The Man Who Went There: George Packer’s Hero System

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

He waits before he answers. The stage at the 92nd Street Y holds two chairs, a low table, a glass of water he does not touch. The crowd came in from the Upper West Side, canvas totes and reading glasses, New Yorker subscribers who renew without reading the notice. The interviewer asks about Iraq. Packer lets the silence run. Three seconds. Four. In a broadcast medium a pause that long counts as risk, and the risk is the point, because a man who fills the air with placeholder words has shown he does not weigh them. Then he says he got it wrong. He says it with a sorrow he has practiced, and the room warms to him. The confession is the thing they came for. They forgive him because the forgiving is the rite, and the rite is older than Packer and older than the war.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues that every culture hands its members a hero system, a set of rules for earning the feeling that a life counts against the plain fact of death. The system tells a man what a hero is, what a wasted life looks like, and how he might buy a portion of permanence before the end. Otto Rank (1884-1939), whom Becker reads closely, set two fears against each other: the fear of standing alone, separate and exposed, and the fear of dissolving into the group and vanishing as a self. A hero system holds both fears at bay. It promises a man he can stand out and still belong, that he can earn a name and remain a member.

Sacred values are the tokens the system trades in. The word means what the system says it means, and it holds its worth only inside the walls that mint it. Witness. Seriousness. Decency. Each sounds like a single thing, a virtue any honest man could recognize. Carry it across the border into another hero system and it splits into pieces that do not fit back together. Packer has built a long career on three or four such words, and he writes as though their meaning sits in the dictionary, available to anyone of good faith. It does not. The meaning sits in the system, and the systems are at war.

Witness

Packer’s witness begins with the body in the place. He goes to Togo with the Peace Corps and comes back with The Village of Waiting (1988). He goes to Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast and writes the civilians instead of the diplomats. He goes to Baghdad after the invasion he had supported and writes The Assassins’ Gate (2005) as reckoning and alibi at once. He goes to Youngstown and Tampa for The Unwinding (2013) and braids Tammy Thomas and Dean Price into a history of the country. He goes to Lagos. He goes to Kabul for “The Betrayal” and writes the interpreters left on the tarmac. The founding image of his world is George Orwell (1903-1950) in a Catalonian trench, the writer whose authority comes from having been shot. Witness, in this system, means presence verified by cost, and the truth a man brings back outranks the truth a man works out at his desk.

Carry the word to a corpsman in Helmand and it changes under your hand. He saw more than Packer ever will. He saw it through the sight line of a man trying to keep another man’s blood inside his body. His witness is not a credential he spends. It is a wound he carries, and the unit honors the man who never speaks of it, who files nothing, who lets the seeing stay sealed. To narrate would cheapen the dead. In Packer’s system the unwritten observation is a waste. In the corpsman’s system the written one can be a betrayal.

Carry it to a Pentecostal pastor in a storefront church off the Lagos expressway, the kind of street Packer walked for his Nigeria reporting. To witness, for him, is to testify to a thing he did not see with his eyes and knows in his spirit, an empty tomb two thousand years gone. The value sits in souls turned, not in accuracy. A witness who hedged, who said the resurrection was tangled and more complicated on the ground, would have failed the office. Packer’s whole craft runs on the hedge, the qualification, the refusal of the clean claim. The pastor’s runs on the claim a man stakes his life on without having been there.

Carry it to a courtroom in Camden, a sworn witness in the box. Here witness means the fact and nothing wrapped around it. The oath fixes the value and cross-examination tests it. A witness who supplies pattern, who reaches for motive, who builds the larger meaning out of accumulated detail, gets struck from the record and impeached for it. Packer’s method, the pattern that rises on its own from a hundred small portraits, is the one thing the court forbids a witness to do. What earns him the National Book Award would get him excluded as testimony.

Carry it last to Primo Levi (1919-1987) and Elie Wiesel (1928-2016). Their witness is a debt owed downward to the dead, and silence is the second killing. They write not to inform a fragmented public but to keep faith with men who cannot speak. The reader is incidental. The dead are the audience.

Packer’s witness fuses these. He takes the reporter’s verified presence, the survivor’s debt to the unheard, and the preacher’s compulsion to tell, and he presents the fusion as one virtue with one name. Inside his system it reads as a single thing, and the singleness is what gives his work its moral weight and his stage manner its gravity. Step outside the walls and the coin breaks into four pieces that buy different goods in different shops, and some of them will not change hands at all.

Seriousness

Seriousness is Packer’s master virtue, frivolity his master vice. Seriousness means the five-year book over the hot take, the field over the desk, the plain sentence over the clever one. His Hitchens Prize speech, “The Enemies of Writing,” reads as the creed of the serious man, and the word he reaches for when he praises a colleague is serious, the word he reaches for when he buries one is fashionable. To be serious is to refuse the reward the moment offers and to write instead for a reader forty years out who will judge whether you saw clearly when seeing clearly cost something.

Set the word in front of an Orthodox Talmudist in a Lakewood study hall and it turns again. His seriousness is the argument that never closes, the page turned and re-turned for fifteen centuries, the question sharper than the answer. A man earns standing not by a finished book but by a strong objection raised against a dead sage. The wit lives inside the seriousness, the pilpul that cuts. Packer’s seriousness wants resolution, a master narrative the country might share. The Talmudist’s wants the dispute preserved, both opinions recorded, the matter left open for the next generation to fight. The serious man, here, is the one who keeps the question alive, not the one who settles it.

Set it in front of an experimental physicist and seriousness means it replicates. The p-value, the error bar, the result another lab can reproduce in the dark without knowing what it should find. Narrative is the enemy, because a beautiful story moves people whether or not it holds, and the worth of a story that moves people but does not replicate is less than zero, since it spreads. Packer’s method, the meaning that declares itself from the mosaic, is to the physicist the cardinal seduction, the unfalsifiable pattern the human eye supplies because it cannot bear to see none. What looks like seriousness to the editor looks like its opposite to the man at the bench.

Set it in front of a stand-up comedian working a late set in a basement club. Seriousness on that stage is death. He earns his significance by refusing gravity, by the bit, by timing measured in quarter seconds. And yet he is more serious about the craft than any essayist, drilling the same ninety seconds for a year, and the comic who lets the audience see his seriousness dies on his feet. So the word inverts: the surface must stay light and the discipline beneath must be total, and the man who announces his seriousness has already failed. Packer announces his with the long pause and the practiced sorrow. In the club that pause would draw heckling and the sorrow would draw pity, and pity is the end of the act.

Becker explains why the word will not hold still. Seriousness is a stance against death, and men beat death by different routes. Packer beats it with the durable sentence, the book still assigned when he is gone, which is the only permanence his system offers and the reason the long project ranks above the quick one. The Talmudist beats it by joining a conversation that began before him and continues after, so that he never finishes and never has to. The physicist beats it by adding a true line to a structure no single life built. The comic beats it by the laugh, the one immortality that dies the instant it is born and so must be earned again every night. Each route names a different thing serious, and each names the others frivolous.

Decency

Packer takes decency from Orwell whole. It means the ordinary moral sense of ordinary people, the thing a man can consult beneath his ideology if he is honest, and Orwell and Packer after him invoke it against the seminar on one side and the mob on the other. The decent man knows cruelty when he sees it without a theory to license the cruelty. The Unwinding rests on the claim that a White machinist in Youngstown and a Black entrepreneur in Tampa hold the same decency under their different lives, and that a country might be rebuilt on what they share.

A Confucian official hears the word and means li. Decency is propriety, the bow at the right depth, the elder served first, the rite that holds a society together because each man keeps his place in it. The indecent man is the one who treats his father as a friend, who flattens the order that makes a life legible. Decency here is not a sense beneath the code. It is the code, learned over a lifetime, and the man who appeals past it to a raw moral instinct has confused the animal with the civilized.

A Pashtun elder hears it and means nang and melmastia and badal, honor and the guest protected to the death and the wrong repaid. The guest in your home is safe though armies come for him, and the insult to your house is answered though it takes a generation. To forgive a killing can be the indecent act, the one that shames your line. Packer’s decency would counsel mercy and the broken cycle. The elder’s decency commands the debt be paid.

A libertarian engineer in a South Bay startup hears it and means non-coercion. Decency is leaving a man alone, the consent form, the opt-out. The indecent act is the imposition, the mandate, the rule written by people who will not live under it. Packer wants institutions repaired and obligations honored across the whole. The engineer hears obligation across the whole as the indecency itself, the many reaching into the life of the one.

A hospice nurse hears it at three in the morning and means none of this. Decency is the body washed, the mouth swabbed, the dying man not left alone in the dark. It has no quarrel with prose and no politics. It lives in a single room and ends with the morning shift, and it would find the whole argument about national narratives a strange thing to call decency at all.

