Rome, Babylon, and the Beast
Halloween 2025
I’ll present this Substack piece in two phases — my raw first draft stream of mind dump from this morning, and the refined ChatGPT version for maximum impact.
Humanity is staring down an apocalypse.
Not the Hollywood kind — the quiet one that slips into your mind before you notice what’s changed.
Tomorrow is Halloween.
Once upon a time it was cute — tiny vampires, little cowboys, astronauts with plastic helmets. A pillowcase full of candy and a flashlight to keep the darkness at bay.
Now?
Pop culture drills into our kids faster than the sugar does. Costumes are less imagination and more algorithm — whatever celebrity or fetish was trending this week. Even the innocent ones — the princesses, the teddy bears — look confused about why everyone is dressed like a murder scene.
On our street, decorations have become horror-movie sets: dismembered limbs on lawns, blood fountains, corpses hanging from trees. “It’s fun,” we say.
Tell that to the toddlers who won’t walk up the driveway unless a parent is literally pushing them toward the monster.
We spend all year assuring them monsters aren’t real…
Then we reward them with candy for acting like they’re not afraid.
Sugar and fear.
Dopamine and dread.
The messaging isn’t mixed — it’s conditioning.
Halloween used to be playful.
Now it feels like a training exercise.
Not Rome’s games.
Not yet.
But we’re marching there — and Babylon is waiting.
Fear is not just a feeling.
Fear is a teacher.
Once you make a child afraid and then reward them with sugar, their brain learns a new rule:
“Fear is the gateway to comfort.”
And when they grow up, the candy doesn’t look like candy anymore.
It looks like debauchery.
It looks like bodies on screens.
It looks like numbness pretending to be pleasure.
We are drowning in sexual imagery — but starving for intimacy.
Everyone is “empowered,” but no one is satisfied.
We replaced connection with consumption.
And the supply is infinite.
Algorithms know your desires before you do.
They personalize the temptation.
They sell you escape from the very fear they manufacture.
Terrified by uncertainty?
Swipe.
Lonely?
Click.
Craving validation?
Post.
But all the digital affection in the world doesn’t quiet the hunger in the human soul.
It only deepens the wound.
This isn’t liberation.
It’s dependence engineered with precision.
And if fear is the leash…
then pleasure is the treat.
Rome understood this.
Bread and circuses.
Now we’ve upgraded it:
dopamine and data.
If fear is the leash and pleasure is the treat, then we must ask:
Who is holding the leash?
Human nature is our oldest monster.
It waits beneath the surface — hungry, impulsive, terrified of meaninglessness.
When the world becomes unpredictable, when tomorrow feels like a shadow —
we reach for the things that quiet the panic.
Comfort is the new catechism.
Self-indulgence is the new sacrament.
Hedonism becomes “self-care.”
Addiction becomes “identity.”
This would be sad enough on its own — a civilization medicating its dread.
But there’s something worse:
someone noticed.
Someone noticed that a frightened population will always choose safety over freedom, distraction over awareness, stimulation over truth.
Someone realized that if they can control what we fear —
they can control what we worship.
Fear teaches obedience.
Pleasure seals the deal.
And a society told from childhood that there are no demons…
grows blind to the ones that wear human faces.
People think the apocalypse will be loud — fire and beasts and skies tearing open.
But I suspect it starts like this:
A gentle suggestion.
A glowing screen.
A world made smaller and safer —
until you notice the walls.
And by then?
You’re already inside.
Okay, here’s the pre AI adjusted first draft, and if you like the message, then stop here, because there are some things I discuss that will almost certainly make you feel uncomfortable, but it is a post about Halloween after all:
I don’t mean to sound dramatic but humanity is facing an apocalypse, and it would be challenging to address the topic lightly.
Tomorrow is Halloween 2025. Personally I’ve never been a huge fan of this consumerist oriented “holiday”. It’s been turned from the cute thing it was back when we had little vampires, cowboys, indians, policeman and astronauts, even the occasional striped criminal complete with the ball and chain. Today, popular culture and never ending advertising leads to celebration of the moments current pop stars for most kids, and slutty — excuse me “sexy” — versions of vampires, cowboys, indians, policeman and astronauts, even the occasional stripped criminal.
