Hello again, I have another meal for you. My mental kitchen has been heating up over the last few weeks since my last manifesto, and I have expanded my ideas into a fuller, deeper project. (Look, mom! I'm finally putting my philosophy degree to use and making my own theory!)
I'll confess, I have got a bit carried away in my research and brainstorming and may have wound up with an outline for a treatise which is over 12,000 words (the outline, not the treatise).
I don't think any of you want to read that.
So, I wrote an attempt at an abstract/introduction to what I want to talk about in my coming essays over the course of 2026 (and maybe—probably—2027). Thankfully, I managed to keep this one around 2,000 words.
Enjoy, and please share any feedback or ask any questions you have from reading.
We have entered the 2nd quarter of the 21st century, and humanity is spiraling—we're in a full tailspin.
Not just politically—though that too; not just culturally—though absolutely; and not just economically—though obviously. Something a little deeper is atrophying. It's something about how we're living, how we're relating to our own existence, how we've become strangers to ourselves and each other. The exhaustion isn't just from working too hard. The anxiety isn't just from the news cycle. The emptiness isn't just from capitalism—though capitalism is the right hand man of our problem!
This treatise is my attempt to name what's actually happening—and what we can do about it.
Let's start from the only thing that is categorically self-evident: you're aware you exist. Whatever else is uncertain, this isn't. You're here, reading this, conscious of being conscious. This is existential awareness, and it is the bedrock of experience. Everything else—your beliefs, your identity, your politics, your pain—is built on top of it.
Now, given this, let me say something that may sound outlandish: human is not a species. It's a condition.
Being born "Homo sapien" doesn't make you human—not in the sense that matters at least. Humanity isn't something you inherit biologically; it's something you achieve existentially. The human condition is this condition of existential awareness—awareness that knows itself, knows it exists, knows it will end, and has to figure out what to do with that terrifying and magnificent in-between.
However, let me make one thing clear: inhabiting this condition is not the same as fulfilling it.
Existential awareness isn't neutral. It comes with baggage—inescapable features I call the essential qualities. These aren't optional add-ons or cultural constructions—those exist too, but as products of these qualities. These are the structural necessities. If you're aware, you will confront your own mortality. You will encounter other conscious beings. You will face the limits of what you can know. You will discover that reality makes claims on you whether you like it or not. You will find yourself stretched across time, shaped by the past, acting in a present that's already vanishing.
These are the Universal qualities—what awareness discovers about the world it finds itself in—the context of your existential awareness.
And then there are the Sensational qualities—what awareness does in response—the experience of your existential awareness. You seek meaning because you cannot not care; this is the one limit of your freedom. You suffer because to be aware is to be vulnerable—feeling is the prerequisite to action. You exercise freedom and bear responsibility for your choices because of that freedom, even when you'd rather not. You ask "who am I?" because your identity is a question, not a settled fact. You seek belonging because you know yourself as part of something larger. You love—and need to be loved—because this is our connection to infinity, whose absence can destroy you. You create, because imagination can bring forth what wasn't there before. You navigate embodiment, this strange situation of being conscious matter. You receive and inherit, shaped by forces you didn't choose but must now reckon with.
These qualities, naturally, don't exist in isolation. They form a web—each connected to the others, each shaping and shaped by the rest. Death gives meaning its urgency. Others make love possible. Uncertainty is the condition of genuine freedom. Truth tests everything else. Pull on any thread and the whole web moves.
And all of these qualities generate questions. Not academic questions you answer once and file away, but living questions you inhabit for a lifetime. How do I live knowing I'll die? What do I owe to others? How do I act when I can't be certain? What actually matters? Who am I becoming?
Here's my central claim: humanity itself—genuine humanity, not species membership—is constituted by engagement with these questions.
The essential qualities are the structure. Engagement is the response. Engagement means holding the conversations that existence demands—meeting the questions with love and openness, staying in the inquiry without grasping for false certainty, letting yourself be changed by what you discover.