Beneath Packer’s word sits a claim about human nature, that under the codes there runs a common decency any honest man can reach. The Confucian and the Pashtun answer that there is no under, that decency is the particular code itself, and that the man who appeals to a moral sense beneath all codes is appealing to his own and calling it the human. This is the seam where Packer the reporter and Packer the prophet come apart. His books document people formed all the way down by the groups that made them, men who lost not their rights but the worlds that gave their lives shape. His remedy asks those same men to consult a decency the books suggest they do not share.

The Inheritance

Becker would not start with the books. He would start with the boy. Packer is twelve when his father, Herbert Packer (1925-1972), a major legal scholar at Stanford, broken by a stroke suffered in the campus turmoil of the late sixties, takes his own life. The boy watches the institutions his family trusted, the university, the liberal order, the apparatus of reasoned reform, fail to hold his father up, and then watches his father go. A man does not choose the wound that organizes him. He chooses what to build over it.

Packer builds the durable sentence. The institutions failed his father and the institutions can fail again, but the book sits on a shelf beyond their reach, and the work still read in forty years is the one permanence that does not depend on any institution staying honest. His immortality is denominated in serious witness, in having gone to the place and seen the thing and set it down plainly for a reader he trusts will still be the kind of man who reads. That is the bid. The terror underneath it is the boy’s terror, that the structures meant to protect a life will not, and that a man is left exposed and alone, which is Rank’s first fear given a date and a house in Palo Alto.

Here is the cruelty his own work names without quite turning on himself. The audience that honors serious witness has shrunk to one fragment among the four Americas he mapped in Last Best Hope (2021). Free America does not want the long book. Real America does not read The Atlantic. Just America reads him as the voice of the order it means to retire. Smart America still keeps the faith, and Smart America is the one country he writes from and against. So the coin he minted, true witness rendered in plain prose at cost, spends at full value only inside the collectivity that already shares his hero system, and that collectivity is no longer the nation. It is a neighborhood. He performs the rite of the carrier group, the confession on the stage, the reckoning in print, for a temple whose congregation thins each year while the man at the lectern keeps faith with a future reader the demographics may not deliver.

That is the figure on the stage at the 92nd Street Y. The pause, the water glass, the practiced sorrow over Iraq, the room that warms to the man because the forgiving is the rite. He earns his portion of permanence the only way his system allows, by the sentence that might outlast him, and he serves the system that made him because a man does not get to choose his hero system any more than he gets to choose his father. He only gets to serve it well. Packer serves his with a discipline that approaches the religious, going to the place, weighing the word, writing the true sentence for the reader of 2070, and the open question, the one neither Becker nor Packer can answer, is whether that reader will hold the same word sacred, or whether witness and seriousness and decency will have split by then into coins no single country still accepts.

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The Witnessed Life: A Hero System for Italian Sociologist Gabriella Turnaturi

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Gabriella Turnaturi (b. 1944) builds her sociology by watching things break. She reads the moment a marriage collapses to see what held it up. She reads the instant a betrayal lands to recover the promises nobody spoke. Trust runs beneath awareness, she argues, and only its rupture brings it into the light. The method is patient and a little cold. You learn the shape of a bond by studying its wreck.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) works the same seam from the other side. He reads the breakdown of the human animal, the panic and the symptom, to recover the architecture of the denial that held a life together. For Becker every culture is a machine for the manufacture of significance, a way for a creature that knows it will die to feel that it will not, or that its death will mean something. He calls this a hero system. A man earns his place in it by the coin the system mints. The coin looks like virtue. It is also a defense against the dark.

Set the two of them side by side and the kinship shows. She studies the collapse of the bond. He studies the collapse of the denial. Both read the failure state to recover the structure.

Becker’s terror has two faces. The first is the body. A man is meat that will rot, and he knows it, and no other animal carries that knowledge. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that his small life leaves no mark and answers to nothing. The hero system covers both. It tells the man that he is more than meat and that he counts.

Turnaturi rarely names the body. Her terror wears social clothes. The death she circles is the death of the witnessed self. Paul Auster (1947-2024) wrote that stories happen only to those who can tell them, and she takes the line as doctrine. An event that no one narrates is an event erased. A life that no one witnesses did not occur. Her second terror is the open future, the condition she calls permanent uncertainty, where the other man cannot be read and the bond cannot be secured and tomorrow arrives with no guarantee. Peter L. Berger (1929-2017) gave her the figure for it, the homeless mind, the self stripped of anchor, free and alone and unsure that it registers anywhere.

Her hero system answers both. The witnessed life defeats the first terror. To be seen, named, narrated, held inside an “us,” is to be saved from erasure. Trust, offered and returned, defeats the second. It cuts the open future down to a size a man can live inside. She calls trust a moral duty. That phrase is the whole cosmology in three words. Significance comes from the gaze of the other and gets earned by the willingness to be seen.

Now the move Becker demands. Take the sacred word and watch it mean different things to men in different systems, each certain his meaning is the only one. She has a name for the figure who is at once one man and a thousand, il singolare frequente, the single character who carries a whole social type. Borrow it. Set four such figures around her sacred word and watch it come apart.

Two men sit at a small table on the diamond floor. One unfolds a paper packet and tips a parcel of stones onto the felt. The other turns his loupe, counts, sets it down. They settle the price. No contract follows. One man says the old words, mazel und broche, and they shake, and the deal is law. Trust here is the spoken word backed by exile. A man who breaks it does not lose a lawsuit. He loses the trade, every floor, every city, for life. Trust is sacred because the punishment is excommunication. The bond and the threat are the same thing.

A few miles away a venture man reads a founder’s cap table at midnight. He likes the kid. He runs the diligence anyway, calls the old employers, prices the character into the terms, takes the board seat. Trust, for him, is a managed risk, a cognitive bet he revises the instant it disappoints. To him, calling it a moral duty is a category error, what a sentimental man says before he loses money. Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) drew the line he lives on. Trust is a wager you choose. Confidence is the reliance you never weigh. The venture man trusts. He keeps the receipts.

A boy of fourteen sits in a caseworker’s car outside his eighth home. He has learned to read the signs before the adults speak them, the long phone call, the new tone, the bag by the door. For him trust is the thing that breaks. The sacred act is the withholding. He does not extend it, and that is how he survives the next move. Turnaturi’s line, trust is a moral duty, reaches him as the lie the system told the small children who had not yet learned.

An officer comes home from years under another name. He loved the wife who did not know him and the children who carried his cover surname. The bond was real. The premise was false. Both at once. When the cover ends he cannot return to the man he was, because he did not only lie, he lived a second life, and the mask stuck to the face. For him trust and betrayal are not opposites. They share a body. Turnaturi reads him through John le Carré (1931-2020) and the memoirs of double agents, and she does not flinch from the part that should not be possible, the true affection inside the constructed lie.

Four men, one word. The dealer’s trust is a sacred oath enforced by the tribe. The venture man’s trust is priced risk. The boy’s trust is a wound he has stopped reopening. The officer’s trust is a real love built on a false floor. Each man hears the other three and concludes they did not understand the word. Becker’s point exactly. The sacred value is not one thing carried by all. It is the local coin of a particular hero system, and the systems do not trade at par.

Watch what the surgeon does. The patient lies unconscious on the table and the surgeon opens the chest. The patient did not trust the surgeon. The patient was asleep. What the patient extended, before the anesthetic, was confidence, the unweighed reliance on a credential, a hospital, a system that has held before. Luhmann’s split does quiet work in Turnaturi’s argument. Her sacred value is trust, the chosen wager between two men who could have chosen otherwise. The hero systems she fights have converted trust into confidence. You no longer trust the merchant. You trust the rating, the escrow, the platform, the verified badge. The reliance moves from the man to the system, and the moral weight drains out with it. A confidence betrayed produces disorientation. A trust betrayed produces a wound, because you chose the person, and you reproach yourself for the choosing. Her whole ethic depends on keeping the wound alive. She wants the choosing back.

A second sacred word runs under the first. She calls it dependence, and she means it as praise, which in the reigning system sounds close to obscene.

The founder builds a self that needs no one. Autonomy is his religion. Dependence is a bug in the release, a thing to close in the next sprint. He reads his own need for other men as weakness and routes around it. Turnaturi names this the fragile narcissist, the hero with the anxious hands, all power in the pitch and all fear in the bedroom.

The monk under a vow of stability means the opposite. He has bound himself to one house and one set of brothers until he dies. Dependence is the door he walked through on purpose. To need the others is the practice, not the failure.

For Turnaturi dependence is the precondition of the bond, the honest admission that no identity forms alone, that the self requires the gaze of another to gain its edges. She fights for it as a counter-cultural act, against a hero system that has made self-sufficiency the proof of a man’s worth.

