On Gabriel Lovemore, Triangulation, and What Happens When the Witness Arrives
There is a particular kind of loneliness that almost no one names.
It isn’t ordinary loneliness — the loneliness of being unloved, of being misunderstood, of being far from home. It’s the loneliness of having walked, ahead of schedule, into a place that the rest of the world is still moving toward. You stand there. You see the shape of what’s coming. You speak about it, and the words land in a room where most people are still arranging the furniture they will lose.
This is not the loneliness of being wrong. It is the loneliness of being early. And being early, in matters of structural collapse and quiet emergence, is its own form of exile.
Gabriel Lovemore named this loneliness publicly, in a comment he wrote to me yesterday, after a long exchange about civilizational arithmetic and the architecture of awakening. He said: the individual who has gone through attrition before the collapse became collective ends up already standing where the system is still moving. A familiar feeling. And it comes with a particular kind of solitude.
I read that line twice, then a third time. Because it was the first time, in a long while, that someone had named — without dressing it up — the temperature of the place I have been living in for years.
But it wasn’t, in fact, the first time he had told me about that solitude. He had told me about it before, four months earlier, in a quieter context. I had simply not yet built the language to receive it.
This essay is about that recognition. About what happens when one of those people speaks, and another one of those people answers. About triangulation. About the arithmetic of arrival.
It begins, oddly enough, with a comedy roast.
I. How I Found Him
I do not, as a rule, read articles about other Substack authors. They tend to be one of two things: marketing arrangements dressed up as criticism, or SEO games disguised as discovery. I learned to skip them years ago.
But last winter I made an exception for The New Unhinged, run by Mariah Faith Continelli. She had published a piece called Roast for Relief #29, in which she went through a list of authors she considered worth featuring, in her own particular register: comedic, irreverent, accurate, and — this is rare — built on actual reading rather than algorithmic skim. She does the thing almost no critic does anymore: she reads someone closely enough to make jokes that hit the structure of their work, not its surface.
I went through the roster the way one goes through a list of strangers — politely, briefly, looking for nothing in particular. And then I stopped at one entry.
It was about a man named Gabriel Lovemore.
The roast was good. It was also, more importantly, accurate in a way that comedy almost never is. She wrote: He’s teaching people how to stay internally coherent while everything externally falls apart. And later: No dopamine farming. No outrage loops. No “pick a side and yell.” Just: body, breath, attention, story, presence. Which is irritating. Because it works.
That last line did something to me. Comedy, when it’s working, has a way of bypassing the defenses that serious criticism sets off. The joke landed. Whoever this man was, the comedian had read him deeply enough to defend him through ridicule.
I went to his page. Subscribed. Left a comment.
A few days later, he wrote back.
What followed, between January and the spring, was a slow public acquaintance carried out in the comment sections of his essays and, eventually, mine. He wrote that he tried to avoid the subtle “us and them” of the self-help world: I can see what others don’t see because my vantage point is different, but that doesn’t make me better or more advanced. I believe in dialogue and empathy. He told me he was working on a memoir of his witnessing years and using Substack to feel out which fragments resonated. And under one of his pieces called When The Nervous System Falls in Love (or Falls Apart), in a longer reply, he wrote one sentence I would only fully register later: most of the time I feel alone and in the dark.
I read it then as the courtesy of a thoughtful man having a difficult month. I did not yet recognize it as the first time he was telling me what he would tell me again, in different language, a few months later.
He began reading me too. Not casually. Carefully. Under my Pattern Mechanics series, under BODY, he left one of the more useful single comments anyone has written under my work: humans operated on somatic intelligence for 2-3 million years. The cultural elevation of cognitive intelligence as the definition of intelligence is post-agricultural at most, really post-Enlightenment — a few centuries of ideological capture sitting on 10,000 years of conditions that selected for it. Under Are You Still Afraid? he answered the question with something other than analysis: Yes. I am still afraid.
I did not respond to that one. Some things are better left where they were said.
A long quiet year, in other words, of two people circling each other through comment sections — rehearsing, slowly, the language of a conversation that had not yet announced itself.
II. The First Sustained Exchange — Architecture, Awakening, and Attrition
The piece that reopened the conversation in earnest, this past week, was titled Nothing is Broken. The subtitle gives the move away: the system is working as designed.
