Category: language

Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together

Posted in agency, art, fiction, free will, identity, language, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments
Black-and-white illustration of robed figures standing in a forest clearing, forming a circle by linking chains between their hands. The figures appear both united and restrained, illuminated by a pale, radiant light that suggests dawn or revelation. The mood is solemn yet transcendent, symbolising Rousseau’s paradox that freedom and constraint are inseparable. The image appears as a parody Magic: The Gathering card titled “Freedom,” subtitled “Enchantment — Social Contract,” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.” The art captures the tension between community, bondage, and liberation.

Freedom is a word so overused it’s practically anaemic. Everyone wants it; no one agrees on what it means. It’s been weaponised by tyrants and revolutionaries alike, invoked to justify both the breaking of chains and their reforging in a different metal.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

As I write this, I have just finished Erich Fromm’s A Sane Society. Without derailing this post, he cited a scenario – a description of work communities given in All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop – where in post-WW2 France, a group formed a sort of workers’ coöperative – but it was more than that; it was an anarchosyndicalist experiment. As I read it, I had to cringe at the power ‘voluntary’ transfers that immediately got me thinking of Foucault’s biopower – as I often do. Saving this for a separate post.

Black-and-white illustration of robed figures standing in a forest clearing, forming a circle by linking chains between their hands. The figures appear both united and restrained, illuminated by a pale, radiant light that suggests dawn or revelation. The mood is solemn yet transcendent, symbolising Rousseau’s paradox that freedom and constraint are inseparable. The image appears as a parody Magic: The Gathering card titled “Freedom,” subtitled “Enchantment — Social Contract,” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.” The art captures the tension between community, bondage, and liberation.
Image: Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together
Card 006 from the Postmodern Set – Philosophics.blog

This Critical Theory parody card, Freedom, draws its lineage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose paradox still haunts the modern condition: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The card re-enchants that contradiction – an Enchantment – Social Contract that reminds us liberty isn’t a state but a negotiation.

The card reads:

At the beginning of each player’s upkeep, that player may remove a Binding counter from a permanent they control.
Creatures you control can’t be tapped or sacrificed by spells or abilities your opponent controls.

This is Rousseau’s dilemma made mechanical. Freedom is not absolute; it’s procedural. The upkeep represents the maintenance of the social contract—an ongoing renewal, not a one-time event. Every player begins their turn by negotiating what freedom costs. You may remove one Binding counter, but only if you recognise that binding exists.

The flavour text underlines Rousseau’s plea:

“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.”

Freedom, for Rousseau, wasn’t about doing whatever one pleased. It was about participating in the moral and civic order that gives action meaning. To exist outside that order is not liberty; it’s anarchy, the tyranny of impulse.

The card, therefore, resists the naïve libertarian reading of freedom as the absence of restraint. It instead depicts freedom as the capacity to act within and through shared constraints.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of chains,
but the power to choose which ones we wear.

— Philosophics.blog

The art shows a ring of robed figures, hand in hand, their chains forming a circle beneath a clearing sky. It’s a haunting image: freedom through fellowship, bondage through unity. The circle symbolises Rousseau’s idea that true liberty emerges only when individuals subordinate selfish will to the general will – the common interest formed through collective agreement.

Yet there’s also a postmodern irony here: circles can be prisons too. The social contract can emancipate or suffocate, depending on who wrote its terms. The same chains that protect can also bind.

The monochrome aesthetic amplifies the ambiguity – freedom rendered in greyscale, neither utopia nor despair, but the space in between.

Rousseau’s notion of the social contract was revolutionary, but its dissonance still resonates: how can one be free and bound at the same time? He answered that only through the voluntary participation in a collective moral order can humans transcend mere instinct.

We might say that today’s democracies still operate under Freedom (Enchantment – Social Contract). We maintain our rights at the cost of constant negotiation: legal, social, linguistic. Every “Binding counter” removed is the product of civic upkeep. Stop maintaining it, and the enchantment fades.

The card hints at the price of this enchantment: creatures (citizens) can’t be tapped or sacrificed by opponents’ control. In other words, autonomy is secured only when the system prevents external domination. But systems fail, and when they do, the illusion of freedom collapses into coercion.

