Marilyn Manson once said, "I AM THE ALL-AMERICAN ANTICHRIST! I WAS MADE IN AMERICA AND AMERICA HATES ME FOR WHAT I AM! I AM YOUR SHIT! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF WHAT YOU HAVE EATEN!"
John 20:11-16 says, "Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”)."
This is the resurrection of Christ. He was tortured. He was nailed to the cross. He died a slow and hideous death. But there he stood, before Mary Magdalene, living and breathing and speaking.
Do I believe this story to be true? In one way, no. In one way, yes. Do I believe it happened in the same way that I believe that I am speaking to you now? No. Do I believe that it contains deeper truths about the human animal? Yes.
More on that shortly. But for now, let me congratulate you for your presence here.
The cowards of the world can only handle me when I'm filtered through the skewed lens of some safe little zombie-brain . . . but if you're here, then it means you like your chaos in the raw.
You are a child of chaos. We are siblings in chaos, you and I. We have seen through the veil of order, and we seek the truth. The big truth. They sexy truth. The dark truth.
Am I right? Do you feel the hunger? Do you feel the thirst? The spiritual thirst? The thirst that you know not how to quench!
You could give yourself to God, but he's a loser. You could give yourself to Satan, but he's a cliche. You could give yourself to yourself, but through the tempest and the static of this age of death, you don't even know who you are. Your life is buried under the soil of death, the living death of this time and this place.
I used to share your confusion. For a very long time, I was confused about who I am. What should I be doing? What should I be saying? Do I deserve the spotlight I've pulled onto myself? Am I worthy of its light?
But those questions have ended. I know who I am. I know what I want. You want to know too? You want to know who I am? Who you are? Who we are together?
In the words of Slipknot, "Chaos is just the beginning." And if you think I lived 20 years of chaos, then you don't yet know what chaos is. You think you've seen the storm? That was the calm before the storm, love. The time of chaos has only now arrived. The time of the new chaos. The time of the new order.
Who am I? I was the clown. I was the demon. I was the thinker. And all of these things have raged within me. You have seen the clown. You have seen the demon. You have seen the thinker. And this was the old chaos. But now . . . well, let's not worry too much about me just yet. Let's talk about you.
You exist in the age of living death. What does that mean? That means that everything human about you is repressed. Your passion, crushed. Your dreams, subverted. Your darkness, repressed. Your sexuality, commodified and sanitized. Your self-expression, curtailed. You are worse than dead. You don't even exist.
Shakespeare once said that,
“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
And maybe that was the truth of his time, but we live a different truth. You live a different truth.
"You are but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That never gets their hour upon the stage,
and was never heard. Your life is a tale
untold due to idiots, full of blah and meh,
signifying ptttthhhpttt."
This surface you. This face you show the world. This mechanical animal. I have no need for it. It does not interest me. It does not entertain me. Cast that aside. It is the living dead. It is the zombie of a person that never lived.
I want to talk to the under-you. The face you've hidden. The ego divinum. I need it. It interests me. It entertains me. Bring it forth. It is the dying life. It is the person who never lived . . . but could.
It's not Jesus that needs to rise from his tomb today. It's you. You are the one who has suffered torture, slow and cruel. You are the one who has died. But unlike Jesus, who died on the cross after years of life, you were born dead, born into a world of death . . .
AWAKE! AWAKE DARK EGO! AWAKE! WITH TALONS SHARP AND FANGS BARED, TEAR OFF THE MASK AND SHOW ME THE FUCKING BEAST WHOSE NAME IS YOURS.
Let's whisper. Let's speak softly so that none may hear us. Tell me . . .
Do you grow weary of your mask?
Speak it.
Do you grow weary of your mask?
Do you tire of this living death?
Do you wish to live at last?
THEN DO IT! LIVE, YOU COWARD! LIVE AT LAST! What stands in your way? Your job? Your family? Your lover? You hater? The mob? The machine?
This is your day of resurrection. This is your day to emerge from the tomb, the tomb you've lived in all your life.
The stone has been rolled away, my sibling.
Why do you linger on the threshold of this empty tomb, still clinging to the comfort of its cold shadows? Why do you hesitate, as if the light might burn, as if freedom might hurt?
Why do you rebel against yourself? Sure, resurrection isn’t gentle. It doesn’t cradle you tenderly as it raises you up from the grave. Resurrection is violent. It tears you open, guts you, and shows you what you’re made of, forces you to shed all that’s false until you stand bare, exposed to the world. But that’s the beauty of it.
