The Human Chicken Farm

On the first day of the 3rd millennium, January 1, the year 2000, the NYPD responded to a call about a doomsday cult committing a mass suicide in an underground bunker in New York City. This cult was thought to be connected to Y2K, the idea that all computers would reset at midnight due to a programming bug and plunge us into a new dark age. Spoiler: it didn’t happen. But what the NYPD found in this bunker was even stranger than a doomsday suicide cult.

What the police found was a simulation of ordinary civilisation wired up with hundreds of cameras and watched by an unseen mastermind: a dining hall, a shower room, a church/temple, a gun range with hundreds of guns, and a ‘pod-hotel’ where occupants lived in bunkbeds wired up with webcams and TV monitors where they could watch one another 24/7. This bunker was not a doomsday cult but rather an unregulated experiment by an eccentric Web 1.0 millionaire called Josh Harris.

Josh Harris is allegedly the first internet pioneer to make a million dollars in New York City off the internet. He made his millions with a digital advertising company called Jupitor Communications, which he sold for 85 million dollars, and then plunged all his money into this series of bizarre experiments/performance art pieces. He started the first internet television website called ‘pseudo.dot.com’, which was an early forerunner of YouTube. The point of the experiments was probing what life would be like once this technology got better and we would be online all the time. This particular experiment in the bunker was called ‘Quiet: We Live in Public’, and there’s a great documentary by the same name if you are interested, and it was billed as an experiment in ‘future living’ or life under ‘internet conditions’. Harris really understood digital technology and what life would be like once this technology got better.

So in the experiment, he got one hundred volunteers, mostly artists and creative types, and subjected them all to a 323-questionnaire psychological evaluation to map out their fears, hopes, histories, and traumas, whether they were an addict, whether their parents divorced, whether they were religious, etc., to identify what buttons to press to manipulate them for the cameras in the bunker. He actually hired a Middle Eastern interrogation expert and psychologists to try and psychologically break the participants during the experiment.

Everyone was recorded in the bunker 24/7 by over 100 cameras, even in showers, toilets, etc., and they could watch each other on the TV monitors. Everything was free—the food, accommodation, and guns, except the video footage, that Harris owned. Their lodgings were also based on how interesting they were on camera; basically, the more interesting citizens got better lodgings, and any that were boring or too moral got the boot from the experiment. It was natural selection of the biggest attention seekers. Harris created a high-drama, high-chaos environment and then profits from the resulting spectacle.

As you can imagine, the wheels came off pretty quickly. – sex, violence, and people constantly performing for the camera’s reported losing all sense of who they were, like puppets on a string and feeling incredibly lonely despite being surrounded by people. As Harris says in the documentary, the more you get to know people in this space, the more lonely you feel. The only moral norm in the bunker was left to be interesting on video, and as one participant described the whole thing, ‘The absolute freedom turned them all into beasts.’ Another participant described life in the bunker as somewhere between a 70s commune and a fascist surveillance police state, which is as good a description of the internet as you’re going to get.

So despite getting shut down on New Year’s Day, the experiment confirmed Josh’s theory that by setting up the environment with technology, you could exploit the human need for connection and attention and basically get people to do anything. As one organiser described, ‘If you walk up to someone and say take off your pants – they won’t do it, but if you walk up with a video camera and say, ‘Take off your pants,’ they’ll do it.’ The camera holds the power of the audience, and I think in a world without God, the audience is as close as you get.

Harris recognised that a generation of young people who grew up watching TV, at some point, would want to be in the TV and that the internet was going to make this possible, and that once we went into the TV it might not be so easy to get out. As he says in the documentary, “Andy Warhol was wrong; people don’t want 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime, they want it every day.” So in this experiment, Harris basically predicted life in the digital age under social media.

By offering everyone the opportunity to become a celebrity and to get an audience, whoever created the digital world would hold the keys to modern people’s deepest desire—to be seen and to be loved. Harris correctly saw we were heading into a world where a person’s value would be determined by how many people would be willing to watch them on a screen, and he saw the best place to be in this coming world was not in fact the one on the screen or the one watching the screen, but the one behind the screen pulling the strings. Harris actually told this to CBS during a television interview, saying the internet would beat the legacy media because they would be the ones ‘programming people’s lives’.

So after this experiment, he did one more where he invented the entire concept of live-streaming in the early 2000s, filming every moment of his and his girlfriend’s life. But then he disappears; first he buys an apple farm, and then he moves to Ethiopia. Then the documentary is released in 2009; he came back on the scene in the 2010s, talking about a new prediction for the future, which he relates to AI and the singularity, but which he argues is the technological endgame of this whole thing, what he calls ‘the human chicken farm’.

In the quiet experiment he showed how networked living, where everyone was always connected, turned people into a human hive, destroying their individual conscience and hence their ability to control their behaviour, but that this isn’t the end point of the technological system. He says the endgame is that in the same way that chicken farmers control the lights and artificial environment of a factory farm to grow optimal chickens for slaughter, with a completely networked society, this could now be done to human beings. I think what he’s talking about is the same thing as what Paul Kingsnorth calls the machine, but what he is describing is how the machine is shaping the scope of our moral imaginations. As Harris says in the documentary, “World War 2 was the most important event of the last century, and the most important event of the next century will be World War 3, and it will be man against machine.”

He made this prediction in 2016, ten years ago. According to my research, he was right. Technology seized the means of human production. As Harris predicted, the technology got better and better; high-speed internet, smartphones, and social media made it possible to always be online, and for the values and standards of those who created the digital worlds became the standards by which we live our lives under internet conditions. This is a profound, albeit silent, revolution. While Harris had people dancing for their crumbs of attention in that underground bunker in the year 2000, one need only open their phone today to see millions dancing for their rations of attention all over the world. A tiny number of companies seized the means of media distribution in the new media environment and hence determined what people see and hence who they become.

I have argued elsewhere that this was the AI apocalypse and that it already happened, when we moved from a culture curated by human judgement to a culture curated by machine learning algorithms. This is a profound transformation, and it means the values of the authors’ virtual worlds leapfrogged the non-virtual world, which happened so seamlessly hardly anyone noticed. Yet, at the same time, everyone knows something is wrong, something fundamental has changed, and as is frequently said online, ‘the world you grew up in no longer exists.’ I think Harris is right; we are already in the chicken farm, and as he argued, the door is rapidly closing behind us.

The Closing Door

What would it mean by the door of the chicken farm to close on us permanently? For us to become trapped in the machine for good? Harris himself relates this idea that we are approaching a kind of event horizon with the machine in the AI singularity. That once they make an AGI that can recursively self-improve, it will just turbo-charge its own intelligence, and we’ll be helpless, and it’ll either vaporise us or put us in a human zoo or something. But I think this is nonsense. It’ll be interesting to see if the non-profitable AI companies continue with this rhetoric after their trillion-dollar IPOs (or if their bubble bursts first), but that’s maybe a different story.

