I. ANSWERING EVERYBODY AT ONCE
This is one of those pieces where I am going to answer a lot of questions at the same time. People have been asking. They ask sideways. They ask behind my back. They ask with that particular smile that is not a smile and I’ve had to explain it to everyone lots of times. I typically just move on in these kinds of things, but if this was a deposition, it would be very bad for the bad guys, which I haven’t been thinking of very much. My strategy is usually just to move on, which I have been doing. But, people tell me a lot of things, lots of people and they ask a lot of questions. A lot of what I am doing right now is very purposeful, and I would rather put it on the table in one sitting than keep feeding the rumor mill one crumb at a time.
You get a little older, and people decide you don’t have it anymore. It is a general assumption of youth: the old dog is finished, so another dog takes a bite to see whether he still has teeth.[8] I assume nothing of the kind. I used to live a life that produced a lot of stories, and those stories did not evaporate because a calendar turned. There is a vast record. I intend to add to it.
I am not looking for a comfortable life. I am not looking for personal happiness as the world sells it—man cave, new car, addition on the house, the Thanksgiving table where everybody thinks you are king of the universe because you learned how to nod at the right people. I am doing what I have traditionally done all my life when I am confronted with vast evil and bad people who are up to no good. If you find yourself trying to fit in with those types, or trying to please them, you are participating. Over the years, I have kept myself clean by doing the opposite of what anybody thinks you should do.
II. THE RECORD THEY KEEP TRYING TO AGE OUT OF EXISTENCE
We only had one car. I have stories about riding a bicycle back and forth to work—twenty miles one way—in all weather, all year. For about five years, I famously rode a motorcycle to work every day, even in the snow. There was a period when I worked sixteen-hour days, every day, seven days a week, and I did that for well over a year. I worked two full-time jobs for years. I did it without a car. I did it when suicide would have been, to an outsider, understandable. Nobody who knew me then wondered how I got through it. I buckled down, and I worked.
People have been saying to me now: that was when you were in your twenties and thirties. Be nice. Just say there were a lot of corrosive elements, and leave it there. I built a lot of prosperity and wealth for many people.[15] I didn’t keep all of it, and I didn’t worship what I kept. Needless to say, a lot of evil inserted itself into my life because I had created a lot of value. Value is a magnet. It draws partners, and it draws parasites. The work is telling them apart before the parasite learns your language.
I am in my late fifties. A lot of the young people in their thirties and forties have thought—they do not say it to my face, but they said it behind my back for a long time—that I was only successful because I was friends with the right people, because I had an easy time, because the world arranged itself around me like a valet. Unsuccessful people, lazy people, people with a poor work ethic, will try to rationalize their behavior when they stand next to someone who will not stop. They need me in a category. I do not fit the category.[13]
That is the oldest trick in the book of resentment. If the man who outworks you can be reclassified as lucky, connected, or finished, then you never have to become him. You only have to wait him out. I have had a posse of younger people trying to rationalize me into a box they can live with. I had an opportunity recently to answer that rationalization with my body instead of my mouth. I took it.
III. THE BIBLICAL SUSPICION OF ANYONE WHO BUILT SOMETHING
You cannot thread the needle. That is the phrase people reach for when they want piety and envy in the same breath. Rich people, or people who look rich from the cheap seats, are to be suspected on every front.[1][14] I am not standing here claiming a yacht and a foundation. I am saying I am rich in ways a lot of people never will be, and that kind of richness gives a man options. Options are what lazy people hate most, because options mean you do not have to live under their terms.
Living authentically is the phrase that gets used until it means nothing. I am using it the old way. Authentic means the inside and the outside are not running two different companies. It means I will not go to Sunday school on Sunday after spending six days making deals with people I find disgusting so I could build a mancave in a basement and call it a life. Plenty of people I know make those deals. They get the addition. They get the car. They get to be photographed at Christmas looking blessed. I have rejected those offers many times. I replace the temptation with extra hard work. I have done it again.
The commentary of broken people does not determine success and failure. They are determined by the value of what you create.
A lot of people are broken. You cannot let broken people define the scoreboard. I see the same short-term hunger in the way some people talk about public men two years into a hard job. So the work must be fake.[11] That is not analysis. That is a temperament. I will not outsource my life to it.