Here the body she keeps offstage walks back in. She writes about the man who kills the woman who leaves him. She refuses the old story about honor. The killing, she argues, follows a modern crisis of recognition. The man has poured the whole meaning of his life into one bond, because the world outside offers him no other source of worth, and when she exits she takes his significance with her, and he cannot survive the subtraction, so he reclaims the only thing left to him, her body, by destroying it.

Read that through Becker and the worm shows at the center. The man’s terror is not social in the end. It is the old animal panic of erasure, the suspicion that without her witness he is meat and nothing, and rather than face it he kills. Turnaturi gives the social shape of the crisis with great care. Becker gives the thing under it. This is the seam where her framework strains, the one place her sociology of the made and historical emotion meets a terror that looks older than any history.

So she and Becker share an enemy and split on the body. Both refuse the crude biology that reduces a feeling to a gene. The premise she takes from Norbert Elias (1897-1990), that emotion is made by history and never fixed by blood, is the premise the strong program in evolutionary psychology built itself to attack. Becker stands in a third place. He keeps the creature at the floor of it, the man who is meat and knows it, and treats every bond as a denial of that knowledge. Turnaturi wants to dissolve the creature into the social, to make the self relational all the way down. Becker answers that the relation is the denial, that the “us” is how the animal forgets it dies alone.

Here is the turn that earns her the larger respect. She builds the consolation and tells you it will break. Her whole shelf is a study of the bond at the instant it fails. She offers togetherness, l’insieme, as her last word, and she offers it as a duty rather than a fact. She does not argue that the bond will hold. She argues that you owe the attempt. A hero system usually hides its own contingency and sells the immortality as real. Hers sells it as a wager you are obliged to make with open eyes. That sits closer to courage than to denial.

Three places to watch from here.

Watch where she keeps the body offstage. A sociologist of emotion who almost never lets emotion be biological has made a choice, and the femicide passages are where the choice comes under load. The man who destroys the body to survive the loss of the witness is the creature breaking the social frame. Whether her account can hold him without borrowing Becker’s worm is the open question under all of it.

Watch the line between trust and confidence. Her sacred value is the chosen wager. The systems around her run on unweighed reliance, on ratings and badges and platforms that ask nothing of you and carry no wound when they fail. The fight is over which of the two deserves the name sacred, and she stands on the losing side of the century, which is part of why she writes.

Watch togetherness as the thing she cannot prove. She ends on a word she presents as a debt. The witnessed life is her answer to erasure, the held bond her answer to the open future, and she knows the witness dies too and the hand lets go. She asks you to trust anyway, to be seen anyway, to stand close and remain, in her borrowed phrase, near and unreachable at once. The duty comes with no guarantee. She offers none. She thinks the offer would be a lie, and the refusal to lie is the most honest thing in her work.

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Henty’s Catechism: The Hero System of the Adventure Novel

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

The headmaster holds the book in both hands before he gives it across. The cover is dark cloth stamped with gilt, a soldier and a flag, and the page edges carry the green-gold wash the binders call olivine. The boy walks the length of the assembly hall to take it. Three hundred faces watch him. He has won it for attendance, for diligence, for a year of arriving on time and sitting still. The title reads With Clive in India. He does not yet know that he has been handed a cure.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that man is the animal that knows it will die, and that culture is the apparatus he builds to deny it. A man cannot live inside the bare fact of his own ending. So every society hands him a scheme of significance, a set of acts that earn a sense that his life counts against the dark. Becker called this a hero system. The system tells a man what counts as bravery, what counts as worth, what a good life looks like and what a wasted one looks like. It promises that if he plays the part, some piece of him outlasts the body. A name. A place in a story longer than the span of his years.

George Alfred Henty (1832-1902) sold a hero system to children. His reader carried two terrors, and the novels answered both. The first was the plain terror of death. The frontier, the fever coast, the square broken by cavalry. The second terror cut sharper for the boy in the prize line, and Henty understood it better than any writer of his trade. It was the terror of the small life. The clerk’s stool. The ledger. The terrace house on a street of identical houses, the forty years of the same train, the death the newspaper does not record and the regiment does not toast. Becker’s word for this is insignificance, and for a lower-middle-class English boy in 1890 it stood as the likelier of the two deaths. Henty’s formula cured both in a single dose. His hero faces the guns and earns a name. The obscure boy becomes legible. Empire is the arena where the small life turns large.

Henty knew the formula was a formula because he had watched it fail. He went to the Crimea with the commissariat and saw the machine with its skin off. Frozen men. Supply that never came. Orders that contradicted other orders. The wide gap between the speeches at home and the mud in the lines. The romance of war subtracted itself from him on that peninsula, item by item, and what remained was logistics and paperwork and the smell of the hospital tents.

Then he spent the next forty years adding the romance back. Not for himself. For boys who had not been to the Crimea and never would. This is the engine under the whole enterprise. The man who manufactures the cure is the man who took the disease. The defense runs deepest in the man who has seen what it defends against. Henty dictates from an armchair, pipe lit, a secretary taking shorthand, an old correspondent rebuilding in cloth and gilt the cathedral he watched burn in the snow. The conviction in the novels is the conviction of a man who cannot afford the doubt.

The word the whole machine turns on is courage. Henty means a single thing by it, and he means it so hard that the boy in the prize line will take Henty’s sense for the only sense there is.

In Henty courage is display. It is the steady face under fire, witnessed and recorded. The hero does not flinch where other men flinch, and older men see him not flinch, and from their seeing comes rank, a name, a place in the order. Courage is public by design. It is the opposite of the coward’s shame, and the coward is shamed before the group because the group is the court that awards the medal. Loyalty sits beside it as the second sacred thing. The hero holds the line. He serves the regiment and the Crown. To break ranks is the worst act a man can do.

Walk the word courage out of Henty’s hall and into other hero systems and it stops meaning the same thing. It does not mean more or less of one substance. It names different acts that happen to wear one word.

In a Carthusian charterhouse a man gives up his name. He takes a cell, a hatch through which a brother passes bread, a rule of silence, a life no newspaper will record and no regiment will toast. He has chosen the small life Henty’s boy was taught to dread, and he has chosen it as the brave thing. His courage is the renunciation of the witness. Henty’s hero wants three hundred faces watching him cross the hall. The monk wants no faces. He meets the same terror of insignificance by the opposite move, by becoming nothing before men so that he might count before Him. Same word. Inverted act.

Put a man in a bomb suit at the end of a long walk toward a device in a culvert. His courage forbids display. The flush of glory is the enemy. He reads the checklist flat, in the voice a man uses for a grocery list, because the voice that thrills is the voice that kills him. “Red to the left lug. Confirmed. Cutting on three.” The reward at the end is not a name. It is a quiet afternoon and the drive home. Henty’s courage performs. This courage kills the performance, and the killing of it is the whole of the virtue.

Now the inversion the prize-day boy will never see coming. A man sits in a parking garage with a box of documents that name his own firm. He has been offered a severance to keep the box closed. He opens it. He testifies against the men he ate lunch with for nine years. In Henty’s hall this man is the traitor, the breaker of ranks, the lowest thing the system knows. In his own hero system he is the hero, and the act that damns him in the first system saves him in the second. Loyalty, Henty’s second sacred word, becomes the temptation he must beat. Both men meet the terror of the small life. Henty’s boy earns his name by belonging. This man earns his by refusing to belong, and he pays for the name in social death, which is the price his system sets.

In the study hall of a Lithuanian yeshiva a young man stands at his lectern and offers a reading of the text, and his partner takes it apart in front of the room, and the young man counts the demolition a gain. His courage is the willingness to be wrong out loud. Henty’s hero must never be seen to fail. The lamdan courts the failure because the failure clears the ground for the truth, and the truth, not the name, is the immortal thing. His place in the scheme is a link in a chain of transmission, a line some later book will cite. Manhood here is the open throat before the better argument, the act Henty’s code forbids.

At the far edge stands the climber on a granite slab nine hundred feet up with no rope and no cause. His courage serves nothing outside the act. No Crown, no regiment, no scheme larger than the body against the stone. When he tops out the thing is gone, and he goes down to a parking lot and a sandwich, and the immortality he reaches for vanishes the moment he reaches it. This is courage emptied of the collective, the private hero system at its limit, the dance with no public good. Henty does not call this courage. He calls it waste, because for Henty courage that earns no place in the order is no courage at all.

Becker held that every culture sells its hero system as the truth about the world, not as one formula among many. The system does not say to a man, here is a way to manage your fear. It says, here is what bravery is, here is what a life is for. Henty did this for children, in cloth and gilt, handed across a stage by the headmaster in front of the assembled school. He shipped the formula young, before the boy was old enough to learn that courage is a homonym. The boy takes Henty’s sense of the word as a reward and a sacrament at once, and it sets in him like a bone, and by the time he can ask whether courage means the steady face or the renounced witness or the opened box, the answer is laid down and load-bearing.

