Author: Philosophics

Philosopher of language and author of speculative fiction

When “Advanced” Means Genocide: A Case Study in Linguistic Implosion

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This post draws on themes from my upcoming book, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. The transcript below is taken from a publicly available exchange, which you can view here. Consider it Exhibit A in language’s ongoing failure to bear the weight of meaning.

Transcript:

KK: Konstantin Kisin
DFW: Deborah Frances-White

KK: I’m saying we were technologically more advanced.
DFW: So you’re saying we’re superior to Australian Aboriginals?
KK: That’s quite the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m not saying we were superior, I’m saying we were technologically more advanced.
DFW: So, how is that the opposite?
KK: Superior implies a moral quality. I’m not making any moral implication. You seem to be, but what I’m saying is…
DFW: I think most people would hear it that way.
KK: No.
DFW: Again, you’re a very intelligent man. How would most people hear that?
KK: Most people would hear what I’m saying for what I’m saying, which is…
DFW: I don’t think they would.
KK: You seem to get quite heated about this, which is completely unnecessary.
DFW: Um…
KK: You think it’s necessary?
DFW: I’m a bit stunned by what you’re implying.
KK: No, you’re acting in a kind of passive aggressive way which indicates that you’re not happy…
DFW: I genuinely… I’m being 100% authentic. My visceral reaction to a white man sitting and saying to me, “And why were we able to commit genocide on them?” and then just pausing—
KK: Yes.
DFW: …is very visceral to me.
KK: Well, let’s go back. First of all, it’s interesting that you brought up my skin colour because I thought that was the exact opposite of the point you’re trying to make in the book.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities

Dissection: Language as Battlefield

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities – especially those laced with power, morality, and history. This transcript is not a debate. It is a linguistic trench war in which every utterance is laced with shrapnel, and each side thinks they’re defending reason.

Let’s pull a few of the shell casings from the mud.

1. Semantic Contamination: “Technologically more advanced”

KK attempts to offer a dry, neutral descriptor. DFW hears supremacist teleology. Why? Because “advanced” is culturally radioactive. It doesn’t merely denote a technical state—it connotes a ladder, with someone inevitably on the bottom rung.

When language carries historical residue, neutrality is a delusion. Words don’t just mean. They echo.

KK is making a semantic distinction. DFW hears a moral claim. Both are right. And both are talking past one another, because language is attempting to cleave affect from description, and it simply can’t.

2. Disambiguation Does Not Save You

KK’s insistence—“I’m not saying we’re superior”—is a textbook example of denotative desperation. He believes clarification will rescue intent. But as any linguist (or postcolonial theorist) will tell you: intent does not sterilise implication.

Language cannot be laundered by explanation. Once spoken, words belong to context, not intention.

KK thinks he’s holding a scalpel. DFW hears a cudgel. And here we are.

3. Phatic Collapse: “Most people would hear…”

This is where the wheels come off. KK argues from semantic specificity. DFW argues from sociolinguistic reception. It’s Saussure versus the TikTok algorithm. Neither will win.

Communication disintegrates not because anyone is lying, but because they are playing incompatible games with the same tokens.

4. Identity as Index: When the Speaker Becomes the Speech

DFW’s invocation of “a white man” is not a derailment—it’s the inevitable endpoint of a system where words no longer float free but are yoked to their utterer. This is the moment the failure of language becomes a failure of interlocution. Argument collapses into indexical entrapment.

At this point, you’re no longer debating ideas. You’re defending your right to use certain words at all.

Which brings us to the final breakdown.

5. Moral Authenticity vs Logical Precision: Unbridgeable Grammars

KK: I am making a logical distinction.
DFW: I am having a visceral reaction.

The failure isn’t moral. It isn’t historical. It’s grammatical. One is operating in a truth-function logic game. The other is reacting within a trauma-informed, socially indexed register. These are grammars that do not overlap.

Conclusion: Language Did What It Always Does—It Failed Us

If this brief and brutal dialogue proves anything, it’s this: you cannot extract meaning cleanly from words when the words themselves are sponges for history, hierarchy, and harm. The moment we ask language to do too much—to carry precision, affect, ethics, and identity—it folds in on itself.

And that, dear reader, is precisely the argument of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that meaning does not reside in words, and never has. It lives in the gaps, the silences, the misfires. That’s where the truth—whatever’s left of it—might be hiding.

Follow the wreckage. That’s where the signal lives.

The Disorder of Saying No

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A Polite Rebuttal to a Diagnosis I Didn’t Ask For

A dear friend — and I do mean dear, though this may be the last time they risk diagnosing me over brunch — recently suggested, with all the benevolent concern of a well-meaning inquisitor, that I might be showing signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

You know the tone: “I say this with love… but have you considered that your refusal to play nicely with institutions might be clinical?”