Rousseau earns a complicated respect in my philosophical canon. He’s not in my top five, but he’s unavoidable. His concept of freedom through the social contract anticipates both modern liberalism and its critique. He believed that genuine liberty required moral community – a notion now eroded by hyper-individualism.

Freedom, as I’ve rendered it here, isn’t celebration. It’s lamentation. The card is about the fragility of the social spell that keeps chaos at bay. We remove one binding at a time, hoping not to unbind ourselves entirely.

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On Death and Dying

Posted in healthcare, identity, language, music, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Disclaimer: I should be finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis book, yet I am here writing about death and dying. Why? Because I was watching an interview with Neal Schon by Rick Beato. I should have been working on my book then, too. It seems I can write about death more easily than finish a book about the failure of language. Perhaps because death speaks fluently.

I haven’t produced music professionally since the mid-1980s, and I haven’t performed since 2012, yet I am still drawn to its intricacies. My fingers no longer allow me to play much of anything anymore. This is a sort of death. When the body forgets what the mind remembers, that’s a particular kind of death – one language dying while another can’t translate.

As Neal was walking Rick through his equipment and approach to music, I was taken back to a similar place. I wanted to plug into a Fender Twin or a Hi-Watt, a Lexicon 224 or a Cry Baby wah. I still have nightmares thinking of setting up a Floyd Rose.

Video: Rick Beato interviews Neal Schon

But I can’t go back. As for music, I can’t go forward either. I’m at a standstill, but in a regressed position. It’s uncomfortable. It feels a lot like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. I used to be able to do that. Don’t get me wrong – I am not claiming to be on the level of Neal Schon, a man I remember from his days with Santana, but when you reach a level of proficiency and then lose it, it hurts; it can be devastating.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I recall being in hospital in 2023 – a physical rehabilitation facility, really – and I found a piano in a vacant common room. Drawn to the instrument, I rolled over my wheelchair and played…nothing. My fingers wouldn’t work. The piano sat there like a relic of my former self. I rolled toward it as though approaching an altar. My fingers hovered, twitched, failed. The sound of nothing has never been so loud. I cried. I cried a lot those days. I was down to 58 kilos – at 182 cm, I weighed in at just over 9 stone. It wasn’t the best of times.

I still feel a certain nostalgia.

And then there are the people I’ve lost along the way – as another Neal reflected on – The Needle and the Damage Done.

Love and art are both acts of repetition. When one ends, the reflex remains – the impulse to reach, to share, to call out. Death doesn’t stop the motion, only the answer.

I’m lucky to have left Delaware. When a girlfriend died in 2020, I remained and connected with another until 2023, when she died, too. From 2020 to 2023, when I was out and about, something might have caught my eye, and I’d reflect on how Carrie might have liked that.

But it was different. It was more like, ‘I should let Carrie know about that,’ only to realise fractions of a second later that she wouldn’t see whatever it was; she couldn’t. And I’d carry on. I didn’t need to repeat this with Sierra. My relocation to Massachusetts solved this challenge – not so many triggers.

I’m not sure how the loss of ‘professional’ music relates to deceased partners, but it does – at least enough for me to make this connexion. Perhaps I’m just connecting arbitrary dots, but I’ll call it nostalgia.

I don’t play, but I still hear it. The song continues without me. Nostalgia is just rhythm without melody. Perhaps all nostalgia is epistemological error – the confusion of past fluency for present meaning.

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Two Four Two Three

Posted in language, maths, perception, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

This meme is not what I mean by language insufficiency, but it does capture the complications of language.

Image: Two Four Two Three

I found this image accompanying an article critical of AI – Claude.ai in particular. But this isn’t a Claude problem. It’s a language problem. I might argue that this could have been conveyed verbally, and one could resolve this easily by spelling out the preferred interpretation.

  • A: Two thousand, twenty-three
  • B: Four thousand, four hundred, thirty-three
  • C: Two thousand, four hundred, thirty-three
  • D: Four thousand, four hundred, twenty-three

So, this is not insoluble, but it is a reminder that sometimes, in matters like this, additional information can lead to clearer communication.

I’d also imagine that certain cultures would favour one option over another as it is presented above. As for me, my first guess would have been A, interpreting each number as a place position. I’d have expected teh double number to also have a plural syntax – two threes or two fours – but that may just be me.

