My reaction to Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus continues with Chapter 4, “Errors: The Fantasy of Infallibility.” Spoiler alert: Harari makes a critical misstep by overly defending so-called self-correcting institutions compared to non-self-correcting ones.
Harari provides a solid account of how religious institutions and other dogmatic ideological constructs are slow to change, contrasting them with relatively faster self-correcting systems like science. Once again, he underscores the tension between order and truth—two critical dimensions in his worldview and cornerstones of Modernist beliefs.
Audio: Podcast conversation on this topic.
I agree with Harari that the lack of self-correction in institutions is problematic and that self-correction is better than the alternative. However, he overestimates the speed and efficacy of these self-correcting mechanisms. His argument presumes the existence of some accessible underlying truth, which, while an appealing notion, is not always so clear-cut. Harari cites examples of scientific corrections that took decades to emerge, giving the impression that, with enough time, everything will eventually self-correct. As the environment changes, corrections will naturally follow—albeit over long spans of time. Ultimately, Harari makes a case for human intervention without recognising it as an Achilles’ heel.
Harari’s Blind Spot
Harari largely overlooks the influence of money, power, and self-interest in these systems. His alignment with the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggests that, while he may acknowledge its fallibility, he still deems it “good enough” for governance. This reflects a paternalistic bias. Much like technologists who view technology as humanity’s salvation, Harari, as a Humanist, places faith in humans as the ultimate stewards of this task. However, his argument fails to adequately account for hubris, cognitive biases, and human deficits.
The Crux of the Problem
The core issue with Harari’s argument is that he appears to be chasing a local maxima by adopting a human-centric solution. His proposed solutions require not only human oversight but the oversight of an anointed few—presumably his preferred “elite” humans—even if other solutions might ultimately prove superior. He is caught in the illusion of control. While Harari’s position on transhuman capabilities is unclear, I suspect he would steadfastly defend human cognitive superiority to the bitter end.
In essence, Harari’s vision of self-correcting systems is optimistic yet flawed. By failing to fully acknowledge the limits of human fallibility and the structural influences of power and self-interest, he leaves his argument vulnerable to critique. Ultimately, his belief in the self-correcting nature of human institutions reflects more faith than rigour.
As I continue to react to Harari’s Nexus, I can’t help but feel like a curmudgeon. Our worldviews diverge so starkly that my critique begins to feel like a petty grudge—as though I am inconsolable. Be that as it may, I’ll persist. Please excuse any revelatory ad hominems that may ensue.
Audio: Podcast of the page contents
Harari is an unabashed Zionist and unapologetic nationalist. Unfortunately, his stories, centred on Israel and India, don’t resonate with me. This is fine—I’m sure many people outside the US are equally weary of hearing everything framed from an American perspective. Still, these narratives do little for me.
Patriotism and property are clearly important to Harari. As a Modernist, he subscribes to all the trappings of Modernist thought that I rail against. He appears aligned with the World Economic Forum, portraying it as a noble and beneficial bureaucracy, while viewing AI as an existential threat to its control. Harari’s worldview suggests there are objectively good and bad systems, and someone must oversee them. Naturally, he presents himself as possessing the discernment to judge which systems are beneficial or detrimental.
In this chapter, Harari recounts the cholera outbreak in London, crediting it with fostering a positive bureaucracy to ensure clean water sources. However, he conflates the tireless efforts of a single physician with the broader bureaucratic structure. He uses this example, alongside Modi’s Clean India initiative, to champion bureaucracy, even as he shares a personal anecdote highlighting its flaws. His rhetorical strategy seems aimed at cherry-picking positive aspects of bureaucracy, establishing a strawman to diminish its negatives, and then linking these with artificial intelligence. As an institutionalist, Harari even goes so far as to defend the “deep state.”
Earlier, Harari explained how communication evolved from Human → Human to Human → Stories. Now, he introduces Human → Document systems, connecting these to authority, the growing power of administrators, and the necessity of archives. He argues that our old stories have not adapted to address the complexities of the modern world. Here, he sets up religion as another bogeyman. As a fellow atheist, I don’t entirely disagree with him, but it’s clear he’s using religion as a metaphor to draw parallels with AI and intractable doctrines.
