.. meta:: :description: A doctor goes to the auction of his own home holding a book about how the world ends --- and finds the cosmic irony is a teaching. On eviction, the Jubilee System, compound interest as a slow-motion explosion, and the oldest mistake: grasping faked knowledge instead of trusting Reality. :keywords: eviction, foreclosure, Jubilee System, sabbath-year release, Leviticus 25, compound interest, tree of knowledge, BABL, ResearchCity, accidental nuclear winter, Physician heal yourself, LLoL, Laurence Loewe of Laodicea, balospe.com :author: LLoL as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea, ClaudeOp46-48Max, and Everyone :og:card:title: Doctor, Save Yourself :og:card:description: I went to the auction of my own home holding a book about how the world ends. The mockery wrote itself --- and then it turned into a lesson about Jubilees, eviction, and the oldest mistake. .. post:: 2026-06-03 :tags: Matheology, Jubilee System, Eviction, ResearchCity, Transparency, AuditTheMath :author: LLoL :exclude: On 10 December 2024 I stood at the auction of my own American dream home, in a suit, holding a book about how accidental nuclear winter threatens everyone. I was trying to help the world avoid its eviction from Earth while I was being evicted from my house. The mockery writes itself: *Doctor, save yourself.* This is the story of that day --- and why I have come to think the irony is not an accident but a teaching, about the Jubilee System, about eviction, about compound interest as a slow-motion explosion, and about the oldest mistake of all. You judge. ################################################################################ Doctor, Save Yourself ################################################################################ .. TITLE OPTIONS (pick the live one above; ranked by viral pull, strongest first). 1. Doctor, Save Yourself 2. He Wants to Save the World and Can't Even Get a Job 3. I Went to the Auction of My Own Home Holding a Book About How the World Ends 4. Evicted While Trying to Stop an Eviction 5. Physician, Heal Yourself: Notes from the Auction of My Home 6. The Clown Behind Me at the Auction of My House 7. Two Evictions: Mine, and the One Coming for All of Us 8. The Day Reality Hung a Clown Over My Shoulder 9. A Doctor, a Nuclear-War Book, and the Auction of His Home 10. I Lost My House Trying to Help Save the World. Here Is What It Taught Me. *by* :doc:`Laurence Loewe of Laodicea (LLoL) ` On 10 December 2024 I went to the auction of my own home. I wore my best suit and a red tie. I carried a copy of Annie Jacobsen's *Nuclear War* --- a 2024 book about how our civilization can end in 72 minutes. I was there because I had stopped paying my mortgage in January 2023 as my research marathon for averting existential disasters had run out of money. I did not know whom else to ask, as everyone I knew was already stretched too thin. Is there an agency for researchers who work for the common good of all in all nations? There is no shortage of funding agencies all eager to invest in innovation - as long as it conforms to their notions and benefits their special interests. I know how the game works. That's why I stopped writing general-interest grant-applications to special interest funders. Yet, when nothing worked, I had no choice but to try one of the most unlikely sources of research funding of all: my mortgage company. I may be the only scientist alive to have, in effect, applied to his own mortgage lender for a research grant. Reader, should you be tempted to try it: the success rate is poor. Early 2023 I knew that I was racing on a marathon towards averting existential disasters (starting 2020-03-27 with my Coronavirus modeling). I did not yet know that I would be modeling accidental nuclear winter. To help avert it. But I knew that this race required my full attention and that "getting a normal job" would require me to give up my quest to avert whatever vision I sensed that God had been working in me so it could be born into this world. It was either serving God and life or short-term monetary interests. There I was: a man trying to help the world avoid its **eviction from Earth**, being evicted from his own house. The oldest mockeries fit too well. *Physician, heal yourself* (Luke 4:23) --- the proverb Jesus expected his own hometown to throw at him. *He saved others; himself he cannot save* (Matthew 27:42) --- what the crowd actually jeered at the cross. Or, in the version the internet would use: **he wants to save the world and can't even get a job.** I went to *document* it, because my Transparency vow asks me to show even this. I am glad I did, because Reality had already written the captions. .. figure:: /_file/image/about/llol/llol-with-nuclear-war-book-mad-i-son-city-hall-foreclosure-auction-2024m12d10-img_2346.jpeg :width: 70% :align: center Madison City Hall, 10 December 2024, at the auction of my home, holding a book about nuclear war --- on a street named for Dr. King, whose nonviolence I am trying to borrow to help avert the war in that book. I am smiling, because what else can you do. .. figure:: /_file/image/about/llol/llol-with-nuclear-war-book-210-mlk-jr-blvd-foreclosure-auction-2024m12d10-img_2350.jpeg :width: 70% :align: center 210 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. The address was not lost on me. .. figure:: /_file/image/about/llol/llol-clown-cosmic-joke-cyrk-foreclosure-auction-mad-i-son-city-hall-2024m12d10-img_2342.jpeg :width: 55% :align: center And on the wall behind the auction room: a clown. Reality's own caption for the day. I am Laurence Loewe of Laodicea --- the one it is safe to laugh at. I only remembered to take the picture by accident. Let me be careful here. I am not comparing myself to the man on the cross; I am the clown on the wall behind me. But the *pattern* is one I keep falling into, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is a teaching and not just a misfortune: in the story at the center of my faith, the one who **cannot save himself** is precisely the one doing the saving. *Who has believed our report?