Letter from the Third Age of Tragedy

My name is Martin Robert Genter Jr.

I should probably start with the scene that haunts me.

On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, American cities were ready to burn. In Indianapolis, a white politician stood in front of a mostly Black crowd and told them the news. Robert F. Kennedy could easily have pandered, or incited, or fled. Instead he reached back twenty-five centuries and borrowed the words of a dead Greek.

He quoted Aeschylus—words he’d learned through Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way when he was drowning in grief after his brother’s murder. He told a crowd on the brink of riot that there is a kind of wisdom that only comes through unbearable suffering, a hard-won grace that falls “drop by drop upon the heart.” And somehow, that night, Indianapolis did not burn.

That line came to him because Jackie Kennedy handed him a book when his world collapsed.

When my own life collapsed, I picked up the same book.

The Fall

On paper, my story was going exactly how it was “supposed” to go.

I was a law student on a full scholarship, with a Master’s in Political Management from GWU, Harvard Kennedy School executive education, ROTC, internships in Congress, a rising star in Mississippi politics. I’d been one of the most popular people at Ole Miss—student government, fraternity leadership, all of it.

Then I did something unforgivable in our system: I cared more about ending real suffering than passing an exam.

I was interning with the UN on proposals to fight poverty and sexual violence in Africa. I took that work more seriously than finals. I missed an exam. The zero dragged down my GPA, and the scholarship vanished. So did the safe path. One moment I was on track to be the respectable lawyer and statesman; the next I was on the downward slope I’ve been sliding down for almost a decade.

Since then I’ve been kicked out of more than one elite place: ROTC, law school, a Dartmouth grad program (for the crime of reusing my own UN report in a paper). I’ve lost tribes over and over again—fraternities, political parties, social circles.

And underneath the résumé bullets is the part I usually hide:

I have spent most of the last ten years in isolation, depression, and dread.

Weeks without hearing a real human voice. Months where books were the only things that felt real. Years of gaining weight, losing myself, numbing with nicotine and alcohol, wondering if I had already peaked and was just falling in slow motion.

I feel closer to the dead than to the living.

I’ve kept reading anyway.

The Boy Who Was Illegal

Part of what makes this ache so deep is that my life is a walking contradiction of everything America is fighting about.

I’m biracial in a country that once made my existence literally illegal.

On one side of my bloodline:

– Plantagenet kings, Charlemagne, the Magna Carta.

– Early American patriots, registered among Michigan’s first families.

– A white grandfather and father who wore the uniform—WWII and Iraq—believing they were serving something noble.

On the other side:

– Ancestors dragged here in chains and treated as property.

– A Black grandfather who fought in World War II and endured such hunger that he once had to eat a dog to survive.

– A mother and stepfather in Detroit who have lived lives of service and love in a country that routinely treated them as less than human.

For almost half of this country’s existence, someone like me—a Black person and a white person marrying and having a child—was forbidden by law. In the racist South where I spent ten years, I watched white fraternities chant lynching slurs around bonfires. I was beaten bloody by a massive football recruit who thought I was just another white guy defending a racist friend; my face still carries the slight droop from the reconstructive surgery.

Later, when I switched from Republican politics to run as a Democrat because I could no longer square my conscience with what I was seeing, almost every friend I’d made in Mississippi vanished. I went from being “their guy” to a ghost.

I don’t have the luxury of a tribe.

I can’t simply declare myself a victim, because my blood carries kings and generals and beneficiaries of empire. I also can’t pretend everything is fine, because my blood carries shackles and scars and the neighborhoods of Detroit where 90% of the faces are Black and 90% of the wealth is somewhere else.

So when people scream “white privilege” at men like my father—who grew up rough, served his country, and never owned anyone—it feels wrong. And when people act like racism is over because slavery is technically abolished while entire cities are still structured around its legacy, that feels like a lie too.

I live in the tension. I am the tension.

I am E Pluribus Unum in one body.

Out of many, one—and out of one, many.

Books, Ghosts, and a Crisis of God

In that long exile, I chased meaning the only way I knew how: through books.

I’ve read hundreds—actually, well over six hundred—serious nonfiction books. Political theory, philosophy, history, tragedy, theology, economics, psychology. Not for a degree. Not for a job. For survival.

There were weeks I talked to no one, but I held long conversations with Robert Kennedy, Ulysses S. Grant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander the Great, Edith Hamilton, Nietzsche, Camus. I listened to them on long walks and late nights until they felt like family. When I say I feel closer to the dead than to the living, I mean it.

Somewhere in there, my old childhood faith cracked.

I couldn’t look at United Nations footage of starving children—skin and bone, under five years old, knowing nothing but agony in a world that could save them with a five-dollar vaccine—and believe in a God who consigns people to eternal torment based mostly on where they were born and what religion their parents taught them.

I remember a 3 a.m. call with my stepfather, a Black pastor in Detroit, telling him:

If that’s the deal—if God damns those children forever for the crime of being born in the wrong village or believing the wrong thing—then I’d rather go to hell with them than spend eternity in heaven pretending that’s justice.

I’m not anti-faith. But I refuse to outsource my conscience.