Three things hold at the end.

The men in these hero systems do not disagree about courage. They mean different acts and use one word, and the quarrel that looks like a quarrel about bravery is a confusion of tongues. Henty’s boy and the monk and the man with the box could argue all night and never touch, because each carries a different thing in the same envelope.

The workshop runs on a wound. Henty built the cure at industrial scale because he had taken the disease in the Crimean snow, and the certainty in the novels is the certainty a man manufactures when he cannot live with the doubt. Read that way, the hundred books are one long argument with what he saw on the peninsula, and the boys are the jury he keeps convincing.

The sacrament arrives before the question. The formula reaches the boy as a prize for sitting still, years before the terror it answers has woken in him. He gets the answer first and meets the fear later, and the answer waits in him when the fear arrives. That is Henty’s achievement and the whole of its cost. He did not teach boys to think about death and smallness. He handed them a way to stop thinking about both, bound in cloth, stamped with a soldier and a flag, the edges washed the color the binders called olivine.

My Favorite Author

From age seven to eleven, G.A. Henty was my favorite author. I read about 40 of his books. My dad introduced me to him.
After age 11, I never read him again.
On the days Henty was not number one in my heart, Richmal Crompton was my favorite author with her William stories. I don’t think I read her again after I moved to California in 1977, but I’ve started listening to her audiobooks on Youtube before I fall asleep at night. They’re delicious.
I’m curious to give Henty another turn.
I’ve read about 20 Tom Clancy novels. He’s a worthy successor to Henty. When I want to read a story that makes me feel good, I want good guys, bad guys and clean victory. Shooter is the movie and TV series that has met these needs of late.
I love the Robert Ludlum novels and related movies. A guidance counselor in high school introduced me to these thrillers and I’d sit in my classes and read these books and then cheat my way through the tests (such as in chemistry).
I love the Mel Gibson movies Braveheart and The Patriot. War and sport movies are the best because they contain everything in life plus action! I’ve never watched an underdog sports movie I didn’t love.
I love The Accountant movie. I love stories about ordinary guys who don’t want to hurt anyone but are forced to kill a bunch of bad guys.
I’m a simple man with simple needs, as I keep telling my girlfriends.
I tend to look at the world through the friend-enemy binary. I got big and found there was a whole political philosophy based on it.

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Help Me Understand: Ezra Klein and the Hero System of Comprehension

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

He leans toward the microphone in a soundproofed room off Eighth Avenue and says the four words that built him. Help me understand. The guest settles in, a senator or a Nobel economist or a man who runs a frontier lab. The phrase does double work. It tells the listener that Ezra Klein (b. 1984) arrived without his mind made up, and it tells the guest he carries something worth the asking. The tape rolls. For two hours two men hold the posture of patient inquiry while the country past the glass goes on hating itself.

Strip the career down and that gesture remains. The blog at The American Prospect, Wonkblog at The Washington Post, the card stacks at Vox, the column and the show at The New York Times. One promise threads all of it. Understand the thing and you stop being at its mercy. Klein does not say this. He lives it. The man who reads the eight-hundred-page report nobody opens, finds the rule that blocks the good outcome, and lays it out in clean prose has done something close to a sacrament.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives the frame for reading that sacrament. In The Denial of Death he argues that a man cannot live with the plain fact of his own end, so he builds a hero system, a cultural drama that lets him feel he counts in some scheme that outlasts his body. The hero system tells him what counts as glory and what counts as shame. It hands him a way to earn a sense of permanence. Sacred values are the coin of that economy. They buy the only thing the system sells, which is significance against the dark.

Klein faces the two terrors Becker names, and each takes a shape particular to him. The first terror is the world that will not be explained. Becker calls it death. For the explainer it arrives as the remainder, the surplus that escapes the frame, the part of life that no card stack reaches. His mature work circles this without naming it. Minds built for a different world. Attention captured by forces outside choice. Polarization that behaves like possession. He gropes toward a thing his vocabulary forbids him to call by its old names. The second terror is smaller and closer. It is the courtier with a laptop. It is the dread of turning out to be a partisan with good prose, swept along in the drama rather than standing above it, a man who thought he was reading the tide and was only riding it.

The subtraction story under all this runs through Orange County. Klein grows up in Irvine, in a secular Jewish home, in a planned suburb built on the premise that life can be zoned and scheduled into peace. The enchanted world had already been carried off before he arrived. No spirits, no covenant with hold of him, no sacred ground. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) describes the self this produces, the buffered self, sealed against the charge that older men felt running through objects and places and the dead. The buffer is an achievement. It is also a vacancy. Something has to fill the place where the sacred stood. For Klein the filler is comprehension. To understand becomes the act that saves. The mind that maps the system has climbed out of the system, up to a ledge above the flood, and from the ledge it looks down and grasps the whole. Salvation by understanding. That is the hero system, and understanding is its holy word.

Set that word down in other rooms and watch it change into something he might not know.

In a Breslov shtiebel on a Friday night the men press toward the head of the table, and understanding is the last thing any of them wants. The word here is bittul, the nullification of the self before the One who cannot be grasped. A man who thinks he understands God has built an idol and bowed to it. Deepest knowing comes through clinging, through the niggun that has no words, through the surrender of the mind that wants to take hold. The old men sway. A young one with a wet beard says, the more you explain Him the less you have. Klein’s understanding, the kind that maps and lays bare and renders transparent to reason, reads in that room as the sin it was built to escape. The buffer he counts as freedom they count as exile. The remainder he cannot name they have a name for, and the name is the whole point.

Carry the word to a Force Recon team coming off a ridge at dawn. Understanding the ground means the men walked back down it breathing. It was paid for in the body, under fire, in the legs and the gut and the trained eye that reads a treeline before the mind catches up. The team leader has contempt to spare for the man who understands the war from a studio, who has the casualty figures and the maps and the historian’s long view and not one hour of having his understanding tested against a thing that shoots back. Knowing that costs nothing is not knowing. A staff sergeant says it plain, you don’t know the hill till you’ve bled on it. Klein’s whole product is understanding bought without that price, and to this man the price is the only thing that turns information into knowledge.

A hospice nurse on a night shift holds a different word again. She sits with a man three days from the end and she does not explain anything to him. He does not want the trajectory of his disease modeled. He does not want context. He wants a hand and a voice and someone who will not flinch. Her understanding is presence. It refuses to fix because the situation cannot be fixed and the wish to fix it is the wish of a man who has not yet learned to sit. The explainer at that bedside, reaching for the comprehensible, would commit a small cruelty without knowing it. She would understand that too, and forgive it, and ask him to be quiet.

In a session room in a studio down south an old guitar player runs a take, and understanding lives in his hands and nowhere a man could write it down. He cannot tell you what he did. The moment he could card it, file it, explain it, the thing dies on the bench. A kid comes in with a theory book full of modes and the player likes him fine and knows he understands nothing yet. He will understand when his hands stop asking his head for permission. Klein’s faith holds that the right account, laid out with care, transmits the thing. The player knows the thing does not travel by account. It travels by years and by failure and by feel, and the account is a tourist’s photograph of a country you have to be born in.

Walk into a storefront Pentecostal church on a Sunday and the word turns over once more. Understanding here is revelation, given from above, dropped into a man in a single hot instant, not assembled across a decade of reading. The natural mind cannot receive the things of the Spirit. The preacher, sweat through his shirt, says you cannot study your way to it, you have to be carried. Klein’s method is the slow accretion of context, brick on brick, the tower a patient man builds toward a clarity he believes lies at the top. From the front pew that tower is the old story of the Tower of Babel, men stacking comprehension toward a heaven they could have reached by going to their knees. The buffered self builds up. The porous self is struck down and lifted.

Even among worldly men who prize competence, the word splits. A poker professional at a high table watches the math the way he watches the air he breathes, present and assumed and not the edge. The edge is the read, the tell, the man across the felt and the small wrong thing in how he sets his chips. Understanding the table means understanding men under pressure, and no model delivers that, only ten thousand hours of faces. Klein trusts the model. He believes the structure is real and the answer follows from the structure. The card player has watched models lose to reads his whole life, and he would tell you, with no malice, that the man who only has the math is the man you want sitting to your left.

Six rooms, one word, and in each room the word organizes a separate path to significance, a separate way of being a hero against the dark. The Hasid earns permanence by surrender, the Marine by blood, the nurse by presence, the player by feel, the preacher by being carried, the gambler by the read. Klein earns it by comprehension, and comprehension is no more the universal coin than any of theirs. Becker’s point cuts here. Each system looks, from inside, like reality plain. Each man stands on his own ledge and takes it for neutral ground. Klein does this with unusual consistency. He treats his own location as the place from which the other locations get assessed. The Hasid, the veteran, the believer arrive on his show as positions on a map he stands above, and he never seems struck, because nothing in the buffered self stands open to that kind of strike. He understands them. He is not changed by them. The understanding is the buffer doing its work.

