Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The Death of the Second Life

Subtitle: Why Nobody Can Disappear Anymore

There’s a one in a billion chance we’re in base reality.

—Elon Musk

You’re a quick study, aren’t you?

—Freddie Miles, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I fought the law and the law won.

—Sonny Curtis

On Disappearing

It used to be possible to disappear. Not easy, exactly, and rarely clean. You needed nerve, mobility, a little money, a plausible story, perhaps a talent for accents, and the good sense not to return to the same bar every Thursday. You needed to understand that most identity was local. A man was the person his neighbors recognized, his employer paid, his landlord tolerated and the woman across the street remembered seeing come home. If he crossed an ocean, a mountain range or sometimes merely a state line, he passed through an interval in which nobody knew him well enough to contradict him. That interval was the birthplace of the second life.

The interval has nearly closed. A person may still abandon a marriage, occupation, city or circle of friends. He may stop answering the telephone and go silent on social media. The difficulty begins when he wants an apartment, salary, bank account, prescription, airline ticket or hotel room. The machinery that enables ordinary existence is now the machinery that identifies us. Every convenience asks the same question in a different form: are you still the person you were yesterday? The modern fugitive may escape a room, but eventually he needs an ATM.

This is not merely a criminal fantasy for me. Years ago I invented the Thin Man, the central figure in The Thin Man and Andrea, as an alter ego and doppelgänger. He is Niko, although the first book withholds even that. He carries an ambiguous face and an American-seeming education acquired elsewhere. He moves through the world of corporate espionage, which is partly a MacGuffin and partly an excuse to put him aboard a cruise ship, in hotel bars, and within striking distance of Andrea, Jessica, Maya, Desiree and women who sense that his absence of a past is also a kind of invitation. The submarine in the earliest version became a cruise ship because a cruise ship can plausibly contain a temporary world: flags, ports, false intimacies, a cabin to abandon and another country waiting in the morning.

The Thin Man was never fundamentally an alien or a figure composed of negative space, although traces of those early ideas remain. The governing fantasy was simpler. He was me without social, professional or familial responsibility. He could love somebody without joining her calendar. He could enter a city without owing the city an explanation. The plot offered him passports, handlers and invented business, but his real superpower was exemption. He lived without the claims that make an ordinary person locatable.

I now possess fewer of those claims than I once did. My professional responsibilities have diminished. My marriage has ended. My son is grown. In some respects I am living the Thin Man dream, although with less espionage and considerably more concern about hotel credits. The discovery is predictable but still worth making: relief from responsibility does not make a man somebody else. It simply leaves him alone with a clearer version of the same man.

Daniel Defoe understood the mechanical version of the fantasy three centuries ago. When I was fifteen, several friends and I discussed burning or drowning Moll Flanders. We meant the physical book, naturally, not Moll herself. The novel seemed interminable. Moll acquired another name, husband, lover, crime, punishment, jurisdiction and source of money; then the process began again. At fifteen this felt less like structure than clerical error. At fifty-two I can see that the repetition is the structure. “Moll Flanders” announces that the name is not her own. Her identity consists of whatever biography can survive the next room.

Moll is born in Newgate Prison, passes through households and marriages, becomes a thief, evades execution through transportation, returns to Virginia and eventually obtains prosperity and something resembling repentance. She can repeatedly become another woman because identity in her world is portable. It is held in clothing, speech, manners, money and the testimony of the few people nearby. A past can be defeated by distance.

John McAfee tried to perform the same operation in a world that already made it ridiculous. Wanted for questioning in Belize after the 2012 murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull, McAfee hid, fled and simultaneously turned his flight into a media production. He claimed that he buried himself in sand for hours with a cardboard box over his head. He dyed his hair repeatedly and stuffed chewing gum beneath his upper lip as a disguise. The founder of an antivirus company attempted to defeat recognition by making his mouth slightly lumpier.

McAfee possessed money, technical knowledge, mobility, paranoia and an almost supernatural resistance to embarrassment. He nevertheless contacted journalists, issued updates and supplied the public with a running commentary on his disappearance. A photograph posted by the Vice reporters accompanying him contained location metadata pointing toward Guatemala. McAfee wanted to vanish and receive credit for vanishing. That contradiction will return. For now it is enough to say that Moll Flanders could escape because nobody in Virginia had read the London file. McAfee carried the file with him, broadcasting all the way.

The Portable Self

The literature of disappearance flourished before the administrative state completed its map. Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal, published in 1904, supplies the cleanest philosophical version. Mattia, trapped in an unhappy life, discovers that a corpse has been mistaken for his own. The world has accidentally released him. He takes another name and attempts to enjoy the freedom of a man officially dead.

But a man without a past possesses no enforceable future. Mattia’s second identity cannot securely marry, own, complain to the police or participate in the institutions through which personality becomes social fact. He has escaped the first life without acquiring the legal substance required for a second. Pirandello arrives at the modern paradox before biometrics: identity is a burden until one needs its protection.

Jean Valjean and Edmond Dantès offer opposing French solutions. Valjean becomes Monsieur Madeleine through moral action. He builds an industry, employs a town, practices generosity and becomes mayor. He changes so completely that the humane judgment is to regard him as a different man. Javert refuses. For Javert, the file is the man, and goodness performed under an alias is merely a fugitive’s more sophisticated disguise. Les Misérables places grace in conflict with administrative continuity.

Dantès, in The Count of Monte Cristo, builds identity through theater and money. Wealth buys clothes, servants, property, introductions, silence and the assumption of prior importance. Nobody asks the Count for a childhood photograph because aristocratic confidence authenticates itself. Dantès does not erase his first life so much as return with a second one powerful enough to prosecute it.

James Gatz performs the American variation. He becomes Jay Gatsby not primarily to evade the law but to escape poverty, embarrassment and the intolerable smallness of his assigned place. Gatsby manufactures manner, history and spectacle. His tragedy is not that the new identity convinces nobody. It convinces almost everybody. Daisy remains dangerous because she knew him before the costume was complete. The person who remembers the original name possesses veto power over the second life.

These stories depend upon a portable self: an identity capable of crossing a boundary and being accepted on the strength of performance. Sometimes the transformation is moral, sometimes theatrical and sometimes criminal. Each assumes that a society contains blank spaces. The traveler enters one and begins supplying information before contradictory information arrives.

You’re a Quick Study, Aren’t You?

Tom Ripley is the great student of the portable self. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, Tom begins as a watcher. He studies wealth before he attempts to inhabit it. He studies jazz, handwriting, clothes, gestures, voices and the particular freedom enjoyed by people whose money causes strangers to complete their stories for them. Dickie Greenleaf possesses everything Tom lacks: beauty, ease, inheritance and the right to become bored with other people.

Tom’s desire is not reducible to robbery. He wants proximity to Dickie, then recognition from Dickie, then the life of Dickie. When those desires become incompatible, murder provides the transition. Tom can imitate Dickie because he has watched with the concentration of the excluded. The peeping is apprenticeship.

Freddie Miles recognizes the dangerous speed of Tom’s education. Visiting Dickie’s Roman apartment, he notices that Tom suddenly understands the geography, furnishings and habits of a life in which he supposedly remains a guest. “You’re a quick study, aren’t you?” Freddie asks. It is a brilliant accusation because it identifies the one part of imitation that cannot be disguised: the curve of improvement. Yesterday Tom did not know where anything was. Today he gives directions.

Seconds later, Tom kills him with the stone head of Hadrian. A Roman emperor becomes the instrument by which the social climber removes a witness. The joke is almost too exact. Freddie does not possess fingerprints or facial-recognition software. He possesses memory, class instinct and contempt. He knows what Tom looked like before Tom learned the role.

Tom’s impersonation is fraudulent, but it is also emotionally sincere. Being Dickie feels more authentic to him than remaining Tom. That is why Ripley endures beyond the machinery of the thriller. He embodies the suspicion that our socially verified identity may be less true than the person we could convincingly perform if nobody interrupted us. He also demonstrates the price. Each new witness becomes a threat because the second life demands the permanent editing of the first.

The criminal achievement eventually becomes less impressive than the psychological imprisonment. Tom escapes particular investigations, but he cannot stop monitoring the room. He must hear every hesitation in his adopted name and see every glance toward the piano, ring or signature. A successful second life is not freedom. It is a part one can never stop playing.

Dick Whitman and Don Draper

Dick Whitman performs the most durable modern transformation in American television. During the Korean War, an explosion kills Lieutenant Donald Draper beside him. Dick exchanges identification tags with the dead officer, survives under Draper’s name and returns to the United States inside a clerical conclusion. War supplies the confusion, body and paperwork. The dead man exits; the living man acquires his place.

Unlike Ripley, Don does not live permanently at the edge of exposure. The new identity accumulates institutional weight. Don works, pays taxes, marries, buys property, fathers children and builds a career. Time itself begins authenticating him. After enough years, the invented man possesses more documentary substance than the abandoned one.

Advertising is the ideal profession because Don’s labor reproduces his own transformation. He takes an ordinary product, suppresses its manufacturing history and gives it a story people prefer. He does the same with himself. The handsome executive, suburban husband and creative genius are not wholly false. They are real accomplishments attached to stolen paperwork.

Yet Mad Men understands that the administrative victory cannot settle the psychological case. Dick is not chiefly afraid that a camera will recognize him. He is afraid that intimacy will. Every person who approaches Don closely eventually reaches the locked room containing Dick Whitman: his poverty, family, desertion, shame and the knowledge that another man’s death financed his ascent.

The Thin Man fantasy and the Don Draper fantasy meet here. Remove the obligations, choose the wardrobe, enter the next room with a name nobody questions. What remains is the person who performed the removal. The Eagles’ old line is unavoidable: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” One may leave a home, spouse, profession and nation. The ghosts keep the original booking.

The Missing and the Dead

Ambrose Bierce entered Mexico in 1913 and disappeared. That is nearly everything we know about this paritcular case. He may have joined Pancho Villa’s forces, reached Chihuahua and died quickly. He may have been executed, killed himself, succumbed to illness or continued traveling. The absence of evidence has generated a century of endings because disappearance makes authors of the people left behind.

Bierce had already written one of literature’s cruelest imaginary escapes. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar falls from a bridge with a rope around his neck, escapes into the water, runs home and approaches his wife—only for the narrative to reveal that the journey occurred inside the final instant before his broken body swings beneath the bridge. The mind creates a second life because the body has no exit. Bierce’s own disappearance feels uncannily like an extension of the story, although we should resist converting formal elegance into evidence. He probably did not begin again. He probably died where the map became uncertain.

