Stage Four: My Philosophy

I haven’t written here in some time, and that is intentional. I have been going through a trial, a crossing if you will. Building a startup is a task like no other. In my free time, I’ve been reading a lot more, of course on crypto and AI, but also on philosophy. I wanted to write a blog post on a fascinating parallel I observed when I came across Wole Soyinka’s The Fourth Stage. I think the personal anecdotes here can be used to connect dots in anyone’s personal “hero’s journey.” Enjoy.

Origins

I am from Harvey, IL, I grew up south of the south side of Chicago. I didn’t realize it at the time but I grew up with the black American elite who sought better living standards outside the city. Though I got in lots of trouble, I did my best to be a good kid in the system. Like every other black American child, I was taught a version of my history that belittled African civilization to a collective continent of brutes.

I never learned about the empires, the wars, the technologies, the spiritual systems, the secret societies, the languages, the written forms, the pantheons, nothing. To me, growing up, Africa was a continent of people who killed animals and gathered berries. My father, who had been traveling to and from the continent since 2002 (when I was just 4), was my saving grace in understanding a bit more about the culture of the remarkable people of Africa. But it wasn’t fully realized until much later in my life when I had the wisdom to put everything together.

In school, almost all my classmates were black, and almost all my teachers were white. They taught me math and science well. But they gave me poisoned history that bred the self hate that most black people around the world also feel when they are convinced that their people amount to nothing. In our history class, black Americans were savage brutes who were tamed and shipped from the wild continent of Africa. No civilization, no language, no skills. Just strong and obedient people who loved Jesus.

It took me time to realize the lies in my teachings, and how that educational system was made to perpetuate itself. You see, as a black person it destroys your sense of self esteem. But as a white person it reinforces the lie that you and your ancestors were the originators of civilization and the only ones to think deeply about things.

I wasn’t able to fully refute this until I spent years traveling and studying. I spent years of my life believing that Africa was poor because the people are lazy and that Europe was rich because the people are smarter. It’s just not true.

Technology was my saving grace. I had an affinity for math and science, I would score 100% on exams I barely studied for. I remember being able to intuitively “feel out” equations I learned about in math class. For example, during exams I often surprised myself at how I can take a sheet of formulas and know how to use the tools in the right way. This made room for my hobbies like robotics and sports. I was grateful to attend school with mostly other black Americans. I found that most white kids were too drunk in their illusion of superiority to be worth spending any time with.

My robotics team was founded by my the nonprofit my father founded, BOOC: Building Our Own Community. I remember attending and winning tournaments where the kids from rich areas would literally laugh at. The moment I knew I’d never be defeated was during a FIRST robotics Illinois State Championship qualifier. We were seeded 32nd out of 32 teams. Dead last. Snobbish kids from the north side of Chicago looked at our robot, then look at the team of black kids, and laugh and hope that they faced us. We finished that tournament 4th out of 32 with our scrappy robot that had cardboard components. It was the first lesson that I learned about how history has been written. The most brilliant people are often the ones with the least resources. The ones with the most resources have the self given right to take that brilliance and call it their own, while writing the story and forcing everyone else to believe a certain perspective that simply is not the truth. I was orders of magnitude more talented than the north side kids, but vastly under resourced. If this was the real world, my talent would amount to nothing. We were lucky it was a tournament with fair rules and not the real world where there are no rules and winner takes all.

I went on to have a nice early career in tech, I studied computer engineering at the top engineering HBCU, I interned at apple and Microsoft, and I learned the tech industry obsessively. I was keeping a close eye on AI because I knew it was only a matter of time until we had viable NLP technology. I did a research internship on LSTM’s at Stanford in 2018 and after getting an intuition and how powerful algorithms can be, I decided that I’d capitalize on AI from that day on. From hardware to software to business and venture capital, my goal was complete and total domination. I knew that this wouldn’t come from climbing up the corporate ladder of tech giants. This would only come from shaking the world up in such a way that there can be a new winner in this winner take all world.