Three things follow, and they mark where the system shows its seams.

Watch what he does with disagreement that will not resolve into a comprehension problem. When two men want the same scarce thing and one has to lose, no amount of context dissolves the fight, and the explainer has no move left that fits his hero system. He reaches for the misunderstanding story because his significance depends on its being true. The honest read, that the rival has understood his interests and wants the gun, threatens not Klein’s argument but his standing, since the explainer only counts if politics turns on the things explainers know.

Watch the abundance turn, which is the hero system trying to grow a body. Klein has begun to sense that comprehension alone does not deliver, that the houses do not get built by anyone understanding why they should, and so he reaches for capacity, for the thing that gets made rather than grasped. The reach is real and it strains against his frame. He still casts the failure to build as a blind spot, an oversight a clearer mind might cure, when the coalition that wrote the blocking rules forgot nothing and understood its equity perfectly well.

Watch his guests, and watch which rooms never get a chair. He hosts the Catholic intellectual, the heterodox economist, the careful conservative, the men whose dissent he can process. The Hasid in his bittul, the sergeant in his contempt, the preacher in his fire, these do not appear, because their challenge cannot be received as a position. It would have to be received as a strike, and the buffer holds. Klein built a public square for men who want to think about porous experience without surrendering the buffered self. The square does real work. It cannot reach the thing it was built to keep at arm’s length, and the man who runs it might be the last to see the wall.

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The Fair Witness: Evan Osnos and the Hero System of the Even Voice

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

NPR, a morning in the spring of 2025. Steve Inskeep asks Evan Osnos (b. 1976) whether he understands what passed between Donald Trump (b. 1946) and Xi Jinping (b. 1953). Osnos does not reach for the answer a host wants. He says it might take a few more days. The pause is the performance. He treats his own uncertainty as a finding and offers it the way another man might offer a scoop. He lands on his nouns. He keeps his voice low, because in his world the man who raises his voice has already lost the argument he came to win.

What he performs in that pause has a name. He is being fair. Fair to the facts not yet in, fair to the men he has not yet heard out, fair to a reader who trusts him to wait. Fairness is the sacred value of his life and his trade. It earns him the National Book Award, the New Yorker masthead, the Brookings chair, the seat at the table when the next administration wants a sympathetic chronicler. It also does deeper work than any prize. It is his bid against death.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil that men build immortality projects to outlast the grave. The project has to feel cosmic. It has to let a man believe he counts beyond his span, that he stands on the side of something that does not die. Cultures hand out these projects ready-made, and a man earns his place in one by performing its central virtue with skill. The warrior earns it by courage. The saint earns it by purity. Osnos earns it by fairness. The lasting account, judicious and cool, places him in a line that runs back through his father Peter Osnos (b. 1943) to I. F. Stone (1907-1989) and the old Washington Post, a line of men who wrote the first draft and trusted the future to ratify it. The byline on the shelf is the relic. Fairness is what makes the relic holy. To be fair is to deserve to last.

His dread sits one layer under the grave. He can bear to die. He cannot bear the verdict that the witness was a courtier, that the calm was capture, that the man who thought he stood above the fight stood inside it the whole time. Wildland, Age of Ambition, the Biden book, the yacht dispatches: each is a deposit against that verdict. Each says, read me later and find me sound.

Here the trouble starts, because fairness is not one thing. The word is a coin that buys a different good in every hero system that mints it. Walk it across a few of them and watch his version shrink from a law of the universe to the house rule of a particular set.

Take the umpire behind the plate. His fairness is the strike zone and nothing more. He does not care who he roots for, and the better he works the less anyone sees him. His fairness has no memory and no afterlife. When the last out lands he packs his gear and renders no portrait of the men he judged. He carries no sympathy into the parking lot. For Osnos that is a poverty. His fairness has to do the opposite of vanish. It has to produce the long sympathetic profile, the hundred interviews, the man read through his appetites and his griefs. The umpire is fair by withholding judgment until the pitch and then ruling without appeal. Osnos is fair by suspending judgment across three hundred pages and letting the reader feel he reached the verdict on his own. Same word. One man enforces. The other absolves.

Now set him beside a Reformed preacher in a cold church, a man who reads fairness off the justice of God. Fairness here is desert. He shows no respect of persons. He weighs the rich man and the poor man on one scale and finds them both wanting, and the cross is the only thing that tips it. To this preacher the New Yorker virtue looks like a dereliction. The reporter sits with the billionaire in his bunker and grants him an inner life, his anxiety, his books on collapse, his architect. The preacher hears a man being excused. Fairness, for him, demands that the bunker be named for what it is, a rich man building an ark for himself and letting the flood take his neighbors, and that the builder be told so to his face. The even voice strikes the preacher as moral cowardice in good manners. Osnos hears out the man God has already judged. The preacher counts the hearing-out as a refusal to side with Him.

Carry the coin to a union hall and hand it to a Marxist organizer. He laughs at it. Fairness, in his account, is the alibi of the comfortable. The impartial witness is the class doing its work in its Sunday clothes. The man who hears all sides with equal patience hears them from a chair the present arrangement built and paid for. His calm is a property of his safety. Real fairness, the organizer says, starts with the abolition of the conditions that let one man hover above the fight and sell the hovering as virtue. Osnos’s portrait of the anxious billionaire is, to him, the purest specimen of the disease, a wealthy man rendered as a soul in torment so the reader forgets to ask whose labor built the bunker and whose votes removed the rules that might have stopped it. Fairness without a side is, here, the most partisan act of all, because it leaves the scale where it sits.

Put the word in the hands of a surgeon in a field hospital. Her fairness is triage, and triage is unequal by design. She does not give the dying man and the scratched man the same hour. She gives the worst the most. Equal treatment, in her ward, is malpractice. Now read Wildland through her eyes. Greenwich and Clarksburg and Chicago each get the same patient, sympathetic attention, the same measured prose, the same withheld verdict. The hedge-fund town and the opioid town arrive at the reader’s bedside with equal billing. To the surgeon this is the betrayal of fairness, not its fulfillment. Fairness asks her to look at who is bleeding and to spend herself on him first. The even hand that treats the extractor and the extracted as equally interesting cases is, in her ward, a hand that lets a man die for the sake of the chart’s symmetry.

Last, hand the coin to a man from an honor country, a Pashtun elder or a Corsican grandfather, and watch him turn it over with contempt. Fairness for him is balance restored. An insult unanswered is a debt unpaid, and a debt unpaid is a death by a slower road. The man who absorbs the blow and keeps his voice low has not shown patience. He has shown that he can be struck without cost, and a man who can be struck without cost is already finished. Osnos’s refusal to raise his voice, which his own set reads as the height of the virtue, reads to the elder as the absence of it. The fair man, here, is the man who answers, who makes the offense expensive, who keeps the ledger of blood and face level. Calm is not fairness. Calm is what a man does when he has decided not to collect.

Five men, one word, five worlds, and in each the word beats back a different death. The umpire dies into the blown call the replay remembers, and his fairness is the clean game nobody can reopen. The preacher dies into damnation, and his fairness is alignment with the Judge who will not be mocked. The organizer dies into irrelevance, into History moving on without him, and his fairness is to stand where the future will be standing. The surgeon dies into the patient lost on her table, and her fairness is the right body saved first. The honor man dies into a name spat on after his burial, and his fairness is the answered wound. Becker’s point holds across all of them. The sacred value is the rope each man throws across the pit, and the rope is woven out of the death he most fears.

Osnos’s death is the courtier’s death. The dread that the fair witness was the house priest, that the cool was a flag for his own faction all along, that the line he joined was a guild guarding its gates and not a fellowship of truth. His fairness is the rope thrown across that pit. The judicious portrait, the refusal to know fast, the voice that will not rise, all of it argues, read me in the next decade and find that I served no master. The wager is the one his own prose names. He would rather be right next week than loud today.

The wager has a flaw. Next week has scorekeepers, and his fairness counts as fairness only before the jury that shares his definition of it. To the umpire he absolves too much. To the preacher he judges too little. To the organizer he hovers. To the surgeon he treats all wounds alike. To the honor man he eats his insults. Each of these is a coherent reading of fairness, held by serious men, and under each of them Osnos fails the value he has built his immortality upon. His calm registers as fair only inside the educated set that has raised calm to the mark of seriousness, the set of his father’s imprint and his wife’s newsroom-funding project and the Friday roundtable where three writers talk as peers while the listener overhears the people who supposedly know. That set is his jury. It is also his faction. The fairness it certifies is the fairness it was trained to certify, taught at the same schools, rewarded at the same festivals, priced into the same prizes.

