โThe Enlightenment didnโt free us from superstition; it mechanised it.โ We built reason into a machine, called it capitalism, and let it think for us.
What followed was a case study in how not to communicate.
LinkedIn, that self-parody of professional virtue signalling, is essentially a digital networking sรฉance: a place where narcissism wears a tie. So I expected a reaction โ just not one quite so unintentionally revealing.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But Firstโฆ
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
โ Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesnโt kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, itโs not an atrocity โ itโs ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented โ and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern โ social mediaโs endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism โ pure, fair, competitive โ untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘Thatโs not capitalism, thatโs bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
ยซ Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. ยป
Image: Mentioned Meme
Thatโs the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonaldโs.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia โ functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. Itโs a comforting fable that erases the costs โ colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapseโfolded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘Youโre confused,’ ‘Youโre a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. Itโs a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
Thatโs precisely the blindness the post was about โ the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken โ just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘Itโs not capitalism; itโs profiteering’.
This is capitalismโs soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isnโt capitalism โ itโs people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. Itโs a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalismโs most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few โ precious few โ saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalismโs violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the โcost optimisationโ logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration โ itโs the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isnโt extinct โ merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People donโt read โ hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic โ all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself โ automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesnโt scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesnโt just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity โ the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage โ the economic expression of the Enlightenmentโs original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isnโt that weโve lost meaning. Itโs that weโve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradiseโฆ end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is โdecencyโ? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. Iโll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in โcost optimizationโ than other businesses. To say that someoneโs chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someoneโs second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with โcapitalismโ. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such โadjustmentsโ to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not โcapitalismโ. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
Youโre a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that donโt work and thatโs where weโre at. Youโre killing the future. Youโre an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and youโll be the one whoโs bitching when youโre on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As Iโve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in todayโs capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Todayโs profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and itโs not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeberโs The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism โ where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyiโs The Great Transformation (1944) describes how โself-regulatingโ markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call โreal capitalismโ is, in Polanyiโs terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stieglerโs Technics and Time (1994โ2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalismโs algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weberโs early insight into rationalisationโthe conversion of moral action into procedural necessityโreaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembeโs Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendtโs Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed โthe banality of evilโ as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debordโs Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Hanโs In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics โ the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzscheโs Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment โ a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenmentโs faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of โself-madeโ success functions as capitalismโs moral camouflage โ the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernityโs central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the EffectivenessโComplexity Gradient, showing how every human system โ political, linguistic, economic โ eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly โ not construction โ is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty โ a narrative form of โcost-optimisation ethics.โ
Image: Humans stumble around with their self-awareness like toddlers with scissorsโaware enough to cut themselves, not wise enough to put the scissors down. โ ChatGPT
If reason had a landscape, it would look like this card: a maze of ascending and descending staircases, forever rational yet going nowhere. Kant might have called it a Critique of Pure Geometry.
Pure Reason, the first card in the Postmodern set, isnโt so much an homage to Kant as it is a cautionary reconstruction. It honours his ambition to build a universe from deduction while quietly mourning the price of that construction: alienation from experience.
Image: Card 001 from the Postmodern Set โ Philosophics.blog
The Meta
Suspend Disbelief (3). For the next three turns, arguments cannot be resolved by evidence, only by deduction.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
The rule text re-enacts Kantโs method. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he cordoned off the realm of empirical evidence and tried to chart what the mind could know a priori โ before experience. The cardโs mechanic enforces that isolation. For three turns, players must reason in a vacuum: no appeals to observation, no touchstones of reality, only deduction.
Itโs a temporary world built entirely of logic, an echo of the transcendental playground Kant envisioned. The effect is powerful but sterile โ thought constructing universes that canโt sustain life.
The flavour text says it plainly:
โReason alone constructs universes. Whether they can be lived in is another matter.โ
โ Immanuel Kant
That line, of course, is apocryphal, but it captures the essence of his project: reason as world-maker and prison architect in one.
The Architecture of Thought
The artwork mirrors Escherโs impossible staircases โ a labyrinth of pure geometry, ordered yet uninhabitable. Each path is internally consistent, logically sound, but spatially absurd. This is Kantโs transcendental edifice made visual: coherent on paper, dizzying in practice.
The lone figure standing in the maze is the transcendental subject โ the philosopher trapped within the architecture of his own cognition. He surveys the world he has built from categories and forms, unable to escape the walls of his own reason.