The First Crack

I fell in love with blockchain after reading the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2020 during my co-op at Apple and from pure COVID boredom. I resolved to be the best blockchain engineer there was and aimed to surpass Vitalik Buterin (it got me far, but later in life I realized that life is about being the best Lance, not besting others).

I landed a post-grad internship at Andreessen Horowitz. People looked at me funny for being a post-grad intern, but I wasn’t there to impress people. I was there to learn, leverage, and surpass. That internship gave me a solid overview of the web3 ecosystem that I still use today to navigate the industry as a CEO.

After that I opened DWeb3 LLC, my blockchain engineering consulting firm. I worked with Metagov, EZKL, and Giza (you can see my LinkedIn to learn more about my takeaways there). I particularly want to talk about my time at Giza.

I started at Giza and was assigned to create a transpiler for converting ONNX based neural networks to Cairo smart contracts. It was a fulfilling project. Eventually, the team had me move out to Madrid, where their office was. It was right after Devconnect in Istanbul in 2023 and I was more than ready to officially leave the United States and see more of the world. I sold / gave away everything in my Charlotte apartment in January 2024 and left for Spain with no idea on when I’d be back in the US. My intention was to head straight to Africa after my stint with Giza. I had questions that needed answering.

In Madrid, I lived my typical life of solitude. I was obsessed with doing well in my work, exercising, and unfolding the mysteries of this world. On the weekends I would go alone to countless museums and learned so much from the history of Madrid, Spain, Europe, and other critical context I missed when I skipped AP European History. One thing that surprised me was how quiet the museums were about Arab Spain, Al Andalus. There was only one museum that had a solid exhibit on Al Andalus, and even then it was just a small portion of the museum that was way too small for the 800 year period of Al Andalus. Especially given the detail they went into about the Spanish Royalty including the various gifts, marriage affairs, and so on. Frivolous information for someone who wants to see past the facade.

Al Andalus was a beacon of civilization in Europe. It defined modern Europe before Europeans defined it for themselves. Córdoba had street lighting, public libraries, and running water when London was mud. But what baffled me was that at this time, so did Koumbi Saleh, the capital of the Ghana Empire! In the year 1000, both Koumbi Saleh in modern day Mauritania was as impressive as Córdoba and was a preferable city to inhabit compared to London. But I thought before European arrival, Africans were monkeys? I read that there were black African soldiers in the Arab military from rich civilizations across the continent. Some of these even went on to inhabit Spain. One of the legends read that the running of the black bulls in Spain was a specific historical allusion to the war between the Christians and Muslims to run the “evil blacks” out.

I would spend late nights in my apartment in Cercedilla with my Turkish roommate reading on this missing period of history. Scholars like Robin Walker and Kaba Kemene were my guiding lights. It was here that teachings from my father, the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empire, started to come back in ways that finally made sense.

The Continent

After I completed the transpiler, my next big project was one of the first implementations of a crypto wallet fully controlled by a cryptographically-proven AI. The barriers were technical though. In order to create a zero knowledge proof of the inference of an LLM more sophisticated than GPT2, you’d need compute that would cost more than any trading strategy that bot could execute. It made my project economically unviable, and thus spelled the end of my time at Giza. I headed straight to Nigeria.

I didn’t go to Nigeria with a plan. I had savings and every intent to build a startup. I just needed to know what problems needed my expertise. I had no idea about how things were run in Africa, so I headed to the economic powerhouse of west Africa for answers.

I will explain the story of how Sereé evolved into Sereel over time, going from stablecoin on and off ramps to blockchain based capital markets infrastructure. What I want to emphasize here are the realizations about African history and people that I made between this growth.

My time in Spain taught me that the various West African Empires had complex governance, economic, and societal standards that Europeans actually hoped to eclipse, not the other way around. But my time actually in Africa showed me what really happened after Europeans used maritime and gunpowder to destroy as much of that history and civilization as possible.