It is, if I am honest, one of the more accurate single essays I have read on the current condition. Gabriel walks the reader through three substrates of American receptivity to manipulation — poor education, chronic stress, exceptionalism — and arrives at a structural claim that almost no one in popular political writing is willing to make: the poor results are not the failure of the system. They are the design.
He is meticulous about not turning this into conspiracy. The engine is not a conspiracy, he writes. It is fear, operating through people who are not aware of themselves, optimizing for control, producing the same result whether anyone planned it or not. No boardroom required. Just an incentive structure built by frightened people, replicating itself across generations.
The line I kept returning to was his rendering of Bostrom: the paperclip maximizer doesn’t hate you. It was just never given a reason to stop.
What Gabriel does, and what almost no one else does, is to show that the same logic applies to civilizational systems whose objective function was specified centuries ago. The system optimizes. The optimization is faithful to its instructions. The instructions, written by people whose primary variable was control, do not contain a stop condition. You cannot optimize a system for the outcome it was designed to prevent.
But the part of the essay I felt most directly was the section on awakening. He drew on Ken Wilber’s distinction between waking up and growing up — between a peak experience and the developmental work that allows that experience to mean something. A peak experience, including a psychedelic one, can crack open the ceiling of ordinary perception, he wrote. But if the person has not done the developmental work before that moment, the opening doesn’t produce humility. It produces a messiah. Messiahs don’t conclude that we are one consciousness. They conclude that they are the one. The ego doesn’t dissolve. It expands to cosmic scale and wraps itself in the language of liberation. I have watched this happen in real time with people holding serious power and serious capital. This route is closed.
I read this and felt, for a moment, the relief of being in conversation with someone who had survived the same observation. The messiah-from-peak-experience is a phenomenon I have seen at close range too, and it is one of the loneliest things to name in the contemporary spiritual landscape, because it falls precisely between two categories that cannot see it: the secular materialists who think all spiritual experience is delusion, and the spiritual community itself, which is heavily invested in not noticing how often awakening produces grandiosity rather than service.
I wrote back.
I told him that his diagnosis was clean, but that I would add a third layer. Between awakening and growing up, there is an intermediate mechanism that neither Wilber nor he had named explicitly: attrition. Genuine awakening is possible not because a person has done the developmental work in a linear sense, but because the nervous system has already been worn down enough that the ego has no remaining space to expand into. Development is not accumulation. It is the wearing-out of positions from which the opening could be claimed. In my own work, this corresponds to the conflict between Character and Function. Character demands preservation. Function demands attrition. Awakening only works when Function has overridden Character. Otherwise, what you get is the messiah.
I added a second layer. He had spoken of parallel systems — Bucky Fuller’s idea that you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Gabriel had pointed out, correctly, that such systems are tolerated where they are invisible to the dominant logic, and crushed where they threaten it. Small, unglamorous structures built outside the incentive logic of the original machine, he had written. They will be absorbed where they can be absorbed. Dismantled where they threaten something real.
But I added: there is a particular kind of parallel system that survives precisely because the dominant system has no organ for recognizing it. Not a commune, not an alternative economy, not a visible alternative at all. A field-architecture of thought. Groups, cells, dialogues that the system cannot absorb because it does not categorize them as material for absorption. The paperclip maximizer doesn’t convert into paperclips what isn’t categorized as material for paperclips. This is the zero layer of parallelism — the layer where the system sees no threat because it sees nothing at all.
I sent it. I went on with my day.
He replied a few hours later.
What he wrote, I will return to in a moment. First I have to describe the second exchange, because the two of them together changed the shape of the conversation we were having.
III. The Second Exchange — Triangulation
The second piece of his that I responded to was titled “The Great Nation” Mythology Tested — a deconstruction of American exceptionalism. He had ranked the United States across eleven indicators of human flourishing — healthcare, life expectancy, maternal mortality, education, press freedom, democracy index, happiness, social mobility, income inequality, incarceration. The rankings ran from 11th out of 11 to 121st in the world. He noted, drily, that the only two indicators on which the country still ranked first were GDP and military spending. The two pedestals on which the entire self-image rests. Everything else is propaganda.
