Strata

The flowered book's revelations sit in my stomach like undigested matter, requiring processing through systems that don't quite know how to metabolize this particular nutrition. I close it and sit with the nausea of recognition, not the comfortable kind that arrives with truth, but the uncomfortable kind that forces you to excavate your own complicity in patterns you thought you were merely observing.

Medusa. The woman whose voice transformed air into cathedral acoustics while men praised my face.

I should feel only sympathy. The book clearly intends me to feel sympathy. But something else surfaces first, a memory that arrives with the specific quality of shame that has been compressed and stored rather than processed and released.

Her name doesn't matter. What matters is the geometry of her body, proportions that made strangers stop mid-conversation, that caused restaurant noise to momentarily cease when she entered. Model-tall, model-thin, but not hollow. She carried intelligence like a second skeleton, structural rather than decorative. And sensitivity, the particular kind that distinguishes certain people from the mass, that makes them perceive wavelengths others miss entirely.

We were friends. Real friends, I thought. The kind where you discuss entropy at 2 AM and she actually understands what you mean, where she can reference obscure literature and you can respond with mathematical frameworks and somehow you're speaking the same language despite using different alphabets.

But walking beside her through city streets, I felt it. The thing I'm supposed to pretend doesn't exist. The feeling that the book wants me to recognize in Medusa so I can forgive her drunken bitterness.

Envy.

Not the hot kind that burns and announces itself. The cold kind that crystallizes slowly, that you can ignore for weeks until one day you're standing next to her and a man, interesting, intelligent, exactly the kind of human you'd want to converse with, looks past you as if you're transparent, his entire attention absorbed by the gravitational field of her beauty.

And I used to feel it. That terrible contraction in my chest. That desire for her to be less so I could be more. That wish for her advantages to somehow transfer to me through proximity, or failing that, for them to simply not exist.

I used to be ashamed. Deeply, specifically ashamed. Because envy used to feel like betrayal, not of her, but of Beauty itself. Beauty is one of the things that arrests me completely, that makes me lose capacity for anything except observation. To envy it felt like treason against my own values, like being jealous of mathematics for being elegant or music for being precise.

But the feeling persisted despite shame, which meant it required examination rather than suppression.

I remember digging backward through memory's strata, looking for the moment this particular mineral deposit first formed. When did envy arrive? When did my face become currency I simultaneously valued and resented?

The memory surfaced with the specific tactile quality of adolescence: age twelve, thirteen, the beginning of understanding that appearance operates as social protocol, that bodies carry messages beyond their biological function.

Adolescence. Age twelve, thirteen. The beginning of understanding that appearance is a social protocol.

I was chubby. Soft in ways that didn’t match magazine proportions. And yet, I could see my face was beautiful. Not in the universal, traffic-stopping way, but in a specific, observable way.

I used to spend hours at the mirror. Not from vanity, but from fascination, the same way I’d study an organism under a microscope. Testing hairstyles, expressions, cataloging effects. It was scientific. It was also the beginning of understanding I possessed something that generated attention I didn’t want, but didn’t want to be denied.

This is where the friction began.

My brother would stand behind me. “You think you’re pretty? You’re not. You’re fat. Look at your face—who would want that?” His voice carried the particular cruelty of children learning to weaponize words.

My mother should have witnessed this blooming. She should have said, “Yes, you’re beautiful, let me help you understand this gift.” Instead, she reinforced him. “Look at you, you are disgusting”

The double bind crystallized: I could see beauty in my reflection, but I was supposed to be ashamed of seeing it. My flowering was a transgression.

This friction, between natural necessity to develop and systematic humiliation from those who should have celebrated that development, became the background radiation of my adolescence. It devastated everything. Not just my relationship to beauty, but my relationship to competence, to achievement, to any form of recognition. Every time I did something well, the same double bind activated: pride in capability versus shame for acknowledging that capability.

The conflict only resolved when I named the error—theirs. The educational malpractice. The systematic undermining disguised as moral instruction.

So no. I don't accept that a middle-aged woman hasn't spent her life excavating what generates her rage toward someone who holds no responsibility for genetic advantages. Medusa had decades to perform this duty. Decades to recognize that the bitter taste in her mouth when men praised my face instead of her voice was information about her relationship to validation, not information about my guilt.

The fact that she didn't, that she chose instead to marinate in that bitterness, to let it ferment into the specific toxicity that requires alcohol to make bearable, this is not tragedy. It's failure of self-examination, failure of intellectual honesty, failure of basic responsibility for debugging your own psychological fractures rather than blaming the nearest convenient target.

I did that mining. It was excruciating. I acknowledged the malware my family installed and spent years working on it. Because the alternative, letting it poison every relationship, was unacceptable. And it unacceptable.

So when the book asks me to forgive Medusa her bitterness, I comprehend the request, but refuse the instruction. Compassion, yes. Recognition of shared pain, yes. But absolution for choosing not to do the work? No.

The same pattern replicates itself across my entire academic trajectory. Infinite instances of sabotage from people who chose their profession not because they were ableto do the work but because society had decided that particular path represented intelligence.

The entire scientific community has paid consequences for these false identifications. The laboratories filled with resentful soldiers serving at the court of whoever established career before them, desperate for the power that has always been fake surrogate for the unconditional love that Nature uses to continue evolution.

Think about the mechanism: someone becomes scientist not because able to produce discoveries, but because "scientist" signifies "intelligent person" in social hierarchy. They achieve the credential through persistence rather than abilities. Then they encounter someone, whose pattern recognition operates faster than theirs, whose ability makes their credentialed competence look pedestrian.

They can't admit they chose wrong. Can't acknowledge they're occupying space that should belong to people who actually can do the work. So instead they sabotage. Subtle at first, failing to share crucial information, scheduling meetings to exclude certain people, taking credit for collaborative insights. Then more overtly, blocking publications, denying resources, systematically undermining anyone whose genuine capability reveals their own inadequacy.

I watched it happen repeatedly. To myself. To others whose only crime was being better suited for the work than those who had arrived first and claimed territory.

The harridan and Medusa and the laboratory saboteurs, they're the same phenomenon. Absence of care from conception through development, substituted with surrogate sold as authentic. Like sugar and sweetener: the stimulus is the same but the function completely different, and so is the result.

Sugar metabolizes into energy. Sweetener tricks your tongue but leaves your cells starving.

Love, the real kind, unconditional, the kind that witnesses blooming without needing to own or diminish it, produces humans capable of recognizing beauty and capability in others without experiencing it as theft from themselves.

Surrogate love, the transactional kind, that requires performance and provides validation only when you meet specific criteria, produces humans who experience every other person's advantage as personal deficit, who need to diminish others to feel adequate themselves.

I turn to my screen with the specific quality of attention that accompanies ritual. I type a single letter: p

The algorithm understands. Like television responding to remote control, it serves the program selected by invisible logic operating beneath conscious interface.

Today's curriculum: Plato.

The videos arrange themselves with pedagogical precision:

"Each person carries their particular genius, their specific configuration of capability that distinguishes them from every other human who has ever existed. The daimon is not ambition, it's recognition of what you're built to do, what you can do better than anyone else not through competition but through architectural specificity."

The lecture unfolds with the casualness of someone explaining basic physics. The professor, older, wearing sweater that suggests comfort matters more than presentation, speaks directly to camera: The Greeks understood that the daimon wasn't chosen. It chose you. Your responsibility wasn't to become something else, but to recognize what you already were and develop it to its fullest expression.

I watch with the absorption of someone receiving instruction in native language after years of translation.

"Plato's concept ofMeasureis not about a rigid, judgmental hierarchy where people are "better"> or "worse." Instead, it's about a functional and organic fit. A society, like a body or a ship, functions harmoniously when each part performs the role it is naturally suited for.

• "An 'Oscar-worthy' actor has the daimon (the innate genius) for profound emotional expression and the capacity to carry a major production. Their 'measure' is large; they require the 'blood' of leading roles, complex characters, and significant resources to fulfill their function."
• "A 'regular actor' (a supporting actor) has a different daimon. Their genius might be for creating memorable, precise character moments that support the main narrative. Their 'measure' is different, not lesser. They require the 'blood' of good supporting roles to fulfill their unique and equally vital function."

"The injustice and dysfunction occur when:

1. The supporting actor, driven by envy (pleonexia) rather than self-knowledge, insists on playing Hamlet. The production fails because they are operating outside their measure.
2. The Oscar-worthy actor is forced into tiny, unchallenging roles. They wither, and the collective culture is impoverished because their full measure is not being utilized."

"So, it's a two-part recognition:

1. Internal (the subject’ role: You must have the self-awareness to recognize your own daimon and its natural scale. Are you a heart or a fingernail? A lead actor or a supporting one? This is not a judgment of your worth, but a clear-eyed assessment of your function.
2. External (The System's Role): The ideal society ('The Republic') is one that identifies this natural measure in each person and gives them the education, resources, and position (the "proportion" of blood/opportunity) they need to flourish in that role."

"The tragedy is that society does not help people find their measure, leading them to covet the measures of others, creating the 'friction' that defines the narrator's life."

I pause the video. Sit with this. The envy I felt toward my beautiful friend, was it actually desire for her specific advantages, or was it rage at being denied development of my own? Was I envious of her beauty, or was I angry that my family had taught me to be ashamed of mine?

The distinction matters. One is coveting what belongs to another. The other is mourning what was stolen from you.

I resume the video.

"Democracy degenerates into mob rule when people vote based on manipulation rather than wisdom. Oligarchy concentrates power among those who already have it. Tyranny emerges when the worst humans convince everyone else that cruelty is strength."

"The optimal system, Plato suggests, would be governance by those who understand their daimon is administration, people who genuinely can do the work of organizing society for collective flourishing, who experience no pleasure from power itself but only from seeing systems function well."

"But this never happens," the professor concludes with resigned amusement, "because people who love power pursue government positions, while people who love good governance avoid them. So we're inevitably ruled by exactly the wrong people."

The video ends. The algorithm waits for my next instruction, patient as always.

I sit with the day's material—the flowered book's challenge, my excavated memories, Plato's frameworks—and let them combine like reagents in controlled experiment.

The synthesis crystallizes:

Everything, the envy, the sabotage, the criminal organizations, the governmental corruption, the laboratory politics, my family's cruelty, stems from the same malfunction. People unable to find their daimon, or prevented from pursuing it by useless social impositions. People who never learned their own limits through experimentation, who never discovered what they're actually built for.

So they occupy spaces meant for others. They pursue paths that signal status, not paths that match their capability. They resent anyone whose genuine fitness reveals their own misalignment.

And then—because humans can't tolerate living in constant awareness of their own fraudulence, they construct elaborate justifications. "I deserve this position because I worked hard." (But hard work at something you're not suited for is just expensive suffering.) "Those people are just lucky/privileged/naturally gifted." (But luck and privilege don't create the kind of capability that makes work feel like play.)

Criminal organizations are the formalized expression of this choice. Their members are not philosophers of evil who discovered a daimon for predation. They are people who, confronted with the hard work of building a self, instead chose to parasitize the selves of others. They are not a logical extension of society; they are the symptom of its deepest sickness: the promotion of the sweetener over the sugar.

My family was a criminal organization in miniature. They did not teach me that my blooming was a transgression because they were evil, but because the sight of an authentic, unapologetic self was an unbearable reproach to their own choice of the sweetener. My growth was a mirror reflecting their own stagnation, and so it had to be shattered.

They, like all the saboteurs and the bitter Medusas, are addicts. Addicted to the easy high of external validation, of power-over-others, of stolen status. This addiction is a direct result of never having tasted the real sugar—the profound, internal satisfaction that comes from using one's own true measure, however small or large, to contribute to the world.

The pattern isn't just a social malfunction; it is a massive, collective flight from selfhood. The friction I feel is the friction between someone moving toward her daimon and a world populated by people running away from theirs, who resent her for reminding them of the journey they refused to take.

I close my laptop. The village outside continues its choreography. Somewhere, people are pursuing work that doesn't suit them. Somewhere, people are sabotaging others whose capability makes them uncomfortable. Somewhere, families are teaching children to be ashamed of blooming.

The pattern is too large to solve. To change it you'd need to restructure everything—education systems that help people discover their daimon rather than forcing them toward prestigious paths, economic structures that reward symbiosys rather than parasitism, social organizations that celebrate specificity rather than demanding conformity.

So the cycle perpetuates. The friction continues. And people, who steadily look for their daimon, who test their limits and capabilities, navigate through systems designed by and for people who do not want to engage in it.

The book was right about the pattern. I see it now, arrival, engagement, transgression, exile. Two-year cycles across decades. Not because I'm broken, but because I'm ethically incompatible with rules designed by people who never found their own daimon and can't tolerate anyone who has.

I think about Plato teaching in his Academy, trying to train philosopher-kings who would govern wisely. I think about how that experiment failed, how it always fails, how the wrong people always end up in charge because the right people understand enough to stay away.

I think about Medusa, drunk somewhere, bitter about her voice going unrecognized, never excavating why recognition from men matters more to her than the intrinsic pleasure of singing well.

I think about all the laboratory soldiers, the resentful credentialed, still occupying spaces meant for others, still sabotaging anyone whose genuine capability threatens their positions.

But understanding the pattern doesn't exempt me from living in systems shaped by people who haven't done that work. Recognition doesn't grant immunity from their resentment. Doing the inward analysis just means I can see the friction clearly rather than being destroyed by it unconsciously.

The algorithm waits patiently for my next query. The flowered book sits closed, having delivered its lesson.