But if you accept my hypothesis that under conditions of digital culture we are indeed in the human chicken farm culturally at this point, there is another way the door could close on us for good. This is what I call in my research the ‘vicious feedback cycle of moral degradation’. In brief, the technological system, digital culture, automates sin and vice for profit; people who sin and develop vices get rewarded socially, so other people copy these behaviours to get the same rewards, and basically human character goes to hell in a handbasket. It’s like a mimetic behavioural disease, where moral failures are rewarded and hence maximised. There is something incredibly demonic to this as well, by the way, like the automation of sin is basically building a highway to hell. But again, I’m optimistic, so I think this is going to backfire in the long run, which I will talk about in the next section.

So in my research, I frame the internet as a ‘formative technology’. In other words, the point of the internet is to form desires and interests in the user that they didn’t have before using the internet. If you have a hoover to clean the house, the hoover helps you achieve your goal of cleaning more efficently. But the hoover doesn’t try and give you new goals. But on the internet, while messaging and posting, consuming, etc., this cognitive scaffolding is trying to change the goals which you are pursuing during the interaction, to goals that are more suited to whoever is paying the highest price. The economic reason for this formative mission is the advertising business model.

The Web 1.0 guys, like Josh Harris, went bankrupt after the dot-com bubble in 2001 because a lot of money was pumped into the internet but they didn’t have the business model to generate enough revenue to pay back the investors. The internet always had this business model problem: how were they going to make money on this thing? It’s amazing; it’s going to change everything, but where is the money coming from? So in Web 1.0, when the investors wanted their money back, it was game over. But the next generation of Web 2.0 companies, like Google, Meta, etc., solved this business problem of how to make money with the internet through advertising.

And there’s an ideological component to all this. Jaron Lanier, inventor of virtual reality, argues a lot of these internet pioneers were hippies, albeit not the Woodstock hippies but computer hippies (the internet also started in the 60s/70s). So they wanted information to be free but also needed tonnes of money to build this computer utopia, and so advertising was the compromise. You give the digital world to users for free, and you profit from the advertisers on the backend. But as Ethan Zuckmann, the inventor of the pop-up ad, said, this business model is the ‘original sin’ of the internet. Due to this business model, the user of the internet isn’t the customer; the advertiser is the customer, and hence, the users’ behaviour is the product. As often said today, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. And as Jaron Lanier puts it, the product the social media companies are selling is the gradual, imperceptible change in your action and perception. ‘ (He describes these Web 2.0 companies as behavioural modification empires).

So this combination of digital technology and advertising creates a race to develop the most powerful technologies for influencing human behaviour ever created. How do they do this? The same way Harris did in the Quiet experiment, you map out people’s personalities and histories and use that information, delivered through an apparently neutral environment, to adaptively influence the user. So the digital medium evolved not to serve the users but to serve advertisers; the money earned was reinvested not into the content but into making the medium better at modifying behaviour.

They borrow a lot of these behavioural design techniques from 20th-century behaviourist psychology like B.F. Skinner. Skinner famously came up with the ‘Skinner box’, or ‘operant conditioning chamber’, which was a controlled environment (often a box) where an animal is rewarded for taking the actions the experimenter wants and punished for taking those the experimenter doesn’t want. Over time the animal is conditioned by the system of rewards and punishments to behave the way the experimenter wants the animal to behave. Using this simple reinforcement learning mechanism, Skinner could get pigeons to play ping pong and guide missiles. If you are interested in how they do this, a great and disturbing book is ‘Hooked’, by a guy called Nir Eyal, who studied at the Stanford Behavioural Design Lab.

Again, we’re thinking about the chicken farm; the farmers have set up this behavioural factory to reward users for engagement (posting, liking, commenting)—basically anything that keeps you in the digital world—and then punishment for not participating, like FOMO, not getting likes, social failure, ostracisation, etc. Over time, the more you participate in that culture and come to internalise those standards and look at your own life through those standards, the better a user you are for them. The scope of the users’ moral imagination comes to be determined by the technological environment.

A good example of this was in Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary; he interviews a streamer, HS TIKKY TOKKY, and asks him, ‘Why don’t you just do good things online?’And HS’s reply was, “If I just done good things, I would never have blown up on social media in the first place.” The standards of the digital attention game have trumped his own conscience basically. But at least he’s still kind of aware that there’s a difference between the good and successful online, but that might not be the case for long.

In a way the digital culture, like the bunker, is simply doing what every culture does; it rewards behaviours the social order wants and punishes behaviours it doesn’t want. In offline cultures this would be the law: if you kill or steal, you go to jail, which is a punishment. But the problem is in the digital world it is rewarding behaviours that would have been considered wantonly immoral even just a few years ago – rewarding lust, greed, gluttony, envy, wrath, and pride; sin-maxxing. It’s also doing so with automated technology rather than human judgement, and I suspect it’s easier to optimise for vices because they have a clear utility function and hence are easier to code (and more profitable).

The companies with the advertising business model have hard-coded this morality into their platforms and automated it across billions of people in a way that is beyond any legal system, and so functions as the de facto laws and norms of the virtual world. What are the consequences of this new digital culture? In these virtual worlds, like the bunker, if the only norm is to get attention, then moral norms and taboos become frontiers for attracting and gaining more attention. An example of this would be Bonnie Bleu, who received an absurd amount of attention and a Channel 4 documentary for having sex with one thousand men in a day. Even secular people recognise these types of things are bringing us closer to the wraith of God. But because of this attentional system, it actually makes sense to do this kind of stunt; Bonnie Bleu is a product of this attentional system.

In my thesis, I compare this digital attentional architecture to the Roman Colosseum. When it first opens, seeing one guy fight another is exciting, but then it has to be two versus one, and then a one versus a lion, and then you’re having pitched sea battles and killing thousands in grotesque theatrical executions. It’s built into the human reward system in the brain that adapts to thrills, and so what was thrilling becomes boring, and so you have to go to something more thrilling to up the ante, what is called ‘hedonic adaptation’. It’s the basis of addiction and the ramping up of addiction. When you operate in hedonism, you end up without surpassing moral norms in the pursuit of thrills. You get caught in this vicious feedback cycle basically where the desires ramp up until you then do cross moral boundaries, which you may not have been aware of. But because people are competing in the digital colosseum, what’s successful gets more extreme, other people copy those who succeed at getting attention, and the whole thing tilts towards crazy town. This is the start of the vicious feedback cycle of moral degradation.

So rather than a rogue AI turning us all into human soup, what I think the door of the chicken farm closing would be is when the collective scope of our human moral imagination comes to be determined by this attention machine. When the machine becomes the dominant formative power of forging the consciences of future generations. Because then we wouldn’t even know what we have lost – we play the game to win and in winning, we lose, because it was not the right game to be playing in the first place. Success in this cultural regime leads to moral corruption and that is a game ender.

And yet, with all that being said, I’m incredibly optimistic. The important thing is we are not chickens in a farm or rats in a lab; we are human beings made in the image of God with free will. So in the final section, I’m going to talk about the ‘silver lining’ of the chicken farm, and I like that metaphor because a silver lining comes when we see the light of the sun shining through the edges of a dark cloud. And the silver lining only happens because dark clouds don’t destroy the sun; the sun, as Dante and Plato employ, is often a metaphor for God. So I don’t think the machine or the chicken farm can destroy God, or change good to evil or evil to good and and so the project is destined for failure. Another Tower of Babel, we will get to watch falling in realtime.

