I. The Makeup Artist, myself
There is a specific kind of silence in a corporate training room.
Not the silence of a library. Not the silence of grief. It is the silence of people who have been optimized.
I know this silence because I produce it.
I stand at the front of these glass-walled rooms — the markers, the flip charts, the slides projected behind me — and I speak the liturgy fluently.
Psychological Safety. Agile Mindset. Growth Culture. Stakeholder Alignment.
I watch the participants: middle managers, senior directors, people who were once somebody’s curious child with a private dream, and are now, in this room, a role with a performance review attached to it.
They don’t look unhappy. That’s what makes it eerie. They look calibrated.
And I am the man calibrating them.
I have a thought I cannot say aloud in front of my clients. It comes to me most clearly at the end of a day when I have done my job well, when the feedback forms are positive and the client wants to renew the contract.
The thought is this: I am a makeup artist for a dying queen.
The image comes from an old book — older than any business framework I have ever taught. But it is the most accurate description I have found for what I witness in these rooms. Bear with me.
And the thought that follows, quieter and more uncomfortable, is this: the queen is also feeding me.
Her salary pays my expenses. Her language fills my days. Her rituals — the workshops, the frameworks, the carefully facilitated conversations — are the reason I can afford, each evening, to sit at my desk and write sentences like this one.
I do not love what she has become. I am not sure I ever fully believed in her promises. But I am inside her palace, at her table, and I know it.
Yoshida Kenko knew this feeling.
He served the Court he mourned. He took his fees from the hands of the very power he watched, with quiet horror, transforming into something cruder and more violent.
He did not pretend otherwise. That honesty — the refusal to claim a purity he did not have — is, I think, what kept his writing true.
I am trying to do the same. To see the queen clearly. To name what she is becoming.
And to remain, without shame, at her table — for now.
II. The Structure Beneath the Structure
For a long time, I had no language for what I was witnessing.
I tried the vocabulary of psychology: burnout, disengagement, identity diffusion. Close, but not quite right.
I tried organizational theory: misaligned incentives, cultural dysfunction. Accurate, but somehow too small for what I was seeing.
I tried sociology. I kept arriving at descriptions that were technically correct and spiritually insufficient.
The language I finally found was two thousand years old.
The image of “Babylon the Great” from the Book of Revelation is so hallucinatory that most modern readers scroll past it.
But the scholars who have spent their lives with this text argue that it is not religious fantasy. It is a structural diagnosis of how power actually works — one that has remained accurate across two thousand years of imperial history.
Babylon is not a city. She is a Spirit of Empire: the seductive logic of a civilization that offers prosperity, meaning, and forward motion in exchange for your complete identification with the system.
She appears as a woman of staggering beauty, holding a golden cup. She is drunk on her own success. She rides a Beast. (Revelation 17:3–4)
The Beast is everything the Woman cannot be in public.
Have you ever noticed that you cannot simply quit the system?
That there is always a consequence — a gap in your resume, a lost pension, a visa tied to your employment, a mortgage that requires your salary to continue?
That is the Beast.
He does not advertise. He does not seduce. He works through the fine print, the default settings, the invisible walls that only become visible when you try to walk through them.
The Woman offers you the cup. The Beast ensures there are no good alternatives to drinking.
Together, they are almost irresistible. She makes you want to belong. He makes it expensive not to.
This is not a new arrangement.
It is not a product of the digital age, or late capitalism, or any other periodization we reach for when we want to feel that our moment is uniquely troubled.
The Roman citizen felt it. The medieval courtier felt it. The salaryman of 1980s in Tokyo felt it.
The structure changes its costume in every era. The logic beneath it does not.
When I look at the world I work in — the global economy, the platform companies, the AI productivity tools, the endless optimization of human attention and labor — I see the Woman in her latest form.
She has never been more sophisticated.
She calls her rituals a culture, her demands a mission, her surveillance a feedback loop.
But the cup is the same cup. And the question it raises is the same question it has always raised: how much of yourself will you trade for the comfort of belonging?
III. What History Keeps Trying to Tell Us
I am aware of how this sounds.
The Woman, in 2026, does not look like she is dying. She looks like she has won.
But I have been reading history long enough to know that this is precisely how it always looks from the inside.
Rome at its height. The British Empire at its zenith. Japan’s bubble economy in 1989, when real estate prices implied that the land beneath the Imperial Palace was worth more than the entire state of California.
In each case, the people inside the system were the last to sense what was coming. The banquets continued. The titles multiplied. The ceremonies grew more elaborate precisely as the foundations cracked.
This is not a prophecy of collapse.
Power does not disappear — it transforms.
The Roman Empire became the Catholic Church. The British Empire became the American century. What ends is not the game, but the particular rules you have been playing by.
And when the rules change, those who gave everything to the current version of the game find themselves with nothing that transfers.
The journalist Naomi Klein has documented the modern version of this pattern.
In The Shock Doctrine, she shows how moments of crisis are used not to rescue people, but to restructure power in ways that benefit those who were already watching carefully.