Let’s set aside the tea and biscuits for a moment and take a scalpel to this charming little pathology. Because if ODD is a diagnosis, then I propose we start diagnosing systems — not people.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When the Empire Diagnoses Its Rebels

Oppositional Defiant Disorder, for those blissfully unscarred by its jargon, refers to a “persistent pattern” of defiance, argumentativeness, rule-breaking, and — the pièce de résistance — resentment of authority. In other words, it is a medical label for being insufficiently obedient.

What a marvel: not only has resistance been de-politicised, it has been medicalised. The refusal to comply is not treated as an ethical stance or a contextual response, but as a defect of the self. The child (or adult) is not resisting something; they are resisting everything, and this — according to the canon — makes them sick.

One wonders: sick according to whom?

Derrida’s Diagnosis: The Binary Fetish

Jacques Derrida, of course, would waste no time in eviscerating the logic at play. ODD depends on a structural binary: compliant/defiant, healthy/disordered, rule-follower/troublemaker. But, as Derrida reminds us, binaries are not descriptive — they are hierarchies in disguise. One term is always elevated; the other is marked, marginal, suspect.

Here, “compliance” is rendered invisible — the assumed baseline, the white space on the page. Defiance is the ink that stains it. But this only works because “normal” has already been declared. The system names itself sane.

Derrida would deconstruct this self-justifying loop and note that disorder exists only in relation to an order that never justifies itself. Why must the subject submit? That’s not up for discussion. The child who asks that question is already halfway to a diagnosis.

Foucault’s Turn: Disciplinary Power and the Clinic as Court

Enter Foucault, who would regard ODD as yet another exquisite specimen in the taxonomy of control. For him, modern power is not exercised through visible violence but through the subtler mechanisms of surveillance, normalisation, and the production of docile bodies.

ODD is a textbook case of biopower — the system’s ability to define and regulate life itself through classification, diagnosis, and intervention. It is not enough for the child to behave; they must believe. They must internalise authority to the marrow. To question it, or worse, to resent it, is to reveal one’s pathology.

This is not discipline; this is soulcraft. And ODD is not a disorder — it is a symptom of a civilisation that cannot tolerate unmediated subjectivity. See Discipline & Punish.

Ivan Illich: The Compulsory Institutions of Care

Illich would call the whole charade what it is: a coercive dependency masquerading as therapeutic care. In Deschooling Society, he warns of systems — especially schools — that render people passive recipients of norms. ODD, in this light, is not a syndrome. It is the final gasp of autonomy before it is sedated.

What the diagnosis reveals is not a child in crisis, but an institution that cannot imagine education without obedience. Illich would applaud the so-called defiant child for doing the one thing schools rarely reward: thinking.

R.D. Laing: Sanity as a Political Position

Laing, too, would recognise the ruse. His anti-psychiatry position held that “madness” is often the only sane response to a fundamentally broken world. ODD is not insanity — it is sanity on fire. It is the refusal to adapt to structures that demand submission as a prerequisite for inclusion.

To quote Laing: “They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”

ODD is what happens when a child refuses to play the game.

bell hooks: Refusal as Liberation

bell hooks, writing in Teaching to Transgress, framed the classroom as a potential site of radical transformation — if it rejects domination. The child who refuses to be disciplined is often the one who sees most clearly that the system has confused education with indoctrination.

Resistance, hooks argues, is not a flaw. It is a form of knowledge. ODD becomes, in this frame, a radical pedagogy. The defiant student is not failing — they are teaching.

Deleuze & Guattari: Desire Against the Machine

And then, should you wish to watch the diagnostic edifice melt entirely, we summon Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the psyche is not a plumbing system with blockages, but a set of desiring-machines short-circuiting the factory floor of capitalism and conformity.

ODD, to them, would be schizoanalysis in action — a body refusing to be plugged into the circuits of docility. The tantrum, the refusal, the eye-roll: these are not symptoms. They are breakdowns in the control grid.

The child isn’t disordered — the system is. The child simply noticed.

Freire: The Educated Oppressed

Lastly, Paulo Freire would ask: What kind of pedagogy demands the death of resistance? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warns of an education model that treats students as empty vessels. ODD, reframed, is the moment a subject insists on being more than a receptacle.

In refusing the “banking model” of knowledge, the so-called defiant child is already halfway to freedom. Freire would call this not a disorder but a moment of awakening.

Conclusion: Diagnostic Colonialism

So yes, dear friend — I am oppositional. I challenge authority, especially when it mistakes its position for truth. I argue, question, resist. I am not unwell for doing so. I am, if anything, allergic to the idea that obedience is a virtue in itself.

Let us be clear: ODD is not a mirror held up to the subject. It is a spotlight shining from the system, desperately trying to blind anyone who dares to squint.

Now, shall we talk about your compliance disorder?

Full Disclosure: I used ChatGPT for insights beyond Derrida and Foucault, two of my mainstays.

Semantic Drift: When Language Outruns the Science

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Science has a language problem. Not a lack of it – if anything, a surfeit. But words, unlike test tubes, do not stay sterile. They evolve, mutate, and metastasise. They get borrowed, bent, misused, and misremembered. And when the public discourse gets hold of them, particularly on platforms like TikTok, it’s the language that gets top billing. The science? Second lead, if it’s lucky.