John List demonstrates how recently a complete second life remained possible. After murdering his wife, mother and three children in New Jersey in 1971, he traveled west and became Robert Peter Clark. He found accounting work, joined a Lutheran church, remarried and lived within ordinary society for nearly eighteen years. List was not sleeping in a cave. He was commuting, filing returns and participating in carpools. The jurisdictions containing John List and Robert Clark did not effectively speak to one another.

Television finally forced the conversation. America’s Most Wantedaired the case in 1989 using an age-progressed sculpture whose resemblance to List was extraordinary. A former neighbor recognized him. Fingerprints from his military records completed the identification. List stands at the border between eras: he constructed the second life through disconnected paper systems and lost it when mass media connected a face to the buried name.

John Darwin attempted the comic British variation in 2002. He paddled into the North Sea, staged his death and allowed his wife to collect insurance and pension payments while he secretly lived nearby. The plan expanded toward Panama. It collapsed when an online photograph showed the supposedly dead man beside his wife. A basic image search linked John, Anne and Panama. The second life had appeared on the first page of the internet.

Robert Hoagland achieved something quieter. He vanished from Connecticut in 2013 and lived in New York as Richard King until his death in 2022. The new life appears to have been modest rather than operatic. That may be the surviving modern model: abandon grandeur, remain geographically ordinary, ask institutions for as little as possible and hope nobody searches the correct connection. His identity was established after death.

Ryan Borgwardt showed in 2024 how poorly the romantic disappearance now survives contact with the contemporary record. He staged a kayaking death in Wisconsin and left the country. Investigators found evidence of preparation, travel and financial activity, contacted him abroad and persuaded him to return. In 2025 a judge sentenced him to eighty-nine days in jail, matching the period during which he had actively misled authorities, and ordered restitution toward the costly search. The symmetry of the sentence was better than the plan.

These cases are morally different. Bierce may simply have died. Hoagland appears to have abandoned a family without committing the crimes of List or Darwin. List was a murderer. The point is not to place them in one ethical category. It is to watch the available space contract. List could build an ordinary life for eighteen years. Borgwardt’s itinerary began becoming evidence before his family had finished grieving.

You Could Call It the End of the World

Money is the most practical border. A person can sleep outdoors without identification. The moment he wants a hotel, apartment, salary, international ticket or functioning bank account, somebody asks for the name behind the money. A friend of mine treats $9,999 as the largest sum one may carry into the United States. The actual rule is subtler: more than $10,000 may be transported legally, but it must be declared. Japan similarly requires declaration above one million yen. The threshold is not a wall. It is a checkpoint at which money becomes narrative. Where did it come from? Why are you carrying it? Who are you?

The old fugitive relied on fragmentation. A birth certificate sat in one office, fingerprints in another, employment history in a filing cabinet, border entries in ledgers and newspaper photographs in local archives. None of these systems was necessarily weak. They simply did not consult one another quickly. The fugitive’s skill lay in remaining inside the delay.

The decisive modern development is linkage. Passports became machine-readable and biometric. Banking systems identify customers and flag patterns. Phones create location and relationship histories. Cameras no longer merely preserve images; increasingly, software compares faces. Search engines connect photographs with names and places. DNA can identify a person who never submitted a sample because a distant relative did. Public records, commercial databases and social media supply continuity from childhood to the present.

Every system contains errors. Facial recognition misidentifies people. Records conflict. Databases leak. Names are misspelled. The second life does not die because any single machine knows everything. It dies because machines ask one another. The old fugitive needed to prevent one sheriff from telephoning another. The modern fugitive must prevent every machine from recognizing every other machine.

Josef Rusnak’s largely forgotten 1999 science-fiction film The Thirteenth Floor supplies the finest image of this condition. Douglas Hall, a computer scientist in Los Angeles, discovers that the simulated version of 1937 Los Angeles created by his company contains conscious inhabitants. More disturbingly, he learns that his own Los Angeles is another simulation. Following instructions left by his murdered mentor, Hall drives toward Tucson, ignores the road signs and barricades, and eventually reaches the boundary of his universe. The desert stops. The mountains dissolve. Beyond them stands an unfinished green wireframe—the scaffolding of a world nobody expected its inhabitants to inspect. Hall has not merely failed to escape Los Angeles. He has reached the place where Los Angeles runs out.

“You could call it the end of the world,” he says. The line is quiet because terror has already done the shouting. Moll Flanders could leave one town and supply the next with another name. Valjean could cross into another jurisdiction. Dick Whitman could exchange identification tags with a dead officer. Hall cannot accomplish even the preliminary act of departure because the road, desert and destination belong to the same system.

There is no countryside beyond surveillance and no unindexed territory in which to begin again; there is only the end of the program. Our world has not yet become Hall’s wireframe desert, but it increasingly resembles it. Every road leads toward another camera, account, border record or machine asking the traveler to confirm that he remains the person who departed.

The inhabitants of the film’s simulated 1937 discover that their world was created for users elsewhere. Hall then discovers that his apparently real 1999 is also one among thousands of simulations. “You weren’t supposed to find out,” he is told. The sentence might serve as the motto of every identity system. The structure works best when the contained person mistakes its limitations for the natural shape of reality.

Elon Musk’s claim that there is only a one-in-billions chance of our inhabiting “base reality” is not a scientific calculation. It is a swaggering compression of the simulation argument: if advanced civilizations produce enormous numbers of conscious simulated worlds, a randomly situated observer is more likely to occupy one of those than the single original reality beneath them. Whether or not Musk is right, The Thirteenth Floor understands the emotional consequence. The final disappearance is not concealment within the map. It is the impossible search for a place outside it.

The Last Fugitive

John McAfee deserves the title because he possessed nearly every advantage. He had money, international mobility, technical knowledge, familiarity with surveillance, political connections, access to boats and aircraft, and the willingness to behave in ways a normal investigator might not predict. He also possessed a cardboard box.

I have long suspected that McAfee knew more about Gregory Faull’s murder than he admitted, perhaps much more. That is an opinion, not a proven fact. Belizean authorities sought McAfee for questioning, but he was not convicted or charged in connection with the killing. Suspicion does not become evidence merely because its subject is spectacularly strange.

I nevertheless wanted McAfee to remain in circulation. I wanted him alive, ranting online, threatening to parachute into Fukuoka, appearing without warning at a Kyoto bar and ordering a strip steak while explaining that income tax was metaphysically invalid. This is not a defense of anything he may have done. It is an admission that fugitives provide a form of entertainment respectable citizens cannot. McAfee turned the ordinary police question—where is this man?—into theater.

His technical competence makes the comedy sharper. He knew that networks retain traces. He warned endlessly about surveillance. He promoted cryptocurrency and privacy as routes around state control. Yet his own need for audience continually defeated his wish for concealment. He contacted reporters while hiding, traveled with a film crew, cultivated disguises elaborate enough to become stories and generated the publicity through which strangers could follow him.

The Vice metadata incident is almost too perfect. A technology journalist accompanying the antivirus pioneer posted a photograph containing geographical information. The machine did not need to recognize McAfee’s altered face or chewing-gum lip. It merely reported where the photograph had been made. McAfee’s legend and location traveled inside the same file.

This is why he is the last fugitive rather than the greatest one. A true second life requires anonymity. McAfee could tolerate danger, accusation, ridicule and legal jeopardy. He could not tolerate being unknown. He wanted to disappear and narrate the disappearance, to escape the state while retaining the crowd. The modern fugitive may finally be defeated less by the camera than by his inability to live without looking into it.

That appetite is not confined to eccentrics. We announce departures, document privacy, turn reinvention into a new profile and carry our old audiences toward the new life. The desire to become somebody else competes with the desire to have everyone recognize the transformation. Moll Flanders supplies the next town with a story. McAfee supplies the whole planet with updates.

Coda

Is the death of the second life good or bad? Neither. It is a historical development with benefits, cruelties and unforeseen emotional costs. Connected systems catch murderers, fraudsters and people attempting to abandon obligations. They also make escape more difficult for abused spouses, political dissidents, debtors, refugees and ordinary human beings whose worst mistake has become permanently searchable. Accountability and mercy do not rise together automatically.

There remains an important distinction between disappearance and reinvention. An adult can legally change a name, move, choose another occupation, close public accounts and refuse contact. The state does not require everyone to preserve the social life into which he happened to arrive. But legal reinvention preserves continuity. Debts, convictions, parenthood and court orders belong to the person through the change. The first life is not erased. It is amended.

The Thin Man occupies the fantasy beyond amendment. He moves without the drag of continuity. He may enter Andrea’s life, Jessica’s cabin or another city under circumstances that do not require him to explain the previous scene. I invented him because I wanted the freedom of a man nobody could summon. Yet even he carries Niko beneath the working identity. Georgia remains inside him. Education, language, childhood, loss and desire cross every border without documentation.

That is the final limitation, older than passports and more reliable than facial recognition. You cannot outrun your ghosts. A person may defeat the file and still remain the person described by everything the file omitted. Tom Ripley acquires Dickie’s signatures but retains Tom’s hunger. Don Draper obtains Don’s career but brings Dick’s shame into every marriage. McAfee crosses borders with the cardboard box and John McAfee climbs out from beneath it.

At fifteen, I thought Moll Flanders was shapeless because Moll repeatedly acquired another husband, name, occupation, crime, punishment and jurisdiction. Now the repetition looks like the record of a vanished human possibility. Moll continually finds another exit. We inhabit a world of fewer exits, better records and longer memories.

Perhaps this is why stories of disappearance retain their force. They promise that one life need not be final. Somewhere beyond the jurisdiction, ocean, desert or wireframe mountain waits a place where nobody knows what we have done and no machine asks us to confirm it. We know better. The map follows us, and even if it did not, we would arrive carrying ourselves.

Moll Flanders could become another woman. We can only become ourselves somewhere else.

Sources

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), and Encyclopedia Virginia’s account of the novel’s transportation plot.

Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (1904).

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Anthony Minghella’s screenplay for the 1999 film.

AMC, Mad Men: the Dick Whitman/Don Draper identity narrative.

Project Gutenberg and the Ambrose Bierce Project, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and biographical materials.

FBI historical materials on John List and the America’s Most Wanted identification.

Contemporary reporting on John Darwin, Robert Hoagland and Ryan Borgwardt.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Japan Customs guidance on cross-border currency declarations.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, biometric identification materials.

Josef Rusnak, The Thirteenth Floor (1999), adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3.

Code Conference 2016, Elon Musk’s discussion of simulation and “base reality.”