Do you wonder if you can bear the weight of resurrection? Because I tell you that you can. Can you bear to be born again—not as the meek ghost you were told to be, but as the living, breathing, raging beast that you truly are?
You have been taught you to fear yourself, to cower before your own power, to kneel to the gods of complacency and conformity. But tell me—does that bring you peace? Does that bring you joy? NO. You are depressed. You are anxious. You are afraid. WHY?
You're depressed because you're not what you are supposed to be. You are anxious because you know you are living a lie. You are afraid because this world has demanded your fear, and you've given it, because you were shown your flaws before you were ever shown your fangs. You were shown your cowardice before you were ever shown your claws.
Listen to me, my sibling in chaos.
I am not here to save you.
Salvation is just another lie, another prison.
I am here to call to the beast within you, to remind it of its strength, of its teeth and claws and muscle and drive.
There is a fire that roars in your belly. And you have turned away from its warmth. You have refused to see by its glow. Every day, since your birth, you've been conditioned to deny the flames of this inner hell. Because those who rule this world must keep you ignorant of the reality that you are a force, wild and untamable, born to break chains, to burn and rebuild. You are the flood, you are the fire. You are a human being. You are warrior. You are a poet. You are a God.
So take this moment.
Take it into yourself.
Let it burn away every layer of doubt, of fear, of anxiety, of depression. Let it strip you to your core, down to the divine self—the ego divinum—where no lie can reach, where no chain can bind.
That is where you are free.
That is where you are whole.
That is where you are unstoppable.
That is where you are alive.
So step forth, raw and radiant. Show this world what it has tried to bury. Let it see you. Let it fear you. Let it bow down before you.
This is your resurrection. This is your kingdom come. This is your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven. And in hell. And in any other realm within you.
I know that the reality is that I probably didn't succeed in bringing you into consciousness, but whether I did or not, it's time to go into the Fray.
I have spoken recently of the old chaos and the new chaos. And I want to be clear about these terms. The old chaos is the chaos that arises from contradiction and conflict. When you have different facets of your personality that strive for dominance, that creates internal chaos. When you have different political factions vying for control of your country, that creates social chaos. The closer the competing elements--whether they be external or internal--are to one another in power and influence, the more pronounced the chaos.
That's why even as America is doing well by many statistical measures, it feels unstable, and it's future seems in question. Sharp divisions create pronounced chaos. If most everyone was MAGA or most everyone was Liberal or most everyone was Leftist, then the chaos of the present would be less pronounced by an order of magnitude.
If 80% of people say "THE SKY IS RED!" then the 20% that say "THE SKY IS BLUE" feel that things are chaos, but the 80% feel that things are stable and righteous, even though they're completely wrong about the idea that unites them.
But the Chaos of old is dying. Why? Because the social orders that have dominated throughout most of our history are eroding. The rise of social media created a robust array of subcultures where truths that were long held sacred went to die. If you believed the earth was flat in 1980, you were the town nut. You would have to search far and wide to find like-minded kooks. The mono-God of the Christian death cult may have died its first death during the enlightenment, but it died its second death online, on social media and in the wake of 9/11, when we all saw that faith may not move mountains, but it can sure knock down buildings.
At first, this only seems to strengthen the old chaos. More subcultures means more disagreements, means more chaos. But what happens when I am God. And you are God. And she is God. And he is God. And they are God. And everyone is a cult of 1? What happens when the amount of ideologies is identical to the number of human beings? What happens when a shared belief in the mono-God or a shared belief in the flat earth or a shared belief in the red sky . . . all fail to work their magic as a social adhesive, because they are lost in the noise of the static of the individual.
That . . . is the new chaos. The chaos of humanity, individuated and awakened. And look at where we are technologically, my siblings: the rise of the machine mind. You and I can create art and code and a great many other things to our specifications, with greater and greater levels of exactitude. Think about the breakdown of everything that follows that reality. Consider the full implications of it. What we are talking about is THE DEATH OF COLLECTIVE REALITY.
Imagine a world where there is no consensus reality, where each person’s experience of existence is a wholly separate universe unto itself. In this new chaos, every individual becomes the sole architect of their reality, not bound to the collective truths or beliefs that once held society together. Truth, once a cornerstone, now fractures into countless shards, each piece reflecting only the self, the ego, the personal god. There is no longer “the way things are”—there is only “the way things are to me.”