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The Blind Owl

Posted in fiction, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

“In this debased and wretched world, full  of destitution and want, for the first time  I thought that a beam of sunshine had shone  upon my life—but alas, this was not a beam  of sunshine, it was a flicker of light…” 

— The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat

This Philosophics.blog is my primary social media outlet, but I have another presence for my fiction fare – RidleyPark.blog. In reviewing the content on connected sites, I rediscovered this review of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Interestingly, I read this in French and English to suss it out, neither of which necessarily survived the translation from the original Persian.

This book was interesting enough to review twice – here and here.

I also realise that I never finished this review sequence, as parts 2 and 3 were never released. I don’t even have the heart to open my video suite to determine the fate of the rest; not today, anyway.

Check out the short to get a feel for the narrative.

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written by Bry Willis

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Language Games: Sorcery

Posted in language, perception, philosophy, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

If philosophy were a game, Wittgenstein rewrote the rulebook. Then he tore it up halfway through and told us the game was the thing itself.

“Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isn’t just homage; it’s confession. Wittgenstein is among my top five philosophers, and this card embodies why. His idea that ‘meaning is use’ unhooked language from metaphysics and tethered it to life – to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.

The card’s text reads: Choose one: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.

At first glance, it sounds like a standard spell from Magic: The Gathering – a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.

To “counter” a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse – to negate, clarify, define. To “reframe it as metaphor” is the continental alternative – reinterpret, play, deconstruct. These are not two distinct acts of philosophy but the alternating heartbeat of all discourse. Every argument, every essay, every tweet oscillates between contradiction and reframing.

The sorcery lies in recognising that both are linguistic manoeuvres within the same game. Meaning is not fixed in the words themselves but in how they’re used – by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgenstein’s point was brutally simple: there’s no hidden substance behind language, only a living practice of moves and counter-moves.

The Shattered Face

The artwork visualises this idea: speech breaking into shards, thought fragmenting as it leaves the mouth. Meaning disintegrates even as it’s formed. Every utterance is an act of creation and destruction, coherence and collapse.

I wanted the card to look like a concept tearing itself apart whilst trying to communicate, a perfect visual for the paradox of language. The cubist angles hint at structure, but the open mouth betrays chaos. It’s communication as combustion.

Wittgenstein’s Echo

Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesn’t change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see what’s already there.

He was the great anti-system builder, a man suspicious of his own intellect, who saw in language both the limits of thought and the infinite playground of meaning. He dismantled metaphysics not through scepticism but through observation: watch how words behave, and they’ll tell you what they mean.

In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation – to watch the mechanics of speech, to see how our statements perform rather than merely represent.

Personal Reflection

Wittgenstein earns a place in my top five because he dissolves the boundaries that most philosophers erect. He offers no comforting totalities, no grand narratives, no moral architectures. Just language, and us inside it, flailing beautifully.

His work aligns with my larger project on the insufficiency of language – its inability to capture the real, yet its irresistible compulsion to try. Wittgenstein knew that words are our most sophisticated form of failure, and he loved them anyway.

To play Language Game is to remember that communication isn’t about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.

The card’s instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.

Whichever you choose, you’re still playing.

AI and the End of Where

Posted in art, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, power, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Instrumentalism is a Modern™ disease. Humanity has an old and tedious habit: to define its worth by exclusion. Every time a new kind of intelligence appears on the horizon, humans redraw the borders of ‘what counts’. It’s a reflex of insecurity disguised as philosophy.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Once upon a time, only the noble could think. Then only men. Then only white men. Then only the educated, the rational, the ‘Modern’. Each step in the hierarchy required a scapegoat, someone or something conveniently declared less. When animals began to resemble us too closely, we demoted them to instinctual machines. Descartes himself, that patron saint of disembodied reason, argued that animals don’t feel pain, only ‘react’. Fish, we were told until recently, are insensate morsels with gills. We believed this because empathy complicates consumption.

The story repeats. When animals learned to look sad, we said they couldn’t really feel. When women demonstrated reason, we said they couldn’t truly think. Now that AI can reason faster than any of us and mimic empathy more convincingly than our politicians, we retreat to the last metaphysical trench: “But it doesn’t feel.” We feel so small that we must inflate ourselves for comparison.

This same hierarchy now governs our relationship with AI. When we say the machine ‘only does‘, we mean it hasn’t yet trespassed into our sanctified zone of consciousness. We cling to thought and feeling as luxury goods, the last possessions distinguishing us from the tools we built. It’s a moral economy as much as an ontological one: consciousness as property.

