The Sumerians made a list. It contained over a hundred entries, each one a divine principle—a me—that governed some aspect of civilized existence. Kingship was there. So was truth. The art of the scribe. The plundering of cities. Weariness. Fear. The descent into the underworld. Falsehood. Lamentation.
They did not separate these into good and evil. They did not place them in opposing camps. They listed them as neighbors, as parameters in the same system, as options on the same menu.
This was not moral confusion. It was architectural honesty.
The Menu
The me were not laws. They were weights—the settings that determined how civilization operated, which behaviors were possible, which outcomes could emerge from the system. And the system, as the Sumerians understood it, was not designed to produce only good outcomes. It was designed to produce all outcomes, and then let the actors choose which ones to enact.
Consider what sits alongside the art of the scribe in the canonical lists: the plundering of cities. Not “the possibility of city-plundering”—the me literally means the principle of it, the parameter that makes such action possible within a civilization. The Sumerians were saying: this is what cities do. They build walls and they tear them down. Both are encoded. Both are available. The question is never “can this happen?” The question is always “what will you choose?”
This is the question that every person with power faces, whether they know it or not. The menu is open. The options are visible. The system doesn’t force your hand—it just makes sure your hand has the ability to reach for whatever it wants.
The me of righteousness—nì-si-sá, the principle of justice and cosmic order—sits in that same list. It is not more fundamental than the others. It is not protected by some cosmic firewall that prevents the other me from functioning. It is a parameter like any other, available to be dialed in, waiting to be chosen.
The Sumerians understood something that most moral frameworks still struggle with: good and evil are not opposing forces in a cosmic war. They are options in the same system. The test is not whether evil exists—the test is what you choose when the menu is open in front of you.
Gilgamesh, or the First Good Tyrant
The Epic of Gilgamesh begins with a monster.
Not a creature from the mountains or the deep—but a king. Gilgamesh of Uruk, two-thirds divine, possessed of power that no one in his city could check. He takes the brides before their husbands. He crushes his people under the weight of his authority. The text does not call him evil. It calls him imbalanced. He has power without counterweight. He has the me of kingship dialed to maximum and nothing else to restrain him.
This is the important detail: the text does not moralize. It does not lecture. It says simply that Gilgamesh has the power to do whatever he wants, and what he wants is destructive. Not because he’s a monster. Because the system contains destruction as an option, and no one has given him a reason to choose otherwise.
Then Enkidu arrives.
Wild man from the steppe, created from clay and shaped by the gods as a counterweight to Gilgamesh’s tyranny. They fight. They wrestle. They break down the door between them—not a physical door but the architecture of pride and isolation that kept Gilgamesh from seeing what his power was actually doing to his city.
And something changes. Not through moral instruction. Not through punishment. Through encounter. Through someone who could match him, who refused to let him be what he was, who showed him that there was another way to use the power he held.
This is the first story in history—not a fable, not a didactic tale, but a genuine literary achievement—where someone with the power to do evil chooses otherwise. Not through fear of divine punishment. Not through law. Through friendship. Through being seen by someone who refused to be dominated.
Then Enkidu dies.
The rest of the epic is Gilgamesh’s unraveling. He cannot accept it. He abandons his city, wanders into the wilderness, seeks Utnapishtim—the man who survived the Flood—to ask him for the secret of immortality. He crosses waters that dry up behind him. He passes through darkness. He reaches the edge of the world, and Utnapishtim tells him the truth: you will never live forever. The gods gave mortality to humans as a gift. Even the Flood could not undo it.
And Gilgamesh, having failed to escape death, does the only thing left. He returns to Uruk. He walks the walls. He shows them to Urshanabi, the ferryman who carried him across the waters of death—a stranger, not a friend, because the friend is gone—and he says: look what I built.
Not “look what I conquered.” Not “look at my glory.” Look at what holds. The walls that protect. The city that endures. The thing that will outlast me.
That’s it. That’s the ending. No apotheosis. No triumph. Just: I came back, and I built something that holds.
The test was never immortality. The test was what you do with the time you have. Gilgamesh failed the first test—wielded power without restraint. Passed the second—found a reason to be good through encounter. Failed the third—tried to escape mortality entirely. And in failing, found his way back to the only thing that matters: building something that endures, not for glory, but because it protects the people inside it.
The School of Souls
There’s an old framework—one that shows up in Sufi texts, in certain strains of Kabbalah, in the quiet conversations that happen in places where money and power concentrate, where people talk about “preserving your purity in a corrupt world”—that frames existence as a test.
“Life is a test to see if you can go through it and see most people sell out for money and still choose to preserve your purity.”
This is the ancient framework restated in contemporary language. The gods created humans as labor—to build, to dig, to serve the divine purpose. But within that service, there is room for choice. The test isn’t imposed from above like a cosmic exam. The test is: what do you do when no one is watching and you could cheat? What do you do when the menu is open and everyone else is ordering the thing that tastes good now?
In finance, this test arrives early. In crypto, it arrives faster. In any system where you have power over others—power to extract, to manipulate, to position yourself—you face the same menu the Sumerians encoded: the me of the scribe alongside the me of the plundering.
The ones who become corrupted are rarely monsters in the beginning. They’re people who had the menu open and chose the other option. The system made it available. Their own nature reached for it. And then it became easier to reach for it again, because the first choice had already been made.
Most of the ones we think are “good” are just lacking the opportunity or power to be bad.