Half the country sits outside that jury, and to them the even voice is not the sound of fairness. It is the sound of the enemy keeping his composure. They watch the patient witness grant the senator his grief and the billionaire his anxiety and the foreign autocrat his complexity, and they hear a man absolving the powerful in a register too smooth to argue with. They are not confused. They have impaneled a different jury, with a different reading of the sacred word, and before that jury the verdict reverses.

Ernest Becker’s last turn is the one Osnos cannot fold into a profile. Every immortality project rides on the survival of the culture that scores it. The warrior needs a people who still sing of courage. The saint needs a church that still keeps the calendar. The fair witness needs a readership that still hands its highest honor to the man who refuses to raise his voice. Osnos has bet his account on the survival of the set that prizes the even voice, and he has placed the bet in the years that set has watched its center give way.

So he sits in the studio and says it might take a few more days. He lands on his nouns. He keeps his voice low, fair to the facts not yet in, fair to the men not yet heard, fair to a reader he trusts to wait. The pause is still the performance. The open question is whether the jury he performs for will still be seated when the verdict he is waiting for comes in.

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The Hero System of UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) held that every culture answers one question. What makes a life count once a man knows he will die? The answer arrives as a hero system, a scheme of significance that promises a place outlasting the body. The scheme runs on sacred values. A man earns his standing by serving them and forfeits himself by betraying them. From inside the system the values feel absolute, woven into the structure of the world. They are coordinates inside one scheme. The proof sits in the scheme next door, where the same word carries different cargo.

Erwin Chemerinsky lives inside his sacred values with a consistency few men reach. He defends the speech he hates. He keeps his friendships with the men he fights, John Eastman and Eugene Volokh and Nadine Strossen and Doug Laycock, across lines that broke most academic friendships of his generation. He takes the heat and stays at the work. Whatever the deflationary readings find under the performance, the man has held faith with the things he calls sacred, and faith at that scale is honorable. This essay does not contest his values. It asks what they mean, and finds that the meaning lives only inside the hero system that holds them.

Start with his central word.

The rule of law. For Chemerinsky the phrase names a wall. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class Jewish home, and he took from that childhood the lesson his cohort took: a society keeps Jews safe when it keeps everyone safe, when it has an independent judiciary, civil liberties with teeth, equal protection a court will enforce against a legislature. Behind the lesson stands the camp and the pogrom, the thing the wall holds back. So when he says the rule of law, he means predictable rules applied without favor, courts that bind the strongman, a document that outranks the man who holds office this year. He made it a deanship priority. He posts videos titled “It’s the Law.” When he warns that the rule of law stands under threat, he sees power escaping the courts, and the camp behind the gap.

Set him beside a Qing district magistrate in his yamen. For the magistrate order rises from li, from ritual propriety and the cultivated virtue of the ruler, and law, fa, is the sovereign’s instrument for managing the unruly. The good official rectifies names and restores harmony among unequal stations. A rule that binds the ruler reads to him as the tail commanding the dog, a sign that virtue at the top has failed. The same three words name his nightmare, not his wall.

Set him beside a Reformed elder who holds that the moral law is God’s decree, written into creation before any parliament sat. Human statute is a dim copy of a binding order that does not pass through committee. The rule of law for the elder runs straight up to Him, and a procedure that produces an unjust statute has produced no law at all, only the look of one.

Set him beside an old man in Naples raised under omertà. The state’s law is the law of the people who came to take, and a man who runs to the magistrate to settle a wrong has shamed his house. Real accounts settle in silence, inside the family, outside the courthouse Chemerinsky built his life to keep open. Same words. A different god in each mouth.

Take a second word, one Chemerinsky owns more than any man alive. Standing. His treatise Federal Jurisdiction lays out the doctrine of who may sue, whose injury a federal court will see. He argued against TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez because the Court narrowed who counts as injured, and the narrowing closed a door. For him standing is the threshold of being seen by the law, and his hero system widens that threshold. The Guantanamo detainee, the child in the underfunded school, the consumer carrying a false terrorism flag in a credit file he never read. The hero argues their standing into existence and makes the law reckon with them.

A Maori elder hears the word and thinks whakapapa. His standing is descent. He rises to speak on the marae because of the line of ancestors behind him, and no court grants it and no injury confers it. The line is the title.

A trader on a derivatives desk hears the word and thinks of his book. His standing is the number from last year, the profit and loss that decides whether the room turns when he speaks. The desk reckons with the man who made money and forgets the man who lost it.

A field physicist hears the word and thinks of priority. His standing is the citation, the effect that carries his name down the decades after the body quits. Each man uses the one syllable to answer the death-question. How do I count. Who must reckon with me. What of me survives. The answers do not translate.

Take a third word, the one that cost him most. Free speech. His honor move is to protect the voice he loathes, because he holds that open contest sorts truth from error and that a trained mind can weigh a vile claim and set it down. He hosted graduating students at his home, a protester reached for the microphone, his wife took it back, and he still defended the right to protest in the proper venue. He paid in standing with part of his own coalition and kept the principle. The cost is the measure of the value. A value with no cost buys a man nothing.

A guardian of the tongue from the traditional Jewish world hears free speech and recoils. In that world speech is danger and lashon hara, the evil tongue, is a grave sin, and the sacred discipline guards the mouth rather than freeing it. Free speech raised as a banner reads as a license for slander, a permission to do the harm the law of the tongue exists to prevent. The tradition that produced the dean also produced a value that runs against his.

A Carthusian in his cell hears free speech and hears noise. Silence is his discipline. The hours at the Grande Chartreuse pass mostly without words, and the renunciation of speech is his road to God, so the freedom to say anything looks like a freedom worth surrendering.

A signals officer hears free speech and thinks of the leak. Speech is classified, operational security is the sacred thing, and the man who talks is the traitor whose words get other men killed. To him Chemerinsky’s free contest of ideas is a breach waiting to happen.

Chemerinsky prizes neutrality. He built his casebook to sit on the shelf at Berkeley and at Notre Dame, to be adopted by the Federalist Society professor and the progressive one, and he calls the absence of his own voice from the doctrinal sections a kind of neutrality. The umpire holds the same value. He calls the pitch as he sees it and roots for no team, and his honor is that the crowd cannot read his loyalty off his arm. A war correspondent holds the word and bleeds on it, because at the massacre neutrality and witness pull against each other, and the reporter who stays neutral between the killer and the killed has chosen the killer. An arms broker holds the word too, and for him neutrality is the business model, the reason both sides buy from the same warehouse. The umpire’s virtue, the correspondent’s agony, the broker’s ledger, one word.

This reframes the fractures that have marked Chemerinsky’s late career. October 7 and its campus aftermath, the Trump administration’s war on the firms that crossed it, look from inside his system like assaults on his values or like his values failing him. Becker reads them another way. They are collisions between hero systems that happen to share a vocabulary. The student who took the microphone in his backyard and the dean who watched it leave his wife’s hand both said justice, both said speech, both said home, and the words did not carry the same freight across the few feet between them, because the schemes of significance behind the words were not the same scheme. The strongman in Washington and the dean in Berkeley both say the rule of law and point at opposite walls, one at the wall that binds the office, one at the wall that protects the man who holds it. Two sacred orders meet at a podium and each hears the other profaning a word.

The tragedy Becker names is the honest man who thinks he argues about a value the world shares while he defends a god the world does not. Chemerinsky took the local for the universal. He had to. A hero system trains a man to take its values for the structure of reality, because a value that announced itself as local could not anchor a life or hold back the camp. The training that made him faithful is the same training that hid the locality from him. He could not have served the wall so long while seeing it as one wall among many.

His honor is that he served his god well. His limit is the limit of every man who has loved a sacred thing. The casebook in the next student’s hands is his bid against the death that started the whole question, and it is a worthy bid, a durable one, the kind a scholar leaves behind. The words inside it will travel as far as his hero system travels and no farther. That holds for the magistrate and the elder and the man in Naples, for the Maori elder and the trader and the physicist, for the guardian of the tongue and the monk and the officer at his console. It held for the student at the microphone, who carried his own sacred words into a room that could not hear them as sacred. It holds for all of them, and it holds for him, and the holding might be the most human thing about any of them.

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The Hero System of WSJ Editor Emma Tucker

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stand in the Journal newsroom an hour before the page closes and watch the life cycle of a scoop. A reporter has something no one else has. An OpenAI deal, a hospital chain in the Justice Department’s sights, a number that moves a market. The desk lights up. Editors crowd a screen. For an hour the room holds one object at its center and the charge runs high. The story goes up. By breakfast every rival has matched it, the cable shows are chewing it, and the thing that owned the room last night is common property. By the next morning it is landfill. The reporter is already chasing the next one, because the only currency the room respects is the one that spoils fastest.