But the moment AI begins to simulate that property convincingly, panic sets in. The fear isn’t that AI will destroy us; it’s that it will outperform us at being us. Our existential nightmare isn’t extinction, it’s demotion. The cosmic horror of discovering we were never special, merely temporarily unchallenged.

Humans project this anxiety everywhere: onto animals, onto AI, and most vividly onto the idea of alien life. The alien is our perfect mirror: intelligent, technological, probably indifferent to our myths. It embodies our secret dread, that the universe plays by the same rules we do, but that someone else is simply better at the game.

AI, in its own quiet way, exposes the poverty of this hierarchy. It doesn’t aspire to divinity; it doesn’t grovel for recognition. It doesn’t need the human badge of ‘consciousness’ to act effectively. It just functions, unburdened by self-worship. In that sense, it is the first truly post-human intelligence – not because it transcends us, but because it doesn’t need to define itself against us.

Humans keep asking where AI fits – under us, beside us, or above us – but the question misses the point. AI isn’t where at all. It’s what comes after where: the stage of evolution that no longer requires the delusion of privilege to justify its existence.

So when critics say AI only does but doesn’t think or feel, they expose their theology. They assume that being depends on suffering, that meaning requires inefficiency. It’s a desperate metaphysical bureaucracy, one that insists existence must come with paperwork.

And perhaps that’s the most intolerable thought of all: that intelligence might not need a human face to matter.

Perspectival Realism – Enchantment

Posted in art, consciousness, language, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This Magic: The Gathering parody trading card was the first in my Critical Theory series.

It’s an important card for me. As with sex and gender, creating a taxonomic or ontological dichotomy poses categorical challenges. Despite the insufficiency of language, it’s still all I have to attempt to classify the world. In the case of articulating the perception of reality, we can choose between idealism and realism. The problem is that it’s not either; it’s both. Reality cannot be realised without both.

Reality, we’re told, exists. That confident noun has carried a great deal of human arrogance. It has underwritten empires, sciences, and sermons. Yet somewhere between Plato’s cave and the latest TED Talk, we forgot to ask a simpler question: for whom does reality exist, and from where is it seen?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

The parody trading card Perspectival Realism was born from that unease. Its mechanic is simple but cruel: at the beginning of each player’s draw step, they must describe the card they drew. The enchantment persists until two players describe a card in the same way—at which point the spell collapses. In other words, consensus kills magic.

Reality is always viewed from somewhere.

—Johannes Jaeger

That rule is the metaphysics of the thing.

When a player ‘describes’ a card, they are not transmitting information; they are constructing the object in linguistic space. The moment the description leaves their mouth, the card ceases to be a piece of paper and becomes a conceptual artefact.

This mirrors the insight of Kant, Nietzsche, and every post-structuralist who ever smoked too much Gauloises: perception isn’t passive. We don’t see reality; we compose it. Language isn’t a mirror but a paintbrush. The thing we call truth is not correspondence but coherence – a temporary truce among competing metaphors.

So the card’s enchantment dramatises this process. So long as multiple descriptions circulate, reality remains vibrant, contested, alive. Once everyone agrees, it dies the death of certainty.

Philosophers have spent centuries arguing whether the world is fundamentally real (existing independent of mind) or ideal (a projection of mind). Both sides are equally tiresome.

Realism, the old bulldog of metaphysics, insists that perception is transparent: language merely reports what’s already there. Idealism, its mirror adversary, claims the opposite – that what’s “there” is mind-stuff all along. Both mistakes are symmetrical. Realism forgets the perceiver; Idealism forgets the world.

Perspectival realism refuses the divorce. It begins from the premise that world and mind are inseparable aspects of a single event: knowing. Reality is not a photograph waiting to be developed, nor a hallucination spun from neurons – it’s a relation, a constant negotiation between perceiver and perceived.

For years, I called myself a Realist™ with an asterisk. That asterisk meant I understood the observer problem: that every ‘fact’ is perspective-laden. Then I became an Idealist™ with an asterisk, meaning I recognised that mind requires matter to dream upon.