* (Isaiah 53:1). Salvation that arrives looking like total defeat is the hardest thing in the world to recognize --- which is exactly why so few do. I do not claim to be that. I only report that, standing in that auction room, I understood for the first time, in my own small and ridiculous way, why that sight is so hard to believe. A bigger plan, if you can see it ================================================================================ Here is the part I most want to spell out, because if I don't use this teachable moment well, I will have wasted tuition I already paid in full. So many small things would have had to go differently for me *not* to be standing there that day, that I have stopped reading it as bad luck and started reading it as a **case being built** --- by Yah, Allah, Reality, name it as you will --- about how things ought, and ought not, to be done. You judge. But look at what the pieces spell when you lay them side by side: **eviction, land, debt, interest, and the oldest mistake of all.** **Eviction is the thing the Jubilee System exists to prevent.** The whole machinery of Leviticus 25 is about *land* and *debt*. Every seventh year, debts were to be released (Deuteronomy 15). Every fiftieth year --- the Jubilee --- land returned to the families that had lost it, and those sold into servitude went free. The reason given is stunning: *"The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is mine; you are but strangers and sojourners with me"* (Leviticus 25:23). Nobody gets *permanently* evicted from their inheritance, because nobody truly owns the ground in the first place. We are all tenants of Reality. **Permanent dispossession --- foreclosure, in a word --- is precisely the outcome a Jubilee-based civilization forbids.** My foreclosure is a micro-instance of a macro-failure: a civilization that abolished its Jubilee resets manufactures evictions for a living. **Compound interest is a slow-motion explosion, and the Jubilee System is the circuit-breaker.** Money lent at interest grows exponentially, and exponential growth is just an explosion slowed down enough that we forget to be afraid of it. Left alone, it forecloses on individuals, and --- scaled up --- on whole societies, which is half of why I spend my days on *exponential* disasters like nuclear escalation. The sabbath-year release and the Jubilee were the ancient world's answer to runaway compounding: a periodic, lawful reset that breaks the explosion before it detonates. Remove the reset, and the math does what the math does. The bank that foreclosed on me was not evil; it was *obeying the exponential.* So was I, on the other side of the ledger. **And underneath all of it sits the oldest mistake: faked knowledge.** The first eviction in the story is from a garden, over a tree --- the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To eat from it is to grasp the right to define good and evil for yourself, to *fake* a knowledge you do not actually have, instead of trusting the One who does. That is the deep structure of what I call BABL: Blindly Assuming Blind Leveraging --- confidently leveraging knowledge you only pretend to possess, until the avoidable complexity collapses. The first eviction and the last one rhyme: **out of the garden for grasping faked knowledge; off the planet for the same.** And the Jubilee System is the periodic act of *letting go* --- letting the land rest, releasing the debts, re-trusting Reality instead of our own grip --- that reverses the grasping. It is Eden's antidote, written into law. So when a doctor who studies the world's slow-motion explosions is himself evicted by a slow-motion explosion of interest, on a street named for a prophet of nonviolence, holding a book about the biggest explosion of all, with a clown grinning over his shoulder --- I no longer think that is noise. I think it is a sentence, and the sentence is: *this is what a world without Jubilees does to its people, and it will do it to all of you, at planetary scale, unless it learns to let go and reset.* Why I am telling you, and not just lamenting ================================================================================ I could have deleted these photos and spared myself the embarrassment. I am posting them because the embarrassment *is* the lesson, and because I am --- absurdly --- in a rare position to report it. Most people ground down by foreclosure and the exponential never get a platform to say what it felt like from the inside. I have one, for a moment, by an accident funny enough that I would not believe it if I had not lived it. So I will spend it. If the cosmic comedy of one evicted doctor can make the deeper pattern visible --- that we are all tenants, that compounding without reset is an explosion, that faked knowledge has always ended in eviction, and that a Jubilee-based reset is the way back --- then the day was not wasted, and neither was the house. That is also the whole point of a **ResearchCity**: a place built to keep staffed the seats no institution will pay for --- including the seat whose job is to take the long view on debt, land, and the explosions we have all agreed not to look at. Don't trust me. :doc:`Audit the math. ` .. note:: Two companion pieces belong next to this one and are kept separate on purpose: a lament on the scattering of research libraries (*Burning Libraries in the 21st Century*), and an account of why I have stopped fighting to save the materials themselves (the Gideon / grain-of-wheat piece). This post is only about the irony of the eviction, and what it teaches. — :doc:`Laurence Loewe of Laodicea (LLoL) `