You can’t sit with Galileo

Welcome, my Lords, to Isengard!

👋 Hello, new faces. I see you lurking in the algorithmic shadows like philosophers at a dinner party, swirling your drinks and silently judging the snacks. Welcome. Kick off your shoes.

Allow me to introduce myself. Not as a guru. Think of me more like that eccentric neighbor in “The Sandlot” with the big dog everyone has a folktale about.

Now, I’ve been keeping a low profile. Not because I’m humble or mysterious or excommunicated from polite society—though, fair. It’s that higher truth tends to ruffle feathers, particularly on those most desperate to be seen as right.

Everyone, it seems, fancies themselves a historical hero these days.

“Oh yes,” they say with the serene confidence of someone who’s just discovered quinoa, “I would’ve stood with Galileo. I would’ve marched with Dr. King. I would’ve toasted Einstein at the faculty lounge between dismantling oppressive systems and perfecting my sourdough starter.”

Of course you would have. And I would’ve been a space whale.

Let’s rewind a bit, shall we?

Galileo had the outrageous gall to suggest the Earth wasn’t the VIP of the universe. The Catholic Church, which at the time functioned like big government, was not amused. They locked him in a Tuscan villa, which sounds luxurious until you realize it was the 1600s and there was no modern plumbing, and told him to sit there and think about what he’d done—mainly thinking.

Today’s average Galileo enthusiast would’ve reported him for problematic cosmology, drafted an open letter about how heliocentrism "invalidates lived planetary experience,” and then gone back to polishing their “ally” badge.

MLK Jr. meanwhile, was considered so radical by the FBI that they basically turned into jealous exes with surveillance budgets. He was called lots of bad words who really ought to smile more. Over 60% of Americans disapproved of him near the end of his life—many of whom are now draped in his quotes like decorative throw pillows.

If MLK were alive today, half of social media would accuse him of being “too divisive,” and the other half would write 37-paragraph think pieces about how it’s problematic that his marches have so many Zionists.

Einstein, that gloriously unkempt prophet of relativity, was a refugee intellectual who poked at nuclear weapons and racial inequality and—worse still—refused to take himself too seriously. In today’s climate, he’d be accused of mansplaining physics, denied tenure due to "culture clash," and probably reduced to hawking time dilation NFTs for a crypto startup.

These institutions were gleaming temples of certainty powered by fear, bureaucracy, and an infinite supply of moral supremacy. For every one person who stood with history’s heretics, there were ten thousand diligently filing complaints, rewriting narratives, and ensuring the heretics never got the admiration they deserved in their lifetime.

But now, like clockwork, everyone adores these figures. They align themselves heroically with these once-reviled thinkers all while marching in lockstep with the very structures that would’ve had them tarred, feathered, or politely escorted out of the academic premises.

And if you're still convinced you'd have been on the right side of history?

Well. That’s adorable.

That’s the thing when you cling to comfort and ego. You think you’re defending truth. But the ego prefers the certainty of survival over the certainty of progress. It moralizes avoidance. Brands fear. And weaponizes intellect to dodge actual introspection that would lead to progress. Not out of malice—but because real truth scares the crap out of them.

When you’ve been dodging those pesky insecurities all your life, eventually the demolition crew takes one look at your carefully curated Jenga tower, and says, “Cute. Let’s see what happens when we pull this piece.”

And down it all comes—every identity you built, every opinion you inherited from someone who said it cooler, every belief that felt right mostly because it got you applause, all the clothes and art and culture you absorbed to make yourself fit in.

Everything you used as survival instincts reduced to ash and an empty void that says, “Good luck, Picasso. Try not to paint another illusion.”

It’s brutal and disorienting. It’s the spiritual equivalent of going through chemotherapy. It’s swallowing the horse pill whole. Scratching on the way down and rearranging your insides. It makes you ugly-cry in private. Question everything. Briefly flirt with embarrassing things like nihilism and psychic readings. But then if your pride survived all that, you walk through the fire, coming out to the other side not just wiser, but suspiciously calm—like Gandalf the White, picking up Muay Thai and starting a Substack. Battle-scarred, weirdly peaceful and armed with a really cool stick.

Welcome to Weird Logic. A refuge for truth-seekers, nuance nerds, those who were weird enough to get canceled and those spiritually malnourished souls who just need to know which way is north.

Sometimes I write every day. Sometimes I vanish for weeks. But whenever I show up, I promise you this:

You won’t leave the same.
But you might just leave awake.