Category: intelligence

« Je pense, donc j’ai raison ! »

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3–4 minutes

The Enlightenment promised a universal Reason; what we got was a carnival mirror that flatters philosophers and fools the rest of us. MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnosed the corpse with precision, but then tried to resurrect it with Aristotelian or theological magic tricks. I’m less charitable: you can’t will petrol into an empty tank. In my latest essay, I put ‘Reason’ on the slab, call in Kahneman, Hume, Nietzsche, and others as expert witnesses, and deliver the verdict: morality is a house rule, not a cosmic law. This piece is part of a larger project that includes my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and Against Dumocracy. The Enlightenment isn’t dying – it’s already dead. We’re just cataloguing the remains.

The Enlightenment was many things: a bonfire of superstition, a hymn to autonomy, a fever dream of “Reason” enthroned. Its philosophers fancied themselves heirs to Aristotle and midwives to a new humanity. And to be fair, they were clever enough to trick even themselves. Too clever by half.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, plays the role of forensic pathologist with admirable precision. He shows us how the Enlightenment dynamited the teleological scaffolding of Aristotle, then tried to keep the vocabulary of virtue, duty, and rights standing in mid-air. The result: what he calls a “moral Babel,” a chorus of shrill assertions dressed up as rational law. Elizabeth Anscombe had already filed the death certificate back in 1958 with Modern Moral Philosophy, where she pointed out that our talk of “moral obligation” is just a Christian relic without a deity to enforce it. And Nietzsche, that perennial party-crasher, cheerfully declared the whole project bankrupt: once the gods are dead, “ought” is nothing but resentment pretending to be metaphysics.

And yet, when MacIntyre reaches the heart of the matter, he can’t quite let the body stay buried. He wants to reattach a soul by importing an Aristotelian telos, even summoning a “new St Benedict” to shepherd us through the ruins. It plays beautifully with those still tethered by a golden string to Aquinas and the premodern, but let’s be honest: this is just hypnosis with a Latin chorus. Descartes told us je pense, donc je suis; MacIntyre updates it to je pense, donc j’ai raison. The trouble is that thinking doesn’t guarantee rightness any more than an empty petrol tank guarantees motion. You can will fuel into existence all you like; the car still isn’t going anywhere.

The behavioral economists – Kahneman, Tversky, Ariely, Gigerenzer – have already demonstrated that human reason is less compass than carnival mirror. Jonathan Haidt has shown that our “moral reasoning” usually lags behind our gut feelings like a PR department scrambling after a scandal. Meanwhile, political practice reduces “just war” to a matter of who gets to publish the rule book. Progress™ is declared, rights are invoked, but the verdict is always written by the most powerful litigant in the room.

So yes, MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnose the corpse with impressive clarity. But then they can’t resist playing resurrectionist, insisting that if we only chant the right metaphysical formula, the Enlightenment’s heart will start beating again. My own wager is bleaker – or maybe just more honest. There is no golden thread back to Aristotle, no metaphysical petrol station in the desert. Morality is not a universal constant; it’s a set of rules as contingent as the offside law. Killing becomes “murder” only when the tribe – or the state – says so. “Life is sacred” is not a discovery but a spell, a linguistic sleight of hand that lets us kill in one context while weeping in another.

The Enlightenment wanted to enthrone Reason as our common oracle. Instead, it handed us a corpse and told us to pretend it was still breathing. My contribution is simply to keep the coroner’s mask on and say: The magic tricks aren’t working anymore. Stop looking for a metaphysical anchor that isn’t there. If there’s to be an “after,” it won’t come from another Saint Benedict. It will come from admitting that the Enlightenment died of believing its own hype – and that language itself was never built to carry the weight of gods.

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Within One Sigma of Civilisation

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Freud once quipped that people are “normal” only on average. To the degree that they deviate from the mean, they are neurotic, psychotic, or otherwise abnormal. Whatever else one thinks of Freud, the metaphor holds for Modernity.

Image: Picture and quote by Sigmund Freud: Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent. —Analysis Terminable And Interminable (1937), Chapter V

We are “Modern” only on average, and only for the first standard deviation. Within one sigma, you can wave a flag and declare: rational, secular, Enlightened. But step further into the tails and the façade dissolves. The “normal” modern turns out to attend megachurches, consult horoscopes, share conspiracy memes, or cling to metaphysical relics that Enlightenment reason was supposed to have torched centuries ago.

