I created a “Book Club Edition” of Propensity, a Ridley Park book of fiction primarily for the European market β specifically in the UK β though it’s available elsewhere. I altered the cover art. As an author, I also wanted to compare KDP and IngramSpark as printers and distributors.
I find the cover texture on this version interesting, but I don’t have a word to describe it. I like it. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about it β the texture. I reworked the art to track the second section of the book. The original cover tracks the first section.
Image: Propensity by Ridley Park; original book cover
At least in this proof version, the black ink is not 100% and is streaky. The KDP version is 100% K and solid black. I mightn’t have noticed except that some section division pages were mostly black, and it is quite evident. I don’t discern a difference in the quality of the text itself.
Illusion of Light
The Illusion of Light is a cloth version of a book also available in paperback. I like the cloth-bound. There is a nostalgic elegance about it. It feels durable β more so than a paperback for sure. I’m not sure about versus the case laminate versions. They come off like textbooks to me β not the vibe I am aiming for.
When drawn, this card alters perception itself. It reminds the player that truth is not something one finds under a rock but something one polishes into shape. Each metaphor becomes a spell; each keyword a crutch thrown aside.
Those who wield the Constructivist Lens see not βfacts,β but fictions so useful they forgot to call them that. Reality wobbles politely to accommodate belief.
βKnowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.β β Richard Rorty
In game terms: Tap to reframe existence as interpretation. Duration: until the next disagreement.
Itβs almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Frommβs The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernismβs last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido β good heavens β was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
βIn the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.β
The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.
Frommβs optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
βAfter the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.β
Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society β as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.
Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasnβt something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it β half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Frommβs optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.
The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.
So yes, Frommβs Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith β this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldnβt see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.
Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Frommβs dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps itβs precisely that naivety thatβs worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion β before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
I finished Mattias Desmetβs The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I mentioned the other day. Unfortunately, my initial optimism was premature. Everything I enjoyed was front-loaded: the first four chapters set up a promising critique of mechanistic rationality and the collapse of shared meaning. Then the book turned into a long, therapeutic sermon. I should have stopped at Chapter 4 and saved myself the sunk-cost regret.
It isnβt that nothing follows; itβs just that what follows is so thin that the cost-benefit ratio goes negative. Once Desmet moves from diagnosis to prescription, the argument collapses into a psychologistβs worldview: an entire civilisation explained through mass neurosis and healed through better intuition. He builds his case on straw versions of reason, science, and modernity, so his ‘cure’ can look revelatory.
The trouble is familiar. Having dismantled rationalism, Desmet then installs intuition as its replacement β an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist canβt stop therapising; he privileges the psychological lens over every other possibility.
The result is a reductionist parascience dressed as social theory. The totalitarian mind, in Desmetβs telling, isnβt political or structural but psychological β a patient waiting for insight. I donβt doubt his sincerity, only his scope. Itβs what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.
Desmetβs project ultimately re-enchants what it claims to critique. He wants rationalism redeemed through feeling, order reborn through connection. Dis-Integrationism stops short of that impulse. It accepts fracture as the permanent condition β no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reasonβs own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.
Modern liberalism rests on the fiction of the autonomous self β the rational chooser imagined to act freely within a stable moral order. Yet under the pressures of uncertainty and social disintegration, this ideal collapses into its opposite: the craving for authority. This essay traces how the Enlightenmentβs myth of autonomy generates the psychological, libidinal, and linguistic conditions for totalitarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it argues that instability and isolation drive individuals to seek coherence through obedience, moralising submission as voluntary freedom and even as pleasure. The paradox of the self-governed subject β I choose to obey, therefore I am free β forms the emotional and moral grammar of modern authoritarianism. Totalitarianism thus emerges not as a historical aberration but as the logical endpoint of Enlightenment individualism: a collective escape from the unbearable weight of self-creation. Within this framework, Dis-Integrationism reframes ethics as maintenance rather than mastery, proposing responsiveness over redemption β an attentiveness that keeps the field open in the half-light where the self still flickers.
NB: I share this for convenience and also to showcase the AI voice of Adele from ElevenLabs. I use this voice for many of my audio renditions, as I find it pleasing to listen to. Given this free sample, I’d like to know how it sounds to you.
Interestingly (or not), this reading was of an earlier draft, so there are minor differences β it includes parts that didn’t make the final edit β but it remains directionally intact.
Besmet, a Belgian psychologist with a background in statistics, begins not with tyranny but with epistemology β with how the Enlightenmentβs dream of objectivity curdled into the managerial nightmare we now inhabit. The first half of the book reads like a slow unmasking of Scientism: how numbers became our gods, and graphs, our catechisms.
Written before COVID-19 but finished during it, his argument turns pandemic data into theatre β a performance of certainty masking deep confusion. The daily tally became ritual sacrifice to the idol of ‘evidence-based’ policy. His point, and mine, is that totalitarianism no longer needs gulags; it thrives in dashboards and KPIs.
