🎧 Field Note 4.2 — An Ontology of Equality

Why authority collapses when it forgets the ground that made it possible.

What does it mean to say that all beings are equally real—and what changes when we take that claim seriously?

In this Field Note, we pause along the trail to reflect on the conceptual ground crossed in Waypoints 4.1 and 4.2, moving from questions of knowledge and language into questions of ethics, authority, and care.

The reflection begins with description itself—how words order the world, how power flattens language to secure obedience, and why slowing down to notice and describe for ourselves is an act of resistance against epistemic capture.

From there, the piece turns toward equality—not as a moral slogan, but as an ontological claim: that all beings participate equally in Being, even when their roles, capacities, and responsibilities differ.

This Field Note explores how hierarchies become distorted when they forget this fact, and how authority—when grounded in ontological equality—is transformed into custodianship rather than control.

Together, we consider:

• How language shapes reality—and how authoritarian power narrows description to maintain dominance.

• Why ontological equality must precede ethics, if authority is to earn consent.

• The difference between equality of being and equality of value.

• Parenting and teaching as custodial roles grounded in care rather than ownership.

• Why not all lessons are equal—and why denying children access to shared knowledge is a failure of responsibility, not neutrality.

• How imagining the future adult a child will become clarifies what care requires in the present.

This Field Note asks what kind of authority can be trusted—one that remembers the conditions of dependency, care, and shared reality from which it arose.

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🎧 Waypoint 4.2 — The Wombfish

How sea-goddesses, dolphins, eggs, and fish with feet reveal the deep, watery origins we still carry within us.

What does it mean to remember that we come from the sea—and never fully left it?

In this episode, we descend from Lassen’s alpine slopes into deep time, following a trail that runs from mountain heather and melting snow into mythic oceans, ancient wombs, and the evolutionary improvisations that carried life from water to land.

Biology and mythology braid together as stories of Doris and the Nereids open into dolphins, eggs, placentas, gill slits, breath, and voice—revealing a lineage that links ocean, mother, and song.

This waypoint dwells on origins not as nostalgia, but as continuity: life adapting, carrying memory forward in soft tissues and borrowed forms.

Together, we trace:

• Alpine heather Phyllodoce, named for a sea-nymph, binding mountain and ocean.

• Doris, Nereus, and the Nereids—figures of flow, care, and transformation predating Olympian hierarchies.

• Delphus, the womb, and what the word dolphin reveals about mammalian kinship.

• Fish with feet, eggs, and the improvisation that led from mud to womb.

• Gill slits, umbilical cords, and aquatic structures repurposed into jaw, ear, and voice.

• Why dolphins sing their calves’ names—and why humans emerge from water learning to breathe and speak.

This waypoint asks what it means to belong to a lineage older than monuments and nations—carried not in stone, but in breath, blood, milk, and memory.

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🎧 Waypoint 4.1 — Of Roots, Rhizomes, and Fish with Feet: The Lurid Bait of Egotism

How mountain heather, ancient rhizomes, and deep time unmask the arrogance of kings, conquerors, and modern Ozymandians.

What happens when we stop mistaking what blooms for what endures?

In this episode, we climb Lassen’s volcanic slopes—where butterflies rise on summer winds, heather crowns the blasted heath, and woody runners weave a hidden underworld beneath our feet.

Here, among flowers that wear tiny crowns, we begin to see how much of life’s architecture is decentralized, ancient, and quietly resistant to the myth of the solitary hero.

This is the hinge point where geology, mythology, and political metaphor converge: a reminder that the structures holding up the world are horizontal, not hierarchical—and that the ego’s dream of standing at the center is always an illusion.

Together, we trace:

• How mountain heather creates a crown with no queen—and why its architecture rebukes the authoritarian imagination.

• The rhizome’s deep-time story, from the Devonian period to the present, and how its networks quietly shaped the living world.

• Persephone, Pluto, and the mythic underworld that mirrors these hidden connections.

• Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and why the monuments of “king of kings” crumble while rhizomes persist for millions of years.

• How fish with feet—and the first wanderers onto land—inherit the labor of ancient roots that stabilized the world long before humans mythologized it.

This waypoint asks what truly lasts: the monuments of proud men, or the quiet, ancient systems that hold the vertical world up—and what it might mean, in an age of demagoguery, to live as creatures of the rhizome rather than subjects of the throne.

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🎧Waypoint 3.4 — From the Rhetoric of Valley Forge to the Forge of Fallacies

How Reagan empowered creationism, undermined science education, and reshaped the American political landscape.

What happens when presidential rhetoric sanctifies doubt over discovery?

In this episode, we travel back to August 1980—when Ronald Reagan told a stadium of evangelical voters that he had “a great many questions” about evolution.

A few polished questions—delivered at the right moment, to the right audience—shifted the ground beneath American science education for generations.

This is the hinge point where a politician’s wink toward “both sides” set the stage for a nationwide epistemic crisis.