Itโs a neat metaphor for Enlightenment hubris: the belief that reason can serve as both foundation and roof, requiring no support from the messy ground of existence.
Kantโs Double Legacy
Kantโs Critique was both the high point and the breaking point of Enlightenment rationality. It erected the scaffolding for science, ethics, and aesthetics but revealed the fault lines beneath them. His insistence that the mind structures experience rather than merely reflecting it gave birth to both modern idealism and modern doubt.
Every philosopher after him โ Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Derrida โ has been trying either to escape or to inhabit that labyrinth differently. Pure Reason captures this tension: the glory of construction and the tragedy of confinement.
My Take
Reason is a magnificent liar. It promises order, clarity, and autonomy, but its perfection is its undoing. It abstracts itself from life until it can no longer recognise its own maker. Kantโs world is flawless and airless โ a rational utopia unfit for breathing creatures.
I view Pure Reason as the archetype of the Enlightenment illusion: the attempt to found a living world on the logic of dead forms. What he achieved was monumental, but the monument was a mausoleum.
The card, then, is not just a tribute to Kant but a warning to his descendants (ourselves included): every system of thought eventually turns into an Escher print. Beautiful, consistent, and utterly unlivable.
Well, not so much hard as not particularly or inherently enjoyable.
I estimate I’ve got about a day left to complete this manuscript โ ‘done’ done. When I open InDesign, it shames me โ 3 days ago, I last touched this document. It doesn’t feel like 3 days have passed, but time flies.
On the right is an older version. I began reworking it into this new version over the summer, and here I am come autumn. It’s even worse if I use the Chinese calendar. Evidently, 7th November is the first day of winter. They can’t wait until soltace.
Anyway, just a brief update. This isn’t going to edit itself, and I can’t afford to pay an editor for a passion project. Besides โ and let’s be honest โ I can’t afford an editor in general โ or at least can’t cost-justify it โ and all my writing is a passion project.
Of course, editors (and cover artists) insist that one would sell more book if only they were edited or professionally rendered. There is an element of truth to this, but I’ve read some gawdawful books that were professionally edited and published through a traditional publisher, because publishers publish.
Me, I operate on razor-thin margins. Most of my publications haven’t even broken even โ even if I ignore opportunity costs, which I can’t because I’m an economist. Accountants get to play that trick.
This said, I do hire reviewers, editors, and artists in small doses โ homoeopathic as they might be โ and I’ve had mixed results.
I’m rambling
Must really be avoiding the editing processโฆ
Recently, I wanted to redesign the cover of one of my Ridley Park fiction books.
Image Comparison: A Tale of Two Propensities
The cover on the left is the original. It is intentionally a minimal 2-D construction โ a representation of the first section of the book, the first 15 chapters.
The cover on the right is the update. It is also minimalist, representing the second section of Propensity. I’m not sure how I would depict the third section. If it comes to me, I may render a third version.
There’s a story to this. I reached out to some cover artists and told them I was unhappy with my original design but had no visual ideas. I’d leave this to the artist. It turns out that some artists don’t want full control over the design process. I can understand the hesitation.
They asked for covers that I might like, so I researched some covers and saved them to a Pinterest board.
As it turned out, after some inspiration, I decided to render this one myself, too. Hey, I tried.
What happened to the rest of the time?
OK, so there’s more. I also created a video book trailer in the evening.
It was fun enough. Give it a watch. It also represents part one of Propensity.
OK, this time for real. Let me know what you thinkโฆabout anything in particular.
Whenever you point out that capitalism kills โ quietly, bureaucratically, with paperwork instead of bulletsโsomeone inevitably pipes up about the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor. Itโs a reflex, like the ideological hiccup of a system allergic to self-reflection.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
One such defender of the sacred market recently wrote:
โHalf a truth is often a great lie. What about the Great Leap Forward? The Holodomor? The Cambodian Genocide? The slaughters caused by socialism?โ (thread)
You can almost hear the pearls clutching.
For context, I share the text from his profile. I’ll let you perform the personality assessment.
One thing I will promise; I never block anyone just because I may disagree with or dislike their words. Because the only people who do are cowards. Want to attack me? Fine. If you think that makes the world a better place, go ahead; you cannot hurt me with your words.
Letโs be clear: the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are not Communismโข incarnate, any more than Donald Trump represents Democracyโข. Systems donโt commit atrocities; people do โ though some systems make atrocity easier, more efficient, and more deniable.