Semantic drift is at the centre of this: the gradual shift in meaning of a word or phrase over time. It’s how “literally” came to mean “figuratively,” how “organic” went from “carbon-based” to “morally superior,” and how “theory” in science means robust explanatory framework but in the public square means vague guess with no homework.

In short, semantic drift lets rhetoric masquerade as reason. Once a word acquires enough connotation, you can deploy it like a spell. No need to define your terms when the vibe will do.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When “Vitamin” No Longer Means Vitamin

Take the word vitamin. It sounds objective. Authoritative. Something codified in the genetic commandments of all living things. (reference)

But it isn’t.

A vitamin is simply a substance that an organism needs but cannot synthesise internally, and must obtain through its diet. That’s it. It’s a functional definition, not a chemical one.

So:

  • Vitamin C is a vitamin for humans, but not for dogs, cats, or goats. They make their own. We lost the gene. Tough luck.
  • Vitamin D, meanwhile, isn’t a vitamin at all. It’s a hormone, synthesised when sunlight hits your skin. Its vitamin status is a historical relic – named before we knew better, and now marketed too profitably to correct.

But in the land of TikTok and supplement shelves, these nuances evaporate. “Vitamin” has drifted from scientific designation to halo term – a linguistic fig leaf draped over everything from snake oil to ultraviolet-induced steroidogenesis.

The Rhetorical Sleight of Hand

This linguistic slippage is precisely what allows the rhetorical shenanigans to thrive.

In one video, a bloke claims a burger left out for 151 days neither moulds nor decays, and therefore, “nature won’t touch it.” From there, he leaps (with Olympic disregard for coherence) into talk of sugar spikes, mood swings, and “metabolic chaos.” You can almost hear the conspiratorial music rising.

The science here is, let’s be generous, circumstantial. But the language? Oh, the language is airtight.

Words like “processed,” “chemical,” and “natural” are deployed like moral verdicts, not descriptive categories. The implication isn’t argued – it’s assumed, because the semantics have been doing quiet groundwork for years. “Natural” = good. “Chemical” = bad. “Vitamin” = necessary. “Addiction” = no agency.

By the time the viewer blinks, they’re nodding along to a story told by words in costume, not facts in context.

The Linguistic Metabolism of Misunderstanding

This is why semantic drift isn’t just an academic curiosity – it’s a vector. A vector by which misinformation spreads, not through outright falsehood, but through weaponised ambiguity.

A term like “sugar crash” sounds scientific. It even maps onto a real physiological process: postprandial hypoglycaemia. But when yoked to vague claims about mood, willpower, and “chemical hijacking,” it becomes a meme with lab coat cosplay. And the science, if mentioned at all, is there merely to decorate the argument, not drive it.

That’s the crux of my forthcoming book, The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that our inherited languages, designed for trade, prayer, and gossip, are woefully ill-equipped for modern scientific clarity. They lag behind our knowledge, and worse, they often distort it.

Words arrive first. Definitions come limping after.

In Closing: You Are What You Consume (Linguistically)

The real problem isn’t that TikTokers get the science wrong. The problem is that they get the words right – right enough to slip past your critical filters. Rhetoric wears the lab coat. Logic gets left in the locker room.

If vitamin C is a vitamin only for some species, and vitamin D isn’t a vitamin at all, then what else are we mislabelling in the great nutritional theatre? What other linguistic zombies are still wandering the scientific lexicon?

Language may be the best tool we have, but don’t mistake it for a mirror. It’s a carnival funhouse – distorting, framing, and reflecting what we expect to see. And until we fix that, science will keep playing second fiddle to the words pretending to explain it.

The Indexing Abyss: A Cautionary Tale in Eight Chapters

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There, I said it.

I’m almost finished with A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, the book I’ve been labouring over for what feels like the gestation period of a particularly reluctant elephant. To be clear: the manuscript is done. Written. Edited. Blessed. But there remains one final circle of publishing hell—the index.

Now, if you’re wondering how motivated I am to return to indexing, consider this: I’m writing this blog post instead. If that doesn’t scream avoidance with an airhorn, nothing will.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I began indexing over a month ago. I made it through two chapters of eight, then promptly wandered off to write a couple of novellas. As you do. One started as a short story—famous last words—and evolved into a novella. The muse struck again. Another “short story” appeared, and like an unattended sourdough starter, it fermented into a 15,000-word novelette. Apparently, I write short stories the way Americans pour wine: unintentionally generous.

Apparently, I write short stories the way Americans pour wine: unintentionally generous.

With several unpublished manuscripts loitering on my hard drive like unemployed theatre majors, I figured it was time to release one into the wild. So I did. I published the novelette to Kindle, and just today, the paperback proof landed in my postbox like a smug little trophy.