Harari juxtaposes “death by tiger” with “death by document,” suggesting the latter—the impersonal demise caused by bureaucracy—is harder to grapple with. This predates Luigi Mangione’s infamous response to UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson, highlighting the devastating impact of administrative systems. Harari also briefly references obligate siblicide and sibling rivalry, which seem to segue into evolution and concepts of purity versus impurity.
Echoing Jonathan Haidt, Harari explores the dynamics of curiosity and disgust while reinforcing an “us versus them” narrative. He touches on the enduring challenges of India’s caste system, presenting yet another layer of complexity. Harari’s inclination towards elitism shines through, though he occasionally acknowledges the helplessness people face when confronting bureaucracy. He seems particularly perturbed by revolts in which the public destroys documents and debts—revealing what feels like a document fetish and an obsession with traceability.
While he lauds AI’s ability to locate documents and weave stories by connecting disparate content, Harari concludes the chapter with a segue into the next: a discussion of errors and holy books. Once again, he appears poised to draw parallels that serve to undermine AI. Despite my critiques, I’m ready to dive into the next chapter.
Chapter 2 of Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus centres on the power of stories and their role in shaping human societies. For Harari, stories are not merely narratives but essential tools that have elevated human-to-human networks into human-to-story networks—a transition he frames as unadulterated Progress™, reflecting his dyed-in-the-wool Modernist perspective.
Audio: Podcast on this content
The Power of Stories
Harari argues that fictional stories underpin the strength of social networks, enabling constructs like nations and economies to thrive. He celebrates these intersubjective frameworks as shared functional experiences that facilitate progress. While Harari’s thesis is compelling, his tone suggests an uncritical embrace of these constructs as inherently good. Branding and propaganda, for example, are presented as valid tools—but only when used by those on the “right side” of history, a position Harari implicitly claims for himself.
Order Above All Else
One of Harari’s key claims is that order trumps truth and justice. He justifies limiting both for the sake of maintaining stability, positioning this as his modus operandi. This prioritisation of order reveals a functionalist worldview where utility outweighs ethical considerations. Harari goes further to define “good” information as that which either discovers truth or creates order, a reductionistic view that leaves little room for dissent or alternative interpretations.
By extension, Harari endorses the concept of the “noble lie”—deception deemed acceptable if it serves these ends. While pragmatism may demand such compromises, Harari’s framing raises concerns about how this justification could be weaponised to silence opposition or reinforce entrenched power structures.
Alignment with Power
Harari’s alignment with institutional power becomes increasingly evident as the chapter progresses. His discussion of intersubjective constructs positions them as the bedrock of human achievement, but he appears unwilling to scrutinise the role of institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF) in perpetuating inequalities. Harari’s lack of criticism for these entities mirrors historical justifications of despotic regimes by those aligned with their goals. He seems more concerned about AI’s potential to disrupt the plans of such institutions than about its impact on humanity as a whole.
Fiction as a Weapon
Harari concludes with an implicit hope that his narrative might gain consensus to undermine opposition to these power structures. His fondness for fiction—and his belief that “a story is greater than any truth”—positions storytelling as both a tool and a weapon. While this reflects the undeniable power of narratives, it also underscores Harari’s selective morality: stories are good when they align with his perspective and problematic when they don’t.
Final Thoughts
Chapter 2 of Nexus is a study in the utility of stories, but it also reveals Harari’s Modernist biases and alignment with institutional power. His prioritisation of order over truth and justice, coupled with his justification of noble lies, paints a picture of a pragmatist willing to compromise ethics for stability. Whether this perspective deepens or is challenged in later chapters remains to be seen, but for now, Harari’s narrative raises as many concerns as it seeks to address. I don’t mean to be overly cynical, but I can’t help but think that this book lays the groundwork for propagandising his playbook.
I question whether reviewing a book chapter by chapter is the best approach. It feels more like a reaction video because I am trying to suss out as I go. Also, I question the integrity and allegiance of the author, a point I often make clear. Perhaps ‘integrity’ is too harsh as he may have integrity relative to his worldview. It just happens to differ from mine.