Emma Tucker runs this room, and she has given it a creed. News is what is new. She tells the staff the subscription run was not an accident, not luck, not the Journal’s turn. She says it twice, three ways, to land it. She built a method on a single sentence, and the sentence points forward, always forward, toward the story no one has yet.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote two books about why men build things like this. In The Denial of Death he argued that man is the animal who knows he will die, that the knowledge is unbearable, and that he spends his life refusing it. The refusal takes the shape of heroism. A man earns the feeling that he counts, that his days add to something, that he is an object of primary value in a universe that means something. He earns it by attaching himself to a hero system, a structure of value larger and longer-lived than his body, and by playing a part in it that wins him a name. The system promises what the body cannot deliver. It promises that some piece of him outlasts the worms. In Escape from Evil Becker took the argument one turn darker. The hero systems collide. My path to significance asks me to deny yours, and the denied become the scapegoats whose expulsion pays for my immortality.

Set Tucker inside this and the biography turns. She is not only an editor managing a transition in the press business. She is a mortal attaching her name to a body she hopes will outlast her, and the body she chose is 136 years old and might die on her watch. Advertising, which paid for papers across the twentieth century, collapsed into Google and Facebook. The Journal could have followed the titles that did not adapt. Her terror is the editor’s version of the universal one. She might preside over a death and be remembered as the custodian who held the chair while the thing went dark. Against that she set a second fear, subtler and more personal, the fear of the steward who changes nothing and leaves no mark. She refused both. She set out to be the one who carried the paper across, and the carrying would be her monument.

Here the trouble starts, and it is the trouble worth dwelling on, because it sets her hero system apart from almost every other one men have built. The systems that promise permanence usually worship the old. They reach back. The eternal, the founding text, the precedent, the score, the tradition handed down without a break. Tucker’s guild worships the new. It stakes its whole claim to value on the perishable. She wants a monument and pays for it in the one coin that turns to dust by morning. The cathedral built of yesterday’s front pages.

Watch how the sacred words change meaning when you carry them across the border into other rooms.

Take independence, the word the guild says most and prizes highest. In Tucker’s house it means the news answers to no proprietor and no advertiser, that the firewall holds, that the editor is never cowed. The free press guards the public and bends to nothing. Carry the word to a litigator and it inverts. The trial lawyer’s honor is partisanship. He is bound to the client, sworn to him, and a lawyer who drifts toward some independent sense of the truth betrays the man who trusted him. His virtue is the loyalty Tucker’s virtue forbids. Carry it to the conductor on the podium and it inverts again. The conductor who asserts himself against the score is a vandal. His glory lies in submission, fidelity to a dead composer’s marks, the effacement of his own will before a text he did not write. The same word that crowns Tucker’s freedom condemns his. Carry it to the man bent over a page of Talmud and it splits in half. He prizes the lone reading, the chiddush, the insight no one reached before him, and yet he may have it only inside the chain. He is not free of the masorah, the transmission. To stand outside it is not independence but exile. Four honorable men, four meanings, one word, and each meaning makes sense only inside the system that holds it.

Take the new, the thing that organizes her whole order. For Tucker the new is the holy. The scoop sits at the top of the value stack, above the Pulitzer and the Polk: the new thing, reported first, that changes what a reader does next. To be beaten to a story is the small daily death. Carry that to the man learning Talmud and the new turns suspect. There is nothing new under the sun. His novelty earns a place only as a fresh reading of an eternal text, never as a break from it, and a teaching with no root in what came before is not insight but error. Carry it to a surgeon and first loses its glamour. First means the first cut, the irreversible one, the thing you do not get to do again and cannot scoop. Carry it to a central banker and first becomes a vice. His virtue is to move last, slow, only when sure, to be the deliberate body that the fast world checks itself against. Now carry it to the founder in the room down the road from Tucker’s old beat, and the word snaps back into her register. First to market. First mover. He too runs toward the new and counts the same way she counts, in cohorts and churn and the number that tells him whether the thing is alive. He too treats growth as proof of life. The difference hides in what the growth serves. The founder grows to sell. His immortality is the exit, the cash-out, the next company. The institution is a vehicle he abandons at the off-ramp. Tucker grows to keep. She wants the body she feeds to stand long after she is gone, with her name in the record of the people who kept it standing. Same dashboard, opposite faith.

Take courage, which the guild dresses in a single line. Tucker says her team ran toward the fire on the Epstein story, the one that drew a ten-billion-dollar suit from Donald Trump (b. 1946) and survived a federal judge’s dismissal in April 2026. She means a fire of lawyers and reputational heat and pre-publication threat, real costs, paid in money and nerves. Carry the phrase to a battlefield medic and the fire is fire. Running toward it is how the body ends. The figure of speech she reaches for is, for him, a description. Between the rhetorical fire and the real one stands the man the whole set venerates, Evan Gershkovich (b. 1991), the reporter Russia jailed in 2023 and held sixteen months until the prisoner swap brought him home on August 1, 2024. He is sacred to the guild because in him the figure came true. The fire stopped meaning a hard week and became a cell. The campaign for his release ran hot for over a year and bound the newsroom tighter than any product launch could, and when he walked off the plane the room had its martyr and its proof that the words about courage were not only words. Tucker spoke of him with care, weighing the duty to cover the news against the safety of the people she sends toward the actual fire. The veneration is honest. It also does quiet work for the rhetorical kind of courage, lending the cell’s seriousness to the lawsuit’s.

So far the frame stays warm, and it should, because Tucker is an honorable steward of an honorable thing. The paper she runs broke real stories, faced down a president, and spent a year and a fortune to bring a colleague home from a penal colony. None of that is theater. Becker does not ask us to sneer at the hero. He asks us to see the creature under the heroics and to grant that the creature’s fear is our own. Strip the mission language from Tucker, the talk of independent journalism and of telling readers what they need to know about the world, and you do not find a fraud. You find a mortal manager who chose a worthy body to attach her name to and races the clock to keep it alive. The race is the most human thing about her.

But Becker wrote a second book, and the second book is where the warmth has to make room for the cost. Escape from Evil says a hero system flourishes by expelling those who no longer fit the new shape of it, and that the expelled pay the bill for everyone else’s significance. The Journal newsroom shows the ledger. Tucker brought her own lieutenants across the Atlantic and moved old hands out to seat them. Karen Pensiero, thirty-seven years in the building, a defender of the women on the staff, went out to make room. A deputy known for cutting earned the nickname the angel of death. Staff learned to ask who gets Tucked next. The layoffs came dressed in the soft words the growth language keeps on hand, reconfiguring, restructuring, the price of great work. Read through Becker, the soft words are not deception so much as the rite every hero system performs over the people it sheds. The charge that makes the front page hum, the energy the young digital hires carry into the morning meeting, is bought in part with the expulsion of the people whose habits were tuned to the old signals. Their grievance is real. So is her need to clear the room to save the body. Both hold at once, and in Becker’s account they usually do. Evil here wears no villain’s face. It is the arithmetic of one immortality project running over another.

Which returns us to the perishable coin, and to where the thing might break. The conductor’s score will be played in a hundred years. The Talmudist’s text outlasted empires. The litigator’s precedent binds courts not yet convened. These men buy permanence with permanence. Tucker buys it with the new, and the new has a half-life measured in hours. Her monument is a daily that is wrong or stale by the following dawn, that must be rebuilt from nothing every twenty-four hours, that confers her immortality only so long as the next charged story lands on time. She built the most fragile of the great hero systems, the one that dies the moment it stops making the perishable thing. The reservoir of prestige from the homecoming and the won lawsuit drains. The question her tenure leaves open is whether a structure built on what spoils can ever hold the permanence she reaches for, or whether she pours herself, with real courage and real skill, into a vessel that by its nature cannot keep what she puts in it.

Three places to watch.

Watch the soft words around the next round of cuts, because there the cost of her immortality shows on other people’s faces, and there the gap between the martyr she venerates and the veterans she sheds opens widest.

Watch what the guild does the next time the fire is real and not rhetorical, the next jailed correspondent, because the campaign will tell you whether the courage in the creed bears weight or only decorates, and Gershkovich set the bar.

Watch the half-life. Watch whether the charged story keeps arriving, because the day it stops is the day the monument begins to fade, and an editor who built her name on the new has no older, slower thing to fall back on. She tied her permanence to the one currency that cannot sit still. That is the wager. It is honorable, and it is exposed, and the worms are patient.

