These are the first two chapter titles of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I suspect I’ll be reading this book twice for good measure. I’m four chapters in, with three to go, and eager for a deeper dive.
Despite being published in 1955, Fromm’s analysis remains strikingly relevant. Mark Fisher picks up a similar thread in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, but whereas Fisher dissects the ideological stranglehold of late capitalism, Fromm, as a psychiatrist, turns the lens on human nature itself. He questions the very concept of normalcy—something we tend to accept uncritically, much like Michel Foucault would in the following generation.
I’ll hold off on any sweeping conclusions until I’ve finished the book (and, more likely, after a second read). But for now, consider this a tentative recommendation. Snow Crash was an amusing detour, but non-fiction is where I feel most at home.
Humans, we are told, are exceptional—unlike the rest of the lowly animal kingdom. We alone possess reason, morality, and the ability to transcend our base instincts. And yet, curiously, this argument is rolled out only when convenient. At times, we are commanded to rise above our primal urges; at others, we are scolded for even thinking about resisting them. This ideological schizophrenia is no accident—it is a feature, not a bug, of our prevailing moral and economic order.
The contradictions of “human nature” arguments can be broken down into two key patterns:
A. We must transcend our animal instincts—but only when they threaten social or economic order.
B. We must accept our animal instincts as unchangeable—but only when they reinforce existing power structures.
This hypocrisy is especially visible in how capitalism and morality are framed. Let’s examine two case studies.
Case 1: Prostitution—A Market That Must Be Morally Suppressed
Sex is as fundamental a biological drive as hunger or thirst. One would think that in a world where everything is commodified, prostitution—the most direct transaction of supply and demand—would be embraced by free-market capitalists. But no. We are told that engaging in this “base” activity is degrading, immoral, and must be curtailed. The same capitalists who defend free enterprise at all costs suddenly become moralists, urging us to resist temptation and rise above our urges. Sex, despite being one of the most natural acts imaginable, is treated as an impulse to be tamed rather than an economic exchange to be normalised.
Case 2: Capitalism—A System We Must Accept as “Natural”
Contrast this with how we are told to think about capitalism. Greed, exploitation, and ruthless competition? Those are “just human nature.” The strong thrive, and the weak perish. We are warned not to question the system because to do so would be to fight against nature itself. Socialism? A naive fantasy. Economic cooperation? Impossible. Mutual aid? Utopian nonsense. We must accept that humans are selfish creatures, that hierarchy is inevitable, and that billionaires accumulating obscene wealth while millions starve is simply the way of things.
Why are we ordered to suppress our instincts in one case yet surrender to them in another? Because morality, in its institutional form, is not about virtue—it is about control.
The Convenient Flexibility of “Human Nature”
This selective logic is designed to keep power structures intact. The rules shift depending on whose interests are at stake:
If an instinct challenges profit or control, it must be suppressed.
If an instinct benefits the ruling order, it must be accepted as natural.
Thus, the same societies that demand moral restraint when it comes to sex, leisure, or pleasure suddenly rediscover their inner Darwinist when defending capitalist greed and economic cruelty.
The “Natural Order” Myth
The claim that capitalism is the inevitable result of human nature is one of history’s greatest ideological scams. If it were indeed “natural,” it would not require:
Constant propaganda to reinforce its legitimacy.
Violent suppression of alternative systems.
Trillions in government bailouts every time it fails.
Moreover, humans are not only competitive, selfish creatures. We are also wired for cooperation, altruism, and communal living—traits conveniently erased from discussions about economics.
Final Thought: Breaking the Cycle
If we can rise above base instincts for sex and violence, why can’t we rise above capitalist greed and exploitation? Why is overcoming “human nature” only demanded when it suits power? The truth is, we are only commanded to rise above when it keeps us obedient—and ordered to accept reality when it keeps the powerful in control.
The only real rebellion is to reject this hypocrisy entirely. The future belongs not to those who passively accept the contradictions of the present, but to those who refuse to play by its schizophrenic rules.
It’s not uncommon to label workers under the capitalist system as wage slaves.
As with the abolition of slavery in the United States, the future will one day recoil at Capitalism, wondering how humanity could ever have justified the exploitation of others for commerce and profit. Then again, that’s the same question, isn’t it?
As with the old story, a man asked a lady: “Would you be willing to sleep with me if I paid you £1,000,000?” Without hesitation, she answered, “Yes.” “And what if I only paid you £5?” The irate lady fumed: “£5? What do you think I am?” The man replied: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re trying to determine the degree.”