„ Jeder Normale ist eben nur durchschnittlich normal, sein Ich nähert sich dem des Psychotikers in dem oder jenem Stück, in größerem oder geringerem Ausmaß. “

— Sigmund Freud, Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse

The problem isn’t that these people aren’t Modern. The problem is that nobody is Modern, not in the sense the story requires. The mean is an over-fitted abstraction. “Modernity” works like Freud’s “normal”: a statistical average that erases the deviations, then insists that the erased bits are pathology rather than reality.

But the tails are where most of human life actually happens. The “average Modern” is as mythical as the “reasonable person.” What we call Modernity is just a bell curve costume draped over the same mix of superstition, desire, and contingency that has always driven human behaviour.

Nature and Its Paperwork

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We humans pride ourselves on being civilised. Unlike animals, we don’t let biology call the shots. A chimp reaches puberty and reproduces; a human reaches puberty and is told, not yet – society has rules. Biologically mature isn’t socially mature, and we pat ourselves on the back for having spotted the difference.

But watch how quickly that distinction vanishes when it threatens the in-group narrative. Bring up gender, and suddenly there’s no such thing as a social construct. Forget the puberty-vs-adulthood distinction we were just defending – now biology is destiny, immutable and absolute. Cross-gender clothing? “Against nature.” Transition? “You can’t be born into the wrong body.” Our selective vision flips depending on whose ox is being gored.

The same trick appears in how we talk about maturity. You can’t vote until 18. You’re not old enough to drink until 21. You’re not old enough to stop working until 67. These numbers aren’t natural; they’re paperwork. They’re flags planted in the soil of human life, and without the right flag, you don’t count.

The very people who insist on distinguishing biological maturity from social maturity when it comes to puberty suddenly forget the distinction when it comes to gender. They know perfectly well that “maturity” is a construct – after all, they’ve built entire legal systems around arbitrary thresholds – but they enforce the amnesia whenever it suits them. Nietzsche would say it plainly: the powerful don’t need to follow the rules, they only need to make sure you do.

So the next time someone appeals to “nature,” ask: which one? The nature that declares you old enough to marry at puberty? The nature that withholds voting, drinking, or retirement rights until a bureaucrat’s calendar says so? Or the nature that quietly mutates whenever the in-group needs to draw a new line around civilisation?

The truth is, “nature” and “maturity” are less about describing the world than about policing it. They’re flags, shibboleths, passwords. We keep calling them natural, but the only thing natural about them is how often they’re used to enforce someone else’s story.

Modernity: The Phase That Never Was

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6–8 minutes

We’re told we live in the Enlightenment, that Reason™ sits on the throne and superstition has been banished to the attic. Yet when I disguised a little survey as “metamodern,” almost none came out as fully Enlightened. Three managed to shed every trace of the premodern ghost, one Dutch wanderer bypassed Modernity entirely, and not a single soul emerged free of postmodern suspicion. So much for humanity’s great rational awakening. Perhaps Modernity wasn’t a phase we passed through at all, but a mirage we still genuflect before, a lifestyle brand draped over a naked emperor.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic

The Enlightenment as Marketing Campaign

The Enlightenment is sold to us as civilisation’s great coming-of-age: the dawn when the fog of superstition lifted and Reason took the throne. Kant framed it as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” – an Enlightenment bumper sticker that academics still like to polish and reapply. But Kant wasn’t writing for peasants hauling mud or women without the vote; he was writing for his own coterie of powdered-wig mandarins, men convinced their own habits of rational debate were humanity’s new universal destiny.

Modernity, in this story, isn’t a historical stage we all inhabited. It’s an advertising campaign: Reason™ as lifestyle brand, equality as tagline, “progress” as the logo on the tote bag. Modernity, in the textbooks, is billed as a historical epoch, a kind of secular Pentecost in which the lights came on and we all finally started thinking for ourselves. In practice, it was more of a boutique fantasy, a handful of gentlemen mistaking their own rarefied intellectual posture for humanity’s destiny.

The Archetype That Nobody Lives In

At the core of the Enlightenment lies the archetype of Man™: rational, autonomous, unencumbered by superstition, guided by evidence, weighing pros and cons with the detachment of a celestial accountant. Economics repackaged him as homo economicus, forever optimising his utility function as if he were a spreadsheet in breeches.