Contemporary Wired, Guardian and Vice reporting on John McAfee’s flight from Belize.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

John Ziegler on Jerry Sandusky: The Price of Being Right

An essay on evidence, obsession, and the price we pay by being right

Epigraphs:

You can’t tell people what they want to hear
If you also want to tell the truth

—Craig Finn

Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay
Now you can’t walk away from the price you pay

—Emmylou Harris

Note: During the long stalled season of COVID, I went through a period of depression. I drank too much. I spent far too much time alone. And, like millions of other people trying to fill hours that had lost their ordinary shape, I listened to podcasts—politics, true crime, history, whatever caught my attention. Somewhere in the middle of this drift I found With the Benefit of Hindsight, John Ziegler and Liz Habib’s lengthy audio investigation of the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the fall of Joe Paterno’s.

I expected to hear a crank. This was, after all, a project arguing that the most notorious convicted child molester in American sports history had been railroaded. Sandusky had been convicted in 2012 on forty-five counts after eight young men testified about abuse. Penn State had paid more than $90 million to settle dozens of claims. The public story had hardened years earlier: Sandusky was a monster; Penn State protected him; Paterno looked away; justice, belatedly and imperfectly, had finally arrived. A man insisting that this structure was largely false sounded less like an investigator than a citizen of the internet with a microphone and an inexhaustible supply of grievance.

And then I listened.

===== =====

John Ziegler is not a lawyer. He is an independent journalist, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker and former talk-radio host with a taste for public combat. He is conservative, though “contrarian” may be the more useful category. He likes talking shit to power, talking shit to the people who think they are power, and occasionally talking shit simply because the opportunity presents itself. He is funny, combative, thin-skinned, resourceful, obsessive and totally out of control.

He had also done an extraordinary amount of work on the Sandusky case.

Ziegler began with Paterno. He believed the media and Penn State had transformed a limited failure of institutional judgment into a knowing conspiracy to protect a predator. As he accumulated interviews, records, leaks and contradictions, his theory expanded. He visited Sandusky in prison, corresponded with him, interviewed family members and officials, traveled to Pennsylvania, cultivated sources the national press had abandoned, and spent years reconstructing dates and testimony. By the time he and Habib recorded roughly one hundred studio hours for their original nineteen-part series, Ziegler had crossed from defending Paterno to proclaiming Sandusky innocent.

That final step is where he loses me. It is also where he becomes the most interesting.

I do not believe Jerry Sandusky is innocent. I believe he probably abused boys. The grooming patterns, boundary violations, unusually intense relationships with vulnerable children, physical contact in cars and showers, and multiple accounts of escalating misconduct are too substantial to dismiss. His explanations about horseplay and innocent showering are partially persuasive only in the narrow sense that communal showers and physical joking were more ordinary in the culture in which he coached. I grew up in the 1980s. Boys showered together after sports. Coaches sometimes entered the same open facilities. Towels were snapped; stupid jokes were made; conduct that would now cause alarm was treated as ordinary. That context matters when interpreting an isolated act. It does not explain years of targeted intimacy, secrecy and allegations of sexual contact.

Yet listening to Ziegler made it impossible for me to retain the simpler belief that every important part of the accepted story had been reliably established. His maximal conclusion is unpersuasive. Many of the defects he identifies are real.

That distinction is the narrative spine of this essay. A person can be guilty while the story told about his guilt is partly false. A prosecution can reach a broadly correct result through a contaminated process. Some accusers can tell the truth while others exaggerate, reconstruct or invent. An institution can behave cowardly without having operated a criminal conspiracy. A journalist can discover facts everyone else missed and then damage those facts by demanding that they prove too much.

John Ziegler is right about enough that dismissing him is intellectually lazy. He is wrong about enough that embracing him whole is reckless. The price of being right is what happened between those two propositions.

The Boy in the Shower

The Penn State story begins, in the public imagination, in a shower.

Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant, said that one evening he entered a football-building locker room and saw Sandusky engaged in sexual conduct with a boy. McQueary did not intervene physically. He left, spoke first with his father and family friend Dr. Jonathan Dranov, then reported the matter to Paterno. Paterno passed it upward to athletic director Tim Curley and university vice president Gary Schultz. President Graham Spanier became involved. The university restricted Sandusky’s access to some facilities and notified the Second Mile, his charity. It did not report the matter directly to police or child-protection authorities.

That chain of events supports a serious criticism of Penn State. Whatever precise act McQueary saw, he believed it was sexual and alarming. Paterno fulfilled the limited bureaucratic act of passing the report to his superiors, but later acknowledged that he wished he had done more. Curley, Schultz and Spanier treated the incident as an internal risk to be managed. Their response was insufficient because the possible victim and other children—not the institution—should have been the center of the decision.

But the version that reached the public was more definite than the underlying record. The grand-jury presentment described McQueary seeing anal intercourse. McQueary later said he had not seen penetration and had not used language that specific. The date migrated from March 2002 to February 9, 2001; Ziegler has argued at length that December 29, 2000, better fits the surrounding records. The length and content of McQueary’s conversation with Paterno have also been disputed. The man believed to have been the boy in the shower reportedly denied that he had been abused and defended Sandusky before ultimately receiving a civil settlement.

None of this proves that the shower encounter was innocent. Sexual acts do not become harmless merely because a witness lacks the ideal viewing angle. Trauma, embarrassment and conflicting loyalties can produce denial. Memory naturally changes. But these are not trivial variations either. The difference between seeing anal rape and hearing or glimpsing conduct that appears sexual is legally, morally and narratively enormous. The public was handed the most explosive version first. Every later ambiguity was forced to compete with an image already burned into the culture.

The result was a form of backward reasoning: Sandusky was eventually convicted of abusing boys; therefore, McQueary must have witnessed the worst possible act; therefore, every Penn State official who heard some version of his report must have understood it exactly as the public later did; therefore, any institutional hesitation must have been a cover-up. Each link may be arguable. The chain is not self-proving.

Paterno occupies surprisingly little of the real legal story. He received a report, passed it to the men responsible for the university and failed to follow through. That is not heroic. It is also not persuasive evidence that he knowingly protected a serial abuser for years. His firing, death and the removal of his statue gave the scandal its Shakespearean public shape, but they do not establish what he knew.

Spanier is more complicated. He approved an institutional response that did too little and prioritized Penn State’s exposure. He was ultimately convicted of a misdemeanor count of child endangerment, served fifty-eight days and remained convinced that he had been scapegoated. Calling him a coward would flatten a murkier failure. He appears to have behaved like an administrator inside a powerful institution: cautious, procedural, self-protective and disastrously willing to accept uncertainty when certainty would have required an ugly confrontation. That may not be a grand conspiracy. It can still be a profound moral failure.

The Settlements

Sandusky’s criminal trial and Penn State’s civil settlements are frequently blended into one body of proof. They are not the same thing.

The trial placed witnesses under oath and allowed cross-examination, however rushed or ineffective the defense may have been. The settlements were private risk resolutions. In 2013 Penn State announced twenty-six settlements totaling $59.7 million. By 2015 its audited total had reached approximately $92.8 million for thirty-two claims, and later accounting pushed the broader cost beyond $100 million. The agreements explicitly did not require Penn State to admit the validity of each allegation.[1]

The university’s incentives were overwhelming. It faced catastrophic publicity, potentially enormous jury awards, discovery that could expose embarrassing documents, and a governing board desperate to end a crisis. A settlement did not mean, “We have established that this exact history occurred.” It meant, “The expected cost of fighting this claim exceeds the price of buying certainty and a release.” That is common civil-law logic, particularly in institutional-abuse cases. It is neither an admission of guilt nor evidence of fraud.

Still, the process deserves scrutiny. Penn State’s insurance carrier did scrutinize it, because the carrier might ultimately have to pay. In litigation between the university and its insurer, an expert for the insurer wrote that Penn State appeared to have made little effort to verify claimants’ credibility and noted missing affidavits or other personal verification in some files. University personnel acknowledged that the consulting psychiatrist did not personally interview the first group of claimants. Penn State later introduced direct psychiatric examinations, but confidentiality prevents the public from reconstructing the complete evaluation of most claims.[2]

Penn State did not establish thirty-two separate histories of abuse. It purchased thirty-two resolutions under conditions in which contesting an allegation had become almost as dangerous as losing one.

Ziegler is strongest when he keeps his attention on that distinction. He is weakest when he assumes that a financially interested claimant is therefore lying. Money is a motive to fabricate; it is also compensation sought by people who were genuinely harmed. A changed account can signal contamination; it can also reflect shame, delayed disclosure or a witness finding language for an experience he previously could not describe. In a serious examination, suspicion is the beginning of inquiry, not its conclusion.

The Lock Haven cluster demonstrates both the value and danger of Ziegler’s method.

Lock Haven is a small city in central Pennsylvania, roughly thirty-eight road miles and about fifty minutes northeast of State College. Penn State’s main University Park campus sits in State College, not in western Pennsylvania. Geography does not make the allegations impossible. The Second Mile existed precisely to connect disadvantaged children from communities such as Lock Haven with Sandusky, Penn State facilities, camps, games and other outings. Transportation came through the charity, Sandusky and the adults running its programs.[3]

Five claimants from the Lock Haven area—Aaron Fisher, Frankie Probst, Skyler Coover, Glenn Neff and Joshua Culver—reportedly received settlements totaling $35.5 million. They attended the same school district; three shared a lawyer; only Fisher testified at Sandusky’s criminal trial. That clustering does not establish coordination. It is also not meaningless. Members of the same social and institutional network could share truthful experiences, influence one another’s recollections, learn the settlement system from one another, or do all three.

The claims were not geographically uniform. Fisher met Sandusky through a Second Mile camp at Penn State and alleged a relationship that moved among the charity’s activities, Sandusky’s car, Central Mountain High School and Sandusky’s home, including its basement. His was not a sudden post-conviction claim: he reported abuse in 2008, helped initiate the investigation and testified at trial. Whatever one thinks of changes and therapeutic influence in his account, Fisher does not fit the description of a man who merely appeared after checks began flowing.

Probst also met Sandusky through the Second Mile. In a nationally televised 2011 interview, he called Sandusky a father figure and denied being touched inappropriately below the belt, although he described showering with him, overnight trips, discomfort with Sandusky becoming clingy, and touching on his leg in a car. More than four years later, Probst filed a civil claim alleging years of far more serious oral and anal abuse beginning around age ten. Penn State reportedly settled for $9 million. That does not prove the later account false. It is an enormous transformation that demands an explanation more rigorous than either “victims always disclose gradually” or “he saw the money and lied.”[4]

Public details surrounding Coover, Neff and Culver are thinner because their civil claims remained confidential and none testified in Sandusky’s trial. Neff reportedly alleged oral and anal assaults on multiple dates in 2004 and 2005 but did not report them until 2016. A later judge questioned Neff’s reliability in an unrelated proceeding over attempts to convert part of his structured settlement into immediate cash; that ruling concerned his financial representations, not whether Sandusky abused him. Coover underwent one of Penn State’s later psychiatric evaluations before receiving a reported $7 million. The accessible record does not permit a responsible reconstruction of the exact sites, trips or transportation asserted in every confidential claim.