My time in Lagos was great, but heartbreaking. I learned the history of Nigeria in depth, from the British West African company to the Biafra war to Shell and BP’s bad deals. So much potential lost to a lack of true sovereignty. The pre-colonial history of the region was my favorite part. I spent so much time learning about the Orishas, Ifa divination, Nsibidi script, Nok iron working (some of humanity’s earliest), and other feats of West Africa that have been ommitted from Western knowledge.

The vast amount of languages in Nigeria alone made me angry at times I would even hear my own peers in middle school teasing about “primitive” African languages. Such a dynamic tapestry of cultures, simply misinterpreted to the rest of the world for corporate profit. A shame.

I spent more time living in Africa amongst Africans, growing into a more complete version of myself day by day. Every cultural insight, every proverb, every unsung hero / heroine, every monument, every discovery made the picture more clear.

The griots stopped me cold the first time I truly understood what they were. Not entertainers. Not oral historians in the watered-down sense Western anthropology assigns them. The jeliw were the hard drives of civilization. A trained griot could recite genealogies going back forty generations without error, could reconstruct the political decisions of kings dead for three centuries, could perform the Epic of Sundiata, the founding myth of the Mali Empire, across multiple days without a single written note. The knowledge wasn't stored in books because books can be burned. It was stored in people, in lineages of people, in overlapping redundant networks of people, so that the destruction of one library could never destroy the whole archive.

The secret societies are what nobody talks about. The Ekpe of the Cross River region in Nigeria. The Poro and Sande of Sierra Leone and Liberia. The Ogboni of the Yoruba. The Komo of the Mande world. These weren't cults. They were the governing infrastructure of societies that didn't organize power through centralized states the way Europe did. They held judicial authority, legislative power, knowledge transmission, economic regulation, and spiritual governance simultaneously. The Ekpe could declare a debt enforceable across communities that spoke different languages. The Ogboni could sanction or remove a king. The Sande, one of the only secret societies in the world where women held primary ritual and political authority, governed female initiation, reproductive knowledge, and women's political interests with a sophistication that European social structures wouldn't approximate for centuries.

When British colonial administrators dismantled these societies, it was a calculated military operation. You couldn't govern the people without breaking the actual governing infrastructure. The conquest wasn't just bullets, it was about politics, education, and exploitation.

The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu exist and yet are still ignored in mainstream society. The Ahmed Baba Institute holds hundreds of thousands of manuscripts written in Arabic and Ajami, African languages transcribed in Arabic script, covering mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, theology, and philosophy produced in the Sahel over centuries. When European scholars began accessing these manuscripts in the late 20th century, they found advanced algebraic concepts, astronomical calculations, and medical knowledge that contradicted their understanding. This material survived because the Sahel's dry climate preserved organic material. The forest belt's humidity destroyed everything equivalent that would have been produced there. What we have from Timbuktu is a fragment. It is enough to understand what we lost everywhere else.

I stood at Great Zimbabwe and felt something that I don't have words for. It’s an enclosure made for an entire community, all built with no mortar. Just carefully cut stones by the tens of thousands. When archaeologists finally proved definitively that the Shona built it, the Rhodesian government at the time made it illegal to publish that finding. A government made it illegal to tell the truth about a building. That is how seriously the lie needed to be maintained.

Being black is such a profound thing. The entire world agreed that it wanted to enslave you. And yet here we are. Growing. Still here.

The Dissolution

Running alongside the geographical journey was a spiritual one that was just as disorienting.

I grew up in the church. It was my family’s practice, and I have no regrets for it. Christianity was the dominant system and I didn’t know much outside it until my adolescence.