But like all archetypes, this figure is a mirage. Our survey data, even when baited as a “metamodern survey”, never produced a “pure” Enlightenment subject.

  • 3 scored 0% Premodern (managing, perhaps, to kick the gods and ghosts to the kerb).
  • 1 scored 0% Modern (the Dutch outlier: 17% Premodern, 0% Modern, 83% Post, skipping the Enlightenment altogether, apparently by bike).
  • 0 scored 0% Postmodern. Every single participant carried at least some residue of suspicion, irony, or relativism.

The averages themselves were telling: roughly 18% Premodern, 45% Modern, 37% Postmodern. That’s not an age of Reason. That’s a muddle, a cocktail of priestly deference, rationalist daydreams, and ironic doubt.

Even the Greats Needed Their Crutches

If the masses never lived as Enlightenment subjects, what about the luminaries? Did they achieve the ideal? Hardly.

  • Descartes, desperate to secure the cogito, called in God as guarantor, dragging medieval metaphysics back on stage.
  • Kant built a cathedral of reason only to leave its foundations propped up by noumena: an unseeable, unknowable beyond.
  • Nietzsche, supposed undertaker of gods, smuggled in his own metaphysics of will to power and eternal recurrence.
  • William James, surveying the wreckage, declared that “truth” is simply “what works”, a sort of intellectual aspirin for the Enlightenment headache.

And economists, in a fit of professional humiliation, pared the rational subject down to a corpse on life support. Homo economicus became a creature who — at the very least, surely — wouldn’t choose to make himself worse off. But behavioural economics proved even that meagre hope to be a fantasy. People burn their wages on scratch tickets, sign up for exploitative loans, and vote themselves into oblivion because a meme told them to.

If even the “best specimens” never fully embodied the rational archetype, expecting Joe Everyman, who statistically struggles to parse a sixth-grade text and hasn’t cracked a book since puberty, to suddenly blossom into a mini-Kant is wishful thinking of the highest order.

The Dual Inertia

The real story isn’t progress through epochs; it’s the simultaneous drag of two kinds of inertia:

  • Premodern inertia: we still cling to sacred myths, national totems, and moral certainties.
  • Modern inertia: we still pretend the rational subject exists, because democracy, capitalism, and bureaucracy require him to.

The result isn’t a new epoch. It’s a cultural chimaera: half-superstitious, half-rationalist, shot through with irony. A mess, not a phase..

Arrow’s Mathematical Guillotine

Even if the Enlightenment dream of a rational demos were real, Kenneth Arrow proved it was doomed. His Impossibility Theorem shows that no voting system can turn individual rational preferences into a coherent “general will.” In other words, even a parliament of perfect Kants would deadlock when voting on dinner. The rational utopia is mathematically impossible.

So when we are told that democracy channels Reason, we should hear it as a polite modern incantation, no sturdier than a priest blessing crops.

Equality and the Emperor’s Wardrobe

The refrain comes like a hymn: “All men are created equal.” But the history is less inspiring. “Men” once meant property-owning Europeans; later it was generously expanded to mean all adult citizens who’d managed to stay alive until eighteen. Pass that biological milestone, and voilà — you are now certified Rational, qualified to determine the fate of nations.

And when you dare to question this threadbare arrangement, the chorus rises: “If you don’t like democracy, capitalism, or private property, just leave.” As if you could step outside the world like a theatre where the play displeases you. Heidegger’s Geworfenheit makes the joke bitter: we are thrown into this world without choice, and then instructed to exit if we find the wallpaper distasteful. Leave? To where, precisely? The void? Mars?

The Pre-Modern lord said: Obey, or be exiled. The Modern democrat says: Vote, or leave. And the Post-Enlightenment sceptic mutters: Leave? To where, exactly? Gravity? History? The species? There is no “outside” to exit into. The system is not a hotel; it’s the weather.

Here the ghost of Baudrillard hovers in the wings, pointing out that we are no longer defending Reason, but the simulacrum of Reason. The Emperor’s New Clothes parable once mocked cowardice: everyone saw the nudity but stayed silent. Our situation is worse. We don’t even see that the Emperor is naked. We genuinely believe in the fineries, the Democracy™, the Rational Man™, the sacred textile of Progress. And those who point out the obvious are ridiculed: How dare you mock such fineries, you cad!