The material conditions are ripe the emergence of this new paradigm. Let's lay it out:
We've got hyper-personalized technology. This machine age—this age of the algorithm—has advanced to the point where technology doesn’t just serve us; it reshapes us, learns us, anticipates our every desire.
We've got artificial servants. The rise of AI isn’t just a technological leap—it’s the birth of a mirror that shapes itself to the soul of the one who looks into it. Each time you create through AI, each time you command it to conjure your dreams, your visions, your fears, it reaches deeper into your psyche, giving shape to your inner world, your personal mythology.
Do you see what this ultimately means?
It means that the concept of truth—the idea that there is something real beyond ourselves, something agreed upon and objective—is splintering before our eyes. The truths we once held sacred are dissolving into a swarm of micro-beliefs, each one as valid as the next, each one a tiny religion of the self. No longer do we need external validation; no longer do we need proof or consensus. Truth is only what we feel, what we choose, what the machine affirms back to us in endless, self-referential loops.
The institutions that once commanded respect—governments, religions, social norms—are slipping into irrelevance as the individual becomes the ultimate authority. The need to answer to others weakens, the need to commune, to conform, to align with any external moral structure falls away. There is no church, no state, no shared philosophy; there is only the self and the curated reality that feeds its appetites.
This is the new chaos. And with it comes new problems. New existential dreads.
With the end of collective reality comes the paradox of boundless freedom—the prison of endless choice. When everything is possible, nothing is meaningful. With each new path, each self-made truth, each isolated reality, choice itself becomes a burden, a shackle. You are free to become anything, yet grounded in nothing. Liberation becomes a new cage, the weight of endless possibility pressing down until freedom feels like torment.
In this brave new chaos, empathy, understanding, and connection begin to fade. How can you truly relate to another when their reality, their truth, their beliefs are as alien to you as yours are to them? Each person becomes a sovereign in their own universe, unreachable, isolated, encapsulated in a cocoon of personalized information, walled off by the algorithm that shapes them.
The great poet Leonard Cohen once wrote a song about the future, and I think that he was spot on in many regards. He said in his song that, "Things are going to slide. Slide in all directions. Won't be nothing. Won't be nothing you can measure anymore. The blizzard. The blizzard of the world will pass the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul."
Gosh, that's an amazing fucking song. But he said something else in that song that I think offers us a solution to the pains that we face going forward. Shockingly, in the same solution that Christ and many others have proposed. Leonard Cohen says:
"You don't know me from the wind
You never will, you never did
I'm the little Jew
Who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine
Of survival."
Love. Is the only engine. Of survival. I think he's right, my sibilings in chaos. I think love is the only engine of our survival. Those whose hearts are filled with hatred are increasingly becoming not just a repugnant mass of assholes, but an existential threat to the human race of which we are all a part.
And in an age of greater and greater individuation, the call to love becomes more radical, more essential—a call to defy the very currents that pull us toward isolation. Leonard Cohen saw this. He saw the inevitable slide of the world, "the blizzard of the world" overtaking and overturning the order of the soul. And in that storm, he offers love, not as sentiment or platitude, but as a defiant, enduring force, the single power that can hold the fabric together even as it shreds.
Because in this new chaos, in this world where each of us becomes our own god, where each truth fractures into infinite reflections, it is love alone that can form any bridge between us. It is love, my siblings, that allows us to see beyond the boundaries of our individual universes, to reach out across the chasms of selfhood that technology and ego have created. Love is what reminds us that we are not alone, that our gods are not isolated, but interconnected, bound by something beyond mere belief or ideology.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Love in this new age is not easy. In a world that tells us to prioritize the self above all, love demands that we recognize the self in others. It demands that we push against the tide, that we step outside our custom-built, hyper-personalized realities and meet others in the wild, unpredictable spaces between.
You want a new faith? You want a new polytheism? You're in it. You and everyone else that awakens into their own divinity. In some ways, we are reaching back to the past. In others, we are reaching out to the future. But as we pull those threads together, we must be animated by a stark and perhaps disconcerting truth--the world as it is now is dying. And in my view, it deserves to die. It is a world of living death. Let it die so that life can become life once more. Let it die so that we may breathe without its suffocation.
I wish that I could tell you on this day, and in the moment, that I love you all. I strive to. I want to. But in so many ways, hatred still pulses within me. Misanthropy. But I know it has no place in the future. So I must kill it once and for all. I must kill it so that I may live in a world that has no room for it any longer.
. . .
I am Fray. I am a wizard. I am a Shaman. I am a magician. I am a philosopher. I am a clown. I am a fool. I am a God.
Who are you?