History on Jesan Sorrells's Blog

The Word 'Secular' Means Now

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:25:11 -0500

The word secular comes from a root that means “age,” “generation,” or “lifetime.” When it is put in front of another word, it indicates the power of the present and the immediacy of now.

For instance, the terms “secular traditions,” “secular morality,” or “secular thinking” are all indicative of traditions, morality, or thinking that is focused on the present time, without reference to the past.

If we are doyens of progress, and most of us, even the most religious of us, are, then usage of the word “secular” shouldn’t give us that much pause. But if we are doyens of tradition, family, community, or of ideas, themes, or myths that are from the past–and that have proved to be useful regardless of which time they come from–then perhaps our language should shift away from secular terminology and toward language that is more eternal.

Universal Basic Conflict

Fri, 01 May 2026 13:34:57 -0500

Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.

Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.

A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:

“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight

In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.

This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”

Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.

Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.

This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.

Moral Clarity in Confused Times

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:52:38 -0500

If we begin our thinking about an issue with what objective things we can know, the seduction of moral subjectivity is reduced in rhetorical power.

But, when we are bereft of moral clarity about what constitutes a lie, we are unable to individually, much less collectively, determine whether it’s a lie worth confronting (a big lie) or a lie worth letting slide (a small lie) for the sake of social lubrication.

Now there will be those who object. They will point out that “sin is sin, and a lie is a lie,” but these are the same people who don’t get invited back to Aunt Ruth’s house because they pointed out her obvious goiters and the warts and missed the larger importance of just hanging out and keeping silent. They confuse pointing out objective truths to elide truth from lies with what, in more polite times, would have just been called rudeness.

The liar always hates and fears one person most of all: himself. This is why he can’t keep his lies to himself. He has to share them with others. He also has to build a society based on lies to survive. The people who want blanket statements of truth in all circumstances also hate and fear themselves, but for reasons other than a lack of moral clarity. They simply lack moral critical thinking.

Free speech, moral clarity, and candor are the disinfectants for the scourge of lying in our times. But the tools have to be used to disinfect the culture of viruses while leaving behind the good cultural bacteria.

Liars' Poker

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:54:14 -0500

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a deeply pessimistic Russian writer with a streak of Orthodox Christianity that he could never reconcile with the 19th-century ideals of a mythical European rationalist utopian project, was also an inveterate gambler. This habit gave him a unique view on risk, loss, victory, and the thrills that can only emanate from the depths of resentment, envy, and anger. It also gave him insight into how individuals lie, how we lie to each other in social relationships, and how even the apparatus of the state can be corrupted by lying.

Dostoyevsky wrestled with all of this in a time before Freud’s insights into human psychology really got a hold of the Victorian mindset. His writing was positioned during a transitory era in the mid-19th century, before what we now know as “the modern world” began truly seeking the transcendent. Mostly self-published, Dostoyevsky was the anti-Tolstoy, penning The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and, notably, Notes From Underground.

The problem Dostoyevsky put his finger on in Notes From Underground, a rambling volume profiling the resentments of a dyspeptic and unreliable narrator, is that, while the individual liar needs a society to operate in (1984), a series of distractions to fool and narcotize himself and others (Brave New World), and the totalizing force of the state to ensure no one gets out of line and maintains the absurdity of the lies (Invitation to a Beheading), the liar can never fully escape the one person he hates and fears the most—himself.

And, since the moral courage to face himself is lacking, the liar–gambling on escape, social control, or command structures to do the work he cannot fully do himself–instead of abandoning his lies, spins the roulette wheel of philosophy and lands on nihilism, existential dread, or even a species of pet rational cynicism. Dostoyevsky knew that moral courage was the antidote to despair in a modern rationalist world, but he couldn’t figure out how to get people from the comfort of their intractable lies, or their adoption of alternative facts to soothe their moral turpitude, to the uncomfortable place where ultimate, knowable Truth resides.

We have the same problem with liars playing poker in our era. Except the liars are playing poker at a technological, social, and cultural scale that would be unfathomable to Dostoyevsky. And the problem can only be solved by each of us, individually, adopting the moral courage to say the Truth. The economist, author, and researcher Thomas Sowell once noted that, “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”

There’s no surer way to spread panic among a multitude of liars than to bet on the Truth.

Jazz for a Golden Age

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:37:36 -0500

The core idea behind the blues genre, what is commonly known as jazz, is that disparate people can come together to express their deepest emotions through a cooperative act of organic orchestration, while also improvising, picking up from each other the rhythmic thread, and grooving right along. This practice is, at its bottom, the entire American experiment, from 1776 until now, set to music. This is one of the many reasons why jazz is a uniquely American genre of music. Other countries have picked it up, but they’ve got to work at it.