Together, we trace:

• Reagan’s Valley Forge performance—and how staged humility became a weaponized doubt.

• The rise of creationist activism—from grassroots pamphlets to national policy.

• How the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal supercharged misinformation in classrooms and living rooms alike.

• The rhetorical sleight-of-hand that made “just asking questions” a political technology.

• The long shadow of 1980—how that moment prepared the soil for our modern post-truth landscape.

This waypoint asks how a nation that once sent astronauts to the moon became a nation where public schools fear teaching evolution plainly—and how much of that shift was born not from theology, but from strategy.

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🎧 Waypoint 3.3 — “Faith, Fury, and the Ditto-Headless Horsemen of the Post-Truth Apocalypse”

What happens when the Medal of Freedom becomes a prop in the post-truth carnival?

Ecce homo.

In this episode, we revisit the 2020 State of the Union—when a reality-television president draped the nation’s highest civilian honor over the shoulders of a talk-radio demagogue.

From Rush Limbaugh’s “AIDS Update” and “feminazi” sermons to the birth of a media ecosystem built on grievance and spectacle, we trace how the epistemic soil was prepared for today’s post-truth age.

We follow the lineage from Reagan’s neolibrian gospel to Trump’s televised theater of trolls—and watch the torch passed to Limbaugh’s heir apparent, Charlie Kirk.

It’s a story about language as contagion, charisma as creed, and the long echo of the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal.

In this episode:

The Medal of Freedom inverted—from conscience to cult.

Rush Limbaugh’s “AIDS Update” and the making of a moral vacuum.

From Reagan’s rhetorical gospel to Trump’s resurrection theater.

Charlie Kirk, martyrdom marketing, and the algorithmic afterlife of hate.

The forging of a post-truth America—and the cost of unexamined laughter.

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🎧 Field Note 3.2 — All the King’s Candy

What do we swallow when we crave certainty, and who’s feeding it to us?

In this episode of No Shortcuts to Now: childhood sweetness and modern certainty; gum scraped from the sidewalk; Sunday school lessons and post-truth prophets; how a sour little candy foretold an empire of outrage.

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🎧 Waypoint 3.2 — The Loudest Belch: Reagan’s Revolution & the Birth of Outrage Media

When did truth become a matter of volume?

When did anger start selling better than honesty?

This is the second episode of season three of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times.

In this episode, we travel from the Revolutionary stage at Valley Forge to the volcanic slopes of Mount St. Helens — and into the media firestorm that reshaped American truth itself.

From Reagan’s smile to Rush Limbaugh’s microphone, outrage became currency, nostalgia became creed, and democracy’s breath grew thin.

🧭 Along the trail

• Washington’s Cato and the Stoic roots of American virtue

• Mount St. Helens and the metaphor of eruption

• Reagan’s “morning in America” and the false Eden of nostalgia

• The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of talk-radio outrage

• From free markets to post-truth politics — and what still smolders beneath the ash

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🎸 Acoustic interludes: “Pink Houses” (John Mellencamp, 1983), performed unplugged.

So: take a deep breath.

It’s a long trail —

and there are no shortcuts to now.

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🎧 Field Note 3.1 — The Phantom Pronoun

How does a single word — “they” — become a weapon, a fog, a spell?

This is a bonus episode of Season 3 of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times.

In this episode: I read aloud Field Note 3.1 — The Phantom Pronoun — a reflection on Macbeth’s witches, borrowed outrage, propaganda’s fog, and the dangers of the phantom enemy. It’s about how language blurs truth and shadow, how tragedy is twisted into division, and how spells can break when we see through them.Image credit: George Cattermole, Scene of Three Witches from Macbeth (1840), Yale Center for British Art — Public Domain.

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📘 New here? Start at the beginning with Waypoint 1.1 — Vulcan’s Evangelist.

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🎧 Waypoint 3.1 — The Iron Key

How many legacies end in ash — and what traces do we leave behind?

This is the first audio installment of Season 3 of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times.

In this episode: I read aloud Waypoint 3.1 — The Iron Key — a reflection on volcanic fire, fragile blossoms, Pompeii’s ashes, and the strange graffiti we leave behind. It’s about how ambition and catastrophe entwine, and how memory survives in traces more fragile — and more enduring — than we imagine.

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🎧 Field Note 3.1 — The Blasted Stage: Kierkegaard’s Clown, Newsom’s Warning, and Trump’s Burning Theatre

How many times does a clown have to yell fire in the theater before the crowd stops laughing?

This Field Note steps into the uneasy overlap of philosophy, politics, and performance — from Kierkegaard’s parable of the clown, to Gavin Newsom’s warning in Sacramento, to Donald Trump’s burning theatre of ambition.

It’s about the danger of laughing while the fire spreads — and the need to take warning seriously before democracy itself goes up in flames.

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So: take a deep breath.

It’s a long trail — and there are no shortcuts to now.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com