Scroll of Origins — The Artist Who Didn't Want a Throne

In my case, as an artist, I always knew where I was coming from, and I still know where I am going. What once felt like fantasy has become, over the years, disturbing in its resemblance — not because the fantasy came true, but because the world grew toward a shape I had once only imagined.

Not all artists carry this. It depends on the medium, I suppose.

There are artists who make out of necessity — because they need the work to understand the world around them. They can live quietly, without recognition, and only realize they were artists by accident. That kind of artist belongs to a large company of people satisfied with an art that occupies the hours, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Then there is the other kind: the artist who becomes dangerous to his era simply by speaking.

Socrates held public discourse in Athens and was executed for it — made to drink hemlock by the city he spent his life questioning. Galileo was silenced by other means: tried by the Inquisition, forced to recant, and confined to his house for the rest of his days. Neither man added anything to the wealth of nations. Both changed what it was possible to think. I once wrote those two fates as if they were the same. I have since learned the difference, and the difference matters: one was killed; the other was made to kneel.

If I had been Galileo, I would likely have kept my mouth shut. And yet much later the world was glad he did not.

In that regard, this is all I am doing.

My dream remains simple: a normal life, and the remainder of my days in peace. But if the world's energy has moved in a direction I described as a student, I cannot ignore the irony — nor, now, the danger inside it.

When I was twenty-one, I carried an idea that was not yet a prophecy. It was a mythology I was building, the way young artists build worlds: a future fully automated; human beings evolving into their next phase, grafted to some degree with machines; a single government over the whole earth. And at the head of it — the most astonishing thing of all — myself.

Not because I was the smartest or the strongest or the best suited to the office. Because, in the story I was telling myself, I was the chosen one.

I was always aware of everything around me. I simply could not find value in most of it. I was a man on a mission — and a man on a mission is, among other things, a man who has already decided the size of his own importance.

Back then I invented a character named Saviour. My conception was that he would be born in a colony on the moon, detached from ordinary life, raised and nurtured to become the savior of humanity. I was not thinking of the Antichrist in those years. I was thinking of the return of the Messiah.

Then it came to me in a dream:

In the 1960s, a series of children were born around the world carrying a particular gene. Most of them were watched from birth by a secret society. Every aspect of their lives was distorted, made as hard as possible — short of killing them. Because among that crop of children would emerge either the savior of humanity, or the Antichrist, or both. Those who failed — tough luck.

I wanted to turn that into a novel. But the vision was so life-shattering that I abandoned the process, and carried it instead as a private cosmology.

Here is the part I have had to learn to say honestly.

Thirty years later, portions of that imagined world began to resemble the actual one. Automation arrived. Machines began to interleave themselves with human life. And the resemblance did a strange thing to me: it felt like vindication. It felt, at times, as if the fantasy had been a premonition, and the premonition had made me a figure inside a story I had once only written.

I had come to believe that out of all the boys who survived, one had been selected to become a world president. That this boy — now a man — was chosen not for his achievements but for his heart: that everything he endured had made him compassionate rather than bitter, resourceful rather than hateful. I did not experience this as a conspiracy theory. I experienced it as something I knew. In the mythology I was constructing, the Messiah was among you, and you could not guess who he was. The original plan, in that mythology, was a base on the moon, and the boys taken there, to return to Earth as the one named Saviour and his twelve disciples.

I want to be plain about what all of that was. It was imagination. It was belief. It was also, at the edges, a way of placing myself near the center of history without having to earn the position.

That is the part that frightens me now. Not that the future began to resemble things I had imagined. That happens to many artists who live long enough — some of what we sketch comes into focus, and most of it does not. The frightening part is how easily a person who believes he has seen the future can begin to believe he deserves authority over it.

And here is what makes that danger worse: the old words have not stayed in the old books. What once sounded like an eccentric private mythology no longer sounds culturally isolated. The language of Messiah and Antichrist, of technological power and global authority and human destiny, has walked into the open air of public life. People now reach for those words when they talk about machines, about the concentration of power, about who will steer what is coming. I do not read that as proof that my old mythology was true. I read it as a reason to ask why these archetypes keep returning — why, whenever a society stands before tools and institutions powerful enough to reshape ordinary life, it reaches for a Messiah and an Antichrist to make sense of them.

When I was young, I asked a different question. I asked *who*: which child, which man, was the Messiah or the Antichrist, and whether I was among them. The question I ask now is different. I ask *what structures* keep any single person from acquiring that kind of unaccountable authority. The first question placed me at the center of the story. The second takes me out of it — which is precisely the point.

The throne is the trap. Not the crown, and not the title — the quiet conviction that because I saw it first, I am owed a hand in steering it. That is where visionary imagination stops being art and becomes something else: a claim of exceptional authority, wearing the clothes of destiny.

I will not take that step.

I have never been able to believe the Earth was created by accident. Even if God were only colliding atoms in the dark, hoping something would emerge, I still believe there is a vision of purpose — a common destiny drawing all of us forward. But I no longer believe that purpose needs a single hand at the top of it. The more I have lived, the more I have trusted the structures that hold when no one is indispensable.

I did not want a throne then, not really. I do not want one now. I am more interested in the structures that make thrones unnecessary — the distributed, accountable, ordinary arrangements in which no single person's vision, however vivid, is permitted to rule anyone else's life.

If I am remembered for anything, let it not be for a vision of the future. Let it be for refusing the authority that vision seemed to offer.

The vision was mine. The authority was never mine to claim.