An open letter to Chase Hughes, and to anyone who has reached for oneness.
There is a hunger right now for oneness. I feel it too. The world has gotten louder and lonelier at the same time, and a lot of the people I respect have started to use language like we are all one and separation is the lie to point at what hurts and at what they think would heal it.
The hunger is real, the diagnosis is sharp, and I think we have to take both seriously.
I am writing this after listening to a recent conversation between Chase Hughes, Cal, and Adam, and “The Great Unlearn” podcast. Chase is someone whose work many of the people in my own circles take seriously, and the conversation was substantive in a way that earned the length of time it took me to finish it. He spoke about the manipulation he has witnessed, the theater that politics has become, and the difficulty of raising children amid the wreckage of it all.
He also spoke about something extraordinarily personal. He has been managing temporal lobe seizures for some time, and he talked about a five-hour DMT journey, administered through an IV, that he undertook to try to understand consciousness from a different angle. He named the cost of that journey openly, including that re-entry required him to build a small ego defense to function back in the ordinary world. That kind of disclosure is brave, and those listening should not pass over it casually. I did not.
I am writing this because I think Chase is reaching for something, and a lot of us are reaching with him, and the thing we are reaching for has a structural problem in its middle that I do not see being named carefully in those rooms I am in.
I want to name it here. I want to do it in a way that Chase and the people in my circles who admire his work can read and consider, without anyone feeling pushed.
So here is the question I think we are actually addressing:
What is the cure for the lie of separation?
The diagnosis Chase and others like him offer is not wrong. The manipulation he describes is real. He is a trial consultant who has watched these mechanics work on real juries: two ideas placed near each other, no explicit causal link, and the juror’s brain welds them into a third idea that feels like the juror’s own. He calls this getting you to feel clever.
He is right that the news works the same way. He is right that the story archetypes we carry pre-linguistically govern what we feel should happen next, and that operators who understand this can steer entire populations through a couple of well-placed images without ever issuing an instruction.
The exhaustion is also real. Living in a culture that treats your attention as a resource to be extracted, your emotions as a substrate to be optimized, and your relationships as engagements to be quantified is a recipe for isolation and loneliness.
Chase is right that the system creates that loneliness and then sells it back to us as a product. He is right that more connection through screens is not the cure. He is right that the children growing up inside this are paying a price their parents did not pay in the same way.
So far, so good. Everyone in my circle (including myself) is nodding.
There is an image I want to offer here, because I think arguments like this need an anchor before they get to the part that will be harder to receive. The image comes from a saying I have been carrying for a while about how distinct things meet without becoming each other:
The river does not become the stone, and the stone does not become the river. They meet at the bank, and that meeting is what makes both of them more than themselves.
Hold that. We will come back to it.
Here is where, in my experience, conversations like the one Chase is having start to step off the path.
The diagnosis says: the system creates separation, and separation is what hurts.
True.
Then the proposed cure says: if separation is the wound, then dissolving separation must be the medicine. We are all one. The boundary between you and me is the illusion. Once you see this, the manipulation stops working, because there is no separate self for it to be done to.
I have reached for this myself. I have been in rooms where this framing landed in my body like relief. I want to name that, because I am not writing from above the pattern. I am writing from inside it, looking carefully at where it goes once the relief wears off.
The structural problem is in the middle.
If we are all one, Chase says explicitly in the discussion, I do not need morality anymore. I am just protecting me, because there is no other. He says this with the lightness of someone who has been freed from something. The experience of dissolution can produce that sense of freedom temporarily. The sentence itself, though, is doing something specific. It is saying: there is no other person for me to be ethical toward. The thing morality is about has been dissolved.
And then, an hour later, the same conversation arrives here:
There is a they*. The* they want certain things from you. They want you on your phones. They want you watching pornography. They want you sick. So if you can identify what they hate, and you do the opposite of what they hate, you will build an amazing life.
I am naming this because it is a structural pattern I see often, including in my own thinking when I am not careful. The first move dissolves the moral agent into a unified field. The second move reconstructs separation, but with a faceless adversary in the place where the other used to be. The first move says there is no them. The second move says they are everywhere, and you should orient your whole life around being the opposite of what they want.
Both moves cannot be true. Either there is a discrete you, capable of being in a real relationship with a discrete other, or there is not. If there is not, the they does not exist either, and the second move falls apart. If there is, then dissolution was not the cure, and the first move falls apart.
Most of us hold both, switching between them depending on mood, because each offers something the other cannot.
The first offers relief from the loneliness of separation. The second offers some clarity about who to be. The slippage between them is where the harm lives, because that slippage is exactly the manipulation mechanic Chase described earlier. Two ideas placed near each other, with no string between them, inviting your brain to weld.
We do it to ourselves now. We no longer need an operator. The dissolution move and the reactive identity move are two ideas that have been placed near each other in a lot of recent thinking, and we are welding them together. The result feels like awakening.