Capitalism is only a matter of degree from slavery. In practice, slavery is a Capitalist’s wet dream.
The genesis of the Modernity Worldview Survey was Metamodernism. Is this still a thing? In recent years, metamodernism has emerged as a supposed successor to postmodernism, claiming to transcend the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. Yet, upon closer examination, this framework reveals itself not as a genuine paradigm shift but rather as a modernist invention that fails to escape the very critiques it attempts to address.
Despite its claims of oscillation between poles, metamodernism betrays its modernist underpinnings through its implicit teleology and notion of progress. The very framing of “meta” as beyond or transcending suggests a linear progression that is fundamentally at odds with the postmodern rejection of grand narratives. Metamodernism positions itself as forward-moving whilst attempting to recapture elements of premodernity, revealing an anxiety about being perceived as regressive or naive.
Podcast: Audio version of this content
This desire to have it both ways—to acknowledge the constructed nature of meaning whilst still pursuing transcendent meaning—doesn’t represent a resolution so much as a psychological coping mechanism. The cognitive dissonance created by attempting to simultaneously hold contradictory positions is assuaged through a clever rhetorical move: claiming that oscillation itself is the point.
A Rebranding Exercise
What metamodernism presents as novel is ultimately a recombination of elements from premodern, modern, and postmodern frameworks without resolving their fundamental contradictions. Rather than being mutually exclusive from these earlier paradigms, it cherry-picks aspects of each whilst maintaining the basic ontological framework of modernism.
The notion that one can meaningfully “oscillate” between accepting objective and subjective realities is particularly problematic. Either reality has objective features, or it doesn’t—pretending otherwise doesn’t create a new philosophical paradigm but rather a convenient means of avoiding the implications of either position.
Postmodern Irony in Motion
Perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of metamodernism is not as a sincere attempt to move beyond postmodernism but as postmodernism performing its own critique. Viewed through this lens, metamodernism becomes postmodern irony in motion—a knowing wink at the impossibility of escaping construction whilst performatively engaging with the desire to do so.
The irony deepens when we consider that “postmodernism” itself is essentially an externally imposed label rather than a self-identification. Most thinkers characterised as postmodernists reject the label, which functions primarily as a modernist attempt to categorise and contain ideas that fundamentally challenge its frameworks.
Art vs. Philosophy
Where metamodernism succeeds is as a descriptive label for certain artistic and cultural productions that deliberately play in the space between irony and sincerity. Works like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” the television series “BoJack Horseman,” and Wes Anderson’s films effectively combine postmodern techniques with sincere emotional engagement.
However, what works as an artistic sensibility fails as a comprehensive philosophical framework or moral compass. The oscillation that enriches art becomes paralysing when applied to ethics or ontology. A moral framework requires some stable reference points; constantly shifting between believing in objective moral truths and viewing morality as entirely constructed provides no reliable guide for actual decision-making.
Insider vs. Outsider Perspectives
Like religious frameworks that balance literal and metaphorical interpretations, metamodernism may function as a lived experience for those who embrace it, even if it doesn’t hold up to external philosophical scrutiny. The cognitive manoeuvres that appear as tricks or inconsistencies to outsiders often feel like natural, intuitive ways of navigating complexity to those within the system.
This insider/outsider divide recalls Thomas Nagel’s famous “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (PDF) thought experiment—there may be experiential aspects of inhabiting a metamodern worldview that aren’t fully comprehensible from the outside. Yet this doesn’t invalidate external critique; inconsistencies and contradictions still matter philosophically.
Conclusion: Beyond Labels
Perhaps the most postmodern insight is recognising that we cannot escape having an ideology—even a position of having no ideology is itself an ideology. What distinguishes various approaches isn’t whether they have ideologies but how explicitly they acknowledge them, how consistently they apply them, and how willing they are to subject them to revision.
Metamodernism, for all its aspirations to transcend earlier frameworks, ultimately reveals more about our contemporary psychological condition than it offers as a coherent philosophical position. It captures our desire to maintain meaning in a world where we’ve recognised its contingency—a desire that may be fundamentally human, even if philosophically untenable.
Rather than seeking yet another “-ism” to resolve our existential and philosophical tensions, perhaps we might more honestly confront the limitations and partialities of all our frameworks, recognising that the search for a perfect synthesis may itself be a modernist fantasy.