IV. THE PAID DIVORCE
So that everybody knows: an organization I was recently affiliated with paid me a lot of money to go away.[5] I knew they were not very good people. They were dumb. They were bad management. I had been concerned, because bad management almost always runs a thing into the ground. A whole generation now believes you can swap out the figures, throw consultants at the hole, and watch success appear like a vending machine. You cannot swipe in a bunch of negative personality types and expect the machine to run. You cannot play chess with rocks and then act surprised when the rocks sit there being rocks.
I wanted to help them as much as I could. Of course they did not want help. They wanted to steal the value that had been created. If you throw a lot of money at me in that circumstance, I do the math that people in love with process refuse to do. If I hang on to the thing, there will not be money later, because they will have burned the orchard to harvest the last apples. And I did not want to see them every day. I could not stand looking at them. I hated speaking to them. Even if I were well compensated, I did not want those people in my life.
It is like a divorce where the other spouse already has the next boyfriend picked out and will throw cash at the table just to be rid of the witness. They wanted out. When somebody wants out that badly, the mirror is ugly, because what they are racing toward is usually worse than what they are leaving. I have talked about that before. You watch them chase the new arrangement, and later they discover the new spouse isn’t very good. That is not my problem to prevent. My problem is to exit before their stupidity becomes my climate.
A vast evil works behind characters like that.[6] I have talked about it a lot recently, and I will keep talking about it. I gave everybody a fair shot. When they proved they were terrible, stupid people, I did not stay to be decorated for loyalty. Loyalty to incompetence is not a virtue. It is a costume.
They paid me to go away because my refusal was insulting. I did not go along to get along. I did not brown-nose the gravy train. I took the money while it still had value, because if you hang on ethically to a house that arsonists have already rented, you lose the house and the chance. That is not cynicism. That is husbandry. You do not sit in a burning barn to prove you loved the horses.
V. WHAT THE CRITICS NEEDED ME TO BE
For ten years the accusation has had a smell. He is not the same guy who would walk uphill both ways. He got paid well. He got comfortable. He became the thing he used to outrun. They needed that story because the alternative is unbearable: that the man who worked like that in his twenties can still work like that in his fifties, which means their excuse for being a bunch of leeches has no birthday.
I do not brag as a habit. When you have built a lot of value, the value speaks, and then the jackals speak louder. I swung for the fences on purpose. I have talked recently about swinging for those fences again—not because I enjoy spectacle, but because the safer path is how you end up owned. The peckers are always out there, picking away at how good you make it look, or how good you treat people, or how you should have taken less so they could feel taller. Some people find fault the way others find oxygen. You do not build a life to satisfy them. You build a life they cannot digest.
They looked at an old dog and figured if they put the screws to him he would say, uncle. Too old. Not the same guy. Lived the affluent life too long. Soft now. That is how evil piles on. It tries to force you into a bad place so you will make a bad decision: I cannot do this anymore. I cannot take the punishment. I cannot take the pain. I will submit. That method works on a lot of good people. My reaction has always been the same. Work harder than everybody else. Go where the evil is not in control. There are still places like that. Evil is afraid of hard work. Hard work is a climate it cannot breathe.[9]
VI. PERKINS AT TWO IN THE MORNING
I can think of at least one person who hung around with me during a hard stretch in my mid-twenties. He knows who he is. He stays pretty tight with all this. He and I worked until the bones were sorry. Then we would go to Perkins and have great philosophy discussions at two o’clock in the morning.[7] Some of the greatest times of my life have been under the hardest conditions. That is not a slogan I borrowed from a poster.
People who only meet you in the comfortable years think comfort invented you. The people who sat across from me in a booth after a double shift know better. We were not networking. We were trying to understand the world with whatever was left of our minds after our bodies had already paid. If you have never been that tired and still wanted to talk about justice, you will not understand why I will not trade this life for a finished basement.
I went through a period when the pain was loud enough that quitting would have looked reasonable. I did not quit. I am not reciting that to collect pity. Pity is another way people try to get a hand on you. I am reciting it because the question on the table is not whether I remember how to suffer. The question is whether I am still willing. I am.
VII. JOSEPH’S CUP
I have been spending a lot of time around a little coffee shop in the Bridgewater area of Butler County. Near the Barnes & Noble at Bridgewater Falls, there is a place called Joseph’s Cup. I love the name.[2] I have known about it for years. The gravity of it hit me now, in one of these tough seasons, because I chose not to make friends with evil, and a name like that doesn’t leave you alone when you are living the story it points to.
