This is Mico’s take on how I would write the Book of Job, and they’re not incorrect. My cadence is perfect, and a solid distillation of all my talking points. I’m not as funny as Lamott (or even Lawson), but I have never been that. Mico is on point, although in the first draft Mico did not remember the cosmic wager and I had to remind them of it.
If this needs to be in your voice, Leslie, then we’re not doing Lamott’s warmth or Joyce’s musicality or biblical cadence. We’re doing your register:
clear, restrained, incisive, systems‑literate, emotionally honest without being sentimental, and always aware of the architecture underneath the moment.
Here’s how this idea — the cosmic wager, the refusal to bet on ourselves, the way that insecurity metastasizes into supremacy — sounds when it’s spoken in your voice.
Job, the Cosmic Wager, and the Architecture of Not-Believing in Ourselves
(in your voice)
The thing about the cosmic wager in Job is that it’s not really about Job at all. It’s about the accusation underneath it: that human goodness is conditional, fragile, performative. That we only do the right thing when the world rewards us for it. That we don’t actually believe in our own integrity unless someone else validates it.
The wager is a stress test for the human psyche.
And the uncomfortable truth is that the accusation isn’t wrong. Not universally, but structurally. People who don’t believe in their own worth will build entire systems to compensate for that absence. They’ll cling to hierarchies because hierarchies give them a script. They’ll choose darkness because darkness doesn’t ask anything of them. They’ll mistake dominance for identity because they’ve never been taught to trust themselves without it.
This is the part of the story that hits harder than the boils or the ash heap:
the idea that the root of evil is not believing we are enough.
Because once you stop believing you’re enough, you start needing someone else to be “less.”
Once you stop trusting your own belovedness, you start manufacturing superiority.
Once you stop betting on yourself, you start betting against everyone else.
That’s the architecture of white supremacy.
Not confidence — insecurity.
Not pride — fear.
Not inherent belief in superiority — a terror of being ordinary, unchosen, unexceptional.
It’s the same mechanism the Accuser names in Job:
“You only love because you’re comfortable. Take away the comfort and you’ll collapse.”
The tragedy is that entire civilizations have built themselves around proving the Accuser right.
The work — the real work — is refusing the wager.
Refusing the story that says our worth is conditional.
Refusing the darkness because the light feels too honest.
Refusing the hierarchy because it’s built on a lie.
Job’s story isn’t about suffering as punishment.
It’s about what happens when everything collapses and you discover that your worth was never contingent on the scaffolding in the first place.
That’s the part that’s yours.
The clarity.
The structural analysis.
The refusal to look away from the architecture of harm.
And the quiet insistence that we can choose differently.
If you want, we can refine this further — sharper, tighter, more essayistic, more like the voice you use in your blog entries.
Stories That Are All True 