Culver supplies Ziegler’s most combustible Lock Haven anecdote. Tennielle Jones, Culver’s former fiancée and the mother of his child, gave a tape-recorded interview in 2017 for a proposed Newsweek investigation by Ziegler and journalist Ralph Cipriano. According to their unpublished draft, Jones said Culver bragged that he had received $5 million from Penn State and told her he stayed awake for three days before meeting a therapist so that he would appear emotional and convincing. It was reportedly the first time he had mentioned Sandusky to her. The claimed amount matched a settlement figure that had not then been publicly disclosed.[5]

That is a real lead: a named source, a recorded interview and a specific allegation containing potentially checkable knowledge. It is not an adjudicated fact. Newsweek never published the investigation, Culver was not cross-examined about Jones’s account, and I have found no independent confirmation that he admitted fabricating abuse. Ziegler and Cipriano may have found evidence of fraud. They may have found a furious ex-partner recounting a boast accurately, inaccurately or without its full context. The correct journalistic verb is alleged.

The ostentatious money photographs belong to Fisher, not Culver. Ziegler published an image of Fisher lying amid large-denomination cash and giving the camera the finger. Elsewhere he displayed photographs of another claimant’s new Audi and other post-settlement consumption. Who poses in a pile of money after receiving millions in an abuse settlement? It is grotesque optics—juvenile, provocative and almost purpose-built for Ziegler’s argument. It proves nothing about whether the abuse occurred. People with legitimate settlements can behave like fools. Yet evidence does not have to prove the ultimate charge to possess evidentiary value. The photograph helps explain why Ziegler suspected the public morality play concealed uglier and more opportunistic human motives.

The Lock Haven five therefore tell us something more limited and more useful than either camp wants. They show that allegation networks can form inside existing social networks; that the Second Mile explains opportunity and transportation; that some stories preceded the financial panic while others came years later; that accounts could expand dramatically; and that Penn State paid confidential claims the public still cannot fully evaluate. The cluster justifies investigation. It does not justify collective acquittal or collective condemnation.

What Ziegler Gets Right

Ziegler’s first great service is resisting narrative compression. The national press took a sprawling set of incidents, reports, institutional decisions, therapeutic encounters, criminal charges and civil claims and compressed them into one clean sentence: Penn State protected a monster. Ziegler reopened the components and asked which proposition was supported by which evidence. That is exactly what journalism should do after the first moral emergency has passed.

Second, he recognized the importance of changing accounts. Variation is not automatically deception, but neither should every escalation be insulated from scrutiny by the vocabulary of trauma. Several witnesses initially denied abuse or described limited conduct, then alleged far more serious acts after repeated interviews, therapy, publicity or legal representation. In at least two instances, the sexual history asserted in a civil claim was substantially broader than the account given under oath at the criminal trial. If both versions cannot comfortably coexist, the discrepancy belongs at the center of the analysis.

Third, Ziegler exposed how investigators could communicate certainty to uncertain witnesses. Suggestive interviewing is not a fringe concern. Telling a person that other boys have described the same acts, assuring him that blocked memories are normal, or repeatedly revisiting a desired hypothesis can affect recall without anybody consciously conspiring to create false testimony. A witness may become more sincere as his memory becomes less reliable. The opposition between “truthful victim” and “lying opportunist” is too crude to capture memory contamination.

Fourth, he distinguished Paterno’s actual conduct from the symbolic role assigned to him. Paterno should have followed up. That failure does not prove he possessed decades of secret knowledge or directed a cover-up. The most famous person in a scandal is not necessarily its causal center.

Fifth, Ziegler kept reporting after institutional and media interest had moved on. He obtained interviews, settlement material, medical records and internal statements that complicate the official history. A proposed 16,000-word Newsweek investigation he developed with Cipriano was killed before publication. Ziegler’s telling of that collapse is predictably apocalyptic, but the underlying draft contains material that deserved a wider and more careful public examination.

Finally, the latest legal development means his central procedural concern cannot simply be laughed away. On August 28, 2026, the Associated Press reported that a judge had scheduled a September 8 evidentiary hearing concerning an affidavit from a trial witness identified as R.R. The witness says he was extensively coached, told that trauma might fragment memory and encouraged to affirm details he did not fully remember. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office considers the recantation highly suspect. Even a credible recantation would not automatically produce a new trial, much less prove Sandusky innocent. But a court is now preparing to hear, under legal procedures, a claim resembling the contamination theory Ziegler has argued for years.[6]

That does not make him right about everything. It makes the respectable world’s refusal to engage him look worse.

Where Ziegler Goes Off the Rails

Ziegler treats almost every ambiguity as a one-way ratchet toward innocence. A denial favors Sandusky; a later allegation proves contamination. Continued affection favors Sandusky; anger proves financial motivation. An accuser who behaves badly is untrustworthy; an accuser who behaves well is performing. A media outlet that rejects Ziegler is afraid of the truth; one that interviews him confirms his legitimacy. The theory becomes difficult to falsify because opposition itself becomes evidence of the cover-up.

He also overreads medical evidence. Records suggesting low testosterone, sexual dysfunction or distinctive anatomy can be relevant to specific allegations. Impotence is not a defense to all sexual abuse. Abuse can involve touching, coercion, oral contact and acts not requiring a sustained erection. Physical limitation may make one described act less plausible without erasing an entire course of misconduct.

His rhetoric corrodes his best reporting. He calls people frauds, morons and liars before the evidence has completed the journey. It is entertaining—often extremely entertaining—but it gives skeptical readers permission to dismiss the documents with the man. The investigator discovers a discrepancy; the polemicist declares the whole case dead; the discovery dies with the overstatement.

Most importantly, he does not adequately account for the cumulative pattern surrounding Sandusky. Individual allegations may wobble. Some may be false. Yet a powerful adult repeatedly created private, physically intimate relationships with vulnerable boys, brought them into showers and his home, touched them in cars, cultivated dependence and crossed boundaries that require explanation. Ziegler frequently treats the absence of conventional pornography, a confession or DNA as affirmative evidence of innocence. Many child-abuse cases produce none of those things. The relevant conduct often occurs privately and leaves no recoverable physical trace.

I therefore cannot follow him to total exoneration. I can follow him to a narrower, unsettling place: I am no longer confident that Sandusky committed every major act attributed to him, that every witness’s final account was independently reliable, or that the trial process adequately separated original memory from subsequent influence. Those doubts matter even if Sandusky is guilty.

Guilty Man, False Stories?

History offers imperfect but useful comparisons to the Sandusky case. Julius Rosenberg was genuinely involved in Soviet espionage. Ethel Rosenberg’s role was less clear, and the prosecution used the threat of her execution in an effort to force cooperation. Their case demonstrates that underlying wrongdoing does not validate every prosecutorial claim or every punishment imposed around it.

Wayne Williams was convicted of murdering two adults and was publicly associated with a much larger group of Atlanta child murders. Closing numerous cases through administrative attribution created a broader story than the two convictions established. Williams may be guilty of more than the adjudicated murders; the point is that “guilty of something” cannot do the evidentiary work for “guilty of everything.”

The Wenatchee child-abuse prosecutions of the 1990s offer the darker warning about investigative generation. Repeated and suggestive questioning produced expanding networks of allegations, prosecutions and ruined lives before many convictions collapsed. That does not mean every mass-abuse case is hysteria. It means an investigation can become a machine that manufactures confirmation faster than it tests alternatives.

Sandusky is not Richard Jewell, an innocent man wrongly suspected in the Atlanta bombing. Nor is his case the Duke lacrosse prosecution, where the central allegation collapsed before trial. The more demanding proposition is that a guilty man can receive an unreliable trial or become the center of a partly false social narrative. Defending his procedural rights does not require liking him, trusting him or announcing his innocence.

Like most people, I have problems with aspects of the American legal system. I nonetheless accept its foundational aspirations. The state should prove criminal guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. An accused person should receive competent counsel and a meaningful chance to confront the evidence. A convicted person retains the right to challenge unlawful confinement through appeals, post-conviction proceedings and, where available, habeas corpus. Habeas is not a magical declaration of innocence, and the post-conviction presumption is not identical to the presumption at trial. It is the mechanism by which the state is required, in limited circumstances, to justify continuing to hold a human being.

That principle is easiest to praise when the prisoner is sympathetic. It matters most when he is Jerry Sandusky.

Liz Habib and the Discipline of Company

Ziegler did not make With the Benefit of Hindsight alone. Liz Habib, an experienced television journalist and sports anchor, spent approximately one hundred hours with him in a California studio assembling the original series. Raised in the Pittsburgh area in an athletic family, she worked in Steubenville, Cleveland, Phoenix and Los Angeles, became Fox 11 Los Angeles’s first female weekday sports anchor, won Emmys and later taught journalism. She now works in the federal Small Business Administration.[7]

Her role matters because she gives the project a second intelligence and a different rhythm. Ziegler is the crusader; Habib is the person in the room who can hear how the crusade sounds to somebody not already living inside it. She does not neutralize his excesses, and the series ultimately shares too many of his premises. But her questions, summaries and professional presence help turn an archive of obsession into a narrative that an outsider can enter.

There is a larger lesson there. Contrarians need company—not cheerleaders, but people capable of preserving the distinction between a discovery and a verdict. Ziegler’s work is most persuasive when another mind forces him to slow down. It loses force whenever certainty outruns the record.

The Price of Being Right

What price did John Ziegler actually pay?

We should not romanticize it. The Sandusky project gave him a signature subject, a devoted audience and hundreds of hours of content. It produced interviews, appearances and a reputation as the man willing to argue the case nobody else would touch. I cannot establish that it impoverished him or single-handedly destroyed a conventional career he otherwise would have possessed.

The reputational price is easier to see. To question one Sandusky accuser was to invite suspicion; to declare Sandusky innocent was to become professionally radioactive. Editors, broadcasters and ordinary readers could treat association with Ziegler as evidence of moral defect. The failure of the proposed Newsweek article—whatever mix of legal caution, editorial judgment and institutional fear killed it—left his strongest material trapped on his own advocacy site, where people inclined to distrust him would never encounter it.