Desmetβs frame intersects beautifully with my own thesis: that obedience today is internalised as reasonableness. Freedom has been recast as compliance with ‘the data’. We surrender willingly, provided the orders come in statistical form.
This is why even Agileβ’ management and its fetish of ‘velocity’ reek of the same mechanistic faith. Every sprint promises deliverance through quantification; every retrospective is a bureaucratic confession of inefficiency. The cult of metrics is not merely a managerial fad β it is the metaphysics of our time. The problem is at once ontological and epistemological: we mistake the measure for the thing itself, and in doing so, become measurable.
Itβs a rare pleasure to encounter a fellow dissident of the numerical faith β a man who sees that the spreadsheet has replaced the sceptre.
I decided to create some social media sharing content, so I appropriated this iconic graffiti and repurposed it to promote The Will to Be Ruled essay.
Image: βFreedom becomes loyalty; truth, consensus; courage, obedience to the prevailing order.β
I intend to find some pull quotes I like and continue drafting promotional material. As these are essays, I derive no income from them. I only wish to spread the word and get comments on them β supportive or detracting; it doesn’t matter.
Are you a single, solid self β or a collection of selves stitched together?
π 200th Philosophics Post in 2025! π₯³ (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. Thatβs the diachronic instinct β 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 projectorβs 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 βnormalβ mode, and casting those who live episodically as deviant, deficient, or disordered.
Freud himself warned against this simplification. The βnormal ego,β he admitted, is an ideal fiction β 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 hadnβt. Granite was more comforting than scaffolding.
Philosopher Galen Strawson takes Freudβs candour further. He names himself an episodic: he does not experience his life as one continuous narrative. Yesterdayβs βIβ is not todayβs. His identity is indexed β Iβ°, IΒΉ, IΒ² β each momentary, heuristically connected but not naturally fused. Where most people see the movie, Strawson insists on acknowledging the strip. Not abnormal, not broken β just candid.
Psychology responds by pathologising him. Statistically rare becomes synonymous with βabnormal,β 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 βsolid selfβ 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 βabnormalβ 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.
Itβs remarkable what surfaces when one lingers deliberately in a given space. In this case, Kazimierz DΔ browskiβs Theory of Positive Disintegration has drifted into view.
As often happens, we find agreement in the opening movement and parts of the second, but part company in Act III. Thatβs where Dis-Integration begins. Like many before and after him, DΔ browski tries to reconstruct atop a compromised foundation. This can only fail. The scaffolding may hold for a time, but reality has a way of reminding us it was never load-bearing. Eventually, the quake comes, and the structure folds in on itself.
Japan, of course, knows this. Earthquakes are not hypothetical there; they are assumed. Traditional builders worked with the instability, designing dwellings that could flex, even collapse, without killing their inhabitants. James Clavellβs ShΕgun is not scripture, but it captures the principle: impermanence as an architectural ethic.
Image: Shirakawa-go by Colette English
Then thereβs kintsugi β the gold-laced repair of broken pottery. The break is not erased but acknowledged, even exalted. The resulting vessel bears the evidence of its fracture, made stronger not by restoration to an imagined wholeness but by visible accommodation of its failure.
If DΔ browski had stopped there β if his ‘positive disintegration’ had remained a celebration of fracture rather than a prelude to rebuilding β we might have been entirely aligned.
I’ve just added a new entry to my Anti-Enlightenment corpus, bringing the total to seven β not counting my latest book, The Illusion of Light, that summarises the first six essays and places them in context. This got me thinking about what aspects of critique I might be missing. Given this, what else might I be missing?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussion of this topic.
So far, I’ve touched on the areas in the top green table and am considering topics in the bottom red/pink table:
Summary Schema β The Anti-Enlightenment Project β Published Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay(s)
Epistemic
What counts as βtruthβ?
Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
Political
What holds power together?
Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail; Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Psychological
Why do subjects crave rule?
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self; The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Anthropological
What makes a βnormalβ human?
The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Ethical
How to live after disillusionment?
The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Summary Schema β The Anti-Enlightenment Project β Unpublished Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay
Theological (Metaphysical)
What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?
The Absent God: Metaphysics After Meaning
Aesthetic (Affective)
How did beauty become moral instruction?
The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Ecological (Post-Human)
What happens when the world refuses to remain in the background?
1. Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
Published September 2025
Objectivity, in the social and moral sense, is a performance β a consensus mechanism mistaken for truth. This essay maps how βobjectivityβ operates as a scaffold for Enlightenment rationality, masking moral preference as neutral judgment. It introduces a five-premise model showing that what we call objectivity is merely sustained agreement under shared illusions of coherence. The argument reframes moral reasoning as provisional and participatory rather than universal or fixed.
2. Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail
Published October 2025 The Enlightenment built democracy for rational ghosts β imagined citizens who never existed. This essay dissects six contradictions at the foundation of βrationalβ governance and shows why democracyβs collapse was prewritten in its metaphysics. From mathematical impossibility to sociological blindness, it charts the crisis of coherence that modern politics still calls freedom. β Read on Zenodo
3. Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Published October 2025 Modern democracies worship the now. This essay examines presentism β the systemic bias toward immediacy β as a structural flaw of Enlightenment thinking. By enthroning rational individuals in perpetual βdecision time,β modernity erased the unborn from politics. What remains is a political theology of the short term, collapsing both memory and imagination. β Read on Zenodo
4. Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self
Published October 2025 βAgencyβ is not a metaphysical faculty β itβs an alibi. This essay dismantles the myth of the autonomous self and reframes freedom as differential responsiveness: a gradient of conditions rather than a binary of will. Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and decolonial thought, it argues for ethics as maintenance, not judgment, and politics as condition-stewardship. β Read on Zenodo
5. The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Published October 2025
This essay formalises Dis-Integrationism β a philosophical method that refuses synthesis, closure, and the compulsive need to βmake whole.β It traces how Enlightenment reason, deconstruction, and therapy culture all share a faith in reintegration: the promise that whatβs fractured can be restored. Against this, Dis-Integrationism proposes care without cure, attention without resolution β a discipline of maintaining the broken as broken. It closes the Anti-Enlightenment loop by turning critique into a sustained practice rather than a path to redemption.
6. The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Published October 2025
Modernityβs most persistent myth is the βnormalβ human. This essay excavates how legibility β the drive to measure, categorise, and care β became a form of control. From Queteletβs statistical man to Foucaultβs biopower and todayβs quantified emotion, Homo Normalis reveals the moral machinery behind normalisation. It ends with an ethics of variance: lucidity without repair, refusal without despair.
7. The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Published October 2025
This essay examines how the Enlightenmentβs ideal of autonomy contains the seed of its undoing. The rational, self-governing subject β celebrated as the triumph of modernity β proves unable to bear the solitude it creates. As freedom collapses into exhaustion, the desire for direction re-emerges as devotion. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, The Will to Be Ruled traces the psychological gradient from fear to obedience, showing how submission is moralised as virtue and even experienced as pleasure. It concludes that totalitarianism is not a deviation from reason but its consummation, and that only through Dis-Integrationism β an ethic of maintenance rather than mastery β can thought remain responsive as the light fades.
Axis: Theological / Metaphysical Core Question: What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?
Concept: This essay would trace how Enlightenment humanism replaced God with reason, only to inherit theologyβs structure without its grace. It might read Spinoza, Kantβs moral law, and modern technocracy as secularised metaphysics β systems that still crave universal order. Goal: To show that disenchantment never erased faith; it simply redirected worship toward cognition and control. Possible subtitle:The Enlightenmentβs Unconfessed Religion.
9. The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Axis: Aesthetic / Affective Core Question: How did beauty become moral instruction?
Concept: From Kantβs Critique of Judgment to algorithmic taste cultures, aesthetic judgment serves social order by rewarding harmony and punishing dissonance. This essay would expose the politics of form β how beauty trains attention and regulates emotion. Goal: To reclaim aesthetics as resistance, not refinement. Possible subtitle:Why Modernity Needed the Beautiful to Behave.
10. The Uncounted World: Ecology and the Non-Human
Axis: Ecological / Post-Human Core Question: What happens when the world refuses to remain background?
Concept: Here you dismantle the Enlightenment split between subject and nature. From Cartesian mechanism to industrial rationalism, the natural world was cast as resource. This essay would align Dis-Integrationism with ecological thinking β care without mastery extended beyond the human. Goal: To reframe ethics as co-maintenance within an unstable biosphere. Possible subtitle:Beyond Stewardship: Ethics Without Anthropos.
11. The Fractured Tongue: Language Against Itself
Axis: Linguistic / Semiotic Core Question: How does language betray the clarity it promises?
Concept: Every Anti-Enlightenment text already hints at this: language as both the instrument and failure of reason. Drawing on Nietzsche, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and modern semiotics, this essay could chart the entropy of meaning β the collapse of reference that makes ideology possible. Goal: To formalise the linguistic fragility underlying every rational system. Possible subtitle:The Grammar of Collapse.
12. The Vanished Commons: Between Isolation and Herd
Axis: Communal / Social Ontology Core Question: Can there be community without conformity?
Concept: This would return to the psychological and political threads of The Will to Be Ruled, seeking a space between atomised autonomy and synchronized obedience. It might turn to Arendtβs notion of the world between us or to indigenous and feminist relational models. Goal: To imagine a non-totalitarian togetherness β a responsive collective rather than a collective response. Possible subtitle:The Ethics of the Incomplete We.
* These essays may never be published, but I share this here as a template to further advance the Anti-Enlightenment project and fill out the corpus.
Philosophics 