But it’s more than that. Some people in the last few years around my home town have taken to going all out with the decorations. With the advent of cheaper blow up displays and larger than life animated props, some peoples houses go from camp to downright terrifying. What seems to be lost in the melee is the innocence of the children it was designed to appeal to. In the last few years taking out my own boys, I’ve noticed that many children, especially the littleuns — the princesses and the teddy bears — get absolutely terrified by much of the fanfare. They walk around and up to houses, too young to be on their own, often too scared to approach certain houses unless their parents are right behind them, encouraging them not to be afraid.
But they are afraid. They’re children. They don’t understand why it’s “funny” to have severed limbs with blood and guts and dead bodies scattered around the font yard. For the rest of the year we teach these kids that “monsters” are not real — there’s nothing to be afraid of in the shadows. Then we associate getting free candy with morbidity, something so ironic it needs to be spelled out - if eating candy actually makes people diseased and sick why are we glorifying it? If being scared is not how we want our kids to operate in the world, why is it okay for one night, just to get something that makes them sick?
The mixed messaging is off the charts, and frankly it’s trauma bonding.
But we aren’t in late stage Rome — once they reach teenager, the “Candy”, becomes debauchery and sex — It’s Babylon.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no prude and I’m not the one to judge anyone else. We all have our faults and I am certainly not Angel. But I’m not a Demon either, and these days it feels as if we are literally being swarmed by demonic forces. With the rise of AI, people have grown accustomed the fear of not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s almost as if we were “groomed” to feel uneasy, and when that fear becomes too palpable, to turn to the things that make us feel like it’s all going to be okay — comfort foods and sex.
But most people don’t have access to the kinds of sex that would make them feel satiated. Not with the ubiquitous atmosphere of selling sex and embracing sexuality that comes with the modern age. So for “satiation”, they’re going digital.
This might be amusing if it weren’t so absolutely tragic and frankly terrifying when you really consider the collateral damages. But the human emotional mechanism isn’t the only thing being hijacked by the rise of AI, threatening our relationships. It’s also threatening our identities in the world of work and completely reshaping how we think about our place in the economy — and we are not ready.
The average thinker doesn’t consider the big picture, the average parent doesn’t consider trauma bonding, and the average trauma bonded parent really doesn’t know how to make sense of the current moment. Since childhood most people have been conditioned to think about things in terms of win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong, but they have no real moral anchor. It’s created a situation Glen Beck has placed on his famous chalk board that really puts things into focus. The world is upside down.
Thanks to the rise of ubiquitous AI use, the pro human, de-growth side on the left side of the chalk board — call it MAHA — cares about you as the individual. It’s anti AI as the pinnacle or “idol”, and Glen describes his own position as “pro ethical AI”, so he wants AI to empower the individual, which is in accordance with my own sympathies.
He also suggests this side is anti “capitalist/Marxist”, but Glen notoriously hates Marxists and communism as a governing system — I would argue with good reason — but he’s also not against big business, big pharma, or big ag, so long as the companies are not in bed with the government, something we call “crony capitalism” —
Hilariously Wikipedia calls it a “pejorative” term — no, it’s a term meaning a corrupted relationship, period. It’s an amusing sign of the time that a writer who is clearly a socialist trained academic might describe it that way, given that they have to describe it to remain relevant, yet they signal they’ll only do so under duress because “real socialism has never been tried”.
— It’s pro workers, real food, free trade, so long as it’s “fair”, local, and awfully close to the concept of the dreaded 15 minute city. Again, the world is upside down, so the concept of being situated close enough to the farm that you might actually know where your food comes from is a great idea, but when you attach it to the concept of a mega city environment, it falls apart under the weight of all those conditions being managed by a small group of people at the top, which makes it not only ripe for corruption, but the perfect juicy target for the corrupted.
And the modern world thanks to the perverse incentive structures built into the trauma bonding model set out by the increasing embrace of the terrifying unknown — pretending it’s okay to be greedy sometimes lacks a moral anchor and puts consumerist morality in its place, like an idol to worship. Another hit anyone?
But what would happen to this model if it were to be thrown completely into disarray? What if we weren’t mentally prepared to handle the kind of transition that takes a new kind of thinking about our place in the universe? What if, we were told that we are not the top of the food chain anymore? Is the fear of the boogeyman popping out of the shadows the kind of thing that would bring us together? Or would we be ready to kneel to the new horror, mistaking it for a new kind of morality to replace the old?
Unlike our friends that want you to be terrified so that you’ll get in line when the time comes, I want you to start thinking for yourself.
