiguity. Indeed, it may even seem to you, — but I know you are more charitable — that the author of such a letter has only a tenuous hold of his senses. But, in any case, before you hasten to make such judgement, let me assure you that my mind is quite intact, and that but for these trying times, I should never have had any doubt in the matter.

But you’ll see for yourself soon enough. It’s not as if there were any use keeping silent on the matter. You may think me mad now, but that’s of no importance in comparison — for if I were to seal it up longer, and God knows it’s been long enough already — if I were to hold my peace and never speak, I am afraid I really should be mad before much longer. But you see there is my goal — it is simply too much for one mind to bear, and my hope is this: that at last by writing this letter, and transmitting to you as much as possible an accurate account of myself, the weight of it all might become distributed more tolerably. For is it not the case, dear friend, that all human experience, were it bound within the confines of a single mind alone, should soon break even the sturdiest soul among us? Thus what is common to all gives the illusion of sanity, but a lunatic is always alone.

Were it possible I would end my isolation and simply write myself into your mind. But my speech is inadequate, and the flood of thought would simply overflow its banks. Nevertheless I must write, for though I fail in the attempt, I may yet avoid the abysmal alternative of complete and utter silence.

Things haven’t really been the same here since you left, so many years ago. All those ambitions of our youth, that tenacious optimism we shared: these haven’t fared so well in your absence. Back then, I saw the world so much differently than I do now, and I have to wonder if it wasn’t entirely due to your influence. Be that as it may, I can only console myself with the faint comfort of inevitability; that the fault is not entirely in myself, and that little of value would result had I remained as I was then.

By far one of the most difficult things is the realization that the world really is the way I’ve come to see it, and though I’ve tried my utmost to step around those traps so cunningly concealed, I nevertheless find myself hopelessly bound up in them. The movement of the great mass of our race possesses the force of a tidal wave, and to swim against this current is suicide. Yet to go with the flow or to attempt to ride the crest, would that death be any less certain when we break ourselves on the great shores of our sin? There is little moral comfort to be had when the greatest good is only a so-called lesser evil, and I am in no way convinced that the evil I’ve chosen is the least of them.

Even worse, these considerations are an endless sap to my courage, so that I feel inadequate to take hold of that tangible good which even now I might still choose.

Nevertheless, though I may feel despondent, I am encouraged to know I still possess hope. For what else but hope could prevent me so long from busying myself with worthless diversions? Had I really given up, you would not now be receiving this letter. I may not know exactly where I’m going, but the wheels are set in motion, and I have hope that before long my direction might become clear to me.

There is so much more that needs to be said. But for the time being it will wait. Certain details must remain confidential, and there’s no telling who may be reading this. Nevertheless, in a little over one month, perhaps two, we may once again know the joy of one another’s company. I only wish I were more certain of the time. You’ll find the address of my current residence on the reverse, if you wish to reach me before then. I’m sure we’ll have much to discuss. Until such time,

Godspeed,

Your Friend

If you could finally taste it: the life-water of alignment between action and intention.

It's yours if you want it. What? you say, I've tried for years to find the time, but something always comes up to get in the way. Yes, I know what that's like. There is no end to the distractions and the shiny objects - always creeping in to steal your opportunities.

Creeping in to steal, just like a thief! But the world is full of thieves, and you know it! And because you know this, you keep an eye on your goods, you lock your doors. If you have something especially valuable, you hide it away and make it difficult to find.

Well then, I ask you, what will you do against the thieves of time? You know who they are, for they are always picking your pocket. Rarely do they out-and-out rob you, but they take a little here, a little there, every day. But instead of locking your doors you've invited them in and made friends with them! Yes, they're thieves you admit, but they're fun to be around and you like hanging out with them. And after all, they only steal a little.

A little, you say, only a minute, but even as you say the word you know you deceive yourself. Minutes are only ever passed one at time. But count them all up, only the minutes, one at a time, and witness the hours, the days, the months, and, dare I say it, the years you have given over to these thieves, and because they greeted you with a smile and a friendly hug, you hardly noticed when they picked your pocket.

But later your heart sinks as you stand at a distance from your great desire. It sits there in the shop window, with a price tag far beyond what you can afford. For you know you have not enough in your wallet now the thieves are gone.

But...

What if I told you the shopkeeper is a patient and generous man? He has a payment plan for men and women just like you. He asks for nothing up front except for your commitment. And after that, the regular payments are...

... Only a minute, one at a time!

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