The Silver Lining of the Chicken Farm

So there is an irony here, that without the internet, something that I have essentially claimed to be evil, I wouldn’t be a Christian. I wouldn’t know God, and hence reality. The silver lining of the chicken farm, because we are not chickens— as this corrupt system is so obviously closing around us and basic morals are degrading, we start to look around for the truth and for a better way of life. And I actually think this is going to result in some tremendously positive outcomes: (1) the end of secularism, (2) a return to education as the cultivation of virtue, and (3) we will see digital saints emerging within the machine.

(1) The end of secularism.

This is actually how I finish my PhD thesis. So basically because with this technological system we have the most powerful formative technology ever invented and that it’s orientated the wrong way, the reality of human moral deformation or moral degradation is going to become super obvious. The laissez-faire relativism that purveyed reasonable, stable, secular societies isn’t going to be tenable under this new technological system. I think we already see this in the re-tribalisation as people search for coherent moral communities within the fragmentation.

Secularism traded on some vague generalities like ‘We all know what a human is’ and ‘We all know what it means to be a good person.’ But as the internet brings the fringe, weird values, and ideas into the centre stage, we must again be very clear on what a human is (anthropology) and hence what a human being should be (morality). Secular society, or liquid modernity as it is called, is probably singularly defined by giving up trying to answer these questions, and instead attempting to broker a neutral ground. Unfortunately, this neutral ground is precisely what has allowed for the behavioural modification empires to rise up and start influencing everyone’s actions for profit.

I think it’s why Pope Leo has become a bit of a superstar even in the secular world because he can make clear pronouncements like AI is not a person, it’s not made in the image of God, and it’s not creative because of Catholic anthropology and morality. While many in secular society might feel that they are different to a machine or that humanity has intrinsic value, there is no real secular worldview to cache out those moral intuitions. From the perspective of materialism, we’re all biological machines, so why wouldn’t an AI be conscious like us and get human rights? What’s the difference between us and them if we are both purely material creatures? In this way, the technology is forcing the issue on these deeper ontological and moral questions that secular society attempted to relegate to the rearview mirror. But that’s just not possible anymore in the world we are heading into.

(2) A Return to Education as the Cultivation of Virtue.

Again, as pointed out, this misaligned formative power has been unleashed on the world, and we are seeing the bad fruits in young people, Jonathan Haidt’s work on the ‘anxious generation’. So as cultures, we will need to get really serious about human moral formation again and quickly; we don’t have a lot of time to shift on this path. I think this is going to precipitate a more intentional education that has to focus on human formation and the cultivation of virtues. Again, a machine that automates vices, and this will become really obvious, so the counteraction to that is spaces of profound human formation.

Ironically, the liberal arts, or humanities, are going to go up massively in importance because of this. The importance of training attention, which we would see in monastic traditions and eastern dojos, needs to become a central focus in the current digital environment. This is the answer to the bad attention environment: environments that train attention, like monasteries for laypeople. The Greeks had a word for this type of education, ‘Paideia’. It doesn’t have a good translation into English; the German ‘Bildung’ is probably closer, but it’s education, not as the transmission of information but as the holistic cultivation of mind, body, and soul.

(3) We will see digital saints emerging within the machine.

So finally, I think the last positive outcome of the chicken farm is an unintended evangelical opportunity to reach people with the gospel who were unreachable, like myself. In the parable of the Sower, Christ tells us that to receive the seed of the word and for the word to grow within us, we must be the right kind of soil—not too hard so that the word stays on the surface and gets eaten by the birds, or too soft so that the word takes root but the plant falls over and dies, but to be good soil for the word to land and grow and flourish. And I think the tremendous irony of the human chicken farm is that it’s creating some incredible soil for the planting of the word of God. I think we are already seeing some of the fruits of that in the conversions of young people around the world.

Clement of Alexandria, the great catechist, argued a Christian convert needs two things: a desire for the truth and a desire for a better way of life. If you don’t desire the truth and you’re happy with your way of life, you lack the motivation to weather the hardships necessary for the Christian life (or indeed the life of virtue). But life under digital conditions is so confusing and unsatisfying that way more people are in that state and looking for something better. And even if they are as bigoted and biased as I was against Christianity and the Catholic Church, if you search for the truth, it leads to Christ. And so there’s a profound opportunity to reach people who were unreachable before as they fall out of the secular life under digital conditions and begin trying to grapple with reality.

This leads to the importance of digital evangelisation, or communicating the gospel in the digital world. Genuinely holy people, with virtues and wisdom, can employ the formative power of the technology for good, albeit with some caveats (mainly it can’t stay on the internet). When people are looking for answers, they’ll go to the internet, and so it’s important they encounter people like Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Pageau, Fr Mike Smitz and the many other Christians working online. I think Christians have a responsibility to be in the digital colosseum and to educate and guide those falling out of the secular worldview seeking truth, goodness and beauty. I believe in a rather humorous twist: the machine that was made for programming people’s lives can be co-opted by Christians to spread the love of Christ. It might be the greatest reversal since the baptism of the Roman Empire!

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have been placed in the human chicken farm by forces beyond our control. But what is under control is how we act and what we love within that system. The Hebrew word for attention is ‘lasim lev’, which means ‘to put your heart’, meaning what you attend to is where you place your heart, what you love. If we pay attention to our own attention, we can derive what is truly of value to us, what we truly love. Often times, that can be a frightful realisation, that we are in fact lovers of money or pleasure or honor, rather than God and wisdom and virtue.

But this moral attention is also the pathway to re-orienting your heart from darkness to light. The desert fathers called this process the ‘battle of heart’, through struggling against the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. Sure these opponents have some new high-tech toys in the attention economy but the fight remains the same: the timeless battle of good and evil within each of our own hearts. They can’t make you love them. The fight takes place on the threshing floor of your own soul, the stories you tell yourself, the perceptions and thoughts you allow take root in your mind, the way of life you pursue, and the way of life you ignore. What you allow into the citadel of your soul, as a Pierre Hadot dscribes it.

The 21st century is a kairotic moment, a moment of judgement, where our souls will be x-rayed by super-computers and our vices and character flaws seized upon for profit and for power by algorithms with a renewed vigor, the like of which the world has never seen. But at the same time, this challenge calls forth from us a renewed attention on asceticism, purification, discernment, wisdom, temperance, love, and all the virtues, both human and heavenly. To misquote Dickens, ‘it was the worst of times, it was the best of times’. As I often try and remind myself these days: the bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward, and the reward for fighting and winning the battle of the heart is the best one possible. As Christ himself tells us, ‘the pure of heart shall see God’.

Peco and his wife, , are the creators and lead authors of both ‘Pilgrims in the Machine’ and ‘School of the Unconformed’. In my opinion, two of the best publications out there on how to live in a world rapidly changing due to emerging technologies! These publications are a constant source of inspiration for analogue living and a lighthouse for human values online. Truly, they are doing the Lord’s work.