But there came a contradiction I could no longer manage. Building Sereel requires a specific relationship with causality. Nobody is coming to save you. When the runway runs out, God does not wire the bridge round. When you are wrong, the market does not forgive you because you have faith. I had been taught to trust God more than myself. That applied to the specific demands of founding a company, produced something I can only describe as a tolerance for incompetence. Including my own. If something wasn't working, I could defer to Providence rather than confront the precise way in which I was failing. There is no savior. When I die, life moves on. My friends and family will care that I starve, but they expect to be paid back when I'm back on my feet. This is just how reality is. Seeing it clearly is more liberating than any faith I have held.

Strength does not come from external sources. It is produced internally and expressed outward. The communities I have moved through that suffer the most, on the south side of Chicago, in the informal settlements outside Nairobi, in rural Zambia, are paradoxically often the most devout. They have been taught to wait. To trust. To endure. The spiritual framework was designed, consciously or not, to produce exactly that endurance.

My father introduced me to Christianity. I love him and I respect his decision completely. He is also not the average Christian. He was teaching about the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition long before it was popular. He boycotted unfair companies and stood with labor unions on the south side of Chicago for decades. The nonprofit he founded, BOOC, Building Our Own Community, fed, protected, and educated thousands. He is the reason I went to Africa at all. What I'm building now is in many ways an extension of what he started.

But I needed to find my own foundation. And I needed it to work so well that all this bullshit could be reversed within my lifetime. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance crystallized something in 2023 that I had been feeling for years. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Not arrogance. The radical act of taking your own perception seriously as a source of truth.

In 2024 I sat in a Buddhist temple in Chiang Mai and truly meditated. Something resolved. I am not a man of religion. I am a man of what is true. And what is true is that power is real, it is cultivated, and it belongs to those willing to undergo the process of cultivating it. Earlier that same year while I was in Spain, changed my name. I added Ato, my Fante name, to my legal name. Lance Ato Nathaniel Davis. LAND. The one who has reached atonement. I didn't want a fully English name. That name was a colonial remnant. The new one was a statement of intent.

The Abyss

All of this brought me to Soyinka.

The Fourth Stage is an essay where Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, Nigerian playwright, builds a theory of tragedy rooted in Yoruba cosmology and argues without apology that it surpasses Nietzsche's. Nietzsche identified two forces in Greek tragedy. Apollo, the god of form, order, beauty, and individual consciousness. Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, dissolution, and the annihilation of the self in collective frenzy. Their tension produces tragedy. Tragedy produces the highest form of human art and consciousness.

Soyinka says: your framework is incomplete. And he offers Ogun. Ogun is the Yoruba Orisha of iron, war, hunting, roads, and creation. He is the god of the smith and the god of the warrior. The one who makes the plow AND the sword with the same hands. He opens the road and makes it dangerous simultaneously. But what makes Ogun philosophically distinctive is what he did.

When the gods wished to reconnect with humanity after a long separation, a primordial forest had grown between the worlds. It’s dense. Impenetrable. Chaotic. None of the other gods would cross it. Ogun alone volunteered. He forged his tool from the material of the very forest he had to hack through. And then he crossed.

The crossing nearly destroyed him. The abyss between the worlds is not empty. It is filled with what Soyinka calls primordial chaos. A realm of dissolution where individual identity loses its coherence. Where the self risks coming apart at the level of its own constitution. To cross is to risk ceasing to exist as yourself.

Ogun held himself together. Through will alone. Not faith in an external force. The pure internal force of a consciousness that refused to dissolve. He crossed. He emerged changed. And he brought his tools back to humanity.

This is the Fourth Stage. Not the Apollonian clarity of form. Not the Dionysian ecstasy of dissolution. Not even a synthesis of the two. It is the stage beneath and between all of that. The moment of maximum existential risk. Where the hero descends into the abyss with full consciousness, neither surrendering to chaos nor retreating into the safety of the known, but holding both in unbearable tension while crossing toward something the community needs.

The Barrier

The most extraordinary thing Soyinka identifies is this: the material for the implement was extracted from the primordial barrier.

