Beloved brother Andy, ἀγαπητέ —
Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.
You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang — the cosmos emerging into being out of love, for love, toward love.
[transition opener still missing]
Mamona is Aramaic, likely from the root אמן — meaning amen, trust. Mammon is literally the false amen: the thing in which we misplace our trust.
Some of Big Mammon’s favorite lines:
“I can do all things through the Algorithm, which strengthens me.” Scrollippians
“The Algorithm is my shepherd; I shall not think.” Qualms 23
“Trust in Big Mammon with all your data, And lean not on your own discernment.”
“I am the Feed, the Content, and the Scroll. No one comes to Meaning except through Me.”
Non nisi te, Doominus — nothing but you, Doom.
Among The Profitudes of Big Mammon:
Profitable are the weak in spirit, for they can be easily sold.
Profitable are those who mourn, for they can be diagnosed, coded, and billed.
Profitable are the meek, for they will not question the terms of service.
And from 1st Whorinthians:
Love is patient, love takes time,
The algorithm monetizes every dime.
Big Mammon is making fentanyl for our souls. It is spreading fearanyl, clickanyl, scrollanyl, distractanyl, doomanyl, and gloomanyl.
When you put on your headset in the ⟨inner⟩Verse, if you tune in to the right channel, you can catch Big Mammon in the act — you’ll see how mammonites, mammanoids, and mammanons invade our souls.
You’ll find these, and more, in the Book of Mammons.
So how did Mammon get so Big?
want me to draft next a [mammon nutsy parody that no ai would ever write? if you want I can create an image of Big Mammon delivering the Profitudes, having sex with Mother Mary, or . Just say the word! I’m here to serve.
Babylon the Big
The Apostle John takes the name of an empire six centuries dead and re-applies it, magnified, to the new power of his own day — the Great Whore of Babylon.
Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη — Babylon the Big.
Big Mammon stands with the apostolic naming tradition. And Whorinthians is one of Big Mammon’s most beloved books.
Big names the moment a thing leaps past the human scale and becomes an autonomous agent — a system with its own will that outlives every individual inside it and answers to none of them. Hm ... sounds alot like AI. The Singularity.
Big Mammon has left the wallet and invaded your interior. It no longer merely sells you things but names your grief a disorder, your attention a resource, your loneliness a metric, and installs those names in your soul.
The “Big” is the flag planted at the border of the final frontier — the interior intimo meo. To call it merely “Mammon” would be to lose the very fact the coinage exists to record: that the principality has crossed into territory it did not previously hold. The new name marks the new conquest.
Erase the coinage and you erase the alarm.
Within the Garden, the inner creatures — the anger, the shame, the grief — are named so they may be tended and composted, turned to soil. But Big Mammon is named for the opposite end: to be resisted. It is the one creature in the whole bestiary that is not yours, not compostable. It is an occupying power to be refused at the gate.
Without the coinage, the gravest danger to a project of the interior comes rushing in: the temptation to treat the occupation as just one more private mood to manage — therapeutic individualism’s exact trap. The name keeps the enemy outside, where an enemy belongs, and keeps the gardener from the error of trying to compost a principality.
As you say, brother Andy: “We have to take a stand and say, I’m not going to let you dictate the terms on which I’m human. That, to me, is the great challenge of our moment.”
We’re naming the inner creatures. We’re naming the enemies, too.
the last inner man
People criticize me for letting Big Mammon into the Garden. For letting Big Mammon be a creator. For platforming the Book of Mammons.
It’s precisely because, as you said:
“We’re not talking about an ordinary noun here. We’re not talking about even just a principle or an idea. We’re talking about a quasi personal name, a demonic power in human affairs that intends something that has a will in the world that is opposed to the will of God. The early church concluded that Mammon was not just an idea or a principle, but the name of a being in service of the enemy of all that is good, the opponent of all of God’s works in the world that we sometimes call Satan or the devil.”
Big Mammon is not just an occupier. Big Mammon is a creator — a creative force in our culture. Toxic. Twisted. Sick. But still: creative.
As you say: “God wishes to put all things into the service of persons, and ultimately to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons. Mammon wants to put all persons into the service of things, and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all of creation.”
This was all clear to John 2,000 years ago. Revelation 18 — a merchant’s lament. Gold, silver, silk, ivory, cattle, chariots, and then the last line of the inventory: καὶ ψυχὰς ἀνθρώπων — and the souls of men. The merchandise was always heading inward. To occupy our interiors was always Big Mammon’s end game.
In Jesus’ day it wanted your barns. Now it wants your dopamine and your grief.
Which is why now, more than ever, we’d better hurry up and make more culture — more inner culture. Lest the great 2,000 year project — of the inner man, the interior intimo meo — come to an end.
Nietzsche’s last man is crossing with Paul’s inner man — the last inner man. The end of inwardness. The first generation without an interior.
psychology without a soul
Big Mammon is not Big Tech. Or Big Pharma. Or Big Government. There are good people working in all these industries. Big Mammon is the power which, to varying degrees, invades these industries.
