The Machine

To live a moral life revolves around one simple question:

Am I witnessing, or am I possessing?

To witness another soul in full fidelity is to revere their humanity. It is an acknowledgement of the approximated divine. It is to whisper to a fellow human, "What pulls at your soul?"

To possess another soul is reduction. It is to reduce another sovereign human into a resource, a tool, a source of comfort. It is to command to a fellow human, "What can you do for me?"

Possession often strikes as a silent crusade. Through blind acceptance of structures, love, and categorization, the crusade of systematic reduction gains fervor.

I recently visited the University of Oregon. I overheard a conversation where one young woman told her friend, "You know how I am. I am just a bad reader, and I always will be." Her friend laughed. In this moment, a capable young soul reduced herself.

No one reduced her, only herself. The Machine had already done its work. It taught her to make her soul legible through deficit, to translate struggle into identity, to render her whole person understandable through limitation. And in this moment of spiritual violence against herself, she too smiled.

Systematic possession metastasizes not through violence, but through repetition. Through every repeated form, diagnosis, label, and score. Through every story we inherit about who we are and who we never will be. It is the daily hammering of nails into the finite soul until illusion pierces the husk.

The Machine is not a metaphor. It is a system of systems. It is the engine of the silent crusade.

The Machine labels the working single mother as a failure for being unable to afford rent.

The Machine reduces souls into line items to produce layoff decisions, considered a data-driven virtue.

The Machine whispers to the influential, "No. They do not deserve dignity. They did not earn it. They could be more like you."

The Machine scores employees for stack ranking, reducing even the capable into parasites marked for outcasting.

The Machine proclaims to the misguided, "If you work hard enough, if you reduce your soul to your output, you will be witnessed."

The Machine is the haunting undercurrent of societal life. Indeed, The Machine is our collective praises of delusion mistaken for virtue and comfort.

It is probably impossible to escape The Machine in this life. Illusion, its ammo, survives in sincerity. And, each day, we feed souls to The Machine in the name of virtue.

We cannot dismantle it alone.

But you can choose, in each moment, to refuse possession. To look into the true nature of ideas, past the messaging.

In this, we choose to witness. To look upn another soul and ask nothing of it but the truth of its becoming.

This is a lonely rebellion that cannot be quantified. But, even if acknowledged for a moment, it is restoration for the trampled.

Only through this may we extend grace. And grace cannot be possessed.

Although we will find ourselves weak, weary, and exhausted, it is enough to persist through our failures with a single question:

Am I witnessing, or am I possessing?