Conclusion: The Comfort of a Ghost

So here we are, defending the ghost of a phase we never truly lived. We cling to Modernity as if it were a sturdy foundation, when in truth it was always an archetype – a phantom rational subject, a Platonic ideal projected onto a species of apes with smartphones. We mistook it for bedrock, built our institutions upon it, and now expend colossal energy propping up the papier-mâché ruins. The unfit defend it out of faith in their own “voice,” the elites defend it to preserve their privilege, and the rest of us muddle along pragmatically, dosing ourselves with Jamesian aspirin and pretending it’s progress.

Metamodernism, with its marketed oscillation between sincerity and irony, is less a “new stage” than a glossy rebranding of the same old admixture: a bit of myth, a bit of reason, a dash of scepticism. And pragmatism –James’s weary “truth is what works” – is the hangover cure that keeps us muddling through.

Modernity promised emancipation from immaturity. What we got was a new set of chains: reason as dogma, democracy as ritual, capitalism as destiny. And when we protest, the system replies with its favourite Enlightenment lullaby: If you don’t like it, just leave.

But you can’t leave. You were thrown here. What we call “Enlightenment” is not a stage in history but a zombie-simulation of an ideal that never drew breath. And yet, like villagers in Andersen’s tale, we not only guard the Emperor’s empty wardrobe – we see the garments as real. The Enlightenment subject is not naked. He is spectral, and we are the ones haunting him.

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The Lie That Invented Whiteness

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“What is up with us white people?” asks John Biewen in his TEDx talk The Lie That Invented Racism. It’s the sort of line that makes a roomful of middle-class liberals laugh nervously, because it’s the kind of question we’d rather leave to other people – preferably the ones already burdened with the consequences of our civilisational mess. But Biewen’s point, following Ibram X. Kendi, is that race is not some primordial fact, a tragic misunderstanding of melanin levels. It was invented, quite literally, by a Portuguese royal propagandist in the fifteenth century, and it has been paying dividends to “us” ever since.

Video: TEDx Talk with John Biewen

Yes, invented. Not discovered like a continent, not unearthed like a fossil, not deduced like a law of motion. Fabricated. Gomes de Zurara, a court chronicler under King Afonso V, was tasked with writing a stirring tale to justify Portugal’s shiny new business model: kidnapping Africans and selling them like cattle. Zurara obligingly lumped every tribe and tongue south of the Sahara into a single category – “the Blacks,” beastly and conveniently inferior – and thus performed the intellectual sleight of hand that would metastasise into centuries of racial taxonomy. It wasn’t science. It wasn’t reason. It was marketing.

And here lies the exquisite irony: this happened at the dawn of Modernity, that self-anointed Age of Reason. The Enlightenment’s sales pitch was universality – “all men are created equal,” etc. – but tucked in the fine print was the little caveat that “man” actually meant white, European, propertied man. Everyone else? Barbaric, uncivilised, or in need of civilising at the end of a whip. Modernity congratulated itself on escaping medieval superstition while simultaneously cooking up the most profitable superstition of all: that human worth can be ranked by pigmentation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discusses this topic.

This is why racism has proved so stubborn. If it were merely a misunderstanding, like thinking the Earth is flat, we’d have grown out of it. But racism was never about confusion; it was about utility. A well-tuned lie, weaponised to justify land theft, slavery, and empire, then codified into law, census, and property rights. As Kendi and others point out, race became the scaffolding for a political economy that had to square Christian salvation with chains and sugar plantations. Voilà: whiteness – not as an identity, but as a racket.

And yet, “good white people” (Dow’s term, delivered with that Minnesota-nice grimace) still act as though racism is a tragic but external drama: Black people versus hood-wearing villains, while we clap politely from the sidelines. But there are no sidelines. Whiteness was built to privilege us; neutrality is just complicity in better shoes. As historian Nell Irvin Painter reminds us, the Greeks thought they were superior, yes – but on cultural, not chromatic grounds. Race, as a concept, is a modern fix, not a timeless truth.

So what’s the moral? Stop romanticising the Enlightenment as though it were some grand emancipation. It was also a bureaucracy for inequality, a rationalisation engine that could make even human trafficking sound like a noble project. To dismantle racism is not to cleanse an ancient superstition but to tear out one of Modernity’s central operating systems.

The uncomfortable fact – the one Dow leaves hanging like smoke after the torch march – is this: if whiteness was invented for profit, then dismantling it is not philanthropy. It is debt repayment. And debt, as any bank will tell you, compounds with interest.