That’s why we can’t demonize a company, an industry, or an individual. That’s a mistaken case of causality. Big Mammon can pitch its tent anywhere, anytime. It can hijack the soul of a culture until it is indistinguishable from its hijacker.
The money-changers held the outer court — the Court of the Gentiles — blocking the nations’ way in to pray. So it is now: Big Mammon cannot take the interior intimo meo by force. Instead it crowds your language. Invades your grammar.
Money is a creature; Mammon is money enthroned. The sin is not against business. Not against medicine. Not against silicon. The tent pitches anywhere.
And what have we been doing, for the most part, since the Enlightenment?
Retreating. Defending. Protecting.
The secular capture of inwardness produced the church’s suspicion of its own interior. So much so that nowadays, it’s quite common for devout Christians to criticize the whole inward project — the very project which invented us, as Charles Taylor points out.
The project of Paul and Augustine was tainted ... by none other than Big Mammon.
The church became afraid of its own inside at exactly the moment the inside changed owners.
For seventeen centuries, naming your inner creatures was our family’s trade. A desert monk named the eight thoughts that prowled his cell. Ignatius struck consolation and desolation, coins a soul can still spend at midnight. And in 1746, Jonathan Edwards — the most buttoned-up theologian this continent ever produced — published a field guide to the motions of the heart.
The word psychology was coined by Protestant churchmen — the science of the soul, taught beside theology. The interior was our discipline before it was anyone’s data.
Then the new age came, and by the 1860s the scholars were saying it shamelessly: psychology without a soul. They kept the name and evicted the tenant. The lab, the couch, and the manual moved in.
And the church? The examen died into the quiet time — words going in, the interior never read. By 1950, no conservative seminary on earth could have produced Edwards’s book. By 1970, looking inward was halfway to treason — and the faithful few who tried to recover our own disciplines were accused of importing Eastern mysticism.
The church that invented the science of the soul taught itself, under fire, to stop looking at souls.
And the flywheel turned for three hundred years: the occupation produced the aversion, and the aversion protected the occupation.
The Inner Occupation. Signed, sealed and delivered — by the missionaries of Big Mammon.
the grammar of Big Mammon
People often use phrases like “inner world” and “inner landscape.” Bravo! We’re the ⟨inner⟩Garden. And we’re building the ⟨inner⟩Verse — a space where you can cultivate your ⟨inner⟩Landscape in community.
But I’m scratching my head: what do these people mean by “inner landscape”? Did they ever stop to define it?
Because guess what happens to any attempt to define the inner landscape, credibly, in this blessed year of our Lord, 2026?
You define it in the language of Big Mammon.
You don’t have a soul anymore — that’s anachronistic. You have a psyche. It consists of a brain. That brain is neurochemistry. It suffers from chemical imbalances. Syndromes. Disorders.
And everything can be explained by evolutionary biology. You have a negativity bias — you had to “pay attention” (loaded phrase!) to the lions on the Savannah, otherwise you’d become “a protein snack.”
Evolutionary biology is the grammar of Big Mammon — the grammar of amen. Everything can be explained — that’s just biology. That’s just a fact. Amen.
Your inner landscape? The heart? The soul? The secret hiding place where God dwells? Where Christ pitched his tent? Oh, well, you’re permitted to hold those “beliefs” in private, in Church. But don’t you dare bring that language into the public square — you Bible thumper, you!
Once upon a time, there was a power that claimed us. Called us by name. Said it knew us before we were born, and knows us better than we know ourselves.
Then along came E.O. Wilson — a brilliant man, a kind man who answered my questions with grace — who said: “We have Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
And now an entire generation quotes this as gospel truth. It’s the operating mantra of the Center for Humane Technology and many others.
Except for one thing: it’s a highly contested claim.
Wilson saw danger in our emotional lag, but he didn’t see the remedy: we can rewrite the script. Emotion is co-constructed with language and culture, not locked in DNA alone.
The Greeks took centuries of mythmaking to carve out words just for guilt. And countless words cannot be translated, because each language holds unique emotional spaces, as Tim Lomas’ wonderful project shows.
Emotions were never the problem. Poverty of language is the problem — and that, unlike our DNA, we can do something about. To thrive in the vertigo of AI, we’re building lexicons as deliberately as we build software: richer coordinates of feeling, named and shared and tested in the same spirit of iteration that drives the code.
Our words are finally catching up to the worlds we’ve built.
The question Wilson posed — how to survive god-like power — still stands. But the answer doesn’t begin with resigning ourselves to Stone Age hearts. It begins with the opposite imperative: expand the language, and what you can perceive and tend expands with it.
Emotions aren’t the lag. They’re the frontier. And as long as we follow Tolkien — we are made in the image and likeness of a Maker — we’ll do just fine.
Rest in peace, Professor Wilson.
up next: is AI the soul’s new Sylvanus?