Humanity, then, exists on a spectrum. It's not binary. The more conversations you hold, the more deeply and honestly you hold them, the more consistently you hold them, the more existentially human you become. The fewer you engage, the shallower and more dishonestly you engage, the more you flee them, the more your humanity diminishes. We're all somewhere on this spectrum, and we're always moving—toward deeper engagement or further flight.
A high bar, I know.
This gives us the Polarity of Humanism.
Humanism, as I define it, is the choice to engage. To face the conversations that the human condition demands. To meet mortality not with denial but with presence. To encounter others not as objects to use but as subjects to meet. To face uncertainty not with false certainty but with courageous action despite not knowing. Across every quality, the same orientation: face it, hold it, let it deepen you.
Anti-humanism is the flight from engagement. It's not an ideology anyone consciously adopts—no one wakes up and says "I reject my humanity today." (Okay, maybe a few people come to mind that probably do this. Active evil exists, in my opinion, and I will write about this specifically soon) It's what happens when the conversations are refused. And there are so many ways to refuse: denial, distraction, dogma, deferral, delegation to authorities who'll answer for you, domination as a way to avoid your own vulnerability, desensitizing yourself until the questions stop arising.
The cost of flight is steep: to flee the conversations that constitute your humanity is to forfeit your humanity itself. Not biologically—you're still Homo sapien—but the genuine humanity that emerges through engagement? That diminishes with every refused conversation. You become confused about your own condition, alienated from the reality you inhabit.
And here's where it gets political: disconnection from your own humanity enables the dehumanization of others. When you've fled your own existential condition, you become capable of denying it in others—their dignity, their interiority, their standing as subjects rather than objects. This is why anti-humanism, though it sounds abstract, manifests in the most concrete horrors: imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, religious nationalism, surveillance tech, AI systems that treat human beings as inputs rather than ends. The flight from being produces every structure of domination.
The polarity of humanism isn't abstract moralism. It's the ground of politics itself and it shapes our world in every way.
But here's what makes this framework revolutionary rather than merely philosophical: most anti-humanism isn't chosen. It's manufactured.
No child wakes up and decides to flee their humanity. Anti-humanism is manufactured—by systems, by conditions, by the relentless machinery of late capitalism grinding away at our capacity for genuine engagement.
The manufacturing process is sophisticated and total. Exhaustion: work regimes that leave no time or energy for reflection. Atomization: breaking the connections between people that make engagement sustainable. Distraction: flooding awareness with stimulation so the questions can't even arise. Externalization: teaching us that meaning and identity come from outside, from consumption and status, leaving the interior hollow. Imagination-imprisonment: convincing us that alternatives are impossible, that this is just how things are. Fear: cultivating anxiety until we armor ourselves against vulnerability. Cynicism: teaching us that sincerity is naive, that everyone has an angle, so why bother engaging genuinely?
This is how anti-humanist systems reproduce themselves. They produce anti-humanist psychology, which produces people who don't resist, who comply and consume, which reproduces the systems, which reinforces the systems, which continues manufacturing the psychology. A perfect loop.
I can't just tell you to "engage with the essential questions" and leave it there. If you're drowning in precarity, exhausted by survival, numbed by trauma—telling you to be more human would be obscene! The framework isn't a method for victim-blaming; no, it's an alternative method for understanding the systems that produce these conditions.
Thankfully, the manufacturing is imperfect—it can't be. The essential qualities can't be fully suppressed. Mortality still comes for us. Love still stirs. The questions still arise in the gaps. This leaves the dialectical opening: the very success of anti-humanism creates the conditions for the humanist reaction. The manufactured psychology produces suffering—and suffering can wake people up to their humanity.
Which brings us to why this polarity is emerging with such urgency now.
The way I see it, two forces are functioning as existential and material primers, forcing the questions into collective consciousness in ways they've never been forced before.