This will be hilarious to approximately no one. I meant to ask ChatGPT 03-mini-high to generate a dummy record. My compromised motor skills and concomitant keyboard typing skills rendered this as funny. Except for the redacted bits in bold, this is the code it rendered. Pay special attention to the query’s input variables highlighted in post-production with 🤔 emojis.
Let’s add a bit to write a funny record per the schema.
import mysql.connector
import logging
import uuid
# Configure logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
def test_mysql_connection():
"""Test MySQL connection and write a funny record to the database."""
logger.info("Testing MySQL connection...")
try:
logger.info("Connecting to MySQL...")
connection = mysql.connector.connect(
host='127.0.0.1',
user='[user]',
password='[password]',
database='[database]',
port=3306
)
if connection.is_connected():
db_info = connection.get_server_info()
logger.info(f"Connected to MySQL Server version {db_info}")
cursor = connection.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT DATABASE();")
record = cursor.fetchone()
logger.info(f"Connected to database: {record[0]}")
# Insert a funny record into survey_results
funny_survey_data = {
"session_id": str(uuid.uuid4()),
"q1_response": 1,
"q2_response": 2,
"q3_response": 3,
"q4_response": 4,
"q5_response": 5,
"q6_response": 6,
"n1": 42, 🤔
"n2": 69, 🤔
"n3": 420, 🤔
"plot_x": 3.14, 🤔
"plot_y": 2.71, 🤔
"browser": "FunnyBrowser 9000",
"region": "JokeRegion",
"source": "comedy",
"hash_email_session": "f00b4r-hash" 🤔
}
query = """INSERT INTO survey_results
(session_id, q1_response, q2_response, q3_response, q4_response, q5_response, q6_response,
n1, n2, n3, plot_x, plot_y, browser, region, source, hash_email_session)
VALUES (%(session_id)s, %(q1_response)s, %(q2_response)s, %(q3_response)s, %(q4_response)s,
%(q5_response)s, %(q6_response)s, %(n1)s, %(n2)s, %(n3)s,
%(plot_x)s, %(plot_y)s, %(browser)s, %(region)s, %(source)s, %(hash_email_session)s)
"""
logger.info("Inserting funny survey record...")
cursor.execute(query, funny_survey_data)
connection.commit()
logger.info(f"Funny survey record inserted with ID: {cursor.lastrowid}")
except mysql.connector.Error as e:
logger.error(f"Error during MySQL operation: {e}")
finally:
if 'cursor' in locals() and cursor:
cursor.close()
if 'connection' in locals() and connection.is_connected():
connection.close()
logger.info("MySQL connection closed.")
if __name__ == "__main__":
test_mysql_connection()
Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus is a masterclass in well-constructed rhetoric. A gifted storyteller, Harari wields his prose with the finesse of a seasoned polemicist, but his penchant for reductionism undermines the very complexity he claims to dissect. As a historian, he undoubtedly grasps the intricate web of historical causality, yet he distils it into convenient dichotomies, cherry-picking points to prop up his preferred narrative. He doesn’t just oversimplify history – he commits the cardinal sin of overfitting the past to predict the future, as though the arc of history bends neatly to his will.
Harari offers binary possibilities, but his worldview is anything but ambivalent. He is a Modernist to his core, a devoted evangelist of Progress™ with a capital P. His unwavering faith in the forward march of human civilisation betrays an almost theological zeal, as if history itself were a teleological engine hurtling toward an inevitable destiny.
More troubling, though, is his tendency to step beyond his lane, veering into the treacherous territory of the Dunning-Kruger effect. He confuses the illusion of control with actual control, mistaking correlation for causation and influence for omnipotence. The result? A grand narrative that seduces with its elegance but crumbles under scrutiny – an edifice of certainty built on the shaky foundations of conjecture.
In the end, Nexus is a fascinating read, not because it reveals an immutable truth about our future, but because it so brilliantly encapsulates the ambitions – and the blind spots – of its author.
For no apparent reason, I was pondering lost temporal words, so I paid a quick visit to ChatGPT and wanted to share the wealth. Perhaps we can bring some of these back from the grave.
Audio: Podcast prattle of this content.
Eldernight: Referring to the night before last, this term has long since faded from common usage.
Erewhile: Meaning “a little while ago” or “previously.”
Ereyesterday: Meaning “the day before yesterday” – a direct counterpart to “overmorrow.”
Erstwhile: Similar to “erewhile,” it denotes something that was formerly the case.