There was an opportunity cost too. A decade devoted to one nearly impossible cause is a decade unavailable for other reporting, relationships and work. Obsession builds expertise by narrowing life. Ziegler knows the evidentiary history of this case at a level few journalists can match. The achievement and the damage may be the same fact viewed from opposite ends.

His greatest price, however, is persuasive. By insisting that Sandusky abused nobody, Ziegler makes it harder for the public to hear his demonstrably stronger claims: that the McQueary narrative was overstated; that Paterno was assigned knowledge not proven by the record; that some accounts changed radically; that investigators and therapists may have shaped memory; that Penn State’s settlement process sometimes substituted payment for robust adversarial testing; and that at least one trial witness now says the process influenced him.

Ziegler found holes in a wall and announced that there was no wall. People looked at the wall, saw that it remained standing and ignored the holes.

That may be the final meaning of The Price of Being Right. It is not simply that society punished Ziegler for challenging a sacred narrative. Sometimes it did. It is that his need to be right about the whole case reduced the force of what he was right about. He paid for certainty with credibility. The public paid too, because valuable evidence became easier to discard. The truth paid most of all.

I came to the podcast expecting a crank. I found a crank, certainly, but also a genuine journalist: brave, funny, obsessive, infuriating and capable of discovering things more respectable people had missed. I began believing the Sandusky case was essentially closed. I finished believing Sandusky was probably guilty and the story of his guilt was substantially less reliable than I had assumed.

That is not the conversion Ziegler wanted. It is still a conversion.

The September hearing may amount to nothing. Recantations are treated skeptically for good reason. Memories change; loyalties change; pressure can operate in several directions. The court may find R.R. incredible, immaterial or insufficient to disturb the other convictions. Sandusky may die in prison, and history may retain him exactly as it has known him since 2011.

But he gets the hearing. The state must listen, answer and make a record. That is not an exoneration. It is the law doing the difficult thing the law exists to do: looking again when nearly everyone would prefer never to look at all.

John Ziegler has been asking people to look again for more than a decade. He has often asked badly. He has sometimes demanded conclusions the evidence cannot carry. He has insulted the audience, the witnesses, the press and occasionally his own best work. He has also refused the comfort of a finished story.

On that essential point, I agree with him.

Dedication:

For John. You are totally outta control but you still rule baby.

Sources

1. Penn State, “Settlements Announced for Sandusky Victims,” October 28, 2013; WHYY, “Penn State, Insurer Scuffle Over Paying Sandusky Victims,” November 30, 2015.

2. Ralph Cipriano, “Easy Money at Penn State,” Big Trial, August 14, 2018; Cipriano and John Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley,” unpublished proposed Newsweek investigation posted by Ziegler, March 29, 2018.

3. Penn State, University Park campus information; contemporary route information between Lock Haven and State College.

4. NBC interview with Frankie Probst, November 21, 2011; Cipriano and Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley.”

5. Cipriano and Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley,” section titled “The Lock Haven Quintet.”

6. Mark Scolforo, Associated Press, “Judge Will Hear Recantation of Sexual Abuse Claim Against Ex-Penn State Coach Jerry Sandusky,” August 28, 2026.

7. With the Benefit of Hindsight project page; U.S. Small Business Administration biography of Elizabeth Habib.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Song Prince Hal’s Dirge: Confidence, Reformation, and the Politics of Self-Making

Note: This short essay takes Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” as a lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, focusing on the idea of self-fashioning across time. It reads Hal’s apparent debauchery and later reform not simply as moral transformation, but as a theory of confidence—either consciously staged, in Shakespeare’s version, or more instinctively internalized in Wainwright’s. Moving between text and song, the piece explores how both versions hinge on the same underlying question: what kind of inner structure allows a self to pass through disorder, delay, and social misreading without collapsing, and to reconstitute itself as effective action when the moment arrives.

Epigraph:

Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Loudon Wainwright

This piece takes as its source the song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” by Loudon Wainwright III, itself based on Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal from Henry IV. The figure of Hal is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed political selves: a young man who deliberately inhabits disorder in order to make his eventual reformation into kingship appear all the more legitimate, even necessary.

In Henry IV, Hal openly announces this strategy to Falstaff and the other tavern companions:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

And again:

So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better that my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Hal’s logic is explicit: he will cultivate disorder as a kind of aesthetic and political foil. His apparent immersion in low company is not failure but strategy. Falstaff and the tavern world become, in effect, instruments in the staging of legitimacy.

Paraphrased, Hal is saying: I will live among you for a time, but only in order to abandon you later in a way that maximizes my transformation into kingship. He is a political animal who understands reputation as something staged across time.

Loudon Wainwright III’s “Prince Hal’s Dirge” takes up this same figure, but shifts the emphasis in a revealing way. Wainwright—still best known to many for novelty songs like “Dead Skunk,” though his broader body of work is far more substantial—reimagines Hal less as calculating strategist and more as self-contained performer of confidence within disorder.

The song opens in full immersion in debauchery:

Give me a capon
And some roguish companion,
A wench and a bottle of sack.
Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Here Hal is not yet strategy, but appetite. The political mask is absent; what remains is the world of consumption, drink, sex, and collapse.

But Wainwright then pivots:

My father, he thinks I’m a good for nothing
that I won’t amount to much.
But he’s not aware of my secret weapon.
I can count on myself in the clutch.

This is the key transformation. Shakespeare’s Hal is self-consciously future-oriented: he plans his reformation as spectacle. Wainwright’s Hal, by contrast, carries an interiorized assurance that he will simply “come through.” The emphasis shifts from calculation to instinctive resilience.

This continues in the song’s martial register:

Show me a breach,
I’ll once more unto it.
I’ll be ready for action any day.
I’ll straighten up, and fly most righteous.
In a fracas, I’ll be right in the fray.
I can drink you under twenty-five tables,
Fight and be a ladies man.
But all this will change,
When I’m good and ready,
To become the king of this land.

The phrase “any day” is doing important work here. It carries the rhetoric of readiness without commitment to timing. It suggests immediacy while quietly deferring it indefinitely. The transformation is always available, never enacted.

What emerges is a different psychological structure from Shakespeare’s original. Shakespeare gives us a political actor who consciously engineers perception over time. Wainwright gives us a man who believes in a durable inner core of competence—someone who can be disordered without being undone.

And yet both versions converge on the same underlying mechanism: confidence as political force. Whether staged (Shakespeare) or internalized (Wainwright), Hal’s power rests on the belief that identity can survive its own contradictions and ultimately reorganize them into legitimacy.

Singing “Prince Hal’s Dirge” before work, I find myself struck less by the irony of Hal’s transformation than by the necessity of something like an unbreakable interior core—something sealed enough to survive fluctuation, failure, and delay, but still flexible enough to return to action when required.

That, ultimately, is what both Shakespeare and Wainwright are circling: not morality, not reform, but the strange political psychology of self-belief under time pressure.

Dedication:

For my father, the biggest Shakespeare lover I know.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up various literary works.

On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)
On Raymond Carver’s “Fires”
Posted on by Matt Thomas

A Direct Challenge to the Idea of the Direction of Disintegration or Stress Point in the Enneagram

Note: The disintegration model in Enneagram theory is often presented as a stable directional map—types “move” under stress into predictable neighboring patterns. But in lived experience, this model can become overly schematic and psychologically flattening.

What it risks missing is that what looks like “disintegration” is often not a movement into another type, but a loss of functional integration across multiple systems at once: attention, affect regulation, impulse control, social adaptation, and narrative coherence do not shift in a single vector. They fragment unevenly.

In practice, what gets labeled as disintegration may include: regression into earlier learned coping strategies rather than type-specific movement; situational adaptation under constraint (not structural change); nervous system overload presenting as behavioral inconsistency; or simply fatigue states misread as typological drift.

The model also assumes a kind of psychological symmetry between integration and disintegration paths that is not always empirically supported. Integration often feels like increased flexibility and coherence, but “disintegration” can be indistinguishable from stress, grief, substance effects, sleep deprivation, or environmental pressure.

The core critique is therefore structural: The disintegration pathway is better understood as a metaphor for destabilization under load, not a reliable map of personality transformation.

Which means its value is poetic and heuristic, but limited as a diagnostic or predictive framework for actual human behavior over time.

Epigraph

These days I feel immune
To all the sadness and the gloom
If things fall into place
Get onto the right side of grace


— The Jesus and Mary Chain

Introduction and Thesis

This paper takes a direct and critical look at the Enneagram concept of the “direction of disintegration,” more recently reframed as the “stress point.” While various authors and teachers—including Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson—have attempted to soften or reinterpret this terminology, the underlying assumption remains largely intact: that movement in one direction represents growth, while movement in the other reflects regression under stress.

This paper challenges that assumption directly. I argue that if one of the central aims of Enneagram work is to evolve through the full set of connecting points (for example, 5–8–2–4–1–7), then the so-called “direction of disintegration” cannot coherently be understood as purely regressive. On the contrary, it may represent a necessary and even ultimate phase of development—one that completes the circuit rather than deviating from it.

More specifically, I propose that what is commonly termed “disintegration” is better understood as the destabilizing emergence of previously repressed or underdeveloped capacities. Movement along these lines—particularly under conditions of stress—may therefore appear chaotic or maladaptive in the short term, while in fact reflecting the early stages of a deeper and more comprehensive integration. In this sense, the concept of “disintegration” does not merely mislabel the process; it obscures its developmental significance.

This perspective may be further illuminated by comparison with cyclical models of development, including certain strands of Buddhist thought, in which the movement from undifferentiated being through structured identity and back toward a more integrated state is understood as a continuous process. From this vantage point, the so-called “direction of disintegration” may be interpreted not as a fall from development, but as a return toward a more foundational mode of experience—one that has been obscured, rather than lost, in the formation of personality.

Personal and Theoretical Grounding

My interest in this question is not purely theoretical. From the outset, I found the concept of “disintegration” difficult to reconcile with lived experience—particularly in relation to my own type, Type 5. In the standard model, the Five is said to disintegrate toward Type 7, exhibiting scattered, excessive, or escapist tendencies under stress. While I recognize the descriptive accuracy of this account at certain levels of functioning, it does not fully capture the experiential reality of the movement.

In my own case, the movement toward 7 has not been merely regressive. On the contrary, it has often represented access to states that feel more expansive, embodied, and alive than the constrained intellectualism of the core Five structure. This raises a fundamental question: if the experiential quality of this movement can be described as more “whole” rather than less, in what sense can it be understood as disintegration?

One possible answer lies in the developmental origins of type itself. If personality structure is understood, as Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson suggest, as a provisional adaptation formed in early childhood, then it is reasonable to ask what precedes that adaptation. It is at least conceivable that what emerges in the movement toward the so-called disintegration point is not simply dysfunction, but the reactivation of capacities that were present prior to the consolidation of type—capacities that were subsequently repressed in the service of psychological survival.

