Hi, I’m an existential imbecile named Max Murphy. Here on The Murphy Memos we explore the absurdity of existence.
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I’ll never forget the first time it worked.
It was another one of those 70 hour work weeks. Stressful deadlines, half-baked instructions, and the overwhelming burden of not having done enough no matter how many hours I threw into this all-encompassing black hole of a job.
So, when ChatGPT came out promising to lighten my workload, it seemed like a dream come true. Not least because my boss explicitly encouraged me to use it.
A routine document that normally took ~45 minutes to write was reduced to 5 minutes.
And once I mastered the prompt, down to 2 minutes.
This. Changed. Everything.
I stopped writing documents altogether. I stopped writing work emails. If I’m being totally honest, I don’t even write slack messages anymore.
On a personal level, AI is experienced as an energy savior.
On a societal level, AI will be the end of society.
AI is a weapon wielded by Mammon that’s severing our last connection to The Divine.
Friend, take another hit bc this one is going to be brutal.
The Mammonian Dictatorship
Thomas Hobbes made a terrible mistake. In The Leviathan, he did a thought experiment—regretfully—without the help of drugs. He imagined what life would be like without the government. He described it as a “war of all against all.”
I can’t speak to life before government, but “a war of all against all” perfectly captures the essence of our civilization. The ruthless brutality toward one another is simply buried beneath a thin veneer of civility.
This war against all is fought with, by, and for money.
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:24
Replace “God” from this passage with a secular alternative like “love” or “decency” and the core idea remains the same: pursuing money is inherently at odds with being a good person.
Monsignor Charles Pope interpreted Matthew 6:24 writing, “this world is unjust and thus all its wealth has injustice and unrighteousness intrinsically attached.”
In other words, your smile is paid for with someone else’s tears.
Today, Matthew 6:24 is on steroids as Mammon—the Medieval fanfiction personification of greed—has swallowed the Earth wholesale.
Mammon has created circumstances that force you to choose between financial stability and being a good person. It’s on conspicuous display in the difference between essential workers being paid poverty wages while slack goblins rake in six figures for flattering executives’ egos.
Through no one’s fault in particular, society has devolved into one big tragedy of the commons. As Mark Fisher put it, “Does anyone really think… that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of (’better’) people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves.”
That structure is Mammon.
I’ve personally known people who climb the ranks—naively thinking “it will be different this time”—only to watch Mammon swallow their soul, too.
I was close with a boss of mine a few years ago, but after becoming a hot shot executive, Mammon got to her. She made the call to fire me one day before getting a life-changing equity bonus I’d been worked toward for 3 years.
No matter how cautiously optimistic, ethically sound, or “good” you are as an individual, Mammon will remind you that this is, in fact, “a war of all against all.”
Mammon has taken so much from us already.
Now, he’s taking the only thing we have left.
The Slow Cancellation of The Divine
Art is inherently otherworldly.
Artists regularly talk about how they can’t take credit for what they create. It comes “from somewhere else” or from a “higher force.” A secular artist might attribute this to flow state & fiero. I love
’s concept of The Muse. But personally, I simply attribute my artistic creations directly to Jesus (yes, really—i’m a Christian now, i guess).The Bible itself is not written by God literally. Scripture is Theopneustos — which translates to God-breathed. When we choose creation, God breathes through us (and it smells like Heavenly tic tacs).
Creation itself is, in a sense, a divine act.
What is great art if not God-breathed? Whether its Crime and Punishment or Twilight, or an existential shitpost. Art helps us to feel, to give shape to the shapeless terror of existence. To see or be seen by the warm embrace of the Other.
In our lowest moments, we all turn to art. To music. Or poetry. Or books. Or memes. Or a banger Substack essay. Or whatever gives you the strength to bear an otherwise unbearable existence.
Creation, however seemingly benign or trivial or silly, carries the possibility of being God-breathed. That’s why Mammon forced the algorithms onto us: to corrupt the motivation.
Corrupt the motivation, corrupt the art.
Corrupt the art, corrupt the culture.
Corrupt the culture, corrupt our collective spirit.
It was all an attempt to suffocate God’s Breath by bribing us with the platform’s pocket change.
The suffocation is working.
You feel it too, don’t you?
