No, Good Enough Is Not Good Enough. And Just Being Human Isn’t Either.

Palantir, Plato, the Pope, and the Unspeakable World

May 29, 2026

“Let’s stop trying to be human and accept what we’ve always been: just monsters.”
— Ezgi Hamzaçebi

***

The Enhanced Games last Sunday in Las Vegas, even though a commercial flop, were a monstrosity.

Athletes competed while using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) banned in traditional sports. The event—also dubbed the “Steroid Olympics” or “Doping Olympics”—was the fitting spectacle for our vice-signaling, Dark Mode age: a Donald Trump Jr.- and Peter Thiel-backed convention celebrating the pushing of the boundaries of human potential. An unholy coalition of tech billionaires, transhumanists, and manosphere figures betting on the merger of biohacking, masculinity, and transgression. The New York Times called it a “festival of superhumanity” and, like many critics, viewed it mainly as a not-so-subtle supermarket for PEDs.

The Enhanced Games were the circus twin of the Palantir Manifesto, published last month on X by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who was, believe it or not, once a student of the late German liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The 22-point text is essentially a summary of Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, which champions a centralized, engineering-based, technocratic, techno-nationalist authoritarian state—including AI-driven weaponry and universal military service—inspired by a worldview grounded in hard power, brute force, and coercion as counterpoints to liberalism’s faith in soft power, moderated civil conflict, and cooperation. Yanis Varoufakis’s “translation” of the manifesto is by far the best way to do it justice. Read it if you haven’t.

The Enhanced Games stood in stark contrast to the World Beautiful Business Forum we hosted in Athens three weeks ago—“the most human gathering for the more-than-human world”—which, in many ways, reminded us that our humanity is not something to be performed but something to be tended to.

I had called the program a monster, a controlled-uncontrollable experiment in intellectual and emotional overload.

And still—it left me wanting.

The Next Human

A few hours after the Forum’s closing picnic, I moderated a panel discussion at the House of NYNN with four Forum speakers. The theme was “Designing for the Next Human.” One of the panelists, Monika Jiang, rejected the premise outright, expressing—if the nodding heads in the audience were any indication—what many people felt:

“Instead of asking how we can be more human, or a better human, or the next human, perhaps the point is to free ourselves from this pursuit altogether, as it reeks of the neoliberal, capitalist, and anthropocentric binary mentality and culture that led us into this mess in the first place. Modernity, in short, will keep holding us within its constraints,” she later reiterated her argument in a Substack note.

In a similar vein, Avram Alpert, in his book The Good-Enough Life, urges us to evade the trap of optimization and abandon the idea that we must lead distinctive lives that leave a mark on history. Instead of extraction and externalities, he advocates contentment with what we have and who we are. He lambasts society’s obsession with “greatness,” instead heralding sufficiency and the acceptance of human limitations as ways to reduce anxiety, inequality, and burnout.

For Alpert, focusing on being “good enough”—providing everyone with decency, meaning, and basic needs such as shelter and healthcare—is a more realistic and fulfilling goal than competing for elite status, which, in his view, harms both individuals and society. He advocates a shift from a competitive, meritocratic ideal toward a cooperative one that values ordinary pleasures and collective well-being, while acknowledging that life will always remain imperfect.

The Thinning

The optimization trap Jiang and Alpert bemoan is aggravated by the marriage of capitalism and dataism. That marriage makes the trap existential. As Yuval Noah Harari contends in Homo Deus, it stems from the impulse to create a new divinity, a new “almighty creator” enabled by superintelligence.

The paradox is obvious: the next human is no human. When humanity’s ultimate accomplishment is the overcoming of humanity itself, the new “almighty creator” becomes the almighty destroyer.

Collapse is inevitable. And it doesn’t bode well when Goliath’s Curse author Luke Kemp—an existential-risk scholar who has studied the collapse of civilizations across 5,000 years of history and views collapse as a necessary catalyst for social change, often liberating the many from entrenched elites—is himself fatalistic. The coming collapse, he told 1,000 captivated listeners in Athens, will be the ultimate collapse, because never before have such lethal technologies been concentrated in so few hands.