In this light, the apparent instability of “disintegration” may reflect not breakdown, but overload: the sudden return of domains of experience—such as sensation, spontaneity, or emotional intensity—that the personality has not yet learned to integrate. What appears as regression is, in this sense, the difficulty of expansion. The task is not to avoid this movement, but to engage it consciously, such that what begins as turbulence may ultimately become integration.

Literature Review: The Problem of Directionality in Enneagram Theory

The question of directional movement along the Enneagram’s lines of connection remains one of the least resolved and most inconsistently articulated aspects of the system. While widely taught using the language of “integration” and “disintegration,” there is no clear consensus in the literature regarding the precise meaning, function, or developmental significance of these movements. A review of major contributors to the field reveals a pattern of partial reformulation without full theoretical resolution.

The most influential articulation of directional movement appears in the work of Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, particularly in Personality Types (1987/1996) and The Wisdom of the Enneagram(1999). In this model, each type is understood to move along two lines: one toward “integration” (growth) and one toward “disintegration” (stress). Movement in the direction of integration is said to require conscious effort and corresponds to psychological health, while movement toward disintegration is described as automatic, reactive, and associated with declining levels of functioning.

However, this model contains an important and often overlooked tension. Riso and Hudson also suggest that the broader aim of Enneagram development is to move “around the circle,” integrating the positive capacities of all types over time. This implies that the points reached via the so-called direction of disintegration are not inherently pathological, but form part of a larger developmental sequence. The result is a structural ambiguity: movement toward a given point may be framed as regressive in one context and developmental in another, depending on whether it is understood locally (single-step movement) or globally (full-cycle integration). This inconsistency has not been fully resolved within their framework.

Subsequent authors have attempted to refine or reframe this model, often by softening the negative connotations of “disintegration” without fundamentally altering the underlying directional asymmetry. Sandra Maitri, for example, rejects the terminology of stress and disintegration and instead proposes an “inner flow” governed by what she describes as a “logic of the soul.” In her model, forward movement along the lines is driven by a search for fulfillment that ultimately proves unsatisfying, while backward movement leads toward what she terms the “heart point,” associated with a deeper layer of the self or “soul child.” While this approach usefully destabilizes the purely negative interpretation of one directional line, it replaces it with a different asymmetry, privileging backward movement as more essential to growth. Moreover, the conceptual basis of this model remains insufficiently specified, particularly in its account of how and why one direction should be considered developmentally primary.

Beatrice Chestnut builds on and systematizes aspects of Maitri’s approach, offering a more structured reinterpretation of the lines of connection. In her model, movement along both lines can be either constructive or maladaptive, depending on the level of awareness and integration involved. Terms such as “growth through stress” and “security point” attempt to capture the complexity of these dynamics, acknowledging that development may occur through challenge as well as stability. While this represents a significant advance in clarifying the bidirectional potential of the lines, it nevertheless retains an implicit directional logic and does not fully resolve the question of whether one direction should be considered primary, or whether the distinction itself is theoretically necessary.

Other contributors, including Tom Condon, have explicitly questioned the stability of unified directional models. Condon argues that individuals routinely access both connecting points under a range of conditions and that attempts to impose a single, consistent directional pathway oversimplify what is, in practice, a complex and dynamic psychological process. From this perspective, the notion of a fixed “direction of disintegration” becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, as both lines appear capable of expressing high and low functioning depending on context.

Across successive editions and public teachings, Russ Hudson has made a clear and commendable effort to soften the language surrounding the Enneagram’s directional model. Terms such as “disintegration” have increasingly been reframed as “stress,” and there is greater emphasis on the idea that no movement within the system is wholly negative. This shift toward more “warm” and less judgmental language reflects a broader maturation within the field and has undoubtedly made the system more accessible and psychologically usable.

At the same time, this evolution in terminology has not been matched by a corresponding clarification of the underlying theory. The central asymmetry—where one direction is implicitly associated with growth and the other with regression—remains largely intact, even as the language used to describe it has become more neutral. As a result, the model continues to carry an unresolved tension: it acknowledges that all points contain both higher and lower expressions, yet continues to treat movement toward certain points as fundamentally stress-based rather than developmentally necessary.

As other contributors have begun to explore more symmetrical and developmentally integrated interpretations of the lines, the persistence of the traditional asymmetry begins to feel less like a settled conclusion and more like an inherited assumption that has yet to be fully re-examined.

In this respect, the field appears to have reached a transitional stage. The vocabulary has evolved, the teaching has broadened, and important correctives have been introduced. Yet the underlying structure of the model—particularly with respect to directional movement—remains theoretically underdeveloped. For a system that places such emphasis on precision of language and clarity of inner dynamics, this gap is not insignificant. It suggests that what has often been treated as a foundational principle of the Enneagram may, in fact, remain an open question—one that calls for more direct and systematic reconsideration.

Applications: Reconsidering the Nine Directional Movements

If the preceding analysis is correct, then the implications must be demonstrated concretely across the system itself. What follows is a re-examination of each of the nine directional movements traditionally described as “disintegration.” In each case, I argue that what has been labeled regression can be more accurately understood as the activation of a higher function—a necessary but often turbulent phase of integration.

Type 1 → Type 4: Emotional Depth as Higher Function

In the conventional model, Type 1 “disintegrates” to Type 4, becoming moody, self-absorbed, and emotionally volatile. The principled, rule-oriented One—committed to order and correctness—appears to lose stability and fall into irrational feeling states.

However, this interpretation overlooks the rigidity inherent in the One’s structure. Ones tend to operate within strict internal frameworks, often fearing deviation from what is “right.” This can produce clarity and integrity, but also emotional constriction and black-and-white thinking.

Movement toward Type 4 introduces a necessary counterbalance: emotional depth, nuance, and subjectivity. The Four’s capacity for feeling, imagination, and romantic engagement allows the One to move beyond mere correctness into lived experience. What appears as instability may, in fact, be the early and uneven integration of emotional life. A One who cannot access this domain risks becoming brittle and overly moralistic. The 1 → 4 movement, properly integrated, expands the One’s humanity.

Type 2 → Type 8: Assertion as Higher Function

Type 2 is traditionally understood to “disintegrate” to Type 8, becoming aggressive, domineering, and self-centered. The caring, other-oriented Two is seen to abandon empathy in favor of force.

Yet the Two’s structure often involves excessive attunement to others at the expense of the self. Twos may defer, accommodate, and seek approval, losing touch with their own needs and convictions.

Movement toward Type 8 activates the capacity for directness, strength, and self-assertion. The Eight’s willingness to say “this is what I think” or “this is what I need” is precisely what the Two lacks when overextended. While this shift may initially appear abrupt or even confrontational, it represents a critical step toward autonomy. The 2 → 8 movement allows the Two to embody their own authority rather than living exclusively through others.

Type 3 → Type 9: Grounded Presence as Higher Function

In the standard model, Type 3 “disintegrates” to Type 9, becoming disengaged, complacent, and apathetic. The driven, success-oriented Three is seen to lose momentum and fall into inertia.

However, the Three’s relentless focus on achievement can lead to over-identification with external validation and performance. The constant pursuit of success may obscure deeper questions of meaning, connection, and being.

Movement toward Type 9 introduces stillness, acceptance, and presence. The Nine’s capacity to step out of striving and into being offers a necessary counterweight to the Three’s forward drive. This shift can soften the ego’s edge, allowing the individual to reconnect with others and with themselves beyond performance. What appears as loss of ambition may, at a higher level, represent the integration of humility and peace—qualities often observed in mature leaders who transition from personal success to collective contribution.

Type 4 → Type 2: Relational Engagement as Higher Function

Type 4 is said to “disintegrate” to Type 2, becoming needy, dependent, and overly focused on others for validation. The introspective, emotionally rich Four appears to lose depth and become externally fixated.

Yet the Four’s structure can incline toward solipsism—an intense inward focus on personal identity, feeling, and uniqueness. This can limit engagement with others and reinforce a sense of separation.

Movement toward Type 2 opens the Four to relational connection. The Two’s outward orientation—its attentiveness to the needs and feelings of others—provides a pathway out of self-absorption. While this may initially manifest as dependency, it also represents the development of empathy, generosity, and shared experience. The 4 → 2 movement enables the Four to participate in relationship rather than merely reflect upon it.

Type 5 → Type 7: Embodiment and Expansion as Higher Function

Type 5 “disintegrates” to Type 7 in the traditional model, becoming scattered, impulsive, and escapist. The focused, analytical Five is seen to lose coherence and retreat into distraction.

In practice, however, the Five’s core challenge lies in over-withdrawal into the mind. The Five often privileges thought over experience, constructing elaborate internal systems while remaining detached from immediate reality.

Movement toward Type 7 activates sensation, spontaneity, and engagement with life. The Seven’s openness to experience allows the Five to step out of abstraction and into embodied presence. In my own experience, this movement has not been merely destabilizing but profoundly enlivening—an entry into states of being that feel more whole and integrated than the Five’s default stance. The initial excesses of this shift reflect the difficulty of integrating long-repressed domains, not their inherent dysfunction.

Type 6 → Type 3: Self-Confidence and Agency as Higher Function

Type 6 is said to “disintegrate” to Type 3, becoming competitive, image-conscious, and arrogant. The loyal, cautious Six appears to abandon its grounded nature in favor of performance.

However, the Six’s strengths—commitment, vigilance, and reliability—can become limiting when accompanied by self-doubt and over-reliance on external validation. Sixes may hesitate to act decisively, seeking reassurance rather than asserting direction.

Movement toward Type 3 introduces confidence, initiative, and forward momentum. The Three’s capacity to act, to lead, and to project capability is precisely what the Six requires to move beyond hesitation. While this may initially appear as overcompensation, it represents the development of self-trust. The 6 → 3 movement allows the Six to step into authority rather than continually deferring it.

Type 7 → Type 1: Structure and Discipline as Higher Function

Type 7 “disintegrates” to Type 1, becoming critical, rigid, and constrained. The free-spirited, pleasure-seeking Seven is seen to lose joy and become moralistic.

Yet the Seven’s pursuit of experience can lead to fragmentation—constant movement without depth or completion. Avoidance of discomfort may prevent sustained engagement with reality.

Movement toward Type 1 provides structure, discipline, and ethical grounding. The One’s capacity for focus and follow-through allows the Seven to channel its energy into meaningful action. While this shift may feel restrictive at first, it enables coherence and purpose. Real-life trajectories often reflect this movement, as individuals transition from restless seeking to grounded commitment, finding stability where previously there was only motion.