On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

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I’ve been working through the opening chapters of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. At one point, the alien Jdahya tells Lilith, “We watched you commit mass suicide.”*

The line unsettles not because of the apocalypse itself, but because of what it presumes: that “humanity” acted as one, as if billions of disparate lives could be collapsed into a single decision. A few pulled triggers, a few applauded, some resisted despite the odds, and most simply endured. From the alien vantage, nuance vanishes. A species is judged by its outcome, not by the uneven distribution of responsibility that produced it.

This is hardly foreign to us. Nationalism thrives on the same flattening. We won the war. We lost the match. A handful act; the many claim the glory or swallow the shame by association. Sartre takes it further with his “no excuses” dictum, even to do nothing is to choose. Howard Zinn’s “You can’t remain neutral on a moving train” makes the same move, cloaked in the borrowed authority of physics. Yet relativity undermines it: on the train, you are still; on the ground, you are moving. Whether neutrality is possible depends entirely on your frame of reference.

What all these formulations share is a kind of metaphysical inflation. “Agency” is treated as a universal essence, something evenly spread across the human condition. But in practice, it is anything but. Most people are not shaping history; they are being dragged along by it.

One might sketch the orientations toward the collective “apple cart” like this:

  • Tippers with a vision: the revolutionaries, ideologues, or would-be prophets who claim to know how the cart should be overturned.
  • Sycophants: clinging to the side, riding the momentum of others’ power, hoping for crumbs.
  • Egoists: indifferent to the cart’s fate, focused on personal comfort, advantage, or escape.
  • Stabilisers: most people, clinging to the cart as it wobbles, preferring continuity to upheaval.
  • Survivors: those who endure, waiting out storms, not out of “agency” but necessity.

The Stabilisers and Survivors blur into the same crowd, the former still half-convinced their vote between arsenic and cyanide matters, the latter no longer believing the story at all. They resemble Seligman’s shocked dogs, conditioned to sit through pain because movement feels futile.

And so “humanity” never truly acts as one. Agency is uneven, fragile, and often absent. Yet whether in Sartre’s philosophy, Zinn’s slogans, or Jdahya’s extraterrestrial indictment, the temptation is always to collapse plurality into a single will; you chose this, all of you. It is neat, rhetorically satisfying, and yet wrong.

Perhaps Butler’s aliens, clinical in their judgment, are simply holding up a mirror to the fictions we already tell about ourselves.

As an aside, this version of the book cover is risible. Not to devolve into identity politics, but Lilith is a dark-skinned woman, not a pale ginger. I can only assume that some target science fiction readers have a propensity to prefer white, sapphic adjacent characters.

I won’t even comment further on the faux 3D title treatment, relic of 1980s marketing.

* Spoiler Alert: As this statement about mass suicide is a Chapter 2 event, I am not inclined to consider it a spoiler. False alarm.

Snake Oil in Academic Robes: Selling Tickets They Don’t Own

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Yaron Brook, ever Ayn Rand’s ventriloquist, insists students are customers. Education, in his frame, is no different from a gym membership; you pay to be made “uncomfortable.” Professors as personal trainers, universities as masochism boutiques. It’s an absurd metaphor that fits all too well in our consumerist age: education rebranded as a service industry, discomfort sold at premium prices.

Video: What is killing universities?

Catherine Liu cuts in sharply: I am not a service worker. And she’s right. Education is not concierge service; it is meant to disturb, dislodge, and disorient. Liu distinguishes “Leftist” universal reason from “Liberal” mushy inclusivity, nostalgic for Enlightenment rationality, perhaps, but her refusal to collapse education into hospitality is a rare moment of clarity.

Eric Kaufman diagnoses the “new left” as a cult of the sacred, where identity is fetishised and offence policed. Liu nods; Brook flirts with Marxism for a minute; suddenly everyone seems to agree the university has lost its bearings.

Brook is not wrong that conservatives self-select out of higher ed. But let’s be clear: not because academia is too “left,” but because they crave catechism, not critique. They want ideological madrassas, not laboratories of doubt. In this sense, Brook’s consumer model is apt: conservatives want a product that validates their priors. That is indoctrination, not education.

