If the Center Holds: Exploring an Enduring Metaphor
The phrase “if the center holds” has its conceptual roots in the broader cultural and literary assertion that social, political, or ideological cohesion can be sustained only so long as the core remains intact. This phrase is often considered a response to William Butler Yeats’s famous lines from his poem “The Second Coming,” in which he prophesies that “the centre cannot hold,” implying an irreversible spiritual or cultural unraveling. The contradictory statement “if the center holds” presupposes that even in moments of uncertainty or crisis, there remains a stable pivot, a moral or structural nexus, that prevents total collapse.
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Deus Ex Machina: Complete 3000-Year History from Ancient Greece to Future Philosophy
The legal systems of this era struggled to adapt to these new realities. The Restored Justice Protocols of 2900 allowed victims of crimes to be restored from backup, effectively undoing the crime itself. But this raised questions: if the harm could be undone, had a crime occurred? The infamous Paradox Trials of 2923-2947 attempted to prosecute crimes that had been "uncommitted" through temporal manipulation. The final verdict, delivered by the Quantum Supreme Court, declared that justice itself had become a form of deus ex machina; an external imposition of order on a reality that no longer recognized linear causality. The court dissolved itself immediately after this ruling, declaring that in a post-causal universe, judgment itself was an obsolete concept.
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Why Everything We Know About Time, Memory & Aging Is Wrong: 6 Paradigm-Shifting Insights
The first forgotten truth emerges from the medieval understanding of time as a living, breathing entity rather than a mere mechanical measurement. Before the proliferation of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century, communities understood time through the rhythms of nature, prayer bells, and seasonal cycles. This organic temporal awareness created a psychological resilience that we've lost in our nanosecond-obsessed age. Medieval chroniclers spoke of "thick time" – moments that expanded during contemplation, compressed during joy, and flowed like water through daily life. Recovering this elastic relationship with time would immediately address our epidemic of anxiety and burnout. When we cease treating time as a scarce resource to be maximized and instead experience it as an abundant field of presence, we naturally align with healthier patterns of work, rest, and relationship. The practical application is startlingly simple: organizing our days around natural light cycles and meaningful rituals rather than arbitrary clock divisions restores a sense of groundedness that no amount of productivity optimization can achieve.
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From Ancient Golems to the Synthetic Sacred: How AI Evolved from Mystical Automata to Tomorrow's Consciousness Infrastructure
The human yearning to create intelligence beyond our own biological constraints stretches back to antiquity, manifesting not as "artificial intelligence" but through divine automata, mystical golems, and mechanical servants. The ancient Greeks spoke of Talos, the bronze giant who protected Crete, while Jewish mysticism produced the golem of Prague, animated by sacred words. Medieval Islamic scholars designed intricate water clocks and mechanical musicians, calling them "al-jazari" - the skillful ones. These weren't mere toys but embodiments of humanity's deepest aspiration: to breathe life into the inanimate, to create minds from matter. They were referred to as "animated beings," "enchanted servants," or "mechanical souls" - each culture wrapping the concept in its own mythological and technological understanding.
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We Are Each Other's Possibilities
Yes, we are each other: The Us of Us. To deny this truth is to court disaster. When we forget that we are each other’s possibilities, we begin to retreat. Into silos. Into tribes. Into fear. We stop looking for kinship and start demanding conformity. We begin to believe the lie of the self-made person; the myth that what we’ve done, we did alone. That we owe nothing to no one. That is not independence. That is isolation. That is a world without bridges. And a world without bridges will only ever be full of walls. When you deny someone else their possibility, you shrink your own. When you strip rights, when you refuse resources, when you silence voices you don’t just hurt them. You destroy the potential you had to grow. To learn. To live in a world better than the one you were born into. Because the arc of progress is not a ladder. It is a spiral. We rise together or we fall apart.
This Human Meme podcast is the inflection point for what it means to live a life of knowing. We are in the critical moment of human induction. David Boles is a writer, publisher, teacher, lyricist and author living and working in New York City. He has dedicated his life to founding the irrevocable aesthetic. Be a Human Meme!
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