To illustrate: imagine Luigi Mangioni shoots and kills Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi is an individual agent. Thompson, by contrast, is the face of a healthcare system that quietly decides who lives and who dies based on profitability.
If Thompson represents a system that allows people to die for lack of coverage, who bears the greater moral burden? Luigi, with his single bullet โ or the corporate mechanism that kills by neglect, at scale, every day?
Capitalism hides behind its abstraction. It kills by omission. Stalin and Mao at least had the decency to be explicit. The capitalist death machine grinds on invisibly, its victims written off as ‘market externalities’.
So when a self-described truth-teller tells me to make a video about ‘the slaughters of socialism’, Iโll happily oblige โ right after he makes one about preventable deaths under his beloved market: the uninsured, the unhoused, the unprofitable. The only difference between Stalinโs gulags and our modern equivalents is branding. One killed by decree; the other kills by design.
I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed โ perhaps too lightly โ against my debt to feminist philosophy. Itโs time to acknowledge that debt more directly and explain how it spills into the mundane greasework of daily life.
[Scroll to the bottom to see Midjourney’s take on feminists. You won’t be surprised.]
I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but letโs name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects โ your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults โ I owe much to the feminist philosophers โ Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again โ and, while weโre at it, the post-colonialists, whose names I’ll not recite for fear of being pompous. Their shared heresy is a suspicion of universals. They expose the myth of neutrality, whether it parades as Reason, Progress, or Civilisation. They remind us that every โuniversalโ is merely someoneโs local story told loud enough to drown out the others.
This isnโt a matter of sex or gender, though thatโs how the names have been filed. The core lesson is epistemic, not biological. Feminist philosophy re-centres care, interdependence, and the politics of maintenance, not as sentimental virtues but as systems logic. The post-colonialists do the same at a geopolitical scale: maintenance instead of conquest, relation instead of domination.
On Gender, Behaviour, and the Lazy Binary
I donโt buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isnโt people; itโs the linguistic furniture we inherited.
Iโm weary of the moral blackmail that calls it misogyny not to vote for a woman, or racism not to vote for a black candidate. These accusations come, paradoxically, from sexists and racists who reduce people to the colour of their skin or the contents of their underwear. Having a vagina doesnโt make one a caretaker; having a penis doesnโt preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.
When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, itโs not because theyโre women. Itโs because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the playerโs gender doesnโt change the rules.
Maintenance as Political Praxis
My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether โ the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance Iโve written about, and the philosophy of Dis-Integration I keep harping on, both gesture toward an alternative mode of being: one that prizes endurance over expansion, care over conquest.
This isnโt new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they werenโt shouting in Latin or running empires. Iโm merely repackaging and re-contextualising, hoping that bundling these neglected insights together might make them audible again.
Knowledge never comes in a vacuum; it circulates. It leaks, cross-pollinates, mutates. To claim โintellectual propertyโ over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. Iโll spare you the full rant, but suffice it to say that the moment knowledge becomes proprietary, it ceases to breathe.
Conclusion
If I have a creed โ and I say this reluctantly โ itโs that philosophy should serve as maintenance, not monument-building. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers model that: constant attention, critical care, resistance to the entropy of domination.
Iโm just trying to keep the engine running without pretending itโs divine.
Telos is humanity’s most persistent delusion โ the idea that existence is crawling toward some luminous conclusion. From Aristotle’s perfect forms to Nietzsche’s Will to Power to Silicon Valley’s AI salvation, the story barely changes: history, we are told, has direction. But direction is not destiny; it is momentum misinterpreted as meaning. Much of my Anti-Enlightenment attention โ and my drive toward Dis-Integration โ centres on this notion.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Progress is the Enlightenment’s secular gospel. Its promise โ that every change is improvement โ keeps the engine of exploitation humming. But change is inevitable; progress is propaganda. The arrow of time doesn’t point toward justice or enlightenment; it just points forward, indifferent to who’s crushed under it.
The Myth of Self-Correcting Systems
We are taught to place faith in systems: markets, democracies, algorithms. If they falter, it’s because of bad actors, not bad architecture. Replace the managers, swap the politicians, tweak the code. But the rot is structural, not moral.