The only way the world makes sense to me now is this:

We are the hands of God, or whatever word you use for that.

If children are tortured, that’s on us.

If we reduce the number of tortured children, that’s on us too.

That’s where Albert Camus, Edith Hamilton, and the Greeks met my own experience. They all say in different ways: suffering is real, absurdity is real, but we still have a responsibility—not to explain evil away, but to lessen it.

The Third Age of Tragedy

Edith Hamilton wrote that there have been only two true “ages of tragedy” in human history:

– 5th-century Athens, the age of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

– Elizabethan England, the age of Shakespeare.

These weren’t eras of doom and gloom. They were Golden Ages—times when life felt exalted, full of terrifying possibility, lived on the crest of a wave. When human beings had seen heroism and catastrophe up close, and art had to stretch to hold that tension.

Hamilton’s point was simple and earthshaking: when life reaches a certain pitch of risk and possibility, you either feel it tragically or joyously—but you cannot feel tamely.

I’m convinced we are living in the third great age of tragedy.

We have unleashed artificial intelligence that can outthink us, nuclear weapons that can erase cities in an instant, biotech that can rewrite life, technologies that can extend lifespan, and networks that can spread lies faster than truth. We can end extreme poverty and prevent most needless suffering—or we can create the most efficient machinery of domination and extinction the world has ever seen.

This is not a normal time. It is a cliff edge.

Richard Tarnas, in The Passion of the Western Mind, calls our moment a “kairos”—a decisive turning point in history. The future of the human spirit and the future of the planet hang in the balance. The individual, he says, is the “make-weight that tips the scales.”

In other words: what we do now matters more than it ever has.

The AI Crisis and the Second Renaissance

A few years ago, just as I was finally preparing to publish my first big book, another blow landed: ChatGPT and its cousins appeared.

Overnight, the thing I’d devoted my whole life to—words, ideas, prose shaped by suffering—was something anyone could approximate by typing a prompt. I wanted to be the next Emerson, Nietzsche, RFK. Suddenly a robot could mimic that voice in seconds.

I won’t lie: that realization almost broke me.

But then another thought came: Prometheus didn’t get to choose whether fire existed. He only had to decide what to do with it.

So I forced myself to learn AI like my life depended on it. I studied, took courses, experimented, built projects, even started working on AI-for-good ideas with UN-related efforts. I came to see AI not just as a threat but as a kind of Promethean fire: devastating in the wrong hands, civilization-saving in the right ones.

Now my days are spent in a strange double exposure: one foot in 5th-century Athens and Elizabethan England, the other in a future no human generation has ever faced before. By night I sit with Aeschylus and Camus; by day I ask an AI to help me distill their wisdom and design ways to reduce suffering at scale.

I’m trying, in my own faltering way, to harness all the wisdom of the past and all the power of the future for something other than profit or partisan victory.

Not to make “my side” win, but to help humanity survive this age with its soul intact.

Why I’m Writing This Publicly

If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering: okay, but what do you actually want?

Here it is, without spin:

I believe we need a Second Renaissance—a conscious, global rebirth of meaning, virtue, and shared story—if we’re going to survive the technologies we’ve unleashed.

I believe that ancient Greek wisdom, the tragic sense of life, and the best ideals of America—E Pluribus Unum, human dignity, freedom, responsibility—are not museum pieces. They’re survival tools.

I believe my strange life—

descendant of kings and slaves,

Patriot Cowboy with a tattoo on my arm and Aeschylus in my headphones,

son of a man who fought Islam overseas and a teacher who fell in love with his Muslim students at the largest Muslim community outside the Middle East—

has prepared me to be a bridge in a time when almost everyone is picking a side.

And I believe I’ve spent ten years in the dark, with the dead, so that I could bring something essential back to the living.

So I am finally, publicly, asking for help.

I am looking for:

A mission-aligned role or partnership where I can combine:

– AI and emerging technology strategy

– Public policy, ethics, and human rights

– Teaching, writing, and civic storytelling

– Bridge-building across race, party, faith, and class

Or a network of allies who see this third age of tragedy and want to build a second renaissance instead of sleepwalking into catastrophe.

If you work in AI governance, public-interest tech, democracy and civic renewal, human rights, education, or any field that needs a tragedian of our age—someone who has actually lived the contradictions we’re trying to heal—I would be honored to talk.

If you simply know someone who should read this, I’d be grateful if you’d share it.

And if you are, like me, a person who feels more at home with ghosts than with your own timeline, someone who has suffered and read and thought in the dark and wonders if any of it matters: I see you.

I don’t know if my life will ever be “successful” in the way LinkedIn celebrates. I do know this:

If I can use everything I’ve been given—my heritage, my wounds, my decade with the dead, my grasp of AI—to reduce the number of tortured children in this world, to lessen avoidable suffering, and to light even a small flame of meaning in this age of dread, then my life will have been worth the pain.

Even if I’m writing and speaking into the void, if I give everything I have to this work, that will be enough.

But I don’t actually want to do it alone.

No true renaissance was ever built by one person.

— Martin Robert Genter Jr.