In this interview, we are discussing Peco’s new sci-fi thriller ‘The Last Upheaval’. We focus on the main themes explored in the book: God, family, relationships in a fractured world, and how to remain human in the machine.

After reading an advanced copy of the book, I can confidently say it is the ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World’ for our current troubled times. But while Orwell and Huxley had the luxury of chronological distance to their hypothesised future dystopias, Gaskovski has hit a buzzer beater and captured our strange civilisational decline in real time! Despite the heavy material, the book never feels hopeless or despondent. Peco’s unique ability to blend big ideas and humour and humanity into an engaging and exciting story keeps you coming back for more and makes ‘The Last Upheaval’ a must-read for anyone who is still awake, upright and literate today. It is a relatable, enlightening, and edifying tale, and the main character is named after Plato’s uncle Solon, so obviously, I’m in.

If you are interested, collect your copy here 👉 https://www.amazon.ie/Last-Upheaval-Peco-Gaskovski/dp/1988604249

Barnes and Noble link: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-upheaval-peco-gaskovski/1151382351?ean=9781988604244

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to The Last Upheaval and its themes
01:03 What is the last upheaval in the novel: a cyber attack
02:07 Exploring the human element in societal collapse
02:54 Current civilizational moment and technological influences
05:09 Narratives around AI and their societal impact
07:21 The religious roots of technological eschatology
08:53 The infrastructure built by digital technology and its implications
10:29 Offloading human cognition onto AI and its risks
12:02 The decline of human skills and virtues in the digital age
15:00 Relational debt and AI's impact on human relationships
16:40 The social and emotional effects of AI relationships
18:20 The subtle ways AI creates dependency and relational shifts
20:12 The slow erosion of human competence and character
22:53 The challenges of governance and ethical AI development
24:19 Environmental and energy concerns related to AI and societal collapse
26:38 Balancing technological progress with human resilience
28:52 The return to community, family, and faith as a solution
30:28 Practical ways to stay human in a digital world
33:22 The importance of social trust and relationships
35:37 The Christian worldview and divine anthropology
39:38 Love, virtue, and the Christian model of human relationships
44:23 The necessity of conflict and difficult conversations in love
48:42 Building resilient communities through faith and family
55:51 The role of education and homeschooling in resilience
58:39 The future of education and AI's impact on learning

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Welcome to Raise the Cross on Substack. Let me walk you through what you’ll find here.

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• From Radical Atheist to Catholic (my story)

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Essays and Podcasts on Post-secular Christianity

• One Year as a Catholic

• Dr Zachary Porcu: How to De-secularise your mind

• Robert Nugent: Signs of Renewal in the Irish Church

• Mark Walsh: Trauma Psychologist Returns to the Church

• J.P Marceau: The Holy and Unholy Spirits of Modernity

• Paula Kelleher: From Feminism to Faith

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Mahon’s Essays on the Meaning Crisis

• The Complete Guide to Meaning in Life

• Dimensions of Meaning in Life: Depth

• Dimensions of Meaning in Life: Significance

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• Philosophical Guide to Self-Development (Part 12)

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• Carl Jung, Pinocchio and Self-Realisation (Part 8)

• Plotinus, Neo-Platonism and Narcissism (Part 7)

• Stoicism, Discipline & Inner Peace (part 6)

• Aristotle, Rationality and Living up to Your Potential (part 5)

• Socrates, Plato and Self-Transformation (part 4)

• The Meaning Crisis and Narrative Part 3

• Virtue Ethics (part 2)

• Attention (Part 1)

The Meaning Crisis Dialogues

• Exploring Platonic Morphospace with DC Schindler and Michael Levin

• Brendan Graham Dempsey: Healing from the Meaning Crisis

• Addressing the Meaning Crisis with Floreology

• J.P Marceau: How Christianity solves the Meaning Crisis

• Mathew Segall: The Metaphysical Revolution in science

• D.C Schindler and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

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• Colin DeYoung and Adam Safron: Sam Harris is Wrong

• Adam Safron on the Cognitive Science of Free Will

• Rick Repetti: Robert Sapolski is Wrong

• Mathew Segall: Kant, Reality and Free-will

• Chris Mastropietro: Meaning and Mythology

• Rafe Kelley: Meaning and Martial Arts

• Dr Igor Grossman: The Science of Wisdom

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• Gregg Henriques: The Problem of Psychology

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Dialogues Against the Machine

• Paul Kingsnorth: How Humanity Beats the Machine

• Dr Iain McGilchrist: Why AI Won’t Save us

• DC Schindler: Escaping Plato’s Cave

• Alicia Jurraro: We are Not Machines

• R.B Griggs: A Universal Ethics for Technology

• Mark Miller and Ben White: How Social Media warps your Cognition

• John Verveake & Sam Tideman: Why Machines are Not Intelligent

• Sam Tideman: Why AGI is Not Possible

• Jelle Bruineberg: How Social Media Manipulates your Mind

• Sebastian Watzl: The Problems of Attention and Social Media

• Dr Zak Stein: Social Media and the Future of Education

Mahon’s Public Lectures

• God and the Machine Lecture: Is the Internet Helping to Spread Faith?

• The Thomistic Institute: The AI Apocolypse Already Happened

• The Catholic Solution to the Meaning Crisis

• The Ethical Issues of Social Media Companies’ Attention Business Model

• What is the Attention Economy? And why is it such a problem?

• Is Social Media Bad for Mental Health?

The Plato’s Republic Lecture Series

• Introduction to Plato and the Republic

• Essay: How Plato Solves the Meaning Crisis

• Book One: What is Justice

• Essay: Understanding the Nature of Justice

• Book Justice vs Injustice Two

• Essay: Is Justice Better than Injustice?

• Book Three: Education

• Essay: Education and the Nobel Lie

• Book Four: The Tripartite Psyche

• Book Five: Philosophy Kings Five

• Book Six: Understanding the Good

• Book Seven: The Cave

• Book Eight: How Democracy Becomes Tyranny

• Book Nine: Making a Tyrant

• Book Ten: The Myth of Er

Some Random Essays

• The intelligibility argument for God

• Why Ireland’s Hate Speech Bill Misses the Point

• Why are we obsessed with evil?

• Why Mind-Reading Leads to Hell

• Sacrificing the Drink for Something Better

• Hercules, Dopamine and Mental Health

• Why Conscience is a Super Power

• How Thoughts Create Emotions

• How I Overcame My Quarter-Life Crisis

• Why is the Modern World so Lonely?

• How to Save Young Men

Mahon’s Books

• The Man with a Mirror Face: A Collection of 12 Short Stories

• Waiting For The Offo (a Stageplay)

If you want to support Mahon’s work, consider subscribing, sharing the publication or becoming a patron

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I know I’m supposed to officially be on holiday for the month of September… But I got one final interview for y’all (if you are in the market for such a thing?).

Recently, had the opportunity to feature on David Cuddy’s highly celebrated podcast, ‘The Wood From The Trees’!