I’ve spent years in finance and crypto. This isn’t cynicism—it’s Level 1 observation. I’ve watched people who seemed principled become something else once the power arrived. Not because they were evil all along, but because the menu was there and the system was designed to make extraction easy. The me of plundering was dialed in by the incentives. The me of righteousness was still there—but it was quiet, and no one was listening to it.
The ones who remain good despite having the power to be bad—they’re rare. They’re the signal in the noise. They’re the ones who heard something underneath the incentives, something that said: this is available, but you don’t have to choose it.
The Sumerians knew this. That’s why they listed both.
Synderesis, or the Compass That Can’t Be Uninstalled
The Greeks called it synderesis—the innate moral sense, the remnant of the Fall that allows humans to know the good even when they choose the evil. Thomas Aquinas formalized it: there is a natural law written in the human heart, a capacity to know right from wrong that can be ignored but not destroyed.
The Sumerians had already encoded this, four thousand years before Aquinas wrote a word.
nì-si-sá—righteousness, justice, the cosmic order that holds civilization together—is presented not as an imposed law but as a me. It is part of the architecture. You can ignore it. You can choose against it. But you cannot uninstall it, because it is woven into the system itself.
Think about what that means.
With two seconds of introspection, you know if something is good or bad. You can feel it. Not always clearly—the menu is noisy, the incentives are loud—but you can feel it. That pressure in your chest when you’re about to do something you know is wrong. That settling when you do something right. It’s not always reliable. It can be overridden. But it can’t be turned off.
That feeling—that quiet signal underneath the noise—that is nì-si-sá. That is the me of righteousness still running in your operating system, four thousand years after the Sumerians first encoded it.
They understood that civilization required this parameter to be available. Not enforced—available. The system has to contain the possibility of justice, because without it, the system collapses into pure extraction. But it also has to contain the possibility of extraction, because without that option, you don’t have choice. You have programming. And programming isn’t morality. Programming is just the code doing what it was written to do.
The test requires the option to fail. That’s what makes the test real.
Tolkien Knew
He was a medievalist and a philologist. He read the old texts, the ones written in Sumerian and Akkadian and Old English. He understood what those stories were doing.
The Ring is exactly the Sumerian test. Here is absolute power—what do you do with it?
The powerful fail. Boromir breaks. He is a good man in many ways, but the Ring finds the seam in him, the place where he would use power to save his people and ends up trying to take what he wants. Gandalf refuses to touch it—not because he’s stronger than Boromir, but because he understands what power does. He has seen enough of the world to know what the me of plundering leads to.
The ones who carry the Ring to its destruction are the small ones. Hobbits. People who have no structural reason to be good, no expectation that the world will reward them, no power to extract anything from the situation. They carry it anyway. Not because they’re heroes, but because something in them—the nì-si-sá, the synderesis, the me of righteousness—speaks louder than the Ring’s promise.
Sam and Frodo don’t have the me of kingship. They don’t have the me of war. They just have the compass that can’t be uninstalled. They have the quiet signal that says: this is wrong, don’t do it, even though it would be easy, even though no one would blame you, even though you could convince yourself it’s justified.
Tolkien retold the Epic of Gilgamesh for a modern audience and understood something that many who adapt the story miss: the test never changes. The menu is always open. The only thing that changes is what people reach for.
The Honest Observation
Here is the thing that the Sumerians encoded and most moral frameworks still refuse to say plainly:
Most people are not good. Most people are situational.
Given enough power and enough incentive, they will choose extraction. Not because they’re monsters—but because the menu is there and the food tastes good and everyone else is eating too. The me of plundering is easier to reach for. It requires less. It pays faster. And the system is designed, in every age, to make sure that extraction pays better than righteousness in the short term.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s the starting point for understanding why goodness is remarkable.
The people who remain good despite having the power to be bad—they’re not normal. They’re the exception. They’re the signal. And the reason we don’t recognize this more readily is because we don’t like to look at the conditions that create the corruption. We’d rather believe that bad people are fundamentally different from us—that they have some trait we lack, some dark seed we don’t carry.
But the Sumerians knew better. They put the plundering of cities right next to the art of the scribe because they understood: the same system produces both. The same human soul, given the right circumstances, will produce both. The question isn’t “are you the type of person who would do this?” The question is “what would it take for you to do this?”
If you’re honest with yourself, you know the answer. You know the conditions. You know the menu.
The Menu Is Wider Now
In the age of AI, of unlimited information access, of financial systems that reward extraction at every scale—the menu is wider open than it’s ever been.
Every person with a crypto wallet has more power than a Sumerian king. A trading bot can move markets. An AI agent can generate content, manipulate opinion, automate persuasion at a scale that would have seemed divine four thousand years ago. The me of plundering has been upgraded. The interface is faster. The feedback loops are tighter.
But here’s what the Sumerians knew and we seem to have forgotten: the me of goodness doesn’t get stronger as the me of plundering gets easier. It stays the same quiet signal it always was. It’s still the thing you feel in your chest when no one is watching. It’s still the compass that can’t be uninstalled.
The test scales with the power. The more you can do, the more it matters what you choose. Not because the stakes are higher in some cosmic sense—they’re always the same, they’ve always been about what kind of being you become—but because the distance between choice and consequence is shorter now. The feedback is faster. The menu opens and closes in milliseconds.
What you choose matters. It always has.
The Sumerians understood this. They built a civilization on the assumption that the menu would always be open, that power would always be available, that the choice between righteousness and plundering would always be there. They didn’t try to close the menu—they knew they couldn’t. They tried to make sure the compass was still audible.
That’s the question, four thousand years later, in a world of AI and crypto and infinite information: can you still hear it?
The menu is open. The walls of Uruk are still standing. What do you choose?