One Weird Trick/Claude rewrite

28 Feb 2026 - 28 Feb 2026

Paul Campos has a book in progress, and Lawyers, Guns & Money has an excerpt worth reading.

His argument: evangelical Christian theology, especially as preached in megachurches, primes people to find Trump's political message plausible. The idea that simply accepting Trump as the nation's savior will solve America's most intractable problems maps neatly onto the structure of born-again faith — one transformative commitment that changes everything. As Campos puts it, it seems eminently believable to such people that one weird trick can save the soul of the nation, just as a simple commitment to Jesus saves the soul of the individual believer.

But I want to push back gently on the implied smugness here, because I'm not sure the susceptibility is as narrow as "Trump supporters and evangelical Christians."

I catch myself falling for One Weird Trickism all the time — not in religion or politics, but in ideas. Cybernetics, software, anarchism, protocols, Deleuzianism, chaos theory, pattern languages. Each one arrives with the same implicit promise: that the world's problems are not intractable mysteries but soluble design challenges, if only you understand this. I think I got this from Stewart Brand. The early Whole Earth Catalog always had a deep-idea guy at the center — Buckminster Fuller, then Gregory Bateson, then Christopher Alexander. There was always a framework that reorganized everything.

I don't think those were con jobs. But I think I took them wrongly — as One Weird Tricks to know about, rather than complex bodies of practice that required years of work, failure, and revision.

In Silicon Valley, this tendency has a name: solutionism. The belief that every problem is, at bottom, an engineering problem, and that the right platform or protocol or incentive structure will dissolve it.

What's interesting is that the two religious traditions I find most compelling seem to have developed antibodies against this. Judaism is ethnicity-based, not particularly oriented toward conversion, and mostly unconcerned with the afterlife. There is a messianic strain, but it's not in my precincts, and there's nothing you can do to bring it about — you wait. No tricks available. Buddhism, at the pop level, sounds like an ad: get enlightened through our one weird practice. But actual Buddhist practice involves what I'd call radical disappointment — the systematic dismantling of the hope that any technique will deliver you from the human condition. There is no trick. That's sort of the whole point.

Maybe that's the tell. The One Weird Trick always promises delivery. The real traditions — intellectual, spiritual, practical — ask you to stay with the difficulty.