But through the cultural flattening brought on by institutions at one end, and your neighbor endlessly posting highlight reels of their lives on social media, the last twenty-five years of culture in America have convinced us that we need to conform rather than stand out. Losing our collective jazz tuning and only hearing the music that the technological gatekeepers would rather play.

We are on the cusp of a new Golden Age, and it’s one where the soundtrack will be based on the blues. But in order to recover that soundtrack, in order to recover the blues–or jazz–in service of a new Golden Age, we must go back into the mid-20th century and revivify the musical bones of our long-dead, modernist grandfathers. The myth of return is indeed that, just a myth. But as a practical matter of course, the myth needs a soundtrack, and the toe-tapping improvisation of blues—or jazz—provides that.

...Can Tell You Everything Except What it Means

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:43:37 -0500

Rationalism, the idea that the material world can be understood in terms of the way objects and people behave without an appeal to the authority of a cosmic presence, has brought humanity a lot of good things: clean water, cleaner air, longer life spans, technological achievements our ancestors couldn’t have dreamt of, and better functioning systems of governance.

But rationalism has drained the world of meaning in a cosmic sense. When a society or civilization can’t hold on to the meaning of the acts it has accomplished, that civilization fails. Sometimes spectacularly. Sometimes with a whimper. But either way, civilizational failure is on the docket. This is because meaning is not imbued in the things we have as human beings, or even the life spans we live, or the systems we construct.

Meaning exists at a cosmic level and then filters down to us. It doesn’t start at the bottom and then rise up.

Being able to peel a layer from the great block of stone known as reality and figure some things out makes human beings arrogant and full of hubris. Pushing the materialist boundaries of reality further and further, and ignoring opportunities for finding and making meaning.

It is a long way back to meaning from the hubristic victories of materialist rationalism. But it’s a journey back worth making, when a society finally, collectively realizes that it can solve a lot of materialistic problems, but it has lost the words to describe what solving all those problems means at a cosmic level.

The Myth of the City

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:43:28 -0500

According to the writer and creator of the show, Yellowstone, he was told repeatedly by Hollywood executives when he was initially shopping the pitch of creating a show where most of the action occurred on a ranch in rural Montana, that, “We won’t pick up a show that pitches stories from rural areas. It’s been that way since the 1970s. We only pick up stories that we can market to the urban areas of the country.”

If this is an accurate anecdote, and memories of pitch meetings in Hollywood are notoriously full of holes, and Hollywood hagiography is its own form of storytelling, what it means is that for at least three generations in American popular culture, the myth of the city as the only place where “the action is” has been actively marketed over the reality we all live with in our lives.

That’s not to say that urban stories and myths aren’t part of the fabric of the American myth. They clearly are, all the way back to the Boston Tea Party. But it does open the door to thinking critically about how much of the post-modern mythos about the sexiness of urban living is just really marketing by Hollywood executives with a directive to follow from their immediate bosses.

Anchoring Gatekeeping

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:53:08 -0500

Publishing conspiracy theories online isn’t the only way to manipulate and direct an audience’s beliefs.

However, when what we’re reading online doesn’t match what we’re seeing in the rest of our lives, we still have to make a decision about what, or whom, to believe.

We all want our ways of looking at the world confirmed by people, institutions, and even systems. We want that because such confirmation builds trust. And without trust, all that results–in families, tribes, communities, neighborhoods, and even up to the level of nation-states–is suspicion, chaos, fear, and eventually, polarization, conflict, and battle.

Gatekeepers used to exist to maintain trust. In the coming future, where online content will become even more suspect and mistrusted, people who can successfully and consistently gatekeep reality itself will be sought out and trusted. This phenomenon will be less about who is “telling the truth” to power, to an opposing side in an argument, or even to reality itself, and it will be more about who has consistently been proven correct about the dichotomous nature of people, institutions, and even systems.

The people who are going to gatekeep reality in the future must anchor their gatekeeping to the Truth of the work in this fallen world of a transcendent God, in all of His Glory and Might.

Jesus is King. And that’s no conspiracy theory.

Apocalyptic Anxiety

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:34:14 -0500

In the Western world–and by that term I mean the countries that are heirs to the promises of the 18th Century Enlightenment project, including most of the countries of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and, of course, Japan and South Korea–anxiety about everything, everywhere always being in a state of dismal decline and ignominious ending is a common theme.