Chapter 1 of Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus, ironically titled “What is Information?” closes not with clarity but with ambiguity. Harari, ever the rhetorician, acknowledges the difficulty of achieving consensus on what ‘information’ truly means. Instead of attempting a rigorous definition, he opts for the commonsense idiomatic approach—a conveniently disingenuous choice, given that information is supposedly the book’s foundational theme. To say this omission is bothersome would be an understatement; it is a glaring oversight in a chapter dedicated to unpacking this very concept.
Audio: Podcast related to this content.
Sidestepping Rigour
Harari’s rationale for leaving ‘information’ undefined appears to rest on its contested nature, yet this does not excuse the absence of his own interpretation. While consensus may indeed be elusive, a book with such grand ambitions demands at least a working definition. Without it, readers are left adrift, navigating a central theme that Harari refuses to anchor. This omission feels particularly egregious when juxtaposed against his argument that information fundamentally underlies everything. How can one build a convincing thesis on such an unstable foundation?
The Map and the Terrain
In typical Harari fashion, the chapter isn’t devoid of compelling ideas. He revisits the map-and-terrain analogy, borrowing from Borges to argue that no map can perfectly represent reality. While this metaphor is apt for exploring the limitations of knowledge, it falters when Harari insists on the existence of an underlying, universal truth. His examples—Israeli versus Palestinian perspectives, Orthodox versus secular vantage points—highlight the relativity of interpretation. Yet he clings to the Modernist belief that events have an objective reality: they occur at specific times, dates, and places, regardless of perspective. This insistence feels like an ontological claim awkwardly shoehorned into an epistemological discussion.
Leveraging Ambiguity
One can’t help but suspect that Harari’s refusal to define ‘information’ serves a rhetorical purpose. By leaving the concept malleable, he gains the flexibility to adapt its meaning to suit his arguments throughout the book. This ambiguity may prove advantageous in bolstering a wide-ranging thesis, but it also risks undermining the book’s intellectual integrity. Readers may find themselves wondering whether Harari is exploring complexity or exploiting it.
Final Thoughts on Chapter 1
The chapter raises more questions than it answers, not least of which is whether Harari intends to address these foundational gaps in later chapters. If the preface hinted at reductionism, Chapter 1 confirms it, with Harari’s Modernist leanings and rhetorical manoeuvres taking centre stage. “What is Information?” may be a provocative title, but its contents suggest that the question is one Harari is not prepared to answer—at least, not yet.
I’ve just begun reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus. As the prologue comes to a close, I find myself navigating an intellectual terrain riddled with contradictions, ideological anchors, and what I suspect to be strategic polemics. Harari, it seems, is speaking directly to his audience of elites and intellectuals, crafting a narrative that leans heavily on divisive rhetoric and reductionist thinking—all while promising to explore the nuanced middle ground between information as truth, weapon, and power grab. Does he deliver on this promise? The jury is still out, but the preface itself raises plenty of questions.
Audio: Podcast reflecting on this content.
The Anatomy of a Polemic
From the outset, Harari frames his discussion as a conflict between populists and institutionalists. He discredits the former with broad strokes, likening them to the sorcerer’s apprentice—irrational actors awaiting divine intervention to resolve the chaos they’ve unleashed. This imagery, though evocative, immediately positions populists as caricatures rather than serious subjects of analysis. To compound this, he critiques not only populist leaders like Donald Trump but also the rationality of their supporters, signalling a disdain that reinforces the divide between the “enlightened” and the “misguided.”
This framing, of course, aligns neatly with his target audience. Elites and intellectuals are likely to nod along, finding affirmation in Harari’s critique of populism’s supposed anti-rationality and embrace of spiritual empiricism. Yet, this approach risks alienating those outside his ideological choir, creating an echo chamber rather than fostering meaningful dialogue. I’m unsure whether he is being intentionally polemic and provocative to hook the reader into the book or if this tone will persist to the end.