The merchants, as the Book of Revelation so precisely puts it, always weep after the fact. (Revelation 18:9–11)
They are, by definition, the last to know. In the list of what they have lost, the text includes, almost as an afterthought: the souls of human beings. (Revelation 18:13)
The question, then, is not whether the system will change. Every system does. The question is whether you will still have a self — a coherent, recognizable, genuinely yours self — when it does.
That is a leadership question.
It is also a philosophical one. And in my experience, most leadership education carefully avoids it.
IV. A Hermit in the Palace
I mentioned Kenko earlier, almost in passing.
But he deserves more than a passing mention. He is, I think, the most honest map I have found for the terrain we are navigating.
He lived in Kyoto during the slow transformation of the Imperial Court — an institution of extraordinary refinement and accumulated beauty, being ground down, decade by decade, by the rising military power of the samurai class.
He mourned the Court. He believed in its values.
He wrote about its fading beauty with the tenderness of someone watching a parent grow old.
And yet it was not the Court that fed him. It was the samurai — the very class he regarded with a courtier’s quiet contempt, the Beast in its most literal form — who hired him to teach their children the classical arts, the poetry, the refinements of a civilization they were in the process of displacing.
He took their money. He taught them. He performed his duties with skill and without visible resentment.
This is the detail that stops me every time I return to his story.
He was not sustained by the world he loved. He was sustained by the world he could not fully respect. And he knew it.
And he wrote anyway — with honesty, with beauty, with a philosophical clarity that neither his patrons nor his grief could touch.
The Woman was luminous and fading. The Beast was brutal and ascending. Kenko sat at the table of the Beast while mourning the Woman, and he did not pretend that his position was clean.
Crucially: the Court did not collapse during Kenko’s lifetime.
The queen did not die. She diminished, transformed, lost her center of gravity — but she persisted, in altered form, for centuries more.
Kenko did not maintain his distance because he was waiting for the end.
He maintained it because he understood something more fundamental: that in any era, under any queen, the greatest danger to a person is not poverty or failure or political upheaval.
It is the slow loss of the self that happens when you let an institution do your thinking for you.
He did not flee. He did not write manifestos.
He walked through the samurai society, performed his duties, collected his pay, and wrote a series of quiet, strange essays called Tsurezuregusa — Essays in Idleness — in which he observed the world with the calm, unhurried attention of someone who had decided, at a cellular level, that the system did not own him.
What Kenko practiced, I have come to think of as Internal Secession.
He had left the palace.
But he had not left the world.
He moved to the margins — a small house, a monk’s robe, a life of deliberate simplicity — and from that distance, he continued to engage with the very society he had withdrawn from.
He taught the sons of samurai. He accepted their patronage. He was, in the most precise sense, an outsider who remained inside the system’s reach.
What he practiced was not escape. It was distance.
And that distance — physical, psychological, spiritual — is what allowed him to see clearly what those still seated at the center of power could not.
He never gave the institution his interiority — the part of a person that generates meaning, that recognizes beauty, that asks the questions the system cannot answer.
He maintained what I can only call a Distance of the Soul: a membrane between what the world required of him and who he actually was.
He was a hermit who lived at the edge of the palace.
And he came out — as he went in — with his mind intact.
V. At the Table, Still
I will keep standing in the glass rooms.
I will keep teaching the words — Agile, Psychological Safety, Growth Mindset — with the professional fluency that pays my rent and keeps the lights on.
I am not going to pretend that I am outside the system. I am very much inside it. We all are.
The Woman’s cup is genuinely appealing, and the Beast’s alternatives are genuinely worse. I am not arguing for a dramatic exit.
I am arguing for a membrane.
Every era in history has contained, somewhere within it, people who managed to remain themselves — who fulfilled their obligations without surrendering their interiority, who dined at the table without being consumed by it.
They were not heroes. They were not saints. They were not even, necessarily, unhappy.
They were simply people who had decided, quietly and without announcement, that the institution could have their labor, their time, their professional fluency — but not the part of them that asked the deeper questions.
That decision is, I now believe, the beginning of genuine leadership.
Not the management of others. Not the optimization of teams.
But the prior, harder, more private work of knowing who you are when the feedback forms are put away and the room is empty and no one is evaluating your performance.
The corporate training world calls this “resilience.”
But that word has been so thoroughly colonized by the system that it has become almost meaningless — another metric, another thing to score yourself on, another way the Woman extracts one more unit of productivity from your interior life.
What I am describing is older and quieter than resilience.
It is closer to what Kenko practiced in the fading court of 14th-century Kyoto, and what every thoughtful person has had to practice in every era since: the refusal to let the institution — however beautiful, however powerful, however generous with its cup — become the final word about who you are.
I am still teaching you to serve the queen.
But I am also, quietly, teaching you something else.
How to remain yourself while you do. In this era, and in every era that follows.
That, I think, is the only honest thing I have to offer. ■