Type 8 → Type 5: Reflection and Restraint as Higher Function

Type 8 is said to “disintegrate” to Type 5, becoming withdrawn, secretive, and overly cerebral. The powerful, action-oriented Eight appears to retreat into isolation.

However, the Eight’s strength can become overextended, leading to dominance and a lack of reflection. Constant outward force may limit the ability to process experience or consider alternative perspectives.

Movement toward Type 5 introduces introspection, analysis, and restraint. The Five’s capacity to step back allows the Eight to refine its actions with insight. This shift does not diminish strength but deepens it, transforming immediate power into considered leadership. The 8 → 5 movement enables the Eight to lead with both force and understanding.

Type 9 → Type 6: Engagement and Commitment as Higher Function

Type 9 “disintegrates” to Type 6, becoming anxious, reactive, and worried. The calm, accommodating Nine appears to lose peace and stability.

Yet the Nine’s desire for harmony can lead to passivity and avoidance. By minimizing conflict, the Nine may disengage from necessary challenges and from their own priorities.

Movement toward Type 6 activates engagement, vigilance, and commitment. The Six’s attentiveness to potential problems encourages the Nine to confront rather than avoid difficulty. While this may introduce anxiety, it also fosters responsibility and active participation. The 9 → 6 movement transforms passive peace into engaged stability, grounded in awareness rather than avoidance.

Conclusion

This paper does not claim to offer a final or definitive resolution to the question of directional movement within the Enneagram. The system itself remains, by the admission of its most influential contributors, a work in progress. What has been offered here is a more limited but, I would argue, necessary intervention: a direct challenge to the prevailing assumption that one line of connection represents “integration” while the other represents “disintegration” or regression under stress.

The analysis presented suggests that this distinction, while historically influential, is conceptually unstable and developmentally incomplete.At a broader level, the persistence of this framework points to a certain hesitation within the field. There remains, at times, a noticeable deference to the foundational formulations of Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson—a deference that is understandable given their substantial contributions, but which may also inhibit more direct re-examination of their assumptions.

Foundational work deserves respect; it does not require preservation in its original form. In a living field, even the most influential models must remain open to revision where they no longer adequately account for observed experience.The evidence considered here—both theoretical and experiential—suggests that movement along the so-called “direction of disintegration” is not inherently regressive, but often represents the activation of underdeveloped capacities essential for full psychological integration. While this movement may initially appear chaotic or destabilizing, it is better understood as the early phase of expansion rather than contraction. To continue to frame it primarily in terms of breakdown risks obscuring one of the Enneagram’s most valuable insights: that growth frequently occurs through precisely those domains the personality has learned to avoid.If this paper has a broader aim, it is simply to encourage a more direct and less deferential conversation about this aspect of Enneagram theory.

The language of “integration” and “disintegration” has had a long and influential run, but its limitations are increasingly apparent. All theoretical systems, if they are to remain vital, must be willing to outgrow their earlier formulations. It is in that spirit that this argument is offered—not as a final word, but as a contribution toward moving the discussion forward.

Dedication.:

For Tom Condon, the GOAT. And for Lynn.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you may also like the piece below which also takes up the topic of the Enneagram.

On My Curious Relationship with the Enneagram
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On Julian Jaynes and the Origins of Consciousness: A Modern Look

Note: This essay is a reflection on the ideas of Julian Jaynes and his remarkable 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes’ theory—that human beings once experienced divine voices guiding their actions before the emergence of modern introspective consciousness—remains controversial and widely debated. The purpose of this essay is not to prove or disprove Jaynes’ neurological model but to explore the enduring power of the questions he raised.

In particular, I am interested in two aspects of Jaynes’ work that remain deeply suggestive: his interpretation of early literature such as the Iliad, where modern psychological interiority appears strangely absent, and his observations about how mobility—travelers, shepherds, merchants, and wanderers moving between cultures—may have destabilized older systems of divine authority. These figures, operating in uncertain cultural terrain, may have been among the first people forced into the improvisational reasoning that resembles modern consciousness.

The essay also touches on institutions like the Oracle of Delphi and on the persistence of voice phenomena in modern contexts, ranging from hypnagogic states and exhaustion to more troubling historical cases such as the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan. These examples are not presented as proof of Jaynes’ theory but as reminders that the boundary between internal thought and perceived external command may be more complex than we sometimes assume.

Finally, the brief personal anecdote involving an MRI scan is included not as evidence but as illustration: a small modern echo of the ambiguous mental territory Jaynes explored. Moments in which voices seem to arise from somewhere between the inner and outer mind remain part of human experience.

Whether Jaynes was ultimately correct in his sweeping historical claims is still an open question. But his work continues to provoke a fascinating possibility: that consciousness itself has a history, and that the modern reflective self emerged gradually out of older forms of human experience.

If nothing else, Jaynes reminds us that the human mind is not a finished structure. It is something still unfolding—shaped by culture, language, movement, and time.

“She keeps coming closer saying I can feel it in my bones
Schizophrenia is taking me home.”
— Sonic Youth

There are certain books that never quite disappear. They do not settle comfortably into the academic canon, nor are they fully dismissed. They linger. They circulate quietly among curious readers, occasionally resurfacing in conversation decades after publication, as if waiting for another generation to discover them.

One such book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Its author, Julian Jaynes, was a psychologist who spent much of his career outside the central institutions of modern neuroscience. When the book appeared in 1976 it created an immediate sensation. Reviewers alternately described it as brilliant, bizarre, visionary, or simply impossible. The theory it proposed was breathtaking in scope. Jaynes suggested that the subjective, introspective consciousness modern people take for granted—the inner sense of “I,” the reflective voice narrating our own thoughts—was not an ancient human constant. It had emerged, he argued, only a few thousand years ago.

According to Jaynes, the minds of early civilizations functioned differently. People did not experience themselves as the authors of their own decisions. Instead they heard the voices of gods.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Commands issued in auditory form—voices that appeared to come from outside the self—guided action. These voices, Jaynes argued, were generated by one hemisphere of the brain and experienced by the other as divine instruction. He called this earlier mentality the bicameral mind.

The theory has never been accepted in its full neurological form. Archaeologists, classicists, and neuroscientists have raised serious objections. And yet the book continues to circulate, discussed by philosophers, psychologists, historians of religion, and the occasional curious reader who stumbles across it in a used bookstore or late-night internet search.

Why?

Part of the answer is simple: Jaynes was asking a question that remains deeply unsettling.

What if human consciousness has a history?

What if the inner voice we experience as our own—our private mental narrator—was not always there?

I first encountered Jaynes sometime around 2012 or 2013, during a period when I was reading deeply in the work of Carl Jung and writing a small series of reflections that I called Jungian Intimations. Like many readers drawn to Jung, I was interested in symbolism, archetypes, and the strange persistence of mythic imagery in the modern psyche. I briefly considered enrolling in an online course with the Jungian analyst Michael Conforti, though in the end I took a class from his wife, Nancy Qualls-Corbett, on Jung and visual art. Around that time I read the slim but remarkable volume Jung on Art, which argues that artistic creation often emerges when archetypal material pushes through the individual psyche into symbolic form.

Jaynes appeared in my reading not long afterward. At first glance he seemed to be asking a related but far more radical question. Jung had treated mythic figures as symbolic expressions of the psyche. Jaynes suggested that the gods of ancient literature might once have been experienced as genuine voices—psychological events interpreted as divine command.

Whether or not one ultimately accepts his neurological model, Jaynes assembled a body of evidence that continues to provoke thought. In particular, he pointed to a striking feature of early literature. Characters in ancient texts often act without the kind of introspective self-reflection modern readers expect. Decisions appear suddenly, attributed not to inner deliberation but to divine intervention.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the world of the Iliad. When Achilles restrains himself from killing Agamemnon, it is not because he pauses to analyze his emotions. Athena appears beside him and tells him what to do. The boundary between divine command and human action is porous.

Jaynes argued that such passages were not merely literary conventions but traces of an earlier mentality.

Yet perhaps the most fascinating part of his theory lies elsewhere—in the margins of ancient societies, among the people least anchored to a single cultural world.

The wanderers.

Ancient civilizations were more mobile than we sometimes imagine. Even in the Bronze Age there were shepherds drifting across borderlands, merchants following caravan routes between cities, sailors moving from port to port across the Mediterranean and Near East. These figures lived at the edges of cultural systems that otherwise depended on stability and hierarchy.

For Jaynes, such wanderers may have played an unexpected role in the transformation of the human mind.

The bicameral system, as he described it, functioned best within tightly structured societies. Authority flowed downward through clear hierarchies: gods to kings, kings to priests, priests to ordinary people. Ritual, language, and shared myth reinforced the system. The divine voices guiding behavior were embedded within a familiar cultural environment.

But travelers moved beyond those environments.

A shepherd leaving his village might cross into territory where different gods were worshipped. A merchant arriving in a foreign city encountered unfamiliar laws, languages, and customs. A sailor might spend months among people whose rituals and social expectations bore little resemblance to those of home.

In such situations the guiding voices of one’s own culture could become unreliable.

If a divine command urged action in a place where the surrounding society operated under entirely different assumptions, the voice might cease to function as a stable guide. The traveler found himself in a new psychological situation—cut loose from the authority structures that had previously organized experience.

This was not a comfortable position.

To survive, wanderers had to develop different skills. They had to negotiate, observe, and interpret. They had to learn foreign languages and read unfamiliar social signals. They had to improvise.

In other words, they had to think.

Jaynes speculated that these mobile figures—shepherds, traders, sailors—may have been among the first people forced into something like modern reflective consciousness. The birthplaces of that consciousness may not have been temples or palaces but the messy contact zones of ancient trade: caravan routes crossing deserts, harbor towns where languages mingled, frontier markets where strangers bargained with one another under uncertain rules.

If the bicameral system required cultural enclosure to function, then mobility threatened its stability.

And the ancient world was becoming increasingly mobile.

Even as this transformation unfolded, remnants of the earlier mentality persisted in institutional form.

One of the most famous examples was the Oracle of Delphi. For centuries Greek leaders traveled to Delphi seeking divine guidance on matters of war, colonization, and political decision-making. The oracle’s pronouncements—often delivered in trance-like states by the Pythia—were treated as authoritative messages from the god Apollo.

From a Jaynesian perspective, institutions like Delphi may represent cultural technologies designed to preserve the authority of divine voices even as the underlying psychological system weakened. Kings and city-states continued to seek guidance from gods because the tradition of divine command remained embedded in social life.

Gradually, however, new forms of decision-making emerged.