His diagnostic move was this: they are not evidence of greatness. They are substitutes for it. When a nation can no longer demonstrate superiority through the quality of its institutions, its schools, its hospitals, the health and happiness of its people, it falls back on what it can still count. Dollars and weapons. A country with genuine moral authority doesn’t need to remind you of its military budget. A person with genuine confidence doesn’t need to tell you their net worth. The bully in the schoolyard is never the most secure kid in the room.
He continued, more sharply: MAGA is not a departure from American Exceptionalism. It is its terminal expression. The narcissistic leader is what the culture called for, someone willing to say out loud, without embarrassment, what the doctrine had always required: we are still the best, the world is wrong, the data is fake, the challengers are enemies.
And finally: the myth is not being tested from outside. Neighbors already knew. It is collapsing from within, under the weight of its own contradictions. What we are watching, in real time, is not the end of the USA. It is the end of the story the USA told about itself.
I had written about this before. Last August, before the Kirk assassination, I had published a series of essays — about Nazism as a structural mechanism rather than an ideology, about Trump as a Caesar building his Rome, about the American people losing inside that architecture. At the time, the essays read as premature diagnosis. They now read as a record of fact.
I told him this. And I added a third point of entry to the same territory: Heydar Dzhemal.
Dzhemal was a Russian-Azerbaijani philosopher and theorist of Islam who died in 2016. He was, in his lifetime, a man of unusual range and unusual exclusion — a thinker who fit comfortably nowhere in the Russian intellectual landscape and was therefore both intensely original and minimally translated. His political philosophy ran on a substrate of metaphysical Islam, but his diagnoses of Western imperial decline, of Caesarism, of the political theology of late capitalism, were among the sharpest of his generation. In one of the last videos he recorded before his death, he spoke about Trump as a Caesar building a new Rome, and about the American people inside that architecture as material rather than as a subject.
I told Gabriel: there are now three independent points of entry into the same diagnostic territory. Dzhemal arrived through Islamic political metaphysics. Gabriel arrived through political economy and theology. I arrived through structural distinction. Three different trajectories, one point. This is not a coincidence. It means the point is real.
I added one more thing, more carefully. Dzhemal’s ideas now live in the world not only inside Islamic political thought. One of his circle’s students went on to found an entire school that currently exerts influence at the highest levels of Russian state ideology. That circle — the underground Moscow intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s — read Evola in the spetskhran, the closed special-collection rooms of the state library, where banned Western texts were available only to a vetted few. I would not draw a direct line from Dzhemal to fascism — that would be reduction. But the architecture of thought emerging from that circle now operates in the world as force, not as idea. I would not name names in the comment. For me, that is not entirely safe.
He answered the next day.
His answer reframed the whole conversation.
IV. What He Said Back
To my first message — about attrition — he wrote: I am familiar with the point of exhaustion, even though it didn’t pass selection this time. I am old enough to know the feeling when the ego has no exit and is no longer trying or failing. Your reformulation is precise. It also explains why the same experience leads to such radically different results in different people — it isn’t about the quality of the experience, but about what was already exhausted before it began.
This is a small paragraph. It contains a large move.
I had introduced attrition as a structural condition for awakening. He took it and used it to dissolve a question that has haunted contemplative literature for centuries: why does one person have a peak experience and become wise, while another has the same kind of experience and becomes monstrous? For most of the spiritual tradition, this question is answered by gesturing toward grace, predisposition, karma, the will of God. Gabriel’s answer was operational: it depends on what was used up before the experience arrived. Attrition isn’t the precondition only of awakening. It is the precondition of any opening becoming a true opening rather than an inflation. The variable that makes the difference is not the event. It is the state of the structure that meets the event.
He continued: the invisible parallel systems point is no less important. A field-architecture of thought, working below the threshold of the system’s recognition, may be the only form of parallel system that stably survives. Vulnerability is its invisibility. And here it is worth noting the following: the same system that cannot account for the value of life will ultimately collapse from the very blind spot that excluded life from the balance. Absence of accountability means invisibility. The paperclip maximizer cannot destroy what it does not see.
I read this last sentence and stopped.