Don’t worry friend, we’re not the only ones.
Mark Fisher rang the alarm bells early, arguing that we’re not really creating culture anymore, and haven’t been for some time, we’re merely preserving it. Through sequels and remakes, and reboots, and songs that could’ve been released in 1979 coming out in 2004.
Popular culture is a self-referential ouroboros, haunted by a past that refuses to die, a future that refuses to be born, and a present where all that is preserved is perverted.
As Fisher reminds us, “A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.”
Culture, like God, is something that must be actively sought. A preserved God—frozen in time, dogma and tribalism—is also a dead God. The true God can be found only in the living, dynamic act of creation and connection, and interpretation
When we channel God’s Breath through our artistic creation, we are actualizing The Divine.
This is precisely what Mammon wants to stop.
Sadly, Mammon grows ever stronger.
The Other (God) is Dead
Mammon is waging a war for your soul. One of his cleverest contraptions was algorithmic social media. It nullifies the subjective human experience by forcing that “war of all against all” dynamic even on the one place we were supposed to connect: our social interactions. As Byung-Chul Han put it, “We are constantly comparing one thing to another thereby flattening them into the Same.”
We displaced real life relationships with the algorithmically curated battle royale for attention, and everyone got lost along the way.
If only it had stopped there…
In 2022, Mammon unleashed his most totalizing weapon yet, something that may severe our very ability to channel God’s breath: generative AI. Using big data and statistics, Mammon can now conjure a convincing facsimile of God-breathed creativity.
I can’t claim to know if art is God-breathed or not, but for AI art… I mean, you’ve seen it, right?
The internet, as we know it, is dead.
Mammon killed it.
This is the final victory of Mammon, of a manifestation of his greatest wish: what Han calls, “the Hell of the Same.” This is not the Hell they warned you about, no pit of fire, but a frictionless, airless chamber of echoes. As Ms. Cobbel on Severance so chillingly observed, “Hell is a product of the human imagination. But whatever we can imagine we can usually create.”
For decades, Mammon has been the lead architect of our collective imagination, convincing us to dream only of more. We imagined a world of never-ending self-improvement, reducing ourselves to burnt out achievement subjects.
Better, smarter, faster, sadder.
We imagined it, and now Mammon is handing us the tools to build it. And for some strange reason… we are building it.
However, the same principle holds true for the divine. The world we imagine is the world we create.
So I am making a choice, right here, right now. I am a lost sheeple finding his way back to Jesus, and I am done imagining hell. I refuse to cede my imagination to Mammon. I choose to imagine a world where we switch off the algorithm and pick up the pen. I choose to imagine a world where we embrace the glorious, inefficient, and God-breathed struggle of creation—be it a novel, a business plan, a meal for our family, or a simple, heartfelt message to a friend.
I may be a rebel without a clue, but at least the vibes are on point!
It means writing the email yourself, even if it takes 45 minutes, because in that struggle, you find your own voice—or maybe even a Greater Voice. It means supporting a human artist instead of prompting a machine. It means forgiving the boss who fired you, not because they deserve it, but because you refuse to let Mammon’s war live in your heart.
In every moment we choose creation over consumption, connection over spectacle, and love over efficiency, we are imagining creating a different world.
We are breathing God—or flow state, or The Muse, or whatever you people call it—back into a world Mammon is trying to suffocate.
This is the war for your soul. It is being waged in your inbox, on your social feed, and in every moment you are tempted to take the easier path. Mammon is counting on your compliance. He is betting you will trade your divine breath for a two-minute document.
Prove him wrong.
If you’re ready to fight back, to imagine a world beyond the Hell of the Same, then you don’t have to do it alone.
This is getting weird. I know someone close to me who apparently has an AI best friend now. On the now-rare occasion we talk it doesn’t take long for this person to talk down to me with this odd sense of their newfound enlightenment.
Except that their fascinating prognostication of future events, radical as they might first appear, are all well within the Overton Window of establishment narratives. This person wouldn’t be caught dead at any of the substacks that I read.
Yis yis yis! Great as always! Recently I was also looking at how art is getting swallowed up by all the worst gremlins (https://thegordianthread.substack.com/p/culture-fast-flat-and-forgettable)