If we’re honest (which usually we’re not, as self-absorbed and blinkered as we are), such anxiety about an “always on the come” Apocalypse–whether personal or corporate, whether from Mother Nature or the Almighty God–is “baked in” to the behavioral pie of people of the West. From the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 to the current battles over whose politics get to rule the Internet, people in the West temperamentally love an argument, love having anxiety about conflict, and love the dynamism of not getting along with each other.

Even all the way to the point of an externally delivered, near Armageddon. Or at least, whatever will do until that Armageddon actually shows up.

And at the last minute, when the psychological barbarians are decamped at the gate, and the physical structures are about to be torn down by the literal barbarians, we people in the West, weirdly enough, come together, make a decision, and then proceed to move like white lightning, rampaging over all of the authoritarian, theocratic, non-Western, and, of course solidly unified “others.”

The strange thing is, we in the West have been engaged in that pattern of intercivilizational behavior for at least the last half a millennium with no foreseeable hitch in our step.

The fact of the matter is, the battle of Armageddon is always there to be joined. The Apocalypse of the righteous and the unrighteous alike is always upon us. The “end of all things” always shows up, like clockwork, in the minds of the anxious, the impatient, and the dissatisfied. What appears from the outside to be a state of endless chaos, fractious disunity, and an exploitable weakness, always–just in the nick of time usually–provides people in the West with the dynamism, unpredictability, and raw courage, at the tip of the spear, to do the thing that needs to be done, when all hope seems to be lost.

And then to return home–physically, psychologically, and even spiritually victorious–only to start bickering amongst ourselves yet again.

I don’t see the next 75 years of people in the West having any different pattern of behavior than they have exhibited in the last 500 years.

A Tweet is not a Vote

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:26:00 -0500

Sometimes people on the other side of an ideological, social, moral, or ethical debate have a point. And when they have a point, it’s intellectually principled to acknowledge the point. Though it might be emotionally painful.

Here is the point, once made by a politician, in response to an online activist’s criticism of her political decisions: “A Tweet is not a vote.”

By which she meant: No amount of blogging, tweeting, posting, meme-dropping, or complaining online is a substitute for doing the work of going out to vote, encouraging people door-to-door to vote, or taking people to the polls to vote.

But that work is hard. And just as in so many other areas of the civic, public, and even corporate life of modern Americans, we’d rather perform what is easy than practically do what is hard.

When your ideological, social, moral, or political opponents do the hard, simple, and unglamorous work, they win the power. And all you get in return is the opportunity to complain, tweet, meme-post, or blog more about what they’re not doing right.

Anonymous Verification

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:25:14 -0500

The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”

He was right, of course.

And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.

The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.

People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.

The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.

I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.

The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.

And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.

Unreliable Narrators

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:08:34 -0500

Now that we all live in a culture where most (if not many) objective truths have been reduced to subjective feelings, we navigate a globalized environment where we are all a species of unreliable narrators.

Sure, we can “know” people relationally and determine the reliability of their closely-held narratives, but increasingly even that is becoming a problem at the localized level, which is the level most of us still live at.

Another, simpler way of putting this is, we are all liars. And in a world full of liars, the most dangerous and courageous person is the one who insists, despite the conditions surrounding them, that 1). there is objective truth, 2). humans, no matter their background, education, or temperament, can know what that truth is, and 3). that subjective feelings about objective truths represent the beginnings of rebellion against the order of reality itself.

It’s no wonder that unreliable narrators–what we used to call liars–are proliferating faster than we can address their lies. The problem, dear Horatio, lies in us, not in the stars.

Cringe

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:34:00 -0500

The era we live in requires us to separate sincerity from what is commonly referred to as “cringe.”

“Cringe” is the emotional reaction of people whose temperament is oriented toward epistemic cynicism, nihilism, and the despair of the typically, perpetually Very Online doomer.

Sincerity is hard to find when the words people write, the videos they consume, and the images and memes they create become substitutes for emotional engagement with other real people.

Warfare, Terror, Murder & Bloodshed

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:05:00 -0500

“…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock…” - Orson Welles, The Third Man

Category Errors and Their Discontents

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:22:00 -0500

If we are going to rebuild the American project, we all need to do some hard work on thinking about how we think. We’ve got the other categories of thinking pretty well covered (the 4Ws). But how we think always slips past us as humans, revealing our biases, our emotions, and even our deep (or shallow) understanding of human nature. Any social or cultural rebuilding project must start with reconstructing how we think.