And then, because I’m an unrepentant completionist (or a masochist—jury’s out), I thought: why not release the novella too? I’ve been told novellas and novelettes are unpopular due to “perceived value.” Apparently, people would rather buy a pound of gristle than 200 grams of sirloin. And yet, in the same breath, they claim no one has time for long books anymore. Perhaps these are different tribes of illiterates. I suppose we’ll find out.

Let’s talk logistics. Writing a book is only the beginning—and frankly, it’s the easy part. Fingers to keyboard, ideas to page. Done. I use Word, like most tragically conventional authors. Planning? Minimal. These were short stories, remember? That was the plan.

Next comes layout. Enter Adobe InDesign—because once you’ve seen what Word does to complex layouts, you never go back. Export to PDF, pray to the typographic gods, and move on.

Then there’s the cover. I lean on Illustrator and Photoshop. Photoshop is familiar, like a worn-in shoe; Illustrator is the smug cousin who turns up late but saves the day with scalable vectors. This time, I used Illustrator for the cover—lesson learnt from past pixelation traumas. Hardback to paperback conversion? A breeze when your artwork isn’t made of crayon scribbles and hope.

Covers, in case you’ve never assembled one, are ridiculous. Front. Back. Spine. Optional dust jacket if you’re feeling fancy (I wasn’t). You need titles, subtitles, your name in a legible font, and let’s not forget the barcode, which you will place correctly on the first attempt exactly never.

Unlike my first novel, where I enlisted someone with a proper design eye to handle the cover text, this time I went full minimalist. Think Scandinavian furniture catalogue meets existential despair. Classy.

Think Scandinavian furniture catalogue meets existential despair.

Once the cover and interior are done, it’s time to wrestle with the publishing platforms. Everything is automated these days—provided you follow their arcane formatting commandments, avoid forbidden fonts, and offer up your soul. Submitting each book takes about an hour, not including the time lost choosing a price that balances “undervalued labour” and “won’t scare away cheapskates.”

Want a Kindle version? That’s another workflow entirely, full of tortured formatting, broken line breaks, and wondering why your chapter headings are now in Wingdings. Audiobooks? That’s a whole other circus, with its own animals and ringmasters. Honestly, it’s no wonder authors hire publishers. Or develop drinking problems.

But I’m stubborn. Which brings us full circle.

I’ve now got two books heading for daylight, a few more waiting in the wings, and one bloody non-fiction beast that won’t see release until I finish the damn index. No pseudonym this time. No hiding. Just me, owning my sins and hoping the final product lands somewhere between “insightful” and “mercifully short.”

So yes, life may well be a journey. But indexing is the bit where the satnav breaks, the road floods, and the boot falls off the car. Give me the destination any day. The journey can fuck right off.

Sustenance: A Book About Aliens, Language, and Everything You’re Getting Wrong

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Violet aliens on a farm

So, I wrote a book and published it under Ridley Park, the pseudonym I use for fiction.

It has aliens. But don’t get excited—they’re not here to save us, probe us, or blow up the White House. They’re not even here for us.

Which is, frankly, the point.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The book’s called Sustenance, and while it’s technically speculative fiction, it’s more about us than them. Or rather, it’s about how we can’t stop making everything about us—even when it shouldn’t be. Especially when it shouldn’t be.

Let’s talk themes. And yes, we’re using that word like academics do: as a smokescreen for saying uncomfortable things abstractly.

Language: The Original Scam

Language is the ultimate colonial tool. We call it communication, but it’s mostly projection. You speak. You hope. You assume. You superimpose meaning on other people like a cling film of your own ego.

Sustenance leans into this—not by showing a breakdown of communication, but by showing what happens when communication was never mutual in the first place. When the very idea of “meaning” has no purchase. It’s not about mishearing—it’s about misbeing.

Culture: A Meme You Were Born Into

Culture is the software you didn’t choose to install, and probably can’t uninstall. Most people treat it like a universal law—until they meet someone running a different OS. Cue confusion, arrogance, or violence.

The book explores what happens when cultural norms aren’t shared, and worse, aren’t even legible. Imagine trying to enforce property rights on beings who don’t understand “ownership.” It’s like trying to baptise a toaster.

Sex/Gender: You Keep Using Those Words…

One of the quiet joys of writing non-human characters is discarding human assumptions about sex and gender—and watching readers squirm.

What if sex wasn’t about power, pleasure, or identity? What if it was just a biological procedure, like cell division or pruning roses? Would you still be interested? Would you still moralise about it?

We love to believe our sex/gender constructs are inevitable. They’re not. They’re habits—often bad ones.

Consent: Your Framework Is Showing

Consent, as we use it, assumes mutual understanding, shared stakes, and equivalent agency. Remove any one of those and what’s left?

Sustenance doesn’t try to solve this—it just shows what happens when those assumptions fall apart. Spoiler: it’s not pretty, but it is honest.