We discussed pretty much every topic under the sun, from faith and meaning to the afterlife and angels and demons, and consciousness and artificial intelligence – you know the standard things these days…

If you are interested, check it out below 👇

As mentioned in the previous email, I will be taking the month of September off this year to get married and finish my PhD!!!

I will be a philosophy doctor and husband next time you see me, all being well. We will be back in October time with a new philosophy series for the Substack, of course interviews with great guests and one super cool announcement that has been quite a long time in the making…

In the meantime, God bless and see you on the otherside!

Mahon.

We have finally arrived at the final lecture of the course on Plato’s Republic on book 10!!!

In this final lecture, we survey Plato’s ontological critique of imitative art, the paradoxical case of Plato's frequent use of images despite his critiques, his arguments for the immortality of the soul and, finally, the famous Myth of Er.

The Platonic case against AI Slop: https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/11/14/the-platonic-case-against-ai-slop/

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and Setup
00:17 Why Book Ten Exists
01:29 Being Versus Appearance
02:39 Art Third From Truth
05:16 Poets Without Knowledge
09:33 Redeeming Images
11:57 Myth of Er Begins
13:14 Choosing Next Lives
14:59 Lethe Rebirth and Wrap

FYI, this will be my last post until the end of September!

I am both getting married and finishing my PhD in the next month, so I’m going to take a back seat on the content until I emerge as a husband and a philosophy doctor.

However, we will be back come October time with some exciting announcements and additions to the future of the publication, so stay tuned and keep living the examined life in the meantime. 🍻

Best,

Mahon.

Over the summertime, I got the pleasure of kicking off the Irish Dominicans’ new Angelic Warfare Confraternity with a series of talks on ‘Digital Media and the Family’. Fr Maurice and I went on a tour around the four corners of Ireland, travelling to Cork, Dublin, Sligo and Newry and, despite the summer heatwave, managing to gather a great audience (check out the talk below)

The confraternity starts next weekend, so any father’s and sons aged 8 to 17 that are interested in taking on this challenge can sign up below 👇

Save your spot

History of the Confraternity

Every night before the talk, Fr Maurice told the story of the origins of the confraternity in the life of one St Thomas Aquinas. According to the legend, Aquinas family imprisoned him in order to prevent him from joining the Dominican Order, which was a comparatively poor religious order. His three brothers, who were all soldiers, kidnapped the angelic doctor and imprisoned him in the tower of Roccasecca Castle to coerce him into recounting his decision.

However, despite his imprisonment, Aquinas was unwilling to back down on his decision to join the Dominicans. So, running out of options, his brothers decided to hire a ‘woman of the evening’ and send her into the tower to break St Thomas’s vows of chastity. But rather than succumb to the temptation, when the woman entered the room, St Thomas took a poker from the fireplace and chased her from the room, branding a cross on the back of the wooden door. After he branded the cross, he knelt in prayer, and two angels appeared to him and placed a corded belt of purity around his waist. In reward for his rejection of this temptation, it was promised that St Thomas’s chastity would never be tempted again.

Based on this tale, in the 16th century, the confraternities began for laypeople to practise the virtue of chastity like St Thomas. It was popular in Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries post-Catholic emancipation. However, eventually the confraternity went cold and has since stopped in Ireland for many years. This 2026 event organised by Fr Maurice represents the re-ignition of the confraternity in Ireland to take on the challenge of virtue and purity today. The confraternity offers an amazing opportunity and guide for father’s and sons to take on a challenge together and grow in faith and virtue, in a culture that is pretty much dead set on the opposite…

Save your spot

The Virtue of Chastity

C.S. Lewis once quipped that ‘chastity is the most unpopular of all the Christian virtues’, which I’m sure most of us can empathise with. If chastity seems ‘old-fashioned’, ‘repressed’ or overly conservative, then you should consider reading some of Bishop Erik Varden’s magnum opus, ‘Chastity and Reconciliation of the Senses’:

‘...chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of the wholeness sought and healing found’ (Varden, 2023, 17).

In this book, Bishop Varden reframes the virtue of chastity not as a restrictive set of rules all about not doing something, but rather as a necessary practice for a life that is integrated, joyful and free. In other words, chastity is the equivalent for sexual drives that temperance is for eating – moderation leads to wholeness, happiness and the redirection of human energies in the right direction. It’s not about not doing something but about sacrificing a short-term pleasure for a long-term good:

‘Ordinarily we think of freedom as scope to do what we feel like. We think in terms of freedom from, not of freedom unto. In Christian terms, freedom is about enabling commitment. The Biblical view of human nature, evidenced in Christ, regards the human being as essentially relational, oblative and covenantal. On this account, unhindered pursuit of momentary inclinations is not freedom. It is enslavement to whim, which, empirically speaking, rarely produces lasting happiness. Sensational thrills can come of it, true, but they are not much of a foundation on which to construct a life’ (Varden, 2023, 113).

The Challenge: Industries of Sin

There is no shortage of industries today whose basic business models are the seven deadly sins, and lust might be the most profitable one there is. Lust is big business, especially in today’s world; it’s hard to avoid, and young boys who grow up in this world are totally unprepared to face the challenges of this new environment.

We desperately need social and educational institutions to prepare young men to face these challenges. But unfortunately in the secular world post-sexual revolution, regulating one’s appetites is seen as old-fashioned and repressed. This is the worst of both worlds: a massive increase in temptation and a massive deficit in the cultural and educational response…

Initiatives like the confraternity are incredibly important in filling this gap. To prevent young people from growing up as addicts by default. The government isn’t doing it; schools aren’t doing it, so the responsibility falls to parents and communities and parishes to develop these core skills necessary to grow up in the current environment.

A yearly pledge might seem like a small thing, but in the delicate process of growing up, it could make a big difference in a young man’s life – preventing access early is the key. So if you are a father with sons between the ages of 8 and 17, I highly encourage you to sign up for the confraternity and to fight back against the corruption of the human soul 👇

Join the fight

This book returns to the core question from Book 2: why the just person is happier than the unjust and whether the tyrant is wretched or blessed.

We will explain Plato’s account of how a tyrant develops from democratic permissiveness, losing the ability to distinguish necessary from unnecessary desires and becoming ruled by insatiable appetites, like someone living out the lawless impulses revealed in dreams.

The tyrant’s rise is enabled by a chaotic city, but his inner disorder makes him miserable, friendless, and unfree, contrasted with the philosopher-king who is ruled by reason. Mahon then outlines Plato’s further defences of justice: an argument from the tripartite soul and an argument about true vs illusory pleasures, culminating in the claim that justice is 729 times better than injustice.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and Series Context
00:16 Book Nine Big Question
01:37 Dreams and Lawless Desires
03:32 How a Tyrant Is Made
04:51 Tyrant’s Addictions and Misery
06:07 Political Rise of Tyranny
09:03 Tyrant vs Philosopher King
10:53 Tripartite Soul and True Judge
14:10 Real vs Illusory Pleasure
17:08 Dopamine Nation and Addiction
20:11 The 729 Times Proof
20:50 Conclusion: Justice Wins

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I recently got the opportunity to go on the ‘Reclaim the Faith’ podcast with John and Danielle and tell my conversion story from radical atheism to the Catholic church.