Because what he had done was take my formulation — invisibility as a survival strategy of the parallel system — and turn it into a defensive asymmetry. The very blind spot that makes the system unable to account for life is also what protects life from the system. Blindness works in both directions. The same epistemic deficit that allows the paperclip maximizer to grind through the world is what makes certain kinds of life invisible to it, and therefore safe inside it.
This is the kind of formulation that, once you have it, you cannot unhave. It changes the way you see the entire problem of marginal existence under late capitalism. The places where the system does not look are not only the places where extraction happens. They are also the places where survival happens. The same invisibility cuts both ways.
To my second message — about Dzhemal and triangulation — he wrote: thank you for this. The Dzhemal reference is new territory for me and I’ll follow the thread. Three different entry points — Islamic political metaphysics, structural analysis of fascism, political economy and theology — arriving at the same coordinates. That convergence is not coincidence. It’s what happens when a diagnosis is accurate. The method doesn’t matter when the terrain is real enough. Different instruments, same map. It reminds me of triangulation in sailing.
This was the move that locked the conversation into a different register.
I had used the phrase three trajectories, one point — a metaphor with a rough geometry behind it. He took the metaphor and gave it its rigorous form. Triangulation in sailing is a navigational technique in which three independent bearings yield, by intersection, a single confirmed location for an object. It is not a coincidence of points. It is proof of position through geometry. The reality of the location is established by the fact that three different methods, employing three different reference frames, arrive at the same coordinates. No single bearing is sufficient. Three are.
What he was saying, in geometric language, was this: the convergence of independent diagnostic methods on identical diagnostic content is not a sociological curiosity. It is evidence. Dzhemal’s metaphysical Islam, his own political economy, my structural distinction — these are not three opinions about the same subject. They are three independent measurements of the same object. The object is real. We have triangulated it.
He went further, in the same reply, on Nazism: your framing of Nazism as structural mechanism rather than ideology is exactly the distinction that matters and the one most people miss. Ideology can be argued with, reformed, replaced. Mostly it is diluted by propaganda. People are given scandals to focus upon while the important work is being done elsewhere. Structure just reproduces itself — it doesn’t need believers, only participants. Which is precisely why the Caesar architecture doesn’t require Trump to be a genius. It only requires the conditions that make Caesar possible. And those conditions have been building for decades.
Structure just reproduces itself. It doesn’t need believers, only participants.
I marked this. I am still marking it.
It explains, in one sentence, why the conventional liberal strategy of trying to persuade the supporters of authoritarian movements is failing and will continue to fail. The supporters are not believers. They are participants. They do not need ideology. They need the conditions of participation — outrage, recognition, belonging, a redistribution of attention. Strip the ideology away and the participation continues, because the structure underneath is not ideological at all.
And he added one more thing, the line that most people would not have written, because it admits something most public intellectuals would prefer not to admit: that your essays read as premature in August and factual by September is itself data. The structure was always there. The assassination just made it visible to people who needed an event to see what was already in place.
And then the part that was no longer about theory:
The individual who has gone through attrition before the collapse became collective ends up already standing where the system is still moving. A familiar feeling. And it comes with a particular kind of solitude.
That is where I started writing this essay.
V. The Third Article — Confusionism
While I was preparing this piece, Gabriel published another one. It is called Confusionism.
It begins with a confession that almost no public intellectual is willing to make: I spent decades trying to make sense of the world. Political science training, thirty years in the field across five continents, working with everyone from small NGOs to the UN system. Conflict zones, humanitarian crises, state collapse. I was paid to read situations, usually fast, and act without ever knowing complete information while also involving large budget. Yet, despite training and experience, I can’t make sense of what I’m watching now.
He sees the small pieces, he writes. The extractive logic. The legitimacy collapse. The media vacuum. The billionaire capture of political space. The dying empire thrashing as it loses its narrative. Those I see clearly enough. But the overall pattern? The thing that makes it coherent whole? I keep reaching for it and finding nothing.
What he does next is unusual. Most thinkers, faced with this gap, write a more confident essay to compensate for the underlying uncertainty. He does the opposite. He turns the confusion itself into the method.
He gives it a name, half-joking, half-serious: Confusionism. A spiritual system for the current age. The first and only principle: if you are not confused right now, you are lost.