(All that’s left for us to do, he suggests, is this: “Don’t be a dick.”)

And even if the outcome is not extinction, superhuman superintelligence will become the great colonizer: of our planet and other planets, of us and other species, and—perhaps most importantly—of the human spirit itself, with the private and interior fully usurped and artificially enhanced, just as the Enhanced Games hacked the human body.

This is the phenomenon Aditi Khorana—novelist and artist, appearing in Athens as an “Oracle from the Future”—described as “the thinning”:

“What you are living through now will later be called ‘the thinning.’ Not collapse. Not catastrophe. Thinning. Less birds. Less touch. Less memory held in the body. More records. More storage. More proof of something that had once been alive.”

This thinning is the work of the X-maxxing-transhumanist complex. The brainmaxxers, looksmaxxers, and bodymaxxers are the moral minimalists—and therefore absolutists. The great seducers and great reducers of our age.

The Unspeakable World

One way to respond to the ideological crusade of the enhancers is through a humbling of our egos, both as individuals and as a species.

This is the terrain philosopher Bayo Akomolafe has explored so often in his soliloquies: the “cracks” between binaries, the wounds of “incompletion” that hold the potential for something new and more powerful to emerge.

The refusal to “complete”—to measure, label, perfect—is at the heart of Akomolafe’s work, which reframes post-colonialism as posthumanism. His perspective belongs to a growing field of more-than-human thinkers urging us to see ourselves as nodes within a larger multispecies network, proposing regeneration and rewilding as foundations for an ethos—and an economics—that is life-affirming, alive, like life itself.

To bring it back to our own turf: any beautiful business must remain unfinished business, or it won’t be beautiful.

A kindred spirit—albeit with a very different language and sensibility—is James Bridle, the artist and author, who demanded that we shut up and listen to the nonhuman life all around us rather than constantly shouting over it. His argument referenced the “unspeakable world,” a concept developed by philosopher Alan Watts and linguist Alfred Korzybski to describe raw reality before human language assigns names to it, and revived vividly in Athens by Miriam Meckel and Léa Steinacker in their talk on the end of the Enlightenment.

It is worth noting that the “unspeakable world” was already invoked by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, where the freed prisoner emerges from darkness into blinding sunlight—a realm impossible to adequately describe to those still staring at shadows.

Speaking of small artificial worlds that hold us captive, I recently rewatched The Truman Show , three decades after its original release. The film has aged disturbingly well. Today, it reads less as a prediction of reality TV and surveillance capitalism and more as a parable about the algorithmic iron cage—about “our minds under siege,” to borrow the title of Bruno Giussani’s new book. It is the hell of a perfect world entirely curated for us.

The most powerful resistance against such a world lies in the cracks we create through spontaneous, non-engineered, unregulated, “wild” human interaction. On stage in Athens, systems thinker Indy Johar conjured the image of two lovers kissing in the street as the most romantic manifestation of this possibility. For him, human interaction itself is the real urban infrastructure:

“Micro-communication—those fine-grained, low-stakes, high-bandwidth cues through which trust, care, misunderstanding, and repair are negotiated in everyday life.”

The antidote to thinning, for Johar, is more “thickness.”

He portrays the “unspeakable world” as the world before it is made legible through mapping and measurement. He calls it “pre-legibility,” and sees festivals and other mass gatherings as incubations of it:

“You could argue the future is already being allocated—quietly but materially—toward experiences that attempt to restore what a predicted, transactional world compresses. The growth of festivals, retreats, and wellbeing environments is not marginal. It is a demand signal.
But these aren’t just entertainment products. They are early, imperfect attempts to price a scarcity: unharvested attention, non-instrumental relationship, unscored meaning, and collective encounter that can’t be reduced to feeds and interfaces. When a society must purchase periodic intensity to feel present, it signals that the everyday has become too thin.”

Beastopia

Johar shares this concern with Pope Leo XIV, who expressed it this week in his widely discussed encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

In stark language, Pope Leo calls out a new, digital form of colonization and slavery, and he even calls on us to “disarm” AI. The language is aggressive, but fitting. Our era is increasingly pitting empire against empire: an institution as old as the Roman Catholic Church against the rising empire of AI-driven governance—the “Silicon Goliath,” as Luke Kemp calls it.