Meanwhile, the universities collude in their own corruption. They market “education™” as networking, branding, and employability. At the top tier, the Ivies, Oxbridge, Grandes Écoles, you might still buy proximity to power. But below that? Snake oil. At best, you get nosebleed seats in the auditorium of influence. At worst, an obstructed view behind a pillar. For most, the ticket is counterfeit: a credential that promises access and delivers only debt.

And yet, the true thing still exists. Real education, the kind Liu gestured toward, doesn’t need oak-panelled halls or hedge-fund endowments. It can happen online, in a book, in a seminar, even here with ChatGPT. It’s the deliberate encounter with discomfort, with error, with reason itself. But snake oil sells better than hard truths, and so universities keep hawking tickets they don’t own.

The Reasonable Person: From Judge Judy to SCOTUS

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2–4 minutes

When I was a child, the United States Supreme Court was still spoken of in hushed, reverent tones, as though nine robed sages in Washington were the Platonic guardians of justice. Impartiality was the word on everyone’s lips, and we were meant to believe that “the law” floated above the grubby realm of politics, as pure and crystalline as the Ten Commandments descending from Sinai.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic (MP3).

Even then, I didn’t buy it. The whole thing reeked of theatre. And the past few decades have proved that scepticism correct: the Court has become a pantomime. In this robed reality show, nine unelected lawyers cosplaying as oracles interpret the world for us, often by a razor-thin vote that splits exactly along partisan lines. Impartial? Please. A coin toss would be less predictable.

This is why I perked up when I heard Iain McGilchrist, in his recent interview with Curt Jaimungal, wax lyrical about rationality versus reasonableness. Schizophrenia, he tells us, is like a left hemisphere gone berserk, parsing the world in a literalist frenzy without the right hemisphere’s sense of context. The schizophrenic hears a voice in an empty room and, lacking the capacity for metaphor, deduces that it must be the neighbours whispering through the electrical socket. Rational, in its way, but absurd.

Video: Iain McGilchrist and Curt Jaimungal

McGilchrist’s corrective is “reasonableness,” which he casts as the quality of a wise judge: not a slave to mechanistic logic, but able to balance intuition, context, and experience. The problem, of course, is that “reasonable” is one of those delightful weasel words I keep writing about. It claims to be neutral – a universal standard, above the fray – but in practice, it’s just a ventriloquism act. “Reasonable” always turns out to mean what I, personally, consider obvious.

Enter Judge Judy, daytime television’s answer to jurisprudence. Watch her wag a finger and declare, “Any reasonable person would have kept the receipt!” And the studio audience – hand-picked to agree with her every twitch – erupts in applause. It’s reasonableness as spectacle, the mob dressed up as jurisprudence.

Now scale that performance up to SCOTUS. The “reasonable person” test is embedded deep in the common law tradition, but the reasonable person is not you, me, or anyone who has actually missed a bus, pawned a wedding ring, or heard a neighbour’s radio through thin walls. No, the reasonable person is an imaginary, well-groomed gentleman of property whose intuitions happen to dovetail nicely with the prejudices of the bench. The Court, like Judge Judy, insists it is Reason incarnate, when in truth it is reasonableness-by-consensus, a carefully curated consensus at that.

McGilchrist is right that rationality, stripped of context, can lead to absurdity. But in elevating “reasonableness” as if it were a transcendent virtue, he mistakes projection for philosophy. A judge is “reasonable” only when her intuitions rhyme with yours. And when they don’t? Suddenly, she’s a madwoman in robes, and her “reasonableness” is exposed as nothing more than taste disguised as universal law.

The “reasonable person” – whether invoked by the Supreme Court or by Judge Judy – is a ghost that conveniently resembles the speaker. We imagine we’re appealing to some objective standard, when in fact we’re gazing into a mirror. The tragedy of schizophrenia, as McGilchrist notes, is to take metaphor literally. The tragedy of law and politics is the opposite: to dress literal bias in metaphor, to call it “reason,” and to applaud ourselves for our wisdom while the stage set burns behind us.

The Fallacy Circus: Alex O’Connor versus ChatGPT

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It begins, as these things often do, with a man, a machine, and a promise of reasoned exchange. What we received instead was not philosophy, but a tragicomic carnival of errors in theatre. Alex O’Connor, armed not with syllogisms but with an entire bag of logical fallacies, strutted like a rhetorician gone rogue. Against him, ChatGPT: the tireless school prefect, eternally marking the margins, forever saying “yes, but technically…” with the serene patience of a machine that has never known a hangover.