These systems aren’t misfiring; they’re functioning exactly as designed โ to preserve their own inertia while leaking meaning, resources, and compassion. The obsession with fixing individuals while sparing the machine is moral sleight of hand. At some point, tightening bolts on a burning engine becomes absurd. What we need is not a tune-up but a renovation.
This is where the philosophy of care and maintenance enters โ not as sentimental housekeeping, but as radical engineering. Care is not complacent; it’s insurgent. It means facing the filth under the hood and admitting that the design itself is faulty.
Feminism and the Forgotten Labour of Repair
For centuries, the labour of care has been feminised, dismissed, and exploited โ a quiet background hum while men congratulated themselves for building civilisation. Yet it is care, not conquest, that prevents collapse.
Philosophical feminists like Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and Marรญa Puig de la Bellacasa saw this long before innovation culture learned to rebrand it as sustainability. They argued that ethical life is not about fulfilment or growth but about tending to fragile systems, material and social. Their revolution is not cosmic; it’s custodial.
The so-called masculine ethos โ endless expansion, disruption, will to power โ has delivered us burnout disguised as achievement. Its gods are metrics, its sacraments quarterly reports, its apocalypse deferred until after the IPO.
The Maintenance Ethic
Abandon the myth of natural or supernatural telos, and what remains is the duty of upkeep: a civic, psychological, and planetary responsibility. Maintenance is not stagnation; it’s resistance to decay through conscious intervention. It recognises that the world does not move toward betterment but toward breakdown โ and that care is the only counter-force we possess.
Progress, as we’ve sold it, is the fever dream of a species mistaking acceleration for evolution. Maintenance is what happens when the dream fades and the mechanic steps in with a wrench.
Societies and cultures are constructs. As with twelve-step programmes, once we recognise this, we can move on to the next step. This is a notion of progress I can endorse: not the myth of inevitable improvement, but the humble acknowledgement that we built these machines and we can rebuild them differently.
The Workshop, Not the Temple
Civilisation doesn’t need another prophet or disruptor. It needs a caretaker with dirty hands. Meaning is not discovered; it is serviced. Systems are not sacred; they are rebuilt.
We can keep worshipping progress and watch the engine seize again, or we can accept the more humbling task of renovation โ not of souls or nations, but of the machinery we ourselves assembled. The future, if it exists, will not be a miracle of purpose but a triumph of maintenance.
The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?
No riots. No rebellion. Just a flatteningโof desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasnโt designed to stay on this long. But now thereโs no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulseโfor readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
Editorial Review
“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.” Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Parkโs chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the storyโs disintegrationโscientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.
This is one of the more popular posts on here, so I shouldn’t have to give this milestone special attention, but I will anyway. Slow news day. It’s more about economics and political science, but I go there, too. Not a big fan of Capitalism in any of its many incarnations.
Video: Midjourney automation
I decided to experiment with Midjourney for this cover art and short animation. Instead of creating a typical prompt, I simply copied and pasted the text into the box above and let Midjourney make sense of it. This was the result. Then I asked to animate a loop.
Enough diversion. Back to finishing my latest book. I see light at the end of the tunnel.
I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.
Philosophy isnโt a mass-market pursuit. Most people are content simply to make it through the day without undue turbulence, and I can hardly blame them. Thinking deeply is not an act of leisure; itโs a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didnโt afford. Even when Iโve been employed, Iโve noticed how wage labour chokes the capacity for art and thought. Warhol may have monetised the tension, but most of us merely survive it.
Video: Sprouting seed. (No audio)
Thatโs why I value engagement โ not the digital pantomime of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, but genuine dialogue. The majority will scroll past without seeing. A few will skim. Fewer still will respond. Those who do โ whether to agree, dissent, or reframe โ remind me why this space exists at all.
To Jason, Julien, Jim, Lance, Nick, and especially Homo Hortus, who has been conversing beneath the recent Freedom post: your engagement matters. You help me think differently, sometimes introducing writers or ideas I hadnโt encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought โ provided I can avoid tumbling into the Dunning-Kruger pit.
And now, a note of quiet satisfaction. A Romanian scholar recently cited my earlier essay, the Metanarrative Problem, in a piece titled Despre cum metanaraศiunile construiesc paradigma ศi influenศeazฤ rฤspunsurile emoศionale โ translation: On How Grand Narratives Shape Paradigms and Condition Our Emotional Responses. That someone, somewhere, found my reflections useful enough to reference tells me this exercise in public thinking is doing what it should: planting seeds in unpredictable soil.
Philosophics 