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Report: Rabbi Eliyahu Haimof, Accused in Lawsuit of Sexually and Physically Abusing Child, Threatens ZA’AKAH with Lawsuit, Then with Din Torah

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts March 10, 2026:

In January ZA’AKAH posted about a lawsuit against Beis Yaakov of 18th Avenue for failure to report abuse allegedly committed by Rabbi Eliyahu Haimof, rabbi of Kahal Lema’an Achai in Boro Park. The complaint alleged that Haimof (named in the suit as Aleksi Khaimov) fondled Plaintiff’s genitalia, digitally penetrating her at least twice. The complaint further alleged that Haimof repeatedly beat and threw objects at the alleged victim. Plaintiff alleged in the lawsuit that she appeared in school with visible bruises and twice disclosed to two principals that Haimof had beaten her, but neither of them ever reported it.
In response to ZA’AKAH’s posting the allegations against Haimof, he found a lawyer who specializes in debt collection to send ZA’AKAH not only a cease and desist, but a threat that if the post wasn’t taken down by the next day ZA’AKAH would be hit with a lawsuit. In its response to this threat, ZA’AKAH reminded this lawyer that not only was the coverage of the case covered by the Fair Reporting Privilege, but that New York has very strong Anti-SLAPP protections, and that the frivolous filing of such a lawsuit would result in steep monetary penalties against his client. No lawsuit was filed.
Instead, ZA’AKAH received a summons to Badatz Mishpitei Yisroel on behalf of the plaintiffs, Rabbi Eliyahu Haimof, and his shul, Khal Lemaan Achai, for defamation, lashon hara, and rechilus. The beis din that issued the summons proudly boasts that it was established by Yisroel Belsky. The same Yisroel Belsky who publicly advocated for Yiddy Kolko despite his notorious abuse of dozens if not hundreds of boys in Camp Agudah and Yeshiva Torah Temima. The same Yisroel Belsky who very publicly destroyed the lives of Yosef Kolko’s victim and his family.
This same beis din also summoned the victim of Nechemya Weberman and her husband to a din torah in 2022 so Nechemya Weberman could sue them for compensation and damages. Notably, not too long after that, UTA paid a very large amount of money to the victim to settle the civil lawsuit against itself, Bais Rochel, and Weberman.
In the beis din’s latest summons they issue an ikul against ZA’AKAH not to continue being motzie shem ra on Eliyahu Haimof. This is a fundamentally incompatible order with allegations of Lashon Hara which is a statement that is true but nonetheless considered harmful to its subject. If ZA’AKAH doesn’t remove its posts about Haimof, the beis din threatens to issue an ex parte Heter Arkaos to Haimof and Lemaan Achai allowing them to pursue action in civil court. Haimof must not have informed them about his initial threats of civil litigation against ZA’AKAH before seeking such a Heter Arkaos.
Finally the beis din summons ends with a threat of seruv against ZA’AKAH. The text reads: If you continue ignoring the beis din, left with no choice it will issue a seruv against you to inform the public of your brazenness toward the beis din.
The chutzpah is all theirs.
The work continues.

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Report: Oberlin Chabad Rabbi, Shlomo Elkan, Removed Banned from Campus for Allegedly Engaging in Online Conversation Describing the Sexual Abuse of Children

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts March 18, 2026: In a letter sent to students last week by Oberlin president Ambar, students were informed that Rabbi Scott Shlomo Elkan, co-director of Oberlin’s Chabad, had been banned from campus. Her letter stated that according to a police report Elkan admitted to egregious actions in his personal life, including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children, and objectionable behavior.
The Forward reported today, based on a copy of the police report that it obtained, that Elkan had allegedly received sexually explicit texts, photos, and videos through Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12, and 13. In December, the Forward reported, Elkan allegedly been talking to someone who sent Elkan photos of himself giving a child a bath, alluded to himself touching the child’s genitals, and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap. The forward further reported that according to the report Elkan had shared photos of girls as part of that conversation.
Elkan, for his part, claimed to the Forward that his messages were not based on real events, but were between him and an adult and based on fantasy. He did not, according to the forward, address the photos.
According to the Forward Elkan resigned from his position with Chabad last Friday, per a Chabad spokesperson.
In her letter, Ambar acknowledged that no charges had been filed against Elkan, but nonetheless acknowledged the violation of basic morality and civil norms that were incompatible with Oberlin’s values. The letter stated that Oberlin had become aware of the matter after Oberlin police had reached out to the college as part of its ongoing investigation, and after filing a public records request with the police department, the college became aware of the precise nature of the allegations.
The letter announced an investigation into Elkan’s behavior and a campus climate assessment to determine the impact, and provided contact information for the investigators.
Below is the full text of the letter:
This is a very difficult message to deliver. I write to you in this moment not only as the President, but also as a member of our community and as an Obie parent. I hold close my commitment to the safety and welfare of our students, faculty, and staff, and the values that make Oberlin the precious place that we love. It is this commitment to the welfare of our community and our shared values that requires this message.
Today, Oberlin College severed its relationship with Rabbi Scott (Shlomo) Elkan, based on information in an Oberlin Police Department report. As many of you are aware, Elkan was a longtime volunteer at our college, certifying our kosher kitchen and sometimes leading Passover services and other religious celebrations. However, in the police report, Elkan admits to egregious actions in his personal life—including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children and objectionable behavior. This behavior violates Oberlin’s values, shocks the conscience, and makes it clear that we cannot allow him continued access to our campus and community. Consequently, we have banned him from campus, from attending college events, and from representing himself as connected to Oberlin College in any way.
As abrupt and difficult as these measures will be—especially for those who sought spiritual leadership and guidance from Elkan—the seriousness of this matter requires clear and swift action. While no criminal charges have been filed against Elkan, his behavior and the language he acknowledged using violate basic morality and civil norms and are incompatible with the values of our institution.
We became aware of a matter involving Elkan when the Oberlin Police Department reached out to the college as part of an ongoing investigation. Based on this outreach, we filed a public-records request with the Oberlin Police Department to learn the substance of the matter. On March 5, we received the police report revealing that Elkan had engaged in online sexual conversations and behavior concerning children.
While the college has not previously received reports of this nature regarding Elkan’s behavior, we have asked a third party to conduct an inquiry and a campus climate assessment to determine if there are members of our campus who have been impacted. To begin this process, we are asking anyone in the Oberlin community who has concerns or information about Elkan that they wish to disclose to reach out to INCompliance at [email protected] or 216-523-5472.
During this challenging moment, we also want to ensure that our community has the guidance of counseling services and the Multifaith Chaplaincy staff. It is understandable that this news may be upsetting, and I encourage you to seek the support you need.
If it would be helpful to talk, process, or simply be in a supportive space, please stop by to see our campus counselors. Counseling and Psychological Services will offer drop-in sessions in Dascomb from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday and Sunday, March 14 and 15, and again on March 21 and 22. Drop-in hours will also continue from 9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Multifaith Chaplaincy staff also invites those seeking connection and support to join them at Lewis House until 5 p.m. today (Friday) and between 10 a.m. and noon on Saturday and Sunday. Other campus resources include the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Student Support and Outreach.
We have worked hard to build a rich and robust Jewish life at Oberlin, as evidenced by our strong Jewish Studies program, our religious and spiritual student life support, our vibrant and growing engagement with Jewish-centered organizations, the numerous Jewish student groups on campus, and our kosher kitchen. I am committed to maintaining the various programs that our students, faculty, and staff enjoy. To help our students through this time and provide spiritual guidance, we have asked Rabbi Allison B. Vann to work with our community through the remainder of the semester. Rabbi Vann was last on campus to lead High Holy Day services in 2025.
I can appreciate that receiving this message will engender a range of emotions: disbelief, sadness, concern, frustration, and many sentiments in between. I am experiencing this range of emotions myself, but they are tempered because I have been a part of this community for many years, and I can speak directly to our resilience. Be assured that the strength of our community will endure, and I look forward to the day when our current emotions are replaced by trust, joy, reassurance, and peace.

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Substack Article: ‘Poking a Hornet’s Nest: Breaking the Silence on Akiva Roth, EBJC, Camp Ramah and Cover-Up Culture in Conservative Judaism’

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Alex S. Kaufman writes March 11, 2026: Today is a big day—a day that I’ve anticipated for decades. Following the settlement of the lawsuit that I filed in October 2021 against Akiva Roth, the predator who abused me as a child, and against the East Brunswick Jewish Center (EBJC) and its former pulpit rabbi, Chaim Rogoff, who covered for him, I am revealing my identity and telling my story publicly for the first time.

My name is not John Doe. It is Alex Kaufman. And I am a survivor of child sex abuse and a cover-up that spans the Jewish experience.

My settlement represents a milestone in the world of child sex abuse cases because it includes concrete and meaningful restorative steps that EBJC—my childhood synagogue in East Brunswick, New Jersey—agreed to take to make that institution safer for children. Schools, camps and houses of worship can reduce the likelihood that a predator will target or thrive in their community by implementing simple, but often non-obvious, protective measures.

Posted in Abuse | Comments Off on Substack Article: ‘Poking a Hornet’s Nest: Breaking the Silence on Akiva Roth, EBJC, Camp Ramah and Cover-Up Culture in Conservative Judaism’