Ogun did not bring his tool to the forest. He made his tool from the forest. The obstacle is the material. The abyss is the resource. I have been living inside this truth for years without words for it. The Western education that diminished me and my people. The systematic erasure of African civilizational complexity that I had half-internalized before I knew it. The colonial worldview, the poverty theology, the cultural framework that made strength something to be received rather than generated. That was the forest.

I built my tool from it. The dismantling of that worldview, the slow and sometimes violent process of unlearning and relearning, that became the material for what I am building. Sereel exists because I understand something about what financial sovereignty means to African institutions that nobody who hasn't crossed this particular abyss could fully understand.

The blockchain infrastructure is not incidental to the journey. It is forged from the same material as the crisis it addresses. Cryptographic proofs are Apollonian in the most precise sense. Deterministic, trustless, and logically complete. A cryptographic proof doesn't care about your history or your politics. It is either valid or it isn't. Smart contracts execute identically across every node in a consensus network. There is no arbiter, no gatekeeper, no relationship to cultivate. The math is the authority.

But the reason to build this for African institutional capital, that comes from the other side. From the Dionysian dissolution of everything I thought I knew about my people and our capacity. From the primordial chaos of standing in Nairobi having abandoned a stable career to build something that might not work, in a place I barely knew, for a market the global venture ecosystem barely respects.

The Apollonian structure and the Dionysian experience are both present in what I do every day. The use of the Apollonian technology to make sure that the Dionysian reality we found ourselves in doesn’t happen again. Smart contract enabled blockchains, made by a European (Russian?) on the Internet, the epitome of Western global information dominance, is being used to liberate the people it once held down and misinformed. The Fourth Stage is what I'm crossing. And once it’s crossed it changes the fabric of one’s reality.

The Crossing Is Not For Yourself

Something the scholarship on Soyinka makes explicit: the protagonist who crosses the abyss does so as a psychopomp. A guide of souls. A carrier of something from the chaos back to the community. The crossing is not for personal enlightenment. Soyinka's plays are full of protagonists who cross beautifully and return with nothing because they were fundamentally disconnected from the people they were supposed to serve. The crossing must be for something beyond the self. Otherwise it is just suffering.

I am building for the Lance that I was. Confused. Miseducated. Carrying the weight of a worldview designed to make me feel like I was downstream of everything important. I am building for African institutions that have been told their financial infrastructure has to be borrowed from the same systems that extracted from them for centuries. I am building for the idea that sovereignty is technical as much as it is political. And that the two cannot be separated. That is the community the crossing is for.

On the Ogun in You The YouTube algorithm will show you Nietzsche all day. The will to power, the eternal recurrence, the Ubermensch. These are not bad ideas. But they are incomplete ones, dressed in familiar authority and fed through a recommendation engine that rewards existing demand. Soyinka is not in that pipeline. He never received the institutional canonization that makes a European philosopher automatically curriculum-worthy. The epistemic erasure I described operates in real time on the platforms we use every day. The algorithm does not create interest. It amplifies existing interest clusters. Soyinka's cluster was never seeded at scale.

But the ideas are there. The framework is there. And it is more complete.

If Nietzsche gives you the tension between form and dissolution, Soyinka gives you what to do with it. Not the Superman, that lonely self-absorbed sovereign of his own will. The psychopomp. The one who crosses the abyss, holds themselves together through will, and returns with something for the people.

Ogun is not the hero who stands apart from the world in magnificent suffering. Ogun is the one who forges his tool from the thing blocking the path, crosses the threshold where identity itself becomes uncertain, and comes back with iron for everyone who comes after.

Stage Four The Fourth Stage is where I am now in life. The crossing itself. Not the preparation. Not the arrival. The active transit of the abyss. The place where the self could come apart. Where the uncertainty is real and not performed. Where what I'm building might not work and the world will not pause to accommodate my heroic narrative.

What I hope is that this philosophical revelation yields something beneficial to everyone in the end. What I seek is true freedom for all, not just personal gain. It’s all void if I’m the only one that makes it through the abyss.