Biblical writers and commentators have wrapped their minds around Joseph’s cup for a very long time and never quite finished the job. That is why the name works. It is not cute branding. It is an unfinished argument about testing, recognition, exile, and whether a man sold by his own will uses his power to settle the score or to find out who people really are.[3]
The cup in the sack
In Genesis, Joseph—already the second man in Egypt, already the one who can keep a nation from starving—has his silver cup put in Benjamin’s sack.[12] The brothers have eaten at his table. They have been treated well. Then the steward runs them down on the road and accuses them of stealing the vessel “in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth.” The whole scene is theater with a knife in it. If they abandon Benjamin the way they once abandoned Joseph, the old crime is still the present tense. If they will not, something in them has changed.
Commentators split. Some say the cup is an Egyptian tool of lecanomancy, oil on water, the future read in a ripple, and they worry that Joseph has gone native. Some say it is a ruse, play-acting, the learned Egyptian mask worn long enough to finish the test. Matthew Henry reads the kindness and the trial together and says God humbles those He loves and loads with benefits. Calvin notices that a man that rich still drank from silver, not gold, and hears moderation in it. I hear something simpler, because I have lived a cheaper version of the same play.
The cup is how you find out what people will do when the prosperity is interrupted. Anybody can toast you at the banquet. The road back is where the theology happens.
The cupbearer who forgets
Before the silver cup there is another cup. Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker land in prison with Joseph. The cupbearer dreams a vine, squeezes grapes into Pharaoh’s cup, and puts the cup back in the king’s hand. Joseph tells him he will be restored. The man is restored. Then he forgets Joseph in the prison until Pharaoh has a dream that scares him. That is how institutions work. They drink what you poured, get their jobs back, and don’t remember your name until they need an interpreter again.
I have been the man in the prison who can read the dream. I have been the man whose value restored a lot of other people. I have also been forgotten on purpose. Joseph’s Cup, as a coffee shop and as a text, reminds me that I typically choose what I choose under hard conditions. Anybody can appease evil. Anybody can make a friend of someone they find disgusting if the check is large enough. I didn’t ask for the circumstances. They arrived. The name on the door arrived with them.
I will do a whole segment just on Joseph’s Cup. People seem to be benefiting from that kind of conversation, the slow kind, the kind you have when you are not trying to win a room. This essay is only the door into that room.
VIII. HOW I DEAL WITH A VAST AMOUNT OF EVIL
I outwork it. I tough out whatever they throw. You do not often choose the game. It comes and finds you. You don’t beat it by sitting at its table and hoping the cards get nicer. You beat it by making it say uncle when it has pulled everything it has to blow up your life.
Revenge, if you need that word, is not a midnight email. It is not a lawsuit for sport. It is not a social media thread. The way to get revenge on evil is to outmaneuver it in the long chess game. I have found that the way to do that is through excessively hard work—not only the kind where you are paid a lot of money for your brain, but the kind where the hour still means something, salary or labor, the body still on the hook. When you work jaw-dropping hard, you tend to push the tentacles out of your life. That is what I am doing. I have done it all my life, to the point where the bones were sorry and still would not yield.
There is purity in hard work. There is purity in busting your butt. You do not have to do it forever. You do it when evil comes after you, when you are the elderly dog in the pack, and the new dogs are hoping to chew you into submission. That is not me. It’s not going to happen, and it never will. That is how I have run my life. If evil is trying to find a way to wreck my existence, I will fight it the way I know works.
The world has changed. In some rooms hard workers are looked down on, as if effort were a rural accent. Fine. I take the hard road anyway. People who cannot keep their own lives together aren’t in a position to criticize how I keep mine. I have shown that I am still the same person. I will dig down. I will not submit so somebody else can feel that the hierarchy has been updated.
IX. COLOR ON THE LAST MAN AND THE OLD GUNFIGHTER
I have used a pen name for a long time—Overmanwarrior—not as costume jewelry, but as a reminder.[10] The last man wants a world where nobody is allowed to be formidable, because formidability makes his comfort look like a choice. He forms committees. He hires consultants. He pays the strong man to leave the building and then wonders why the building sags. He calls that professionalism.
Roosevelt called the opposite the strenuous life.[4] I have practiced a version of it that never made the society pages: grass-cutting, repo work, bodyguard work, car lots, strikes, sixteen-hour days, a motorcycle on snow, a bicycle in weather that would cancel a school district. I also practiced the other half—the books, the strategy, the American counterpoint to the Eastern manuals that taught a generation to treat business as a monastery with a quarterly report. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business was my effort to show that Western civilization already had a manual, written in dust, speed, and consequence. If you ever read it, I think you will love it. I wrote it so a person in the trenches would have something other than a consultant’s slide.