Projection: The Mirror That Lies

Humans are deeply committed to anthropocentrism. If it walks like us, or flinches like us, it must be us. This is why we get so disoriented when faced with the truly alien: it won’t dance to our tune, and we’re left staring at ourselves in the funhouse mirror.

This isn’t a book about aliens.

It’s a book about the ways we refuse to see what’s not us.

Memory: The Autobiography of Your Justifications

Memory is not a record. It’s a defence attorney with a narrative license. We rewrite the past to make ourselves look consistent, or innocent, or right.

In Sustenance, memory acts less as a tether to truth and more as a sculpting tool—a way to carve guilt into something manageable. Something you can live with. Until you can’t.

In Summary: It’s Not About Them. It’s About You.

If that sounds bleak, good. It’s meant to.

But it’s also a warning: don’t get too comfortable in your own categories. They’re only universal until you meet someone who doesn’t share them.

Like I said, it’s not really about the aliens.

It’s about us.

If you enjoy fiction that’s more unsettling than escapist, more question than answer, you might be interested in Sustenance. It’s live on Kindle now for the cost of a regrettable coffee:

📘 Sustenance on Amazon US
Also available in the UK, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, JP, BR, CA, MX, AU, and IN—because alienation is a universal language.

On Ishiguro, Cioran, and Whatever I Think I’m Doing

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Sora-generated image of Emil Cioran and Kazuo Ishiguro reading a generic book together

Having just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I’ve now cracked open my first taste of Cioran—History and Utopia. You might reasonably ask why. Why these two? And what, if anything, do they have in common? Better yet—what do the three of us have in common?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Recently, I finished writing a novella titled Propensity (currently gathering metaphorical dust on the release runway). Out of curiosity—or narcissism—I fed it to AI and asked whose style it resembled. Among the usual suspects were two names I hadn’t yet read: Ishiguro and Cioran. I’d read the others and understood the links. These two, though, were unknown quantities. So I gave them a go.

Ishiguro is perhaps best known for The Remains of the Day, which, like Never Let Me Go, got the Hollywood treatment. I chose the latter, arbitrarily. I even asked ChatGPT to compare both books with their cinematic counterparts. The AI was less than charitable, describing Hollywood’s adaptations as bastardised and bowdlerised—flattened into tidy narratives for American palates too dim to digest ambiguity. On this, we agree.

What struck me about Never Let Me Go was its richly textured mundanity. That’s apparently where AI saw the resemblance to Propensity. I’m not here to write a book report—partly because I detest spoilers, and partly because summaries miss the point. It took about seven chapters before anything ‘happened’, and then it kept happening. What had at first seemed like a neurotic, wandering narrative from the maddeningly passive Kathy H. suddenly hooked me. The reveals began to unfold. It’s a book that resists retelling. It demands firsthand experience. A vibe. A tone. A slow, aching dread.

Which brings me neatly to Cioran.

History and Utopia is a collection of essays penned in French (not his mother tongue, but you’d never guess it) while Cioran was holed up in postwar Paris. I opted for the English translation—unapologetically—and was instantly drawn in. His prose? Electric. His wit? Acidic. If Ishiguro was a comparison of style, then Cioran was one of spirit. Snark, pessimism, fatalistic shrugs toward civilisation—finally, someone speaking my language.

Unlike the cardboard cut-outs of Cold War polemics we get from most Western writers of the era, Cioran’s take is layered, uncomfortably self-aware, and written by someone who actually fled political chaos. There’s no naïve idealism here, no facile hero-villain binaries. Just a deeply weary intellect peering into the abyss and refusing to blink. It’s not just what he says, but the tone—the curled-lip sneer at utopian pretensions and historical self-delusions. If I earned even a drop of that comparison, I’ll take it.

Both Ishiguro and Cioran delivered what I didn’t know I needed: the reminder that some writers aren’t there to tell you a story. They’re there to infect you with an atmosphere. An idea. A quiet existential panic you can’t shake.

I’ve gotten what I came for from these two, though I suspect I’ll be returning, especially to Cioran. Philosophically, he’s my kind of bastard. I doubt this’ll be my last post on his work.

The Trust Myth: Harari’s Binary and the Collapse of Political Credibility

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Yuval Noah Harari, always ready with a digestible morsel for the TED-addled masses, recently declared that “democracy runs on trust, dictatorship on terror.” It’s a line with the crispness of a fortune cookie and about as much analytical depth. Designed for applause, not interrogation, it’s the sort of soundbite that flatters liberal sensibilities while sanding off the inconvenient edges of history.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Let’s be honest: this dichotomy is not merely simplistic – it’s a rhetorical sedative. It reassures those who still believe political systems are like kitchen appliances: plug-and-play models with clear instructions and honest warranties. But for anyone who’s paid attention to the actual mechanics of power, this framing is delusional.

1. Trust Was Never Earned

In the United States, trust in democratic institutions was never some noble compact forged through mutual respect and enlightened governance. It was cultivated through exclusion, propaganda, and economic bribery. The post-WWII boom offered the illusion of institutional legitimacy – but only if you were white, male, middle-class, and preferably asleep.

Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, women – none were granted the luxury of naïve trust. They were told to trust while being actively disenfranchised. To participate while being systemically excluded. So no, Harari, the machine didn’t run on trust. It ran on marketing. It ran on strategic ignorance.

2. Dictatorship Doesn’t Require Terror

Equally cartoonish is the notion that dictatorships subsist purely on terror. Many of them run quite comfortably on bureaucracy, passive conformity, and the grim seduction of order. Authoritarians know how to massage the same trust reflexes as democracies – only more bluntly. People don’t just obey out of fear. They obey out of habit. Out of resignation. Out of a grim kind of faith that someone – anyone – is in charge.

Dictatorships don’t extinguish trust. They re-route it. Away from institutions and toward strongmen. Toward myths of national greatness. Toward performative stability. It’s not that terror is absent—it’s just not the whole machine. The real engine is misplaced trust.

3. Collapse Is Bipartisan

The present moment isn’t about the erosion of a once-trustworthy system. It’s the slow-motion implosion of a confidence game on all sides. The old liberal institutions are collapsing under the weight of their hypocrisies. But the loudest critics – tech messiahs, culture warriors, authoritarian nostalgists – are no better. Their solutions are just new brands of snake oil in sleeker bottles.

Everyone is pointing fingers, and no one is credible. The public, caught between cynicism and desperation, gravitates either toward restoration fantasy (“make democracy work again”) or authoritarian theatre (“at least someone’s doing something”). Both are dead ends.

4. The Only Way Forward: Structural Reimagination

The only viable path isn’t restoration or regression. It’s reinvention. Systems that demand unconditional trust – like religions and stock markets – are bound to fail, because they rely on sustained illusions. Instead, we need systems built on earned, revocable, and continually tested trust – systems that can survive scrutiny, decentralise power, and adapt to complexity.

In other words: stop trying to repair a house built on sand. Build something else. Something messier, more modular, less mythological.

Let the TED crowd have their slogans. We’ve got work to do.

“Trust the Science,” They Said. “It’s Reproducible,” They Lied.

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—On Epistemology, Pop Psychology, and the Cult of Empirical Pretence

Science, we’re told, is the beacon in the fog – a gleaming lighthouse of reason guiding us through the turbulent seas of superstition and ignorance. But peer a bit closer, and the lens is cracked, the bulb flickers, and the so-called lighthouse keeper is just some bloke on TikTok shouting about gut flora and intermittent fasting.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

We are creatures of pattern. We impose order. We mistake correlation for causation, narrative for truth, confidence for knowledge. What we have, in polite academic parlance, is an epistemology problem. What we call science is often less Newton and more Nostradamus—albeit wearing a lab coat and wielding a p-hacked dataset.

Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit—the rotting mango of modern inquiry: nutritional science, which is to actual science what alchemy is to chemistry, or vibes are to calculus. We study food the way 13th-century monks studied demons: through superstition, confirmation bias, and deeply committed guesswork. Eat fat, don’t eat fat. Eat eggs, don’t eat eggs. Eat only between the hours of 10:00 and 14:00 under a waxing moon while humming in Lydian mode. It’s a cargo cult with chia seeds.

But why stop there? Let’s put the whole scientific-industrial complex on the slab.

Psychology: The Empirical Astrological Society

Psychology likes to think it’s scientific. Peer-reviewed journals, statistical models, the odd brain scan tossed in for gravitas. But at heart, much of it is pop divination, sugar-dusted for mass consumption. The replication crisis didn’t merely reveal cracks – it bulldozed entire fields. The Stanford Prison Experiment? A theatrical farce. Power poses? Empty gestural theatre. Half of what you read in Psychology Today could be replaced with horoscopes and no one would notice.

Medical Science: Bloodletting, But With Better Branding

Now onto medicine, that other sacred cow. We tend to imagine it as precise, data-driven, evidence-based. In practice? It’s a Byzantine fusion of guesswork, insurance forms, and pharmaceutical lobbying. As Crémieux rightly implies, medicine’s predictive power is deeply compromised by overfitting, statistical fog, and a staggering dependence on non-replicable clinical studies, many funded by those who stand to profit from the result.

And don’t get me started on epidemiology, that modern priesthood that speaks in incantations of “relative risk” and “confidence intervals” while changing the commandments every fortnight. If nutrition is theology, epidemiology is exegesis.

The Reproducibility Farce

Let us not forget the gleaming ideal: reproducibility, that cornerstone of Enlightenment confidence. The trouble is, in field after field—from economics to cancer biology—reproducibility is more aspiration than reality. What we actually get is a cacophony of studies no one bothers to repeat, published to pad CVs, p-hacked into publishable shape, and then cited into canonical status. It’s knowledge by momentum. We don’t understand the world. We just retweet it.

What, Then, Is To Be Done?