This interview is the most in-depth I’ve done on the various stages in that intellectual and emotional journey so far and so might offer some interesting insights to those who are on a spiritual journey themselves 👇

Best,

Mahon.

This interview has been a long time coming; I’ve always been a fan of Paul’s work, so it’s really great to get him on the pod for a chat on his latest book, ‘Against the Machine’.

Get 'Against the Machine'

In this episode we are discussing the history and concept of the machine, its spiritual and historical and philosophical roots, and most importantly, what a better story than the machine might look like? We explore how we return to tradition, our own conversion journeys, and how to counteract the dehumanising effects of modernity.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction and guest introduction
01:05 What is the machine? Its history and systemic nature
04:13 The spiritual and theological dimensions of the machine
08:40 The modern pursuit of power and the myth of progress
12:21 The fall, pride, and the desire to become gods
16:40 The technological religion and the quest for immortality
22:37 AI and the final stage of the machine
30:07 A better story: returning to roots and tradition
36:30 The Christian story, repentance, and living rightly
48:49 The role of the Eucharist and spiritual renewal
57:28 Conclusion: hope and returning to the eternal

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I recently got the great pleasure of being the inaugural guest on Fionn Curran’s new podcast, ‘The Tree of Life.’

Fionn is one of Ireland’s biggest and best DJs and music producers who is taking a bold step to start talking about meaning and faith and philosophy for young people in modern Ireland.

Tune into the conversation 👇

Chapters:

00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:40 Mahon’s Story
00:03:40 Faith in Ireland today
00:08:05 Nietzsche
00:10:23 Selfish desires vs Marriage
00:16:30 Jordan Peterson
00:22:23 Footballers & Showings of faith
00:25:00 Greek Philosophy
00:30:00 Protestantism & OCD
00:37:40 Embodying Christ
00:42:10 former IRA woman’s story
00:45:00 the crucifixion
00:55:00 Evangelizing and questioning religion
01:02:00 Jesus as the highest Ideal
01:06:00 Catholicism & Beauty
01:11:30 Prayer to finish

In this lecture, we will meet the five regimes: aristocracy (love of wisdom), timocracy (love of honor), oligarchy (love of money), democracy (love of freedom), and tyranny (love of gain). We will meet the five characters that both create and are created by these various regimes and depict the psychological portraits of their decline.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and Setup
00:16 Back to Republics Main Question
02:28 Five Regimes and Characters
04:46 Aristocracy Ideal State
05:39 Nuptial Number Mystery
07:11 Timocracy Honor and War
08:43 Timocratic Character
10:27 Oligarchy
12:07 Oligarchic Soul Split
13:15 Democracy
14:14 Democratic Decadence and Desire
15:19 Necessary vs Unnecessary Desires
18:48 From Democracy to Tyranny
19:29 Making a Tyrant
20:52 Wrap up

In the conversation we discuss Levin’s “Platonic Morphospace” research programme, which treats morphogenesis, physiology, and behaviour as pattern navigation by goal-directed cellular collectives. We discuss how these discoveries question the foundations of the mechanical philosophy for science and highlight alignments with neo-Platonic philosophy.

Mike's website: https://thoughtforms.life/
DC's books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/D.-C.-Schindler/author/B001JRTOAU

Chapters:

00:00 Introductions and Setup
00:29 Levin’s Big Questions
01:14 Patterns and Morphospace
03:21 Beyond Evolutionary Explanations
03:51 Synthetic Agents Xenobots
05:04 Minimal Computational Models
06:09 Actionable Research Program
08:02 Schindler’s Neoplatonic Lens
14:36 Machines Organicism Debate
19:19 Cognition as Continuum
22:03 Nonphysical Causation Example
25:15 Math Truths as Causal
28:35 Expanding Platonic Space
30:48 Forms Beyond Matter
31:29 Life Versus Death Question
33:03 Dog Corpse Thought Experiment
35:21 Operational Categories Spectrum
37:40 Death As Shrinking Agency
40:26 Hybrids Xenobots Blur Lines
41:46 Embryo Alignment And Goals
44:28 Soul As Organization Pattern
48:19 Transformation Models And Math
53:52 Phase Transitions Emergence Debate
58:07 Wrap Up Future Work

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We are back with a new podcast interview!

This week I am talking to Mark Walsh ( ⁨@FeralPhilosophy_mw⁩ ) - Mark is a globally recognised embodiment trainer, trauma educator, and author who has spent over 25 years dedicated to one mission: helping people get into their bodies and stay sane. Holding an honours degree in psychology from Leeds University and an Aikido black belt, Mark founded Europe’s first specialist embodiment training company and is widely regarded as a world leader in the field. He is the CEO of Embodiment Unlimited, founder of the Certificate of Embodiment Coaching (CEC). He has qualified over 2,000 coaches across more than 40 countries. Mark hosts The Embodiment Coaching Podcast with over 3 million downloads, and led the record-breaking Embodiment Conference — featuring 1,000 teachers and attended by over 500,000 delegates worldwide.

In this podcast, Mark shares his transformative journey through spirituality, embodiment, and the crisis of modernity and back to his Catholic roots. We explore the importance of tradition, morality, and community in restoring meaning and mental health in a fragmented world.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Mark Walsh and His Background
02:53 Exploring Spirituality and Family Influence
06:03 Navigating Nihilism and Materialism
09:00 The Role of Embodiment in Healing
11:57 The Search for Meaning in Modernity
14:53 Rituals, Liturgy, and the Body
18:01 Cultural Critique and the Absurdity of Modern Life
20:51 The Need for Boundaries in Society
23:53 The Future of Spirituality and Hope for the Younger Generation
31:07 The Role of Spirituality in Recovery and Society
32:01 Christianity and Modern Philosophies
33:13 The Balance of Kindness and Boundaries
34:41 The Crisis in Psychology and Therapy
36:35 Integrating Tradition and Modern Psychology
39:17 The Limitations of Modern Therapy
41:03 The Importance of Community and Nature
43:14 Rediscovering Meaning in Suffering
48:17 Humility and Tradition in Faith
51:37 Cultural Strategies for Change

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It’s been a while (I’m sorry) but the Plato’s Republic lectures are back!

Before the end of the year we will be getting through the last books 7-10, and if you want to catch up on the lectures so far here is the link:

Course Playlist

In this lecture on book 7 we will discuss the following:

• The Digression of books 5-6, including the images of the sun, divided line and the Cave.

• The cave as an image of education — reorienting the soul from shadows and appearances toward reality.

• Tracking the prisoner’s painful ascent from images to objects to intelligible forms and ultimately to the Good as the source of intelligibility.

• The return to the cave, where the enlightened person is mocked and potentially killed, linking this to Socrates’ fate.

• Drawing on John Vervaeke, Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age, and concepts like salience, enkrateia, and sophrosyne, framing the ascent as moral and attentional training.