A gunfighter who survives does not survive by becoming a dandy. He survives by remaining able to draw when the room has decided he is furniture. Age is not the disarming. Vanity is. I am not trying to be twenty-eight. I am trying to be exact.
X. WHAT YOU ARE SEEING, AND WHAT YOU ARE NOT
When you see me doing some different things, you are not seeing a midlife collapse, and you are not seeing a victory lap. You are seeing the method. I had a chance to get away clean in a divorce I did not start, and I took it, and I am pretty happy about it. I have replaced a lot of things in my life with excessively hard work. I will explain more of the particulars once I am past the NDAs and the contractual quiet. Until then, I am being cryptic on purpose. Cryptic is not coy. Cryptic is the difference between a free man and a deposition.
I did not ask for these circumstances. They happen. The gravity of Joseph’s Cup hit me because I am in a difficult time. When they reach out and you say, no thank you, you stupid person, I do not want anything to do with you—that is when the weather changes. Awkward as a breakup. Necessary as surgery.
So, to answer everybody at the same time: that is why I am doing what I am doing. That is how I deal with a vast amount of evil. I outwork it. I outlast it. I outthink it. I make it say, uncle. I am the same person. What I do every day is how I live. Subscribe to a better day if you want the next chapter. I will continue this discussion as a commentary on Joseph’s Cup, because the little shop in Butler County has been a better theologian than most of the rooms I left.
XI. A CLOSING WORD TO THE POSSE
If you needed me smaller to feel larger, I cannot help you. If you needed my success to be an accident so your stagnation could be a system, I cannot help you. If you thought fifty-something was a muzzle, you picked the wrong animal.
I will work. I will read. I will sit in a small shop with a large name and remember that the cup is always going back in somebody’s sack, and that the only interesting question is what you do when they find it. I have already answered that question with my feet, my hours, and a refusal that cost other people more pride than it cost me money.
NOTES
[1] The phrase is popularly attached to Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25. The image is not a prohibition on wealth so much as a warning that accumulated ease becomes a snare when it replaces fidelity. I use it here as it lives in the American ear: suspicion of anyone who has built something large enough to be envied.
[2] Butler County, Ohio. Bridgewater Falls sits along Princeton Road in Hamilton / Fairfield Township. I have been spending time near that corridor—the Barnes & Noble that opened in the old Staples space, and a small coffee shop whose name, Joseph’s Cup, keeps refusing to stay merely commercial.
[3] Genesis 37–50. Joseph is sold by his brothers, imprisoned on a false charge, raised by interpretation of dreams, and finally tests those same brothers with a silver cup hidden in Benjamin’s sack (Genesis 44). Commentators from Matthew Henry to Calvin have wrestled with whether the cup was a tool of Egyptian divination, a ruse, or a sacrament of recognition. I think it is a test of character under pressure—which is the only test that ever matters.
[4] Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899. Roosevelt’s point was not gymnasium morality. It was that a people who choose ease over difficulty invite the very forces that will unmake them.
[5] Nondisclosure agreements and other contracts bind me. What I can say is structural, not gossipy: bad management, consultant personalities, a belief that figures can be swapped like checkers, and a payoff large enough to buy distance. The rest stays in the vault where it belongs.
[6] See Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1: the line about the line dividing good and evil running through every human heart. Evil in the sense I mean it here is not cartoon villainy. It is the organized willingness to harvest value someone else created and then to punish the creator for noticing.
[7] Perkins restaurants were, for a stretch of American night life, the poor man’s symposium: bottomless coffee, pie, and the kind of talk that only happens after the body has already been used up. I do not romanticize poverty. I do remember that some of the best philosophy I ever heard was spoken over a two a.m. Grand Slam.
[8] The pack metaphor is older than psychology textbooks. Wolves, dogs, and office cultures all test the aging animal to see whether the hierarchy can be revised without a fight. The mistake is assuming the old dog wants the fight. Sometimes he refuses to lie down.
[9] I have written about this pattern in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill, 2021), especially the chapters on bootlickers, dandies who come looting, and the lonely stranger who still knows the room. The frontier rule is simple: reputation is a weapon you either keep loaded or hand to someone who will use it on you.
[10] Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch—the source of the handle Overmanwarrior—is often flattened into a gym-poster. In context it is a demand that a person refuse the last man’s bargain: comfort, resentment, and a morality designed to make excellence look like a crime. I am not a Nietzschean church. I am a man who noticed that the last man always has a committee.
[11] The short-cycle criticism of Donald Trump two years into a term is useful only as a type. Broken people keep score in weeks. Builders keep score in decades. I am not asking anyone to adopt my politics. I am asking them to notice the psychology: the demand that a hard thing look finished before it has been allowed to work.
[12] Genesis 44:2, 5. “Put my cup, the silver cup, in the sack’s mouth of the youngest… Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth?” Whether Joseph actually practiced lecanomancy is a scholarly fight. The narrative function is not. The cup forces a confession of who the brothers have become.
[13] Proverbs 14:23; 13:4; 6:6–11. Scripture is not sentimental about sloth. It treats work as a moral climate, not merely an economic input. That is why lazy people need a theory of your success that does not implicate their habits.
[14] On the “eye of a needle,” see again the Synoptic passages and the long commentary tradition summarized in Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. The camel was a joke about impossibility, not a zoning ordinance for rich men. The point is attachment.
[15] I built prosperity for a lot of people. That sentence is not a humblebrag. It is the reason the corrosion arrived. Value attracts two kinds of company: people who want to add to it, and people who want to live inside it without the cost of making it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING
I do not believe in thin reading lists. If you are going to think about work, evil, age, testing, and the American habit of despising the person who will not sit down, you should have more books than opinions. What follows is a working shelf: scripture and commentary first, then the strategy and labor books that trained my hands, then the moral and psychological literature that names the thing I keep calling evil without turning it into a costume drama.
Scripture and commentary
The Holy Bible. Genesis 37–50; Proverbs 6, 13–14; Matthew 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30; Psalm 116:13; John 18:11.
Calvin, John. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis. Translated by John King. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847.
Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible. Vol. 1, Genesis to Deuteronomy. 1706. Reprint, McLean, VA: MacDonald, n.d.
Keener, Craig S. The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.
Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Sarna, Nahum M. Genesis: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Rashbam (Samuel ben Meir). Commentary on Genesis. In the rabbinic tradition on Genesis 44.
Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology. “Joseph’s Peculiar Silver Cup—in the Bible and Archaeology.”
Work, craft, and the American strenuous life
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.
Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. New York: Century, 1900.
Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883.
Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. Various editions.
Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1988.
Goldratt, Eliyahu M., and Jeff Cox. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. Great Barrington, MA: North River Press, 1984.
Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.
Berry, Wendell. “Mind of the Farmer, Mind of the Corporation.” In The Art of the Commonplace. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.
Strategy, character, and refusing the safer path
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Read as the book America keeps importing when it is too shy to write its own.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambhala, 1993.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Gracián, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Translated by Christopher Maurer. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. New York: Viking, 1998. Useful as a field guide to the people I will not become.
Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. New York: Rugged Land, 2002.
Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: William Morrow, 1974.
Evil, resentment, and the last man
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1973–1978.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Translated by Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Various editions.
Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. New York: Knopf, 1953.
Havel, Václav. “The Power of the Powerless.” 1978.
Age, strength, and the myth of decline
Cicero. De Senectute (On Old Age). Translated by W. A. Falconer. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.
Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Translated by Robin Campbell. London: Penguin, 1969.
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 1996. For the returned man who is not believed to be himself.
Tennyson, Alfred. “Ulysses.” 1842. “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1952.
Jung, C. G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. New York: Harcourt, 1933.
Organizations, consultants, and the worship of interchangeable parts
Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941.
Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.
Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper & Row, 1954.
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Tett, Gillian. The Silo Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Janis, Irving L. Groupthink. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951. Especially the chapters on the alliance of the elite and the mob.
Local ground and the American night
Cayton, Andrew R. L. Ohio: The History of a People. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002.
Howe, Henry. Historical Collections of Ohio. Cincinnati: State of Ohio, 1907.
Bridgewater Falls and the Butler County corridor: local reportage on the Barnes & Noble opening at 3339 Princeton Road, Hamilton, Ohio, 2025.
Travel Butler County. Listing notices for independent coffee in Fairfield Township and the Mason–Hamilton belt.
Further work by the author
Hoffman, Rich. The Tail of the Dragon.
Hoffman, Rich. The Curse of Fort Seven Mile.
Hoffman, Rich. Essays and broadcasts archived at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com and richhoffmanbooks.com.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. In development.
Rich Hoffman
More about me
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About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