Should we become mystics? Take up tarot and goat sacrifice? Not necessarily. But we should strip science of its papal robes. We should stop mistaking publication for truth, consensus for accuracy, and method for epistemic sanctity. The scientific method is not the problem. The pretence that it’s constantly being followed is.

Perhaps knowledge doesn’t have a half-life because of progress, but because it was never alive to begin with. We are not disproving truth; we are watching fictions expire.

Closing Jab

Next time someone says “trust the science,” ask them: which bit? The part that told us margarine was manna? The part that thought ulcers were psychosomatic? The part that still can’t explain consciousness, but is confident about your breakfast?

Science is a toolkit. But too often, it’s treated like scripture. And we? We’re just trying to lose weight while clinging to whatever gospel lets us eat more cheese.

Redémarrer avec le français : Un voyage après 30 ans

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English translation below.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (in English/en anglais)

J’ai toujours aimé la langue française, depuis mon enfance. À l’université, j’ai suivi quelques semestres de français en tant qu’option libre. Même mes enfants ont été exposés à la langue dans leurs jeunes années, avec des phrases françaises glissées dans mes conversations. Mais voilà, c’était il y a longtemps ; aujourd’hui, c’est une autre histoire.

Cela fait maintenant plus de 30 ans. Bien que je capte encore des éléments de la langue de temps à autre, il y a bien longtemps que je n’ai pas regardé un film en français ou lu Le Monde. L’attrition est rapide, et c’est bien pour cela que je souhaite me remettre en selle.

Je partais souvent en voyage avec mes livres et mes albums vinyles — je sais, je suis un peu démodé — mais tout cela a été perdu dans un incendie. J’ai donc dû repartir à zéro.

Aujourd’hui, je n’ai même pas l’impression d’être un B1. Honnêtement, je dirais que viser un niveau A1 serait déjà ambitieux. Ma force a toujours été la lecture, mais mon vocabulaire en pâtit. Ensuite viennent l’écriture, suivie de l’écoute et de la parole, bien loin derrière. Bref, voici comment je compte m’y prendre pour retrouver au moins le niveau B.

Ma méthode

J’ai commencé par des matériaux de lecture basiques. Et quand je dis “basiques”, je parle de livres pour enfants. Je sais qu’il faut choisir un contenu qu’on peut lire à 98 % sans dictionnaire. Personnellement, je me permets 90 %, mais je ne cherche pas systématiquement à vérifier un mot.

Dans la pratique, je lis jusqu’au bout pour comprendre le sens global, en notant des mots ou des conjugaisons que je ne connais pas. Quand un mot m’est inconnu, je le note. Parfois, je le retrouve plus tard, et il m’éclaire. À une deuxième lecture, je cherche les mots qui restent obscurs. Comme un puzzle, tout commence à prendre sens.

Mon premier choix a été la version française du manga One Piece. Mais, comme j’avais l’impression de ne pas respecter ma règle des 90 %, j’ai vite dû abandonner. Premièrement, il y avait trop de termes maritimes à cause du thème pirate. Deuxièmement, les éléments de bande dessinée m’ont déstabilisé.

Je me suis ensuite tourné vers Le Petit Prince. Un classique, n’est-ce pas ? Eh bien, il est un peu daté. Et il ne respecte pas entièrement ma règle des 90 %, mais je persiste. En restant fidèle à ma méthode, j’ai opté pour des histoires courtes pour adultes débutants. Chaque histoire est suivie d’un résumé et de questions de compréhension, avec des réponses en français, ce qui est un bonus pour l’autocorrection.

J’ai aussi consulté des ressources en ligne pour améliorer mon écriture et ma compréhension orale. Et bien sûr, il y a trop de vidéos YouTube pour les compter.

Mon point faible reste… eh bien, mon point faible. Alors, j’ai demandé à ChatGPT des idées, histoire de ne pas avoir à engager un tuteur de langue. Petite confession : j’ai essayé une application de langue basée sur l’IA, mais je l’ai trouvée plus frustrante qu’autre chose, alors j’ai vite abandonné. ChatGPT m’a suggéré d’utiliser la fonction “saisie vocale” de Google Docs, paramétrée en français. Je l’ai testé. En lisant des passages de mes histoires disponibles, l’application comprenait parfois ce que je disais, parfois pas. Bien que cette approche ait des limites évidentes, cela m’a permis d’évaluer ma diction et de la corriger en conséquence.

Je viens de redémarrer mon parcours. J’espère trouver le temps et maintenir l’endurance nécessaires. D’ici là, voici donc le premier rapport de cette nouvelle aventure.

ENGLISH VERSION

Getting Back to French: A Journey After 30 Years

I’ve always loved the French language since I was a child. At university, I took a couple of semesters of French as free electives. I even exposed my children to it in their younger years, peppering my speech with French phrases. But that was then; this is now.

It’s been over 30 years. While I still catch bits and pieces incidentally, it’s been a long time since I watched a French-language film or read Le Monde. Attrition sets in quickly, and that’s why I want to get back in the saddle.