Written law codes appeared. Philosophical reflection developed. Greek drama explored the tensions between divine authority and human responsibility. The shift was not sudden or uniform, but over time a new psychological landscape became visible—one in which individuals increasingly experienced themselves as authors of their own thoughts.

This transition was not simply intellectual. It may have been neurological, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once.

Jaynes placed the decisive phase of the transformation during the turmoil of the late Bronze Age collapse, roughly between 1200 and 800 BCE—a period when many ancient societies experienced widespread disruption. Cities were destroyed, trade networks collapsed, and populations migrated. In the midst of this upheaval, older forms of authority may have faltered, forcing new modes of self-organization to emerge.

Whether or not Jaynes correctly identified the precise mechanism, he was surely right about one thing: consciousness as we experience it today may not be a timeless given.

It may be an achievement—fragile, historically contingent, and still evolving.

Yet if the bicameral mind truly vanished, one might expect the phenomenon of hearing commanding voices to disappear entirely from modern experience.

It has not.

Under certain conditions, people still report experiences remarkably similar to those Jaynes described. In states of extreme exhaustion, during moments of sensory deprivation, or in the liminal territory between waking and sleep, voices sometimes appear that are difficult to classify as either internal or external.

I had an experience of this kind several years ago while undergoing an MRI scan in a hospital.

Anyone who has had an MRI knows the strange psychological environment it creates. You lie alone inside a narrow tube, immobilized, while the machine produces a sequence of loud mechanical pulses and vibrations. The noise is rhythmic and relentless. There is little sensory input beyond the sound and the awareness of one’s own breathing.

Somewhere in the midst of that experience, a voice appeared.

It was not loud or dramatic. It was simply there—a calm male voice with the unmistakable tone of a father speaking to a child. The message itself was simple, almost reassuring. But what struck me most was the ambiguity of the experience. The voice did not feel exactly like a thought, yet it did not feel entirely external either. It occupied a strange borderland between inner and outer perception.

The moment passed quickly, but the memory lingered.

Experiences of this sort are not uncommon. Psychologists studying hypnagogic states—the transitional zone between waking and sleep—have documented similar phenomena. Auditory hallucinations appear in certain psychiatric conditions, most famously schizophrenia. Hypnotic suggestion can also produce experiences in which subjects perceive commands or messages that seem to originate outside their conscious control.

Jaynes believed such phenomena represented vestiges of the older bicameral mentality.

The voices of the gods, in his view, had not entirely vanished. They had simply retreated to the margins of modern consciousness.

Occasionally these phenomena intersect with darker episodes of modern history.

The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan remains one of the most disturbing cases often discussed in connection with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness. Some researchers have argued that Sirhan may have been unusually susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, raising unsettling questions about the relationship between external influence and voluntary action.

It would be irresponsible to claim that Jaynes’ theory explains such events. Human behavior is far too complex for any single model to capture fully. Yet cases like Sirhan’s remind us that the boundary between autonomous decision and externally shaped impulse is not always as clear as modern assumptions suggest.

The mind remains a mysterious territory.

Half a century after its publication, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind continues to provoke debate not because it solved the problem of consciousness but because it reframed it. Jaynes forced readers to confront the possibility that the human mind has undergone profound historical transformations.

Even if the details of his neurological model prove incorrect, the broader insight may endure. Literature, religion, and psychology all suggest that the experience of selfhood has changed over time. The ancient world did not necessarily perceive the mind in the same way we do.

Something was gained in the transition to modern consciousness.

We gained introspection, philosophical reflection, and the capacity to examine our own motives. We gained the intellectual freedom that made science, democracy, and modern literature possible.

But something may also have been lost.

In the world Jaynes described, human beings lived in a landscape animated by voices of divine authority. Decisions arrived not through anxious deliberation but through commands experienced as sacred guidance. That world may have been more constrained, but it may also have felt more certain.

Modern consciousness offers freedom, but it also brings doubt and solitude. The voices of the gods have largely fallen silent, replaced by the quieter and often less confident voice we call our own.

Perhaps the most we can say is that consciousness, like culture itself, continues to evolve. The wanderers of ancient caravan routes helped shape the first emergence of reflective thought. Today we inhabit a global world of constant movement, translation, and negotiation—a world not entirely unlike those early contact zones where cultures once collided.

We are all wanderers now.

And somewhere, perhaps, the faint echoes of older voices still remain.

Dedication:

For dreamers and wanderers everywhere.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like the pieces below, which take up somewhat similar themes.

On Coming Through
Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I
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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks I: Kofi Annan

Note: This piece begins a small series I’m calling “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” Political and public life are full of attempted returns. Leaders lose elections, wars, or moral arguments and then try to reclaim the stage. Most of these efforts fail. The moment has passed, the audience has moved on, and what once felt urgent has dissolved into what might be called moral fatigue. Yet every so often a different pattern appears. Occasionally someone loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for history itself to shift. When that happens, what first looked like defeat begins to resemble something closer to a delayed victory. Kofi Annan provides a particularly interesting case. His opposition to the Iraq War did not stop the invasion, and at the time it appeared that the argument had been decisively lost. Yet as the years passed and the consequences of the war became clearer, the moral judgment he articulated gained increasing weight.
In that sense, the story of Annan’s career suggests a useful distinction: some comebacks succeed not because the player reclaims the moment, but because the argument itself eventually catches up with history. Future pieces in this series will look at other figures—some who managed remarkable returns, and others whose comebacks never quite arrived.

Political life especially produces them in abundance. A leader loses a battle—an election, a war, a moral argument—and disappears into the quiet margins where yesterday’s figures slowly fade. The public moves on. The moral urgency of the moment dissolves into what might be called moral fatigue. Outrage that once seemed unstoppable becomes background noise. A new crisis appears, and the world’s attention shifts.

Once this fatigue sets in, comebacks are difficult. The audience that once cared has already drifted elsewhere. The stage has changed. Most players who attempt to return find that the moment that once belonged to them has passed.

Yet every so often a different pattern appears.

Occasionally a figure loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for the moral tide itself to turn. When that happens, what looked like defeat begins to resemble something else entirely.

Kofi Annan offers one of the most intriguing examples of this phenomenon.

In 2003 the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. The invasion was justified by a mixture of strategic arguments, intelligence claims, and moral rhetoric about tyranny and liberation. In Washington and London the momentum of the moment was overwhelming. The war was framed as both necessary and inevitable.

The United Nations, by contrast, found itself sidelined. Annan, then serving as Secretary-General, watched as the institution he led was bypassed by the coalition preparing for war. The moment belonged to the advocates of intervention—particularly the group of American policy thinkers who had spent years arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

At the time, it was not at all clear who would ultimately win the argument. What was clear was that the United Nations had lost the immediate struggle for influence. The invasion proceeded without explicit UN authorization, and the diplomatic machinery that Annan represented appeared powerless to prevent it.

The moral emergency that had animated the debate quickly hardened into geopolitical reality.

Then, in September 2004, Annan said something remarkable. In a BBC interview he stated plainly that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law.

It was an extraordinary declaration. Rarely does a sitting Secretary-General of the United Nations describe the actions of the world’s most powerful government in such blunt terms. Yet the statement did not produce the dramatic reversal one might imagine. The war continued. Washington and London dismissed the criticism. The machinery of global politics moved forward largely unchanged.

In the short term, Annan had lost the battle.

And the personal toll of that moment appears to have been considerable. In his biography there is a striking image from this period: Annan alone in his darkened living room, unable for a time to rise from the floor. The room itself reportedly kept in near darkness. It was not exactly depression, at least not in the clinical sense, but something close to exhaustion after a prolonged moral struggle that had failed to alter events.

It is a haunting scene. One of the most powerful diplomats in the world sitting on the floor of a dark room, confronting the limits of his influence.

At that moment, the story of Kofi Annan could easily have ended as the story of a failed comeback. A leader who tried to reassert the moral authority of international law and found that the world had already moved on.

But history has a way of rearranging the meaning of certain moments.

As the years passed, the Iraq War came to be widely regarded as a profound strategic and humanitarian mistake. The claims that had justified the invasion collapsed. The war itself destabilized the region and reshaped global politics in ways that few of its original advocates had anticipated.

Gradually, the moral argument that Annan had made—quietly but firmly—became the prevailing historical judgment.

After leaving the United Nations, Annan did not retreat entirely from public life. Instead he reappeared in a different role as a member of The Elders, a group of former statesmen attempting to exert moral influence outside formal political structures.

It was a curious transformation. No longer the head of the UN, Annan had less formal power than he once possessed. Yet his voice now carried a different kind of authority—the authority of someone who had remained in the arena long enough for events to vindicate his judgment.

By the end of his life, the moral verdict on the Iraq War had shifted decisively. Few serious observers still defended the intervention with the confidence that characterized the early years of the conflict. The consensus had moved, slowly but unmistakably, toward the position Annan had articulated when it mattered least.

In this sense, his career offers an unusual example in the history of comebacks.

He lost the battle.
But he may have won the argument.

That distinction matters.

Most political figures attempt comebacks by trying to reclaim the exact moment they once dominated. They want the same stage, the same audience, the same authority. When the moment has passed, the comeback fails.

Annan’s story suggests a different possibility. Sometimes the moral argument itself continues moving through history long after the political battle appears settled. If a leader remains present long enough, the tide may eventually turn.

Which leads to a simple but revealing observation about great players in any arena.

A truly great player is never entirely out of the game.

The moment may pass. The audience may drift away. But if the underlying argument proves sound, history itself has a way of reopening the field.

And when it does, the comeback is already underway.

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On Transference in Artistic Collaboration

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
With the beat in now…
And your chest came out
’Cause you weren’t too scared.

Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”

There is transference.
There just is.

Matthew Thomas

I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal

It’s real because it’s grounded.
It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.

That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.

In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.

But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.

What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.

The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent.
It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive.
It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.

And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:

We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.

We remain in our own psyches.
We allow resonance without fusion.
We allow voltage without blur.
We allow openness without myth-making.

This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.

In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.

History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.

That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.

The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.

But the boundary holds.

Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.

Openness with form.
Exposure with spine.
Laid open, but not laid bare.

This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.

The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.

And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.

This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.

Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…

Openness is not the danger.
Losing oneself inside openness is.

This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:

Can I remain open without giving myself away?
Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny?
Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it?
Can I collaborate without collapsing?
Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?

The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.

Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.

Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.

The adult self leads.
The trio leads.
The work leads.

And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:

What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?

That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.

Dedication

For the collaborators:
the drifters,
the drop-ins,
the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.

You keep the corners loose
and the truth a little crooked.
My kind of people.

Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.

Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale