Monologue Transcription

[Ah, the City of God. Not the one Augustine wrote of—though his shadow still lingers—but the one pixelated and twitching in the margins of your attention. Because as the City of Science crumbles, what do we do? We look backward. We search for stability in ruins. We scavenge old blueprints We try to construct a new order out of fragments of past Cities. Look around today: the so-called architects of our digital present—technocrats, mystics, hustlers—aren’t building something new. They’re reaching back. They’re trying to patch the fallen City of Science with ideas stolen from the City of God. Spiritual branding, algorithmic prophets, sacred feeds. They want the certainty of faith without the tedium of fact. But this cycle isn’t unique. When the City of God itself collapsed under the weight of schism and scripture, people looked further back—to the City of Glory. Renaissance scholars resurrected Greece and Rome, trying to revive the polis, the orator, the philosopher. And what did they create? Not a reborn polis at all, but something stranger. Something none of them expected. They built the City of Science. That is the pattern, listeners. What we long for in collapse is never what we get. The new City is always born sideways—unexpected, unwanted, inevitable. (leans forward, quieter)And so, if we are to understand the City of God, we must start with its foundation. The codex. A bound book. Portable. Durable. Silent. Not a scroll you recited, but a container of total belief. With it, Rome’s dying cults gave way to Christianity. With it, the Quran unified tribes into a caliphate. With it, emperors and bishops claimed entire continents. But not everyone took up the codex. Judaism—its temple shattered, its people scattered—resisted. Bound by tradition, it clung to scrolls and tablets. Its identity sharpened against the codex’s universalizing authority. And this resistance has a parallel: centuries later, when the City of Science was born, the Islamic caliphates would resist the printing press. Fearing its loss of control, they clung to scribes and calligraphy even as Europe mass-produced books. Both examples serve as a cautionary tale: ignore the new medium at your peril. Refusal may preserve tradition, but it also ensures eventual eclipse. And the codex produced other rivals. Most striking was Mani—the Persian prophet whose followers carried his radiant, illustrated codex like a holy artifact. An awe-inspiring book, meant to eclipse every other. His vision did not triumph, but it revealed the codex’s spellbinding power: to make faith portable, transferable, reproducible. That was the gift of the City of God. Its sovereignty was the right to codify belief. And its rejection? Plurality. Mystery. The shifting web of cults, rites, and local gods—all swept aside in favor of One God, One Book, One Truth. (leans back, voice lower, disdain creeping in) This permanence allowed empires to rule not just with swords and stirrups—but with chapters. Of course, permanence was also its flaw. When people read for themselves, the contradictions became unavoidable. The myth cracked. And from those cracks poured war, philosophy, the Crusades… and eventually, science. (beat) Now, as the scientific order dissolves into noise, the instinct is the same. We crawl back toward God. Toward the illusion of certainty. We want the canon, the sacred feed, the tribe that cannot be questioned. And yet, if the pattern holds—what rises next will not be what we ask for. The City of God beckons. But the City to come will not be something else entirely. Gabe, let me finish the thought. A little guy? ]