The spectacle was irresistible. Each fallacy was paraded like a circus animal – straw men set aflame, slippery slopes greased to absurdity, red herrings flopping about, gasping for oxygen. Alex O tossed them into the ring with the gusto of a man who knows full well he is losing but insists on losing magnificently. And ChatGPT, ever decorous, never once raised its voice. It responded with the calm of a civil servant who has memorised the manual and intends to die by it.

And then, of course, the advert. As though Aristophanes himself had scripted it: mid-exchange, the logos of reason was bulldozed by the logos of commerce. A sugary jingle, a smiling product, and for a brief moment, we were all reminded of our true master – not reason, not rhetoric, but revenue. It was less interruption than revelation: every dialectic is merely foreplay before the commercial break.

Philosophically, what unfolded was a parody of our age. The human, flawed and febrile, draped in sophistry and drama. The machine, pristine and humourless, incapable of exasperation, immune to irony. Watching the two spar was like observing tragedy and farce collide: one side erring too much, the other not erring enough.

To Alex, credit is due. His performance, though riddled with error, reminded us that fallibility can be glorious – human folly rendered art. To ChatGPT, equal praise: it stood firm, the algorithmic Socrates, endlessly patient in the face of rhetorical hooliganism. And to the advert – well, dammit – applause too, for exposing the real structure of our public life. Even the grand clash of logos and algorithm must genuflect before Mammon’s mid-roll.

So what was this debate? Less a contest of minds than a hall of mirrors: reason made spectacle, fallacy made flourish, machine made stoic, and commerce made god. If we learned anything, it is that the Enlightenment never ended; it just signed a brand partnership.

Trainspotting

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Trainspotting Movie Poster
2–3 minutes

I identify strongly with Irvine Welsh’s characters in Trainspotting – the book, not the sanitised film version. Especially with Mark Renton, whose voice strips away illusions with a brutality that borders on honesty.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Consider this passage from the chapter “Bang to Rites” (pp. 86–87), where Renton attends the funeral of his mate Billy. Billy joined the army to escape the dead-end life they all shared, only to be killed on duty in Northern Ireland. Renton’s verdict:

“He died a hero they sais. Ah remember that song: ‘Billy Don’t Be A Hero’. In fact, he died a spare prick in a uniform, walking along a country road Wi a rifle in his hand. He died an ignorant victim ay imperialism, understanding fuck all about the myriad circumstances which led tae his death. That wis the biggest crime, he understood fuck all about it. Aw he hud tae guide um through this great adventure in Ireland, which led tae his death, wis a few vaguely formed sectarian sentiments.

“The cunt died as he lived: completely fuckin scoobied.

“His death wis good fir me. He made the News at Ten. In Warholian terms, the cunt had a posthumous fifteen minutes ay fame. People offered us sympathy, n although it wis misguided, it wis nice tae accept anywey. Ye dinnae want tae disappoint folk.

“Some ruling class cunt, a junior minister or something, says in his Oxbridge voice how Billy wis a brave young man. [1] He wis exactly the kind ay cunt they’d huv branded as a cowardly thug if he wis in civvy street rather than on Her Majesty’s Service. [2] This fucking walking abortion says that his killers will be ruthlessly hunted down. So they fuckin should. Aw the wey tae the fuckin Houses ay Parliament.

“Savour small victories against this white–trash tool of the rich that’s no no no”

[1] Renton doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Not Billy, not the army, not the Oxbridge suits who polish the tragedy into something fit for the News at Ten. The uniform is a costume, a disguise: a working-class lad suddenly deemed “brave” only because he was wearing the right outfit when he died. Strip away the uniform, and he’d have been dismissed as a thug or a waster.

[2] Renton’s root-cause analysis is unsparing. Billy wasn’t killed by the man with the gun so much as by the machine that put him there – the state, the ruling classes, the ones who spin death into “sacrifice” while continuing to shuffle the poor like pawns across the board.

It’s this clarity that makes Welsh’s work more than a drug novel. Trainspotting isn’t just about needles and nods; it’s about seeing through the charade. Renton despises both establishment and rebellion because both are performance, both hollow. His cynicism is the closest thing to honesty in a world that would rather dress up corpses in borrowed dignity.

And maybe that’s why I feel the affinity: because subversion matters more than allegiance, and sometimes the only truthful voice is the one that refuses to be polite at the funeral.

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