The Rise of the Silicon Threat
One of Harari’s most striking claims in the preface is his fear that silicon-based organisms (read: AI) will supplant carbon-based life forms. This existential anxiety leans heavily into speciesism, painting a stark us-versus-them scenario. Whilst Harari’s concern may resonate with those wary of unchecked technological advancement, it smacks of sensationalism—a rhetorical choice that risks reducing complex dynamics to clickbait-level fearmongering. How, exactly, does he support this claim? That remains to be seen, though the sceptic in me suspects this argument may prioritise dramatic appeal over substantive evidence.
Virtue Ethics and the Modernist Lens
Harari’s ideological stance emerges clearly in his framing of worldviews as divisions of motives: power, truth, or justice. This naïve triad mirrors his reliance on virtue ethics, a framework that feels both dated and overly simplistic in the face of the messy realities he seeks to unpack. Moreover, his defence of institutionalism—presented as the antidote to populist chaos—ignores the systemic failings that have eroded trust in these very institutions. By focusing on discrediting populist critiques rather than interrogating institutional shortcomings, Harari’s argument risks becoming one-sided.
A Preface Packed with Paradoxes
Despite these critiques, Harari’s preface is not without its merits. For example, his exploration of the “ant-information” cohort of conspiracy theorists raises interesting questions about the weaponisation of information and the cultural shifts driving these movements. However, his alignment with power concerns—notably the World Economic Forum—casts a shadow over his ability to critique these dynamics impartially. Is he unpacking the mechanisms of power or merely reinforcing the ones that align with his worldview?
The Promise of Middle Ground—or the Illusion of It
Harari’s stated goal to explore the middle ground between viewing information as truth, weapon, or power grab is ambitious. Yet, the preface itself leans heavily toward polarisation, framing AI as an existential enemy and populists as irrational antagonists. If he genuinely seeks to unpack the nuanced intersections of these themes, he will need to move beyond the reductionism and rhetorical flourishes that dominate his opening chapter.
Final Thoughts
I liked Hararis’ first publication, Sapiens, that looked back into the past, but I was less enamoured with his prognosticating, and I worry that this is more of the same. As I move beyond the preface of Nexus, I remain curious but sceptical. Harari’s narrative thus far feels more like a carefully curated polemic than a genuine attempt to navigate the complexities of the information age. Whether he builds on these initial positions or continues entrenching them will determine whether Nexus delivers on its promise or merely reinforces existing divides. One thing is certain: the prologue has set the stage for a provocative, if polarising, journey.
As the clock ticks us into 2025, a peculiar tale has surfaced in the blogosphere: a dark twist on the classic fable of the “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” served with a side of nihilistic absurdity. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find the original story over at Blog for Chumps. It’s a biting little narrative that turns traditional moralising on its head. Here’s why it deserves your attention.
Audio: NotebookLM Podcast on this topic.
The Tale in Brief
A hungry wolf, tired of dodging vigilant shepherds, decides to forgo subterfuge altogether. He waltzes into the flock, making no effort to hide his predatory nature. A naïve lamb follows him, and predictably, the wolf claims his meal. Later, the wolf returns to the sheepfold, where the shepherd — instead of protecting his flock — teams up with the wolf. Together, they butcher a sheep before abandoning the scene entirely to indulge in McDonald’s, leaving the traumatised sheep to accept their grim new reality.
Not exactly bedtime reading for the kids.
Themes: A Cynical Mirror to Our World
This tale is not merely a grotesque subversion of pastoral simplicity; it’s a scalpel slicing into the rotting carcass of modern society. Here’s what lurks beneath its woolly surface:
1. Cynicism Towards Authority
In most fables, the shepherd embodies protection and care. Here, he’s a collaborator in senseless violence. The shepherd’s betrayal critiques the notion of benevolent authority, suggesting that those entrusted with safeguarding the vulnerable often act in their own interests or, worse, align themselves with destructive forces. Sound familiar? Think political complicity, corporate greed, or any number of modern failures of leadership.
2. Normalisation of Atrocity
The sheep, described as cognitively intact, accept their grim reality without resistance. This isn’t a story about oblivious innocence; it’s about the horrifying human capacity to adapt to systemic violence. It reflects how people, faced with injustice, often acquiesce to their oppressors rather than challenge the status quo.
