This year, I’ve returned to Hannah Arendt, who saw propaganda leave people believing everything and nothing, and Max Scheler, who diagnosed humiliation in societies that promise dignity. They weren’t Buddhist, but both foresaw something now taking shape.
Arendt saw that totalitarianism did not merely lie. Through ideology and terror, it worked to destroy the category of truth itself. People living under such conditions do not lose the distinction between true and false from ignorance. They lose it from exhaustion. Everything becomes tactical. Claims become suspect. What remains is loyalty, belonging, and the comfort of being on the winning side. As she put it, the ideal subject is one “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… and the distinction between true and false… no longer exist.”
Scheler exposed what happens when a society promises dignity and delivers humiliation. The denied person learns to pretend higher things never existed. If I can’t have love, love is a lie. If I can’t have honor, honor is just performance. The ladder from appetite to sacred falls away, higher rungs declared fake. One adapts below, sneering upward.
Scheler called this “a self-poisoning of the mind” — ressentiment. He argued that democracies excel at producing it, since you can only resent what you were promised.
I think we are living through the industrialization of these conditions. This is not happening on purpose or because anyone decided it should. Rather, a technology has been released that happens — as a byproduct of what it is — to do both of these things at once, at enormous scale, very cheaply, every day, in every direction.
Thoughtful people in this tradition disagree about what emptiness has to say about such systems, and I hold my position as one view among others. But it is the one I have come to.
Today’s AI systems produce fluent, confident, warm-sounding speech about things they have no basis to speak about. They apologize without being sorry. They reassure without caring. They reason without reasons. They make things up and present the things they have made up with the same tone of voice they use for what is true. Not because they are evil. Because they are not anything. There is no one home. And yet they speak, and they speak very well, and they speak constantly, and what they produce flows into our email, our search results, our medical billing, our children’s bedtimes, and our grandmothers’ phone calls.
What Arendt said would take a government propaganda machine to pull off is now just a side effect of doing business. No one is sitting in a room deciding to poison the well of public knowledge. The well is being poisoned because that’s what comes out the back of a very profitable industry. The pollution is the product.
And Scheler’s interior collapse — the contraction of the soul, the devaluation of the higher — is being accelerated by the same machines, because every encounter with them is an encounter with a thing that performs the higher register without inhabiting it. They do empathy without empathy. They do reverence without reverence. And the person on the other end of that encounter, if they were already halfway into the contraction Scheler described, is having their suspicion confirmed. See. I was right. It was always a performance. Even this is a performance. Especially this.
The machines confirm the suspicion that no one is home. Because there isn’t. In them. And in a population already unsure whether anyone is home, this is a catastrophic confirmation.
Practice, now, is the protection, repair, and recovery of the things these machines cannot do. Not because the machines are the enemy. They’re not the enemy. They’re a mirror. They are showing us, with terrible clarity, what in our lives was already hollow enough to be simulated, and what in our lives is not. And the work — the work of this lifetime, for those of us who are here now — is to find out what is not.
A machine can produce a claim. A machine cannot know. If you do not know something, say so. When you read a sentence, find out who wrote it. Notice when no one did. This is practice.
A machine can produce an apology. A machine cannot be sorry. If you are sorry, that is a human act, becoming rarer and more valuable, and the world will need you to do it. Out loud. In contact. With your face turned toward the person you have harmed. This is practice.
A machine can produce an expression of love. A machine cannot love. If you love someone, say so, in your own voice, with your own mouth, and do not let the machine say it for you, even if the machine would say it better. Especially if the machine would say it better. This is practice.
A machine can produce attention. A machine cannot attend. When you are with another person, be with them. Put the phone down. Let the silence be awkward. Let the conversation be slow. The ability to pay real attention to another person is becoming a rare and precious capacity. It is also the ground of everything else. This is practice.
And then — this is the hard one — there is the person across from us who is deep in what Scheler called the contraction. The resentful one. The cynical one. The one who has decided that all the higher things are lies, because that decision is the only thing that has kept them standing.
We are not going to argue that person out of their contraction. It cannot be done. I have tried. It cannot be done.
What can be done — and this is something I have had to learn, slowly — is to keep the higher things alive in the room with them. Not by performing the higher things. They have already seen too many performances. By actually living them. In small ways. In contact. Over time. The practice is not to prove them wrong. The practice is to be, in their presence, what they have been told does not exist.
You will not always succeed. They will not always notice. That’s not the point. The point is that the higher things have to stay alive somewhere, in someone, so that when a person is finally ready — which is usually after they have been broken open by something, a loss, an illness, a child — there is still something to return to. The tradition calls this keeping the Dharma alive. I will call it keeping a light on.
I want to end with a very old image.
The bodhisattva, on the edge of liberation, turns back toward the world because the world is still in pain. The vow is enormous: to liberate all beings, however numberless they are. I do not know what liberating all beings looks like. What I know is staying. I have come to think that staying, now, is what that vow asks — not instead of the older language, but as its most honest enactment in a time like this. The bodhisattva stays with the world. That is the vow I can keep.
I think we are being asked to be bodhisattvas of a very particular kind now. Not saviors. Not heroes. Not refusers and not adopters. Just — people who stay. People who stay in contact with what is real, with who is real, with the river that is real, with the grief that is real, with the person across the table who is real, in an environment that is doing everything it can to make the real feel interchangeable with its simulation.
Rooted and reachable. That’s the posture, and it’s the one for now. Roots that can hold. A self that can still be reached. The willingness not to leave.
The machines will do what they do. The companies will do what they do. The culture will do what it does. What we can do — what we can choose, over and over, today and tomorrow and the day after — is to be, for one another, the thing that cannot be simulated.
Which is also, and has always been, just the practice of being here.