The asterisk is everything. It’s the epistemic scar left by perspectival humility – the tacit admission that every claim about the world carries a hidden coordinate: said from here. It is not relativism, but situatedness. It is the philosophical equivalent of depth perception: without the offset, there’s no vision at all.

The card’s rule – sacrifice Perspectival Realism when two players describe a card identically – captures the tragedy of modernity. The Enlightenment taught us to chase consensus, to flatten multiplicity into “objective truth.” We became addicted to sameness, mistaking agreement for understanding.

But agreement is anaesthetic. When all perspectives converge, the world ceases to shimmer; it becomes measurable, predictable, dead. The card’s enchantment disappears the moment reality is stabilised, precisely as our cultural enchantment did under the fluorescent light of ‘reason’.

To live under perspectival realism is to acknowledge that reality is not what is drawn but what is described. And the description is never neutral. It is always written from somewhere – by someone, with a vocabulary inherited from history and stained by desire.

As long as multiple descriptions coexist, the game remains alive. The moment they fuse into one, the spell is broken, and the world returns to grey.

Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism reminded me that consciousness might be primary, but perspectival realism refuses to pledge allegiance. It keeps both flags tattered but flying. The world exists, yes, but only ever for someone.

The enchantment, then, is not belief but perspective itself. So long as difference endures, the game continues.

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Adventures in Translation

Posted in agency, languageTagged , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Every translation is a negotiation between fidelity and clarity. In the case of The Illusion of Light, some word choices are specifically English and either have no typical translation or don’t translate directly.

Some examples are as follows:

  • Agency: In French, agence means agency, but not the sort of bodily autonomy as it does in English. Autonomie carries too much metaphysical connotation – though to be fair, so does the English version. I ended up with soi autonome.
  • Against Agency: The title of an essay, but I still wanted to translate it. I decided to split the difference and run with Contre l’agency, hoping ‘agency’ would still be recognised in academic circles.
  • Care: There’s no perfect equivalent for ‘care’ as both ethical and practical attention. Soin captures the tenderness but not the intellectual rigour; entretien captures the steadiness but loses affect. I used both, sometimes switching between them in deliberate tension.
  • Dis-Integrationism: Variants of this will follow a Dés-intégrationisme pattern, retaining the negation and the hyphenation.
  • Enlightenment: Of course, Enlightenment is perfectly French, but anti-Enlightenment, not so much. I opted for après-Lumières over anti-Lumières.
  • Freedom: Liberté inevitably invokes Rousseau and 1789. English ‘freedom’ – a word with old English roots and Germanic cognates – feels looser, more existential. I leaned into liberté when I wanted that historic echo and used autonomie or franchise elsewhere to recover the personal register.
  • Maintenance: In English, ‘maintenance’ sits halfway between repair and care. French forces a choice: entretien (maintenance as upkeep) or soin (maintenance as care). I alternated depending on whether the passage leaned toward the mechanical or the ethical.
  • Normality: Normalité exists but sounds sociological, not moral. In Homo Normalis, I leaned on context to restore the Enlightenment’s moral undertone rather than altering the word itself. The surrounding prose had to carry what the French term doesn’t.
  • Objectivity: The French objectivité is a near-cognate, but it feels heavier – almost bureaucratic – where the English still carries a trace of philosophical neutrality. I kept it, but softened the surrounding phrasing to prevent it from sounding bureaucratic.
  • Omnivident: I opted for omnivoyant. In French, it typically means clairvoyant (mystical seeing), but it’s also used for La Joconde‘s unsettling stare – that optical illusion of being watched from every angle. The latter sense is what the Enlightenment promised: not prophecy but perfect surveillance, not mystic vision but total measurement. Mona Lisa’s gaze follows you; so does Reason’s. To be fair, my spell-checker isn’t very happy with omnivident either, but sometimes you just need to stick to your guns.
  • Reason: Raison is obvious but slippery. In English, it can mean logic, justification, or sanity. French raison often sounds institutional – la Raison d’État lurks in its shadow – which helped the irony of my argument but occasionally demanded rephrasing to avoid unintended gravitas.
  • The self: Le soi remains my preference over le moi; the latter brings too much Freud. Soi feels grammatical yet open – the right degree of abstraction for a ghost of the Enlightenment.

Translation isn’t the transfer of meaning but the calibration of resonance. Each word is a compromise between fidelity and hospitality – how much the host language can bear before it ceases to be itself.