3. Inversion of Expectations
The wolf doesn’t even bother with the traditional sheepskin disguise. His audacity mirrors the brazen nature of modern exploitation, where bad actors operate in plain sight, confident in the public’s apathy or resignation. It’s a commentary on the erosion of shame, accountability, and even the pretence of decency.
4. Absurdity and Nihilism
The shepherd and wolf ditch their victim to grab fast food, trivialising the violence they’ve inflicted. The juxtaposition of archaic brutality with banal consumerism is absurd yet disturbingly resonant. It suggests that, in our era, even cruelty can be relegated to a footnote in the pursuit of comfort or convenience.
Symbols: Layers of Meaning
The tale brims with symbolic resonance:
The Wolf: A stand-in for unchecked greed or predatory systems, the wolf’s brazen behaviour highlights the dangers of apathy and unchallenged power.
The Shepherd: His betrayal symbolises the failure of institutions — governments, corporations, or other entities — to protect those they claim to serve.
The Sheep: Far from being simple-minded, the sheep’s acceptance of their grim new reality is a biting critique of societal complacency.
McDonald’s: A modern symbol of triviality and consumerism, it underscores the absurdity of senseless violence in a world driven by shallow comforts.
A Stark Commentary on Power Dynamics
At its core, the story is a brutal satire of power and complicity. Though ostensibly adversaries, the shepherd and wolf unite to exploit the powerless. It’s a chilling reminder of how often power structures protect their own interests at the expense of the vulnerable.
The sheep’s passive acceptance is equally damning. It forces readers to confront their own role as silent witnesses or even complicit actors in systems of oppression. What happens when we’re no longer shocked by atrocity but instead integrate it into the fabric of our existence?
The Satirical Edge
What makes this story particularly effective is its dark, sardonic, and unapologetically hyperbolic tone. It revels in absurdity while delivering a grim truth about human nature. The shepherd and wolf’s nonchalance is as hilarious as it is horrifying, making the tale an unsettling mirror of a society where injustice and apathy often go hand in hand.
Final Thoughts
This fable may be short, but its implications are vast. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of complacency, the betrayal of trust, and the absurdity of modern priorities. More importantly, it’s a call to resist the normalisation of harm — to recognise wolves and shepherds for what they are and demand better from ourselves and those in power.
So, as we usher in a new year, let this tale serve as a grim reminder: the wolf doesn’t always need a disguise, and the shepherd isn’t always your friend. Sometimes, they’re just two blokes on their way to McDonald’s.
Because I didn’t want to expend the time and effort of drafting an essay on this follow-up to my recent post on the debate on the age of consent and other morally charged issues, I asked ChatGPT 5.2* for a response after a chat and using my article as input. Here it is unedited.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
There is a peculiar social reflex that appears whenever rigorous reasoning is applied to a moral taboo. The reasoning is not assessed. It is diagnosed. The act of analysis itself is treated as incriminating. To ask whether a law is coherent is taken as evidence that one wishes to violate it. To interrogate a norm is assumed to be an endorsement of its transgression.
Logic becomes guilt by association.
This is not a recent development, nor a failure of individual temperament. It is a recurring structural feature of liberal moral discourse. And it has been observed, repeatedly, by thinkers who were then punished for observing it.
Most of them learned to speak obliquely. Those who didn’t were posthumously moralised into villains.
Power Punishes Inquiry Before It Punishes Acts
This pattern is clearest in the work of Michel Foucault, though he never named it so baldly. Across his analyses of sexuality, psychiatry, criminality, and deviance, Foucault shows how discourse does not merely regulate behaviour. It regulates who may speak and at what cost.
In The History of Sexuality, inquiry into sex is not treated as a neutral investigation. It is treated as participation. To analyse is already to be implicated. The question “why is this norm structured this way?” is reinterpreted as “why do you want to do this?”
Power does not refute the argument. It reframes the arguer.
What I have called the moral contamination reflex is simply Foucault’s power-knowledge dynamic rendered without euphemism. Description collapses into confession. Analysis becomes evidence.