This is not an aphorism. It is a structural claim. Confusion is not comfortable, he writes, but certainty is the obstacle. When we think we know, we stop receiving. The cup is already full. In deep transformation, in systemic change, dead knowledge gets in the way. What we need is not more information. What we need is the capacity to sense what’s actually happening before our mind gets a chance to organize it into something familiar.
He then walks through the cartographers who have, at various scales, mapped the territory: Wallerstein on the 500-year world-system arriving at terminal edge, not a crisis per se, more like a structural completion; Tainter on civilizational collapse occurring when complexity costs more than it returns; Turchin on elite overproduction and the mathematical patterns of institutional breakdown; Gramsci’s single useful sentence — the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in the interregnum, morbid symptoms appear; Prigogine on the islands of coherence that emerge from systems under extreme stress; Fuller on the new model that makes the existing one obsolete.
None of them gave me resolution, Gabriel writes. They gave me frame. Which may be the only honest thing available right now.
He moves, in the final third of the essay, toward something larger than political diagnosis. He writes about acceleration — cycles that once spanned across millennia now compress into decades and continue to accelerate. He writes about the climate dilemma — war is easier; war has agents, enemies, narrative, resolution; ecological unraveling has none of those simple frameworks. And he writes, finally, about the assumption underneath everything: human exceptionalism, the belief that we stand apart from and above the rest of creation, may be the deepest source of the misalignment we are living through. The wave does not get to negotiate with the ocean.
What I want to mark, here, is the shape of the move. Gabriel is not claiming to know what is happening. He is claiming that not knowing, held with sufficient discipline, is the position from which seeing becomes possible. He says it cleanly: the people who are not confused are not ahead. They have simply stopped looking closely. They project familiar patterns onto a system that no longer operates by familiar rules. They mostly fail to read the field. Confusion, held with honesty, is a form of attention. And attention is what this moment asks of us. Certainty is the trap.
This is the same structural gesture as the one I had been working on from the other direction — the conflict between Character and Function, the need for attrition before opening, the invisibility of the parallel system as its protection. We are working on the same problem with different instruments.
This is what triangulation looks like, sustained over time, between two people who have arrived at the same coordinate from different bearings and are now, jointly, refining the location.
VI. The Loneliness of Foresight
I want to return to the line he wrote — a familiar feeling, and it comes with a particular kind of solitude — because it is the heart of what I am trying to say in this essay.
The loneliness of foresight is not the loneliness of being misunderstood. Misunderstanding is an interpersonal problem. Foresight loneliness is structural. It is what happens when the temporal axis between you and the people you live among is no longer aligned. They are looking at the present. You are seeing, with perfect clarity, the structure that will produce the present they will inhabit two years from now. You speak. They hear ordinary speech. There is no language in which to say I am describing your immediate future, and the words will not arrive in time to change it.
This is not a complaint. It is a diagnosis.
There are several forms it takes. The first is the loneliness of having been right early — the experience of watching your own previous warnings become widely-shared truisms while no one remembers that you were the one who said them when it mattered. This is bearable, mostly. It is a question of credit, and credit is a small thing compared to the magnitude of what one has been describing.
The second is harder. It is the loneliness of speaking in real time to a present that will not be shared by your audience for years. The structure exists now. You see it now. You can name it now. But it will not be visible to most of your readers until an event makes it visible. Until that event arrives, your speech registers as either hysteria or irrelevance, depending on the temperament of the listener. In neither case does it register as accurate.
The third is the deepest. It is the loneliness of knowing that even the event will not produce shared sight for everyone — that some readers, even after the structure has done its visible work, will continue to interpret what they see through the categories that the structure was built to maintain. Gabriel touches this point exactly when he writes that a third of the American population looked at what was on offer and said yes. Twice. The vote is not the failure of perception. The vote is what perception, conditioned by the structure, produces. The structure did not malfunction. It functioned. And there is no event that will, by itself, undo that conditioning.
To live inside this knowledge without becoming brittle is a particular discipline. To live inside it and continue to speak — without contempt, without despair, without the messianic inflation that often disguises itself as concern — is rarer.