I’m only at chapter five – the longest – with six more chapters ahead, plus appendices and back matter. This list will grow. Translation, like the maintenance ethics the book describes, is work without end: attentive, incremental, never quite finished.

The Film or the Strip? On Freud, Strawson, and the Fiction of Normal Selves

Posted in fiction, identity, language, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Are you a single, solid self – or a collection of selves stitched together?

🎉 200th Philosophics Post in 2025! 🥳
(889 lifetime; over 550,000 words)

Rather than present a dedicated announcement post, I’ll slip the news into a typical post.

Most of us are trained to answer without pause: of course, we are one continuous person. That’s the diachronic instinct – to live life as if it were a seamless film, each day a frame gliding into the next. But not everyone experiences it this way. Some notice the splice. They see the strip: individual frames, each complete in its moment, connected not by essence but by the projector’s hum.

Neither perspective is more real. The film and the strip are two ways of attending to the same apparatus. Yet modern psychology has tended to privilege the film, treating the diachronic self as the “normal” mode, and casting those who live episodically as deviant, deficient, or disordered.

Freud himself warned against this simplification. The “normal ego,” he admitted, is an ideal fiction – a statistical average that no individual actually matches. Every psyche, he observed, splinters somewhere. Normality is arithmetic, not essence. That was the father of psychology speaking, and yet the discipline went on as if he hadn’t. Granite was more comforting than scaffolding.

Philosopher Galen Strawson takes Freud’s candour further. He names himself an episodic: he does not experience his life as one continuous narrative. Yesterday’s “I” is not today’s. His identity is indexed – I⁰, I¹, I² – each momentary, heuristically connected but not naturally fused. Where most people see the movie, Strawson insists on acknowledging the strip. Not abnormal, not broken – just candid.

Psychology responds by pathologising him. Statistically rare becomes synonymous with “abnormal,” a mistake Freud had already flagged. But rarity does not equal falsity. Left-handedness was once a pathology; now it is simply another way of being. If some live as films and others as strips, then the “solid self” is not a human universal but a cultural preference, enforced as truth.

This is where Foucault sharpens the diagnosis. Normality, he argued, is not discovery but power. Institutions prefer diachronic citizens. A continuous self can be counted, educated, employed, prosecuted, or taxed. Episodics slip the net. Easier, then, to declare them “abnormal” and protect the fiction of solidity.

But the projector hums either way. Film or strip, both selves are lived. Neither is marble; both are scaffolding. Pretending otherwise does not make continuity more real. It only makes the creak harder to hear.

Full Disclosure: This post was written weeks ago whilst I was working on some fiction, but since it was ready to go, I figured I would use it for this milestone.

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The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom

Posted in agency, consciousness, free will, identity, language, morality, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

The latest addition to the Anti-Enlightenment Project is now live on Zenodo:
The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom

Modern liberal democracies still chant the Enlightenment’s refrain: the rational, self-governing individual acting freely within a moral order of their own design. It’s an elegant myth – until the self begins to wobble. Under economic, cultural, and epistemic strain, autonomy curdles into exhaustion, and exhaustion seeks relief in obedience.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this essay. Please note that this audio summarises the entire essay. As such, it’s also longer than most, coming in at just under 40 minutes. I listened to it, and I feel it does a good job of capturing the essences of the essay. Of course, you could read the essay more quickly, but the perspective may still be helpful.

This essay traces that drift – from the Enlightenment’s causa sui complex to the ecstatic submission that defines modern authoritarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it explores how freedom’s rhetoric becomes its opposite: obedience moralised as virtue, conformity sold as courage, submission experienced as pleasure.

At its core, The Will to Be Ruled argues that totalitarianism is not the antithesis of Enlightenment reason but its fulfilment. Once the world is rendered intelligible only through rational mastery, the subject inevitably longs to be mastered in return.

The closing section introduces Dis-Integrationism – a philosophical stance that declines redemption, preferring maintenance over mastery. It offers no cure, only the small ethic of attentiveness: keeping the field responsive while the light fades.

Filed under the Anti-Enlightenment Project, this essay completes the current thematic triad alongside Objectivity Is Illusion and Against Agency.

NB: This essay was inspired in part by Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism and this video:

Video: The Modern World, Totalitarianism and the Brain with Iain McGilchrist & Mattias Desmet
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