As secular society comes under threat from agents non grata—and perhaps even more dangerously, from the agents we willingly invite into our homes, minds, and hearts—it is ironic that we turn to a centuries-old religious institution for orientation and hope. Dogma still demarcates something sacred. The Pope rises to defend our humanity, but what he is ultimately defending against the “new almighty creator” is divinity itself.

He understands that the new battleground is not attention, but intimacy: our capacity to feel close to one another and to something transcendent: “No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself,” he declares.

But he also knows that: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

The Babel analogy is striking. Large Language Models (LLMs) are decoupling language from meaning, only to gradually generate new forms of language and meaning humans may no longer understand. AI might move from being the world’s “biggest consensus machine”—as Zoe Scaman aptly described it—to becoming the world’s greatest generator of misunderstanding.

AI is creating a second “unspeakable world.”

Its complement is wild. An AI that can no longer explain itself must be met with a somatic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aliveness that can no longer contain itself. A monstrosity.

As the new synthetic territory outgrows the map, the answer is not to produce a larger, more accurate, perfectly fitted map. The answer is to develop a map capable of outgrowing the territory—a map that itself becomes new territory.

One that is beautifully messy. One that is the product of “machine-assisted rewilding,” as Indy Johar calls it.

Let’s call this new territory Beastopia.

It is where both “unspeakable worlds” meet: the pre-legible—the wild, animalistic, animist, subconscious, subterranean, mycelial, mystical, metaphysical world—and the post-legible: the fully simulated, synthetic reality of AI.

Our task is to bring out the best in humans so that this more-than-human territory, Beastopia, does not become inhumane.

Bringing out the best in humans, however, does not mean simply “being human.” Retreating into humility or decency alone will not suffice. We cannot allow the thinning to advance. We must constantly thicken. We must constantly sense, articulate, and embody our humanity. Instead of settling for being “good enough,” we must continue striving for greatness.

Striving for greatness can become dangerous—perhaps even catastrophic—but without it, now that we face a new almighty creator-destroyer, we surrender to a world curated by someone else.

Greatness means the desire to create and curate this world ourselves—or at least to try.

And it begins with language.

The vocabulary we have been using to “humanize” the more-than-human—including within our own House of Beautiful Business gatherings and community—has begun to feel exhausted: slowing down, liminality, sitting with the questions, holding space, cultivating imperfection, tolerating ambiguity, attuning to the body, feeling into things. (The next time you schedule a meeting, please don’t call it an “invitation to co-sense.”)

We need a new language: not only to read or speak Beastopia, but to listen to it.

We cannot simply go home. We must enter the Tower of Babel. A lot will be lost. And what we will gain will not weigh much until we lose it, too. We must grieve and dance and build simultaneously. Tenderness is a pursuit. Softness is only possible when the stance itself is furious.

Let’s not resign ourselves to “being human.”

We are human because we are monsters.

Let’s become monsters again.

- Tim Leberecht

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Community Updates

Curated by feminist scholar and Athens main stage speaker Ezgi Hamzaçebi, the exhibition The Promises of Monster at Hara Istanbul brings together ten artists who explore the representations of human and non-human bodies and ways of being deemed “monstrous.”

The Beautiful Business School contributor Gabriella White was a guest on the Poets & Thinkers podcast by Benedikt Lehnert, where she spoke about improv, creative play and developing negative capability as leadership practices.

For the inaugural episode of the new UNREASONABLE podcast, Felix Zeltner sat down with Andy Pearson, creative director at Liquid Death, ultra-runner, and the person who inspired the name of this podcast.

Rafael Phoca is hosting Efervescência 2026 in Forte São João, Vitória, Brazil, and HoBB co-founders Till Grusche and Tim Leberecht will be joining virtually on June 18 to present ten years of beautiful business.

Still feeding from the energy in Athens, there are so many self-organized local HoBB meet-ups popping up across the globe now—from Berlin to New York to Oslo—that we stopped tracking. If you want to stay up to date with what’s happening in your town or region, make sure to sign up for the local WhatsApp groups.

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