Who are we? Who are you? What are the values that produce your morality? Which side of the chalk board do you belong on? Why? Do you even know there is a chalk board? Who’s been scattering the choices, turning them inside out and upside down?
You can hide in your home, pretending you can hide from these questions all you want, but I want you to consider something — what if you were conditioned to be afraid?
What if people, who themselves are terrified of their own skeletons in their own closets being exposed, have been working to get you ready for their big production moment so you might accept their solutions?
Before I make my final point, I have to tell you about something that terrified me into almost not having children. It wasn’t the climate change propaganda, or the overpopulation propaganda, or the disease propaganda — most of those can be largely mitigated with the proper orientation in your own life and actions — it wasn’t the financial propaganda or the communist/socialist propaganda, and it wasn’t the possibility of an alien attack — It was human nature.
There was a movie I watched just before I met my Wife, and had our two amazing boys that truly terrified me. It was the most jarring thing I had ever seen. The movie was called “The Mist”, and I’m going to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it. The thing that was so jarring was ending. I can truly say I didn’t expect it, and when I saw it, I was shocked anyone would ever put out anything so horrific, but it’s the kind of thing that today we see way more than we ever used to, even if it is in a different context.
As it turns out, there’s something about that ending that made it even more terrifying in the movie version, an adaptation of a novella by Stephen King:
The original ending for The Mist (2007 film) was a devastating twist where protagonist David Drayton shoots his son and the other survivors after their car runs out of gas, only to immediately discover that the U.S. military is just minutes away, having cleared the mist. This is a significant departure from the original novella’s ending, which is more ambiguous. The film ending was created by director Frank Darabont, with Stephen King’s approval, to be more shocking and conclusive than the book’s ending.
This video explains the difference between the movie’s ending and the novella’s ending:
I suggested:
“it’s the kind of thing that today we see way more than we ever used to, even if it is in a different context.”
The different context is the world is changing into something terrifying and unpredictable, right in front of our very eyes. Via social media there’s a steady barrage of sexual and violent imagery unlike anything humanity has ever been exposed to before, and some people, perhaps due to trauma bonding, get off on it. The like the extreme dopamine hit. They embrace all forms of body mutilation and modification, because deep down perhaps they’re showing outwardly that they are not afraid.
But the evidence is that lurking just underneath the surface is a monster — one we’ve been trained to ignore — there’s nothing there to be afraid of just go to sleep honey, there’s no scary monster under the bed. What is it we’re telling the children, ultimately? That the material world is all that exists, and that there are no demons and no devil — that’s all just a silly children’s story. But sin is something that lives deep inside of us and can indeed take control when the conditions manifest themselves, and they are manifested all over the world right now, because we pretend there’s no such thing as God, and no such place that can protect you from impending doom.
Human nature is the most terrifying thing on the planet because we are our own worst enemies — we make excuses and we enable vice — we embrace chaos and we reject authority — we accept authority and we accept the warm embrace of a caring parent — but that parent can’t save us from the inevitable — Only God can do that.
Despite what you may have heard or been programmed, traumatized, or conditioned to believe, not just any god, and most certainly not the gods of Babylon:
The term “Great Tribulation” occurs four times in the New Testament: Matthew 24:21, Acts 7:11, Revelation 2:22, and Revelation 7:14. Some take the words of Jesus in Matthew 24:21 to be describing a period of intense persecution and tribulation at the end of the age, prior to Jesus’s return.[4]
21 For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
11 Now there came a dearth over all the land of Egypt and Chanaan, and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance.
22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.
14 And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
The devil wants you to be afraid, to get tribal, and live in perpetual fear that your candy might be taken away from you — so he hides your dopamine hit hidden behind a simple verification.
The devil wants you to give up, give in, and be afraid — you don’t have the strength to do this alone.
Jesus by contrast Walks, invites, and tells you not to fear the devil, because all the devil has is fear and loss, and tribulation, but when you know Jesus you’re never really lost, and while it’s in our human nature to be fallen, it’s in His Nature, we find forgiveness, not punishment — courage, not fear — Heaven, not Babylon.
Trick, or Treat?
Fascinating. You really hit the nail on the head about the conditioning, not just mixed messaging. It's chilling how algorithms amplify these trends, turning cultural rituals into predictive models for fear response. As a teacher, I see this shift constanly.