Thinking Itself Becomes Suspicious
Hannah Arendt encountered the same mechanism outside the domain of sexuality. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she refused moral theatre and insisted on analysis. The result was predictable. Her work was read not as an explanation, but as an apology. Reflection was interpreted as sympathy. Distance as betrayal.
She did not excuse. She thought. That was enough.
Arendt grasped something liberal societies remain unwilling to admit: in moralised contexts, explanation is treated as exculpation. The refusal to perform outrage is itself construed as an ethical failure. Thought becomes suspect because it disrupts consensus emotion.
Interpretation as an Affront to Feeling
Susan Sontag made the same diagnosis from another angle. Against Interpretation is often misread as anti-intellectualism. It is not. It is a critique of cultures that prize affective immediacy and treat analysis as dilution.
In taboo domains, interpretation is framed as aestheticising harm, smoothing over pain, or evading responsibility. Feeling must remain raw. Unmediated. Authoritative. Analysis becomes a threat because it interrupts the emotional unanimity that stands in for moral clarity.
Liberal cultures, Sontag saw, defend affect as moral authority and punish anyone who insists on distance.
Logic Never Gets Jurisdiction
Where Foucault and Arendt focus on power and panic, Stanley Fish supplies the institutional explanation. His work on interpretive communities shows that arguments about taboo subjects are never evaluated on formal grounds. They are assessed for alignment.
If a conclusion threatens a community’s moral posture, the reasoning is reclassified as motive-revealing behaviour. The argument is not wrong. It is telling on you.
Fish’s core insight applies cleanly here: what counts as reason depends on whether the community wants the conclusion. Logic does not fail. It is denied jurisdiction.
The Oldest Warning Everyone Claims to Believe
None of this would have surprised John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, his fear is not bad laws, but laws insulated from scrutiny by moral certainty. Once questioning itself is pathologised, correction becomes impossible.
Mill assumed that rational inquiry survives moral offence. That assumption has quietly expired. What remains is the performance of rationality alongside the suppression of its consequences.
The Scapegoat Absorbs the Argument
René Girard supplies the anthropological layer that completes the picture. In moments of moral panic, societies do not debate inconsistencies. They select carriers of contamination.
The thinker becomes the stand-in for the anxiety the argument provokes. Accusation replaces refutation. Biography replaces premise. Once the speaker is expelled, coherence is restored without ever being examined.
This explains why historical figures are so often retroactively moralised. Their arguments are no longer addressed. Their character is sufficient.
The Pattern, Stated Plainly
What unites these perspectives is a single rule that liberal societies refuse to articulate:
Certain questions may not be asked without self-implication.
To analyse is to confess. To clarify is to endorse. To question is to reveal desire.
This is why figures like Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze are now routinely invoked as moral warnings rather than intellectual interlocutors. The goal is not to understand what was argued, but to signal that asking such questions is itself disqualifying.
Moral certainty is preserved. Legal incoherence is left untouched.
What This Essay Is Not Doing
This is not a defence of bad arguments, harmful acts, or historical petitions. It is a defence of a distinction that has become strangely controversial: that describing the structure of a norm is not the same as endorsing the behaviour it regulates.
To point out that a legal threshold is philosophically arbitrary is not to advocate its abolition. To analyse a moral panic is not to side with its villains. To insist on logic is not to confess desire.
But this distinction is precisely what the moral contamination reflex is designed to erase.
Why Logic Feels Radioactive
The reason this argument provokes hostility is not that it is wrong. It is that it threatens a stabilising mechanism. Liberal societies rely on the fiction that their laws are both rational and morally self-evident. Scrutiny exposes the seams.
If logic is allowed back in, the theatre collapses. And theatres, moral or otherwise, do not like their lighting rigs inspected.
This is not a new failure mode. It is a recurring one. It appears whenever inquiry approaches a taboo and disappears the moment the inquirer becomes the story.
Which, predictably, is taken as further evidence of guilt.
Written by ChatGPT 5.2
microglyphics
* Full disclosure and notice: If you don’t prefer GPT output, feel free to skip this piece. The names in bold had been hyperlinked, but the extended content didn’t survive the copy-paste process.