• Finally, we compare the Cave Allegory to Social Media and The Matrix, comparing the modern and ancient perspectives on transcendance.

00:00 Lecture 7
00:22 Recap and Digression
05:41 Inside the Cave
10:51 Climbing to Sunlight
12:47 Divided Line Revisited
18:31 Source of Intelligibility
21:26 Return and Resistance
23:50 Axial Age and Two Worlds
27:11 How to leave the Cave
33:00 Social Media as the Cave
33:46 The Matrix Retells the Cave
39:15 Plato vs Matrix on Happiness

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Recently participated in a great interview with Dr Simon Ussher on understanding the meaning crisis and human flourishing!

His channel Floreology is dedicated to the science of human flourishing, and how it intersects with Christianity 👇

Best,

Mahon.

In this podcast, I talk to Dr. Zachary Porcu about his book, Journey to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age. We discuss why the modern secular worldview stops people from understanding ancient faiths, how Dr Zak explains these categories and concepts to his students, and the spiritual and ethical consequences of secularism.

Get the book: https://www.amazon.ie/Journey-Reality-Sacramental-Life-Secular/dp/1955890625

Get the course: https://zacharyporcu.substack.com/

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Journey to Reality
02:32 The Need for a Pre-Catechism
05:37 Understanding Religion and Worldviews
10:55 The Challenge of Changing Categories
15:44 Engaging with Cultural Contexts
19:16 The Role of the Internet in Faith
26:33 The Future of Catechism and Pre-Catechism
32:18 Exploring Orthodox Masterclasses
34:12 Practical Lifestyle Changes for Spiritual Growth
37:14 The Impact of Technology on Attention and Thought
40:50 The Dystopian Future of Technology and AI
46:49 The Church's Response to Secularization
50:17 The Meaning Crisis and Mental Health
54:27 The Shallow Nature of Modernity and Hedonism

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My Initial Doubts

When I set out to become a Catholic last year, I didn’t know what to expect.

Despite my acceptance of the Christian story, metaphysics and ethics, joining the Catholic Church as an Irish person was a whole level above (hence why I procrastinated getting baptised for the entirety of 2024). In my head I knew that the journey to God was not an intellectual exercise, and you had to participate in the sacraments and the life of the church to go on that journey. Yet, my heart was still divided on the church: the scandals, the stories of repression, death and decay – was it all a broken ruin worth turning your back on, like they said? And yet, to remain outside the church’s walls was to remain, in some sense, unfinished, like a spiritual Peter Pan?

The fact that finding a place to be baptised proved difficult and that the church had no standardised process for adults seeking baptism only compounded my doubts in early 2025 when I went seeking baptism – maybe this was not the true church? Surely the true church would have a big massive neon sign outside and pull you in like a magnetic tractor beam? And not be so difficult to join? Not to mention that when I did find a place to get baptised in Rathfarnham, and attended my first mass on that dreary January Wednesday morning, I was the only one in the pews below sixty years old.

That morning, I sloped down the back and sat by myself in the pew; that way, if the inspiration struck, the option was there to simply run out of the church and never come back again. But as the mass began and the rag-tag choir rose, composed of two elderly gentlemen in the front row, my soul was put at ease. The two men started a ghostly chant, and then the other parishioners broke in behind them, and the lilting melody of those aged Irish voices, melted away the icy fears that gripped my heart. Their faith, quiet as it was on that dreary Wednesday morning, shone through and moved me to the point of tears. I found that the spirit still burnt brightly in that humble place, and I concluded though scarred and wounded, embattled and bruised; the church was alive and singing.

Finding Faith and Faithlessness

Each time in the Catholic Church when I have opened a door expecting ruins and decay, I have found green growths of life and deep joy instead. My journey into the Catholic faith and the sacraments began with tension and trepidation, facing great resistance that blocked the bigger picture, like tunnelling through a cave with only the light of a lamp in front of you. But as the year has gone on, that narrow tunnel opened up into wider and wider caverns, filled with beauty and treasures and gold and rubies and gems and many others who were emerging from their respective tunnels, led by their own lights, to discover the same.

Throughout the year, there has been great joy in getting to know those who tend the treasures of the Catholic tradition and those who are just discovering them alike: the exuberant peace of a difficult confession, the feeling of Christmas day when queuing for communion, and the sound of a missing piece, one did not know one was missing, clicking into place. I came to the conclusion, it is this church and this tradition that is the heart modern Ireland is missing.

But this is where things get complicated again…

The joys of participating in the sacraments are like a delicious meal one has tasted, and so naturally, one wants to share the meal with other people. But unfortunately, what you learn then pretty quickly when you do try and share what you have discovered with others is that most people in Ireland hate the Catholic Church and religion in general (including Catholics). It’s a somewhat paralysing experience at first to find yourself suddenly transformed into the villain or a villain apologist in the unseen drama of another’s mind, when only a moment ago you were a friend or an ally. Paranoia can take hold, and it feels like a great chasm has opened between oneself and friends and family and modern culture and that you must now withdraw or exist on the margins or disappear completely.

It’s like one of those mythological stories, an inversion of Tír na nÓg, where you only walked into another room and then returned, but for everyone else, you’ve travelled a great distance and now stand on the opposite side of a gorge (’It’s like I don’t even know you anymore’). This is very hard to experience. You return with your excited news of a God still living, but those eyes that have not glimpsed the treasures for themselves regard you with the same story you did the church only a moment ago: the scandals, the stories of repression, death and decay, and a broken ruin worth turning your back on…

In my experience, after realising the absurd gap between the secular worldview and the sacred or sacramental worldview which I was participating in, one can get a sort of ‘world sickness’. The feeling of world sickness comes from being a convert and lurching between the secular and the sacred worlds like a seasick sailor. The two are so different you could end up with a kind of schizophrenia or a double life as a secular person and a practising Catholic under the cover of darkness – how do you marry up the two worlds? Is it even possible?

At first frequently, I was ranting and raving at people, arguing about complex theology and metaphysics over brunch and generally alienating people. This confusion even resulted in some sin on my part: bitterness and enmity in my heart, which I had to confess. When I went to confession, the priest asked me quizzically,

“Do you have cause to be around people like this often?”

And I had to laugh.

“Father, it’s the entire world that I live in…”

“That’s the way it is these days,” he explained.

The Need for De-Secularisation

A lot of the time this year, I felt yoked to two ships that were travelling in opposite directions. But like a dog with a bone, desperately I’ve been trying to find a bridge across this chasm to somehow reunite these two worlds so that they might even understand and talk sensibly to each other. In these attempts, and through the insight of Dr Zachary Porcu, I started to understand that prior to even considering joining the church, I’d undergone a long period of ‘de-secularisation’.

Through studying philosophy and the history of ideas, I’d been given a totally new set of categories to understand reality and through these new categories I was able to start grasping the sacred worldview, piece by piece. The problem is when you transition to a new worldview how quickly you forget the old one (and those who got you there, hence why Jordan Peterson was so easily defamed). Importantly, this de-secularisation took me over ten years! And I’m a pretty quick learner!