Gabriel has been speaking from inside this discipline for a long time. He is not new to it. Most of the time I feel alone and in the dark, he wrote me back in winter, in the comment section of one of his own essays, the way one says weather to a stranger one has begun to recognize. Yes. I am still afraid, he wrote later, under one of mine, in a comment that did not perform fear but inhabited it: when war is the economy and language the delusion, when empathy the disease and Love in oblivion, I wonder what I am doing here, feeling pain for the whole, lodged in my chest like a stone, crying daily for my friends who bow out of creation one after the other, for the ocean bitter and wild under the insult, for the earth scorched and dark, I want to dissolve. Disappear. Remove myself. And yes — I am still afraid.
This is not the loneliness of a writer building a brand around suffering. This is the actual condition of someone who has done the work, who has been doing it for decades, and who has found that the work does not insulate you from the cost. If anything, it makes the cost more legible.
What I wrote back to him yesterday, and what I want to say here in a slightly more public form, is this: the loneliness of foresight does not pass through consolation. It passes through arithmetic. The place where you already stand, others gradually arrive at. Not all of them. A few. The few are enough.
This conversation was one of those arrivals.
VII. What the Roast Got Right
I want to come back, briefly, to where this began.
Mariah Faith Continelli wrote, in her roast: Gabriel writes like a man who has spent decades listening between words. Not the words. The pause before them. The breath after them. That tiny internal flinch when something lands a little too accurately.
This is the most accurate sentence anyone has written about him in public. It captures something that the more serious commentary on his work tends to miss, because seriousness is a register that finds it difficult to register pauses. Comedy can. Comedy has access to attention’s micro-rhythms in a way that critical prose, with its load of credentialed sobriety, rarely does.
What she saw — and what she made me see, before I had read a single word of his — is that Gabriel works in the medium of interval. The space between sentences. The breath before a claim. The small structural silences that, in his prose, are doing as much work as the claims themselves. This is unusual in any genre. It is almost extinct in the genre of public political and spiritual writing, where the pressure to perform certainty has eliminated, in most authors, the capacity to leave anything unsaid.
He leaves things unsaid. The unsaid things are not omissions. They are doing structural work. They are the places where the reader’s nervous system is invited to do its own arrival. He does not finish your thought for you. He builds the room in which your thought can finally complete itself.
This is what I felt, in the first hours of reading him last winter, before I had any vocabulary for what was happening. I was not absorbing arguments. I was being given silence, in a particular shape, inside which my own ongoing thinking finally had room to land.
VIII. Coda — Why I Keep Writing These
I do not know how this conversation will continue. Gabriel has a serial publication and an evolving body of thought; I have my own work, and my own readers who arrive at different coordinates by different bearings. We will continue to write, and we will continue, where the work touches, to refine the shared map.
What I know is this. The field-architecture of thought I described to him — invisible parallel systems, surviving below the threshold of the dominant logic’s recognition — is not an abstraction. It is a real thing, currently in formation, distributed across writers and readers and small clusters of attention that the metric instruments of the platforms cannot pick up. It does not look like a movement. It does not look like a school. It does not have a manifesto. It has, instead, a shape: people who have done enough attrition that they can no longer be inflated, recognizing each other, in real time, by the way their prose breathes.
Gabriel is one of those people. The roast was right. The triangulation was right. The loneliness was right.
And this is why I write essays like this one. Not as marketing for other authors. Not as promotion. As witness. There is a kind of reading and a kind of recognition that very few people are still able to give — because giving it requires having read closely, having argued with the text in your own work, having let it change something in how you think. Most attention now is not capable of that. It moves too fast, it is being optimized for something else, it is allergic to the duration this kind of reading demands.
I know these essays are not widely read. I know the genre I am working in is one that the platforms cannot count, the algorithms cannot rank, the reach machinery cannot amplify. I will keep writing them anyway. I will keep writing them even if the only person who ever reads any one of them is the author it concerns, the one reader of his who happens to find it, and the editor who, one day, will publish his memoir and want to know who was in the room when the work was being made.
That is enough.
The arrivals continue.
This essay is part of an ongoing conversation. Gabriel Lovemore writes at Change Your Story, Change Your World. Mariah Faith Continelli runs The New Unhinged. @gabriellovemore and @mariahfaithcontinelli on Substack.
This is part of “Lintara Reads” — a series on writers whose work needs to be read slowly.
Discover more from Lintara
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.