I used to travel with my books and record albums—dating myself, of course—but they were lost in a house fire, so I had to start over.

These days, I don’t even feel like I’m at a B1 level. Honestly, A1 feels like a stretch. My strength has always been reading, but my vocabulary has suffered. Next comes writing, followed by listening and speaking, which are far behind. Anyway, here’s my approach to getting back to at least the B-range.

My Approach

I started with basic reading materials. And by “basic,” I mean books for children. I understand that one should choose content they can read 98% of without using a dictionary. I allow myself 90%, but I don’t reach for one anyway.

In practice, I read to the end for comprehension, marking words or conjugations I don’t know. If I come across a word I don’t know, I make a note of it. Sometimes I’ll see it again, and it will click. On a second pass, I’ll look up any still-unknown words. Like a puzzle, it starts coming together and making sense.

My first choice was the French version of the One Piece manga. But, as I wasn’t following the 90% rule, I quickly had to abandon it. First, there were too many nautical terms because of the pirate theme. Second, the comic book elements threw me off.

Next, I thought of Le Petit Prince. A classic, right? Well, it’s a bit dated. And it doesn’t fully adhere to my 90% rule, but I persist. Staying true to my method, I grabbed some A1 short stories for adult beginners. Each one is followed by a summary and comprehension questions, with answers in French, which is a nice bonus for self-correction.

I’ve also engaged with some online resources for writing and listening comprehension. And, of course, there are too many YouTube videos to count.

My weakest link is still… well, my weakest link. So, I asked ChatGPT for ideas short of hiring a language tutor. Full disclosure: I tried a language-learning AI app and found it more frustrating than not, so I ditched it. ChatGPT suggested using the voice typing feature in Google Docs set to French. I tried it. Reading passages from my available stories, the app sometimes understood me, sometimes didn’t. Whilst there are clear limitations to this approach, it allowed me to assess my French pronunciation and correct it accordingly.

I’ve just restarted my journey. I hope to find the time and maintain the stamina. Until then, this is my documentation of step one.

Unwilling Steelman, Part V

Posted in agency, free will, identity, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, scienceTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

You Cannot Originate Yourself

The causa sui argument, and the final collapse of moral responsibility

“If you cannot cause yourself, you cannot cause your choices.
And if you cannot cause your choices, you cannot own them.”

Audio: NotenookLM podcast on this topic.

Everything until now has pointed to erosion:

  • Your choices are state-dependent.
  • Your identity is cumulative, not authored.
  • Your evaluations are judged by compromised observers.

But here, finally, we strike at the bedrock.

It isn’t merely that you are manipulated.
It isn’t merely that you are misperceived.
It’s that you never could have been free, even in theory.

Because you did not make yourself.

The Causa Sui Problem

To be ultimately morally responsible, you must be the origin of who you are.

  • You must have chosen your disposition.
  • You must have selected your values.
  • You must have designed your will.

But you didn’t.

You emerged:

  • With a particular genetic cocktail.
  • Into a particular historical moment.
  • Through particular developmental experiences.
  • With particular neurological quirks and vulnerabilities.

And at no point did you step outside yourself to say:

“I would like to be this kind of agent, with this kind of character.”

You were thrown — as Heidegger might say — into a situation not of your choosing, with equipment you didn’t request, subject to pressures you couldn’t anticipate.

And everything you think of as “yours” — your courage, your laziness, your generosity, your rage — is the unfolding of that original unchosen situation.

No Escape via Reflexivity

Some will protest:

“But I can reflect! I can change myself!”

But this, too, is a mirage.

Because:

  • The desire to reflect is conditioned.
  • The capacity to reflect is conditioned.
  • The courage to act on reflection is conditioned.

You didn’t author your ability to self-correct.
You simply inherited it — like a river inheriting a particular gradient.

Even your rebellion is written in your blueprint.

Freedom by Degrees Is Not Freedom

The compatibilist fallback — that freedom is just “acting according to oneself” — collapses under causa sui.

Because the self that acts was never authored. It was configured by prior causes.

If you cannot be the cause of yourself,
then you cannot be the cause of your actions in any ultimate sense.

Thus:

  • No ultimate credit for your virtues.
  • No ultimate blame for your vices.
  • Only causal flow, chemical procession, narrative stitching after the fact.

The criminal and the saint are both unlucky configurations of biology and circumstance.

TL;DR: No Self, No Sovereignty

  • To be responsible, you must be causa sui — the cause of yourself.
  • You are not.
  • Therefore, you are not ultimately responsible for your actions.
  • Therefore, free will — as traditionally imagined — does not exist.

There is choice.
But there is no chooser behind the choice.
Only the momentum of prior conditions, impersonating agency.

Series Summary: Unwilling Steelmen

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy

What remains, if not free will?
Something perhaps stranger — and possibly, more humane:

A universe of actors who deserve understanding, but not blame.
Compassion, but not judgment.
Help, but not hagiography.