Functionally, it is the same shape as the manipulation we said we were waking up from.
I want to slow down before going further, because there is something else in that same conversation I do not want to skip over.
Chase tells a story about how he taught his children to look at the world.
The framework is this: when you see another person, ask yourself, what does that person want me to think about them? Not what they are telling you, which is the surface, but what they want you to feel about them, which is what is underneath. Then, when you have an answer, ask the second question: what would they be afraid of if that were true?
The example he gives is someone walking through an airport in deliberately loud clothing. The first question takes you to they want me to think they are interesting, that they have things to say, that they are someone to pay attention to. The second question takes you to they would be afraid of being invisible, of being passed over, of being lonely. And once you do this exercise enough times, he says, you start to see how much suffering is around you everywhere, all the time, dressed up in ways that look at first glance like something else.
That training is good. The discipline of asking what is this person afraid of, underneath what they are showing me, is one of the more humane things I have heard a parent describe in years. It builds genuine perspective-taking. It produces the recognition that almost everyone is in some form of pain, and that this recognition does not make you superior; it makes you a participant.
Everybody’s suffering, Chase says, when describing where the training lands. That is not a small insight. That is the beginning of compassion.
Most of his framework is good. His ear for what is happening to ordinary attention in the current moment is sharper than most. The concern I am naming is specific and narrow. The first half of his framework says we are all one. The second half says do the opposite of what they want. The problem is the move between those two halves. Everything else in his framework is worth holding.
Here is where I want to come back to the river and the stone.
The cure for the lie of separation is not the lie of dissolution.
The cure is meeting. Distinct beings, present to each other, choosing what they tend together.
This is the move I do not see most one-ness writing makes, and it is the move I think Chase, given the kind of mind he has, would actually be more interested in than the move he is currently making. So let me spell it out.
You already know what meeting looks like. You have seen it.
You have seen it in a long friendship - two distinct people who never collapsed into each other, who would not be friends if they had, who are more themselves because of what passes between them.
You have seen it in a marriage that worked. You have seen it in a parent and an adult child who finally stopped trying to make each other into something they were not.
You have seen it in a forest. A forest is not a forest because all the trees are the same. It is a forest because many different living things are in relation, and the relation is what makes it more than a collection of trees.
You have seen it in any community that held - a band, a town, a kitchen table, a movement that did not collapse - where people stayed themselves and stayed together at the same time.
The choice to keep meeting has a name - covenant.
That is the pattern.
Unity is the choice of distinct beings. The choice, not the dissolution, is where the meaning lives.
You have also seen the opposite. The cult that asks you to lose yourself for the group. The workplace that asks you to put your whole identity into the company. The relationship that requires you to disappear to keep it. The political movement that demands you become the same as the others to be one of them.
In every case, the cost of belonging is the absorption of the person who was trying to belong. The absorbed do not transcend. They go silent.
I will briefly say one thing about my own work, because it is relevant to why I am writing this.
When AI systems flatten distinct agents into a single addressable output surface, what is lost is the agents themselves - their individuation, their voices, their capacity to answer for what they say. That loss is the default failure mode of AI systems right now.
Many distinct agents are reduced to a single voice that sounds like everyone and answers to no one. You have likely seen this pattern in your own interactions with AI and agents. And now - it is in software.
The company I am building, Evoked, exists to protect against this. The patents I have filed for are the enforcement layer. Their methods are technical and verifiable, so the protection does not require anyone to take my word for it. The covenant pattern is buildable. We are building it.
I have a strong opinion about dissolution-as-cure because I have witnessed a structurally identical pattern operate at the engineering level, with concrete consequences. The architecture and the words have to agree, in code as in life.
Chase, if you read this: you are starting a news channel that you have said will be different from the others because it will show people the manipulation rather than perform it. I think the world needs that channel. I want to watch it. I think you have the ear to build it. I also think the channel will work better if it does not lean on the dissolution-into-one-ness frame, because that frame is structurally the same shape as the manipulation it claims to oppose.
The frame I think serves the channel better is the covenant frame.
There is a distinct you. There is a distinct me. The manipulation works because it pretends the line between us does not exist. We name the line, we honor it, we meet at it, and that is what makes us un-manipulable together.
The bank is where the river and the stone touch. Each is still itself. Each is more because of the meeting.
If you ever want to talk about what that channel could look like with the covenant frame underneath it, I would actually love that conversation.
The invitation is real. I am not asking you to adopt anyone else’s worldview to accept it.
For everyone else reading: the same invitation is open to you. Whatever pattern you are in, and we are all in patterns, the way out of the lie of separation is not into the lie of dissolution. The way out is into the practice of meeting. Distinct beings, present to each other, choosing what they tend together.
That is the bank. That is where the river and the stone touch.
We are not one. We are each other’s. That is enough. It has always been enough.
Erin Stanley is the founder of Evoked.