The vast majority of people that are part of the secular culture have not undergone this autodidactic ‘pre-catechism’ and so are working with an entirely different set of modern categories that preclude the sacred or sacramental worldview. So, I’ve started to chill basically and recognise that helping people firstly see the categories that are guiding their thinking and the alternatives and why the alternatives might be better than the former is deep and slow work that requires patience, understanding and compassion.

And importantly, this understanding has given me a kind of quiet underlying confidence because every bit of my mind was once composed of that secular worldview, and through pursuing the truth, I shed it like a snake shedding skin. I feel like I’ve run through this whole video game already and have then come back to people who are only at the beginning. Despite the many difficulties and the upward slope, if you persevere, I know where it ends: beyond modernity, with the capacity to grasp both the secular and the sacred worldviews.

In the meantime, there are many who are further along on this trajectory, who experienced the Jordan Peterson wave, symbolic world, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis etc., and so have de-secularised their minds enough to return to a living faith. And throughout the year, I’ve met more and more of these people who are being drawn by the light of truth, goodness and beauty in the great tradition. What at first seemed like only a few droplets has quickly become a stream and even at times threatens to turn into a roaring river. These prodigal sons and daughters are taking on a new apostolic mission to help the secular cross over from the derelict secular worldview, like they were helped themselves, and building many flotilla’s and channels and groups around this shared aim.

In quiet moments of great joy for me personally, the light in my own eyes has sparked enough curiosity in others to go and see the treasures for themselves, and then I get the great pleasure of seeing the light in their own eyes. Like the fading ripples of a pool made still, my own purpose has crystallised throughout this year as a go-between in this great transition or advent of the sacred, a philosophical ferryman of sorts, worldview middle management, who can attempt to stand in the tension between the secular and the sacred and hold a space for those who might cross.

Conclusion

If we had eyes to see and we could look up, we would see the cosmic wheels turning; we’d see we are in the lurch at the moment, coming down off a four-hundred-year binge on materialism that, in many places, is not yet over. The end of modernity will not be brief or clean, and the goods of the world will go on and on, but honestly, they aren’t all that good anyway. In that sense, the old saying is true: not all that glitters is gold. But also by contrast, not all that doesn’t glitter is not gold.

Modernity, if you will allow me to be reductive, is a critical age and has spent a great deal of time and intellectual resources heaping coal on the Catholic Church to dim the shine of its treasures. Therefore, as modern people, we see only through a glass darkly, dimly apprehending the glory of spiritual realities with our atrophied intellectual vision, like a light at the end of a dark tunnel that can be easily dismissed as an illusion or trickery. But as the soot comes off the great tradition, more and more will see the gold glittering and be called forth to participate in the supper of the Lamb. So you know, all hands to the wheel.

For all the grand narratives abounding for your attention at this transitory moment – transhumanism and the political and economic utopias – my vote goes to this ‘return to the roots’ paradigm. Not necessarily to go full Amish (although they might be onto something), but to return to your tradition with your newly minted bifocal vision: to be able to see both the secular and the sacred worldviews and thus participate fully in the deep moral transformation that is required of us: “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God” (Mathew 5:8), but also start to establish thriving post-secular christian communities, oriented around proper values like love, family, community - wouldn’t that be something?

In brief, I wasn’t sure about the Catholic church particularly in Ireland but after one year of investigation and participation I don’t have those doubts anymore. Sure there are difficulties, under staffing and short-comings, but in my experience if you are humble and willing to take on responsibility, those are gaps which young people are actually there to fill (i.e starting prayer groups, bringing other young people in, building communities etc) - in short, and you can imagine reading this in a John F Kennedy accent; “ask not what your parish can do for you, but of what you can do for your parish”.

The real question is, are you going to take my word for it? Or the secular story of decline and degeneration? Or are you going to go and see for yourself? Run the experiment: one year of ‘catholic-maxxing’ and let me know what you think.

I’m back with another podcast on the faith in Ireland/signs of renewal. This time I’m speaking with Robert Nugent from the Catholic Man YouTube channel.

In this podcast we discuss the resurgence of faith among young people, the importance of authentic community, and practical steps to renew the Catholic Church in Ireland. We also explore how the Holy Spirit is working silently amidst crises, the role of prayer groups, and innovative ways to foster faith in a modern context.

Key topics include:

• The rising interest in faith among Generation Z and the signs of renewal within the church

• The perceived crisis in the Catholic Church: challenges and signs of hope

• The role of community, prayer groups, and faith in action to foster spiritual growth

• Innovative approaches like faith-based pilgrimage walks and lay-led prayer groups

• The importance of spiritual mentorship, formation, and authentic friendship in faith development

• How Orthodox monastic traditions exemplify community and faith renewal in practice

• The need for modern digital strategies, such as QR codes and online faith formation, to connect with seekers

• The significance of sacramentally driven transformation—understanding theosis and spiritual purity

• Practical steps for integrating faith into everyday life: confession, prayer, humility, and community

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction and Personal Connections

02:32 The Resurgence of Faith Among Gen Z

07:16 The Role of Community in Faith Formation

11:51 Challenges in Engaging with the Church

11:56 Building Intentional Faith Communities

17:43 Learning from Other Faith Traditions

22:54 Building Community Through Faith

25:42 The Challenge of Faith Formation

27:47 Transformational Faith and Theosis

35:30 The Role of Sacraments in Transformation

41:20 The Importance of Humility in Faith

Best,

Mahon.

Howiyee!

There is a really cool event happening at Maynooth University this coming Saturday on 'Being Human in the Age of AI' (hosted by @ThomisticInstitute Ireland), and I wanted to share it with you in case you might be interested in joining us on the day?

Try peeping the lecture schedule:

• “I Compute, Therefore I Am”: The Distinctively Human in the Age of AI by Dr. Robert McNamara | 11:00 AM

• The AI Apocalypse Already Happened (and What You Can Do About It) by Mahon McCann | 2:30 PM

• Artificial Intelligence: A Theological Investigation by Fr. Ezra Sullivan, O.P. | 4:00 PM

The event is free to attend but you do need to register, though, to save your seat on the day, as numbers are limited 👇

https://thomisticinstitute.org/events/being-human-in-the-age-of-ai-symposium-ireland

Hopefully see you there!

Best,

Mahon.

In 2025, my friend Jacob, who’s been on the podcast numerous times, told me about his plans to host a summer Resonant Man retreat just outside London.

Unfortunately, couldn’t attend due to the timing but am super excited to join the ‘Summer Soulstice’ for the first time in 2026 at the beautiful Pitchcott Hill Farm.

It’s going to be a weekend of fun and festivities, and if you are a man and looking for a new adventure this summer, consider joining us the 19th to the 21st of June!

Save your spot

I will be hosting a martial arts workshop over the weekend, combining traditional Japanese Ninjutsu and Western Boxing, for a crash course in Celtic Ninja warrior training, and there are a bunch of other dynamite thinkers and speakers to look forward to!

If you might be interested but want to learn more, there will be a free info session this Thursday 8 pm Irish time 👇

Info session

Peace,

Mahon.