Fortnight: Short for “fourteen nights,” this term refers to a two-week period and is still in use in British English.
Nudiustertian: A wonderfully specific Latin-derived term meaning “of or relating to the day before yesterday.”
Overmorrow: This term was used to indicate the day after tomorrow.
Sennight: Derived from “seven nights,” this word was used to mean a week.
Umwhile: Another Scottish term meaning “at times” or “occasionally” in the past.
Whilom: An archaic term meaning “formerly” or “once upon a time.”
Yore: While you touched on similar concepts with “whilom,” this term specifically means “of long ago” or “of time long past.”
Yestereve: This term referred to the evening of the previous day, essentially what we’d call “last night.”
Yestermorrow: An intriguing word that denoted “yesterday morning.”
Yestreen: A Scottish and Northern English word meaning “yesterday evening” or “last night” – similar to “yestereve” but with different regional origins.
These terms, though largely obsolete, offer a glimpse into the linguistic richness of earlier English, providing nuanced ways to express temporal relationships that have since been lost in modern usage.
If you are reading this, you are likely familiar with David Chalmers’ idea of the Hard Problem of Consciousness—the thorny, maddeningly unsolvable question of why and how subjective experience arises from physical processes. If you’re not, welcome to the rabbit hole. Here, we’ll plunge deeper by examining the perspective of Stuart Hameroff, who, like a philosophical magician, reframes this conundrum as a chicken-and-egg problem: what came first, life or consciousness? His answer? Consciousness. But wait—there’s a slight snag. Neither “life” nor “consciousness” has a universally agreed-upon definition. Oh, the joy of philosophical discourse.
Video: Professor Stuart Hameroff and others promote the idea that consciousness pre-dates life. A fuller version is available at IAI.
Audio: Podcast on this topic.
For the uninitiated, Hameroff’s stance is heavily flavoured with panpsychism—the idea that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, like space or time. In this worldview, consciousness predates life itself. From this vantage, Hameroff’s proposition seems inevitable, a tidy solution that fits neatly into a panpsychistic framework. But let me stop you right there because I’m not signing up for the panpsychism fan club, and I’m certainly not prepared to let Hameroff’s intellectual sleight of hand go unchallenged.
To make his case, Hameroff engages in a curious manoeuvre: he defines both life and consciousness in ways that conveniently serve his argument. Consciousness, for him, is not limited to the complex phenomena of human or even animal experience but is a fundamental property of the universe, embedded in the very fabric of reality. Meanwhile, consciousness eventually orchestrates itself into life—a secondary phenomenon. With these definitions, his argument clicks together like a self-serving jigsaw puzzle. It’s clever, I’ll grant him that. But cleverness isn’t the same as being correct.
This is the philosophical equivalent of marking your own homework. By defining the terms of debate to fit his narrative, Hameroff ensures that his conclusion will satisfy his fellow panpsychists. The faithful will nod along, their priors confirmed. But for those outside this echo chamber, his framework raises more questions than it answers. How does this universal consciousness work? Why should we accept its existence as a given? And—here’s the kicker—doesn’t this just punt the problem one step back? If consciousness is fundamental, what’s the mechanism by which it “pre-exists” life?
Hameroff’s move is bold, certainly. But boldness isn’t enough. Philosophy demands rigour, and redefining terms to suit your argument isn’t rigorous; it’s rhetorical trickery. Sure, it’s provocative. But does it advance our understanding of the Hard Problem, or does it merely reframe it in a way that makes Hameroff’s preferred answer seem inevitable? For my money, it’s the latter.
The real issue is that panpsychism itself is a philosophical Rorschach test. It’s a worldview that can mean just about anything, from the claim that electrons have a rudimentary kind of awareness to the idea that the universe is a giant mind. Hameroff’s take lands somewhere in this spectrum, but like most panpsychist arguments, it’s long on metaphysical speculation and short on empirical grounding. If you already believe that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, Hameroff’s arguments will feel like a revelation. If you don’t, they’ll feel like smoke and mirrors.
In the end, Hameroff’s chicken-and-egg problem might be better framed as a false dichotomy. Perhaps life and consciousness co-evolved in ways we can’t yet fully understand. Or perhaps consciousness, as we understand it, emerges from the complexity of life, a byproduct rather than a prerequisite. What’s clear is that Hameroff’s solution isn’t as tidy as it seems, nor as universally compelling. It’s a clever sleight of hand, but let’s not mistake cleverness for truth.