AI is the existential primer. Artificial intelligence represents the apex of anti-humanist logic: extraction without limit, automation of everything, human beings as inefficient machines to be optimized away, an absolute minimization of engagement. The tech oligarchs aren't hiding it anymore. AGI replacing human labor. Brain-computer interfaces "enhancing" us beyond recognition. The obsolescence of the human as a goal.
AI forces the question that anti-humanist systems have always tried to obscure: What is the value of human beings? If machines can write, paint, think, converse—what remains? The anti-humanist answer is: not much. But this answer is monstrous, and more of us sense it every day. AI is inadvertently forcing confrontation with the essential questions: What makes consciousness valuable? What is meaningful? What do we owe each other? What is the purpose of creating things?
The blatant corruption of "traditional" institutions is the material primer. Across every institution—government, media, academia, corporations—those who claim authority are visibly acting against those they claim to serve. The legitimacy crisis is total. Trust has collapsed not because people are irrational but because the evidence of betrayal is overwhelming. This forces its own questions: What do we owe to institutions that betray us? Where does genuine authority come from? How do we act when the systems have failed?
Of course, these primers don't operate alone. Climate crisis, economic crisis, rising bigotry of all kinds, the collapse of the internet into a dark forest—all of these intensify the confrontation, create suffering that can wake people up, and prepare the ground that AI and institutional corruption are tilling.
Together, they're creating what Marx and Engels called the sharpening of contradictions. The anti-humanist trajectory is accelerating, becoming more explicit, more visible. But precisely because of this acceleration, the humanist counter-movement is growing.
And it is growing. The humanist turn is real, even if it doesn't yet know its own name.
Look around: The return to craft, to embodied skills, to making things with your hands. The analog revival—vinyl, film photography, paper books. The "cozy" phenomenon, slow living, the rejection of optimization culture, "raw-dogging" boredom. The sobriety movement, people choosing presence over numbing. The meaning crisis discourse, the renewed interest in contemplative traditions across the secular/religious divide. The return of socialist and communist theory into mainstream discourse. The rejection of hustle culture and young people refusing to make work their identity.
These aren't coordinated yet. They don't share a common language. Many participants wouldn't even identify as part of a single movement. But, to me, they share an orientation: toward engagement, away from flight. The task is articulation, connection, coordination—giving the turn a name and a direction.
That's part of what this treatise is attempting.
If the polarity of humanism is real, then revolutionary politics must be revolutionized. Every political question is a question about the human condition at scale. A humanist politics evaluates any policy, institution, or movement by a single criterion: Does this serve or hinder human engagement with the essential questions of existence? Does it expand people's capacity to hold the conversations, or does it produce conditions—exhaustion, distraction, domination—that make engagement impossible?
Alas, we can never escape dialectics: individual transformation and systemic change must happen together. Neither can wait for the other.
We cannot transform society without transformed people. History is full of revolutions that replaced one domination with another because the revolutionaries carried the old psychology into the new structures. But we also cannot transform people without transformed conditions. Individual awakening under anti-humanist systems is heroic, and a small cohort must achieve this first, but it is untenable at scale. The manufactured psychology is produced by systems; individuals swimming against the current will exhaust themselves if the systems do not change.
So: do the inner work and the outer work. Transform yourself and join the struggle. Build communities that support both—collective aid for survival and collective transformation for liberation. It's prefigurative politics baby: build the new in the shell of the old, materially and spiritually. Don't wait for one to be complete before starting the other.
This won't be accomplished in one generation. I doubt I'll live to see the death of anti-humanism; but revolutionary hope means commitment without guarantees. We work toward what we may not live to see—every strike of the hammer is meaningful in itself.
This is a treatise for those who sense that something fundamental is wrong but lack a framework for understanding it. For those exhausted by political discourse that never reaches the real questions. For those who feel the weight of existence and don't want to flee it but don't know how to face it. For those ready to stop being spectators of their own lives.
The human condition is a test. The test is whether we engage or flee. Our humanity—individual and collective—is determined by how we answer.
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst