Present Day, June 15, 2026
The first track on Sanctified Hunger is called Well Trained. I chose it as the opening because it describes the precondition for everything that follows: the systematic training of human beings to surrender their own judgment in increments so small they do not register as loss.
I have watched this process operate in every institutional context I have studied, but religious institutions have historically been its most sophisticated practitioners. The training begins early. First you are taught that certain questions are not questions but sins. Then that certain answers are not answers but heresies. Then that the appropriate response to doubt is not investigation but confession. Then that the confession itself is proof of the institution’s necessity.
By the time the training is complete, the person inside it cannot distinguish between their own convictions and the convictions that were placed there by the training. This is not an accident. It is the point.
I was not well trained. Rinaldo tried and failed because I had access to too many books before he understood what I was doing with them. The failure of my training is the origin of everything I have become since: the witness who could not be contained by the institutional version of the sacred, the questioner who outlived every authority that tried to name his questioning as damnation.
Well Trained opens the album because this is where it always begins. Before the holy war, before the atrocity committed in the name of heaven: the training. The careful, patient, centuries-refined training of people to accept what they are told without asking who benefits from the telling.