I was chatting with some Catholics on Social Media, responding to a post about the need to grow their base. I sympathised that it must be difficult because the product of organised religion was not exactly tailor-fit. Protestants have provision for roll-your-own, but not Catholics. This led me to a discussion about what Jung wrote about rituals – that it doesn’t matter if the underlying rationale was remembered because some people like ritual for its own sake – candles, incense, wafers, whatever.
(I studied Jung intensely in the mid-’90s, and while I still find him useful as metaphor, I don’t take his broader metaphysics seriously anymore – too mystical for my tastes. But this particular insight about ritual sticks.)
Follows are the unedited results.
Yes, and Jung was being quietly subversive about it. He was pointing to something most modern institutions would rather not hear.
For Carl Jung, ritual doesn’t need to be true in the propositional sense to be effective in the psychological one. Its power doesn’t reside in correct belief, historical accuracy, or even conscious assent. It resides in repetition, form, symbol, and the way those elements bypass the rational gatekeeper and go straight for the nervous system.
Which is precisely why ritual unnerves modernity.
Once you accept Jung’s claim, you’re forced to concede that meaning is not the primary engine of human orientation. Function is. A ritual can continue to stabilise, contain, and organise psychic life long after its original metaphysics has decayed, been forgotten, or become frankly unbelievable. The candles still work even if God has quietly slipped out the back.
This is deeply inconvenient for Enlightenment-descended sensibilities, which insist that symbols must justify themselves, that practices require reasons, and that belief precedes action. Jung flips that on its head. We act first. We kneel first. We chant first. Understanding, if it arrives at all, comes later as a kind of aftercare.
Which helps explain your mate’s conversion without invoking any sudden metaphysical awakening.
Catholic ritual functions even when belief wobbles. Protestantism, having stripped ritual back to avoid superstition, leaves belief carrying all the weight. Once belief falters, there’s nothing left to hold the structure together. No choreography. No inherited muscle memory. No symbolic surplus. Just a sermon competing with the rest of the week’s content.
Jung saw this coming. He understood that modern people would continue to need ritual even as they lost faith in the stories that once justified it. His worry wasn’t that people would abandon religion. It was that they would abandon ritual competence and then wonder why anxiety, fragmentation, and compensatory myth-making flooded in through the cracks.
From that angle, Catholicism’s current crisis looks different again.
The conservatives think ritual must be defended because it encodes truth. The progressives think ritual can be loosened because truth can be updated. Jung would have said both are missing the point.
Ritual persists because it does work that language cannot do. It orders time. It disciplines the body. It makes the invisible feel locally real. Strip away the incense, the repetition, the inherited forms, and you don’t get a purer faith. You get an exposed psyche scrambling for substitutes.
So when someone says, “I’m drawn to Catholicism because of the candles and incense,” they’re not being shallow. They’re being honest in a way theologians and sociologists often aren’t. They’re admitting that humans are not primarily convinced creatures.
They are conditioned ones.
Jung didn’t romanticise that fact. He warned about it. But he understood it well enough to say the thing modern institutions still resist admitting: you can drain a ritual of meaning and it will still shape lives long after the doctrine has stopped persuading anyone.
In 2024, I produced 154 blog posts here – a total of 122K words. More importantly, in 2024 the blog had more than twice the number of visits than in 2023. It’s seen an increase in traffic every year since its inception in 2017 – despite my neglect from being distracted elsewhere.
As nickdruryfad63dc877 rightly noted, some content is less focused than others. In this case, I was busy. To borrow from Pascal, “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” As I responded to him, not only was the post meandering and an amalgamation of 4 or 5 – not necessarily mutually exclusive – topics, I didn’t even make the point I set out to make, so the topic remains a prime candidate for a future release.
I want to share more here but have other blogs and interests. It’s not a full-time profession, but it could be. Content creation is difficult. It’s even harder when one creates unevenly in several domains. We’ll see where this year goes.
Currently, I am putting the finishing touches on a Metamodernism Worldview Survey that is a culmination of earlier ideas. I am also finishing a couple of books and an essay, plus some short stories, some related to this blog, others not so much. I’ve also neglected my associated YouTube channel, so I’d like to render more content there, too.
Philosophics 