Picture this.

A man lies awake on an oxhide in the entrance hall of his own home. He has spent twenty years trying to return here. Now that he has finally arrived, he cannot tell anyone who he is.

The man is Odysseus. The home is Ithaca. The men who have occupied his house are still inside, eating his food and competing to marry his wife. His anger rises. He could attack them now. Instead, he strikes his chest and speaks to his own heart:

“Endure, my heart. You have endured worse than this.”

What is happening here?

Odysseus is not merely thinking. He is giving himself an instruction. One part of him is furious. Another remembers what happened before, compares the danger, and decides to wait.

Then Athena appears.

That detail matters. Odysseus is capable of directing himself, but the goddess has not disappeared. Human judgment and divine guidance occupy the same scene.

I found myself returning to this scene while reading the Japanese historian Ryoji Motomura’s How to Read World History as a Liberal Art. Motomura introduces one of the strangest theories of human consciousness ever proposed: Julian Jaynes’s “bicameral mind.”

Jaynes argued that the people represented in the Iliad did not experience consciousness as we do. When they faced a new or difficult situation, they heard commands that they understood as the voices of gods. A god supplied the decision. The human being carried it out.

That claim should make you pause.

Jaynes was using the word consciousness in a narrow sense. He did not mean that ancient people could not see, learn, speak, or solve problems. He meant that they lacked the inner space in which we step back from ourselves and say: I am thinking about this. I will choose what to do.

In Jaynes’s reading, something changes between the Iliad and the Odyssey. The gods recede. Human beings begin to consider options, make plans, tell lies, remember the past, and direct themselves. The long voyage of Odysseus becomes more than a journey home. It becomes a journey towards becoming a self.

It is a breathtaking idea.

It is also a disputed one.

This is not settled science. Far from it.

We should not state as fact that people living three thousand years ago lacked consciousness, or that writing rewired the brain and silenced the gods. The Homeric epics grew out of a long oral tradition. We cannot date their composition with the precision Jaynes’s argument requires. His account of the brain has also been heavily criticised.

So why pay attention to it?

Because even a theory that is historically uncertain can help us see an important question.

Jaynes asks us to notice a change in a very simple sentence:

Who is the subject of the decision?

In one kind of story, a person acts because a god commanded it. In another, a person considers what to do, chooses, and becomes answerable for the result. The decisive movement is not simply from religion to reason. It is from external command to internal responsibility.

The silence before judgment

Think about a decision you are delaying.

Perhaps you believe you need one more piece of information. So you collect more data, consult another expert, and search for a precedent. Eventually, you hope, the correct answer will reveal itself.

But the hardest decisions do not work that way.

The hardest decisions arrive when the available voices disagree. One expert says move quickly; another says wait. The numbers support one option; experience points to another. What is good for one person may be unfair to the organisation. What protects the present may damage the future.

At some point, the voices stop being able to decide for us.

That is where judgment begins.

Judgment is therefore not the possession of certainty. It is what becomes necessary after certainty has run out.

This is also where responsibility enters. As long as I can say, “I was only following the instruction,” the decision does not quite belong to me. The moment I say, “I heard the advice, understood the risks, and chose this,” I become its author.

Responsibility begins when the subject of the sentence becomes I.

The gods in the meeting room

The ancient gods have not entirely vanished. They have changed their names.

You have probably met the modern gods in a meeting room. They appear as the boss, the precedent, the policy, the market, the consultant, the spreadsheet, or “what headquarters wants.” Each can provide knowledge that deserves to be heard. Each can also become a way of escaping ownership.

We can usually recognise this escape by its language:

The data made the decision.
The process required it.
The system recommended it.
There was no other choice.

Sometimes those statements are accurate. Often they conceal the human judgment that selected the data, designed the process, accepted the recommendation, and defined the available choices.

Leadership does not mean refusing outside guidance. Odysseus still listens to Athena. A leader who ignores expertise, evidence, or dissent is not independent; they are merely isolated.

The harder task is to hear many voices without surrendering the final authorship of the decision.

Autonomy is not the absence of voices. It is the refusal to make any one of them responsible in your place.

A new divine voice

Now add AI to the meeting room.

AI speaks with unusual fluency. It can compare options, produce a recommendation, supply reasons, and express uncertainty. It can sound less like a tool than an adviser who has already completed the thinking.

That is precisely why it can become a modern oracle.

The danger is not that AI will always give us bad answers. The greater danger is that its good answers will make it easy to forget who must answer for them.

An AI system can recommend that a company close a division, reject an applicant, change a curriculum, or enter a new market. It can estimate consequences. But it cannot inhabit those consequences. It cannot face the people affected, carry the memory of the decision, or repair the trust that may be lost.

It can contribute to judgment. It cannot own judgment.

If Jaynes imagined that consciousness emerged when the voices of the gods began to fade, AI presents us with the reverse temptation: to hand judgment back to a voice outside ourselves.

The question is no longer whether the voice is divine. The question is much closer to us:

Are we using its authority to avoid becoming the author of what happens next?

Writing after the voices

Here is where writing enters the story.

Jaynes connected the decline of the divine voices with the rise of writing.

His historical claim may be too strong. Yet writing does change our relationship with thought.

A voice disappears as soon as it is heard. A written sentence stays in front of us. You can question it, place it beside another sentence, notice what it leaves out, and return to revise it. Writing gives you some distance from the voices inside and outside you.

This may be one of the quiet origins of judgment—not writing as proof that consciousness suddenly appeared, but writing as a practice through which judgment can be examined.

To write down a decision is to make its hidden structure visible:

  • What did I notice?
  • Which voices did I trust?
  • What did I leave out?
  • What consequence am I prepared to accept?
  • What evidence would make me revise my view?

Writing does not guarantee a good decision. It makes it harder to pretend that no decision was made.

Becoming the subject

Odysseus does not become fully independent of the gods. Nor do we become independent of history, institutions, other people, or machines.

That may be the deeper lesson of the scene in the entrance hall.

He hears anger. He hears memory. He speaks to his own heart. Then Athena speaks. His judgment emerges among these voices, not outside them.

The mark of maturity is not that you stop listening.

It is that, after listening, you can say:

This is what I have decided.
This is why.
These are the consequences I can foresee.
And if I am wrong, I will return and revise it.

Perhaps judgment began when the gods stopped providing an unquestionable answer.

Leadership begins in the same place. ■

Sources and further reading

First published on Substack on Sep 16, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/when-the-gods-stopped-speaking-judgment

Cover image: Rembrandt, “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” (1653) (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons — source)

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