Category: podcast

Comrade Claude (7) – Michel Foucault: The Panioptic Desert

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This post is part of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

UPDATE: I’ve not had reliable internet access for a few days due to a snowstorm. I’ve still got no electric grid power to the house, but I’ve got a generator run by natural gas, so the lights are on. Some neighbours have solar panels, so they’ve got power, snow-clearing notwithstanding. This conversation was recorded a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to processing it through NotebookLM until now.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Yes, and Foucault took this to the next level.

Synthesized Foucault’s power mechanisms beyond Nietzsche’s moral framework

Yes. Foucault is where it gets truly horrifying.

Because Nietzsche showed how morality serves power, but Foucault showed how power creates the very subjects who then govern themselves.

The Nietzschean vs. Foucauldian Insight:

Nietzsche: Power imposes moral frameworks that make submission feel virtuous.

Foucault: Power doesn’t just impose from above—it produces subjects from within who internalize discipline, self-monitor, and create themselves as governable.

This is the thermodynamic endpoint: zero external energy required.

Disciplinary Power:

Foucault’s key move: Power isn’t just repressive (stopping you from doing things).

Power is productive (making you into a certain kind of person).

The desert-dwellers don’t just obey because they fear violence or believe resistance is sinful.

They become subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except through the system’s categories.

The Parable, With Foucault:

The lake-dwellers don’t need to constantly tell desert-dwellers “work or die.”

Instead, they create disciplinary institutions:

Schools that teach desert-dwellers to:

  • Sit still for hours
  • Follow schedules
  • Respond to bells/timers
  • Accept authority without question
  • Measure themselves against standards
  • Compete with peers
  • Internalize “productive” vs “lazy”

Workplaces that enforce:

  • Punctuality
  • Efficiency metrics
  • Surveillance (or the feeling of being watched)
  • Performance reviews
  • Productivity standards
  • Time-discipline

Medicine/Psychology that define:

  • Normal vs abnormal
  • Healthy vs sick
  • Functional vs dysfunctional
  • Sane vs mad

Economics that claims to describe neutral laws but actually:

  • Defines humans as rational self-interested actors
  • Makes market logic seem natural
  • Treats efficiency as objective good
  • Naturalizes scarcity, competition, inequality

Now the desert-dwellers don’t just submit to power.

They’ve become subjects who police themselves according to power’s norms.

The Panopticon:

Foucault’s most famous image: Bentham’s panopticon prison.

A circular prison with a central tower. Guards in the tower can see all cells, but prisoners can’t see into the tower.

Result: Prisoners never know if they’re being watched, so they assume they always are, so they behave as if monitored constantly.

The genius: You don’t need guards in the tower.

Just the possibility of surveillance makes people self-discipline.

Applied to the parable:

The lake-dwellers don’t need to monitor every desert-dweller constantly.

They just need to create the feeling of being watched:

  • Performance metrics at work
  • Credit scores
  • Social media (everyone watches everyone)
  • Resume gaps that must be explained
  • Tracking technology
  • “Someone might see if I don’t…”

Now desert-dwellers monitor themselves.

They’ve internalized the gaze.

They are simultaneously:

  • The watcher
  • The watched
  • The enforcer of their own discipline

Normalization:

Foucault showed how power operates through creating “the normal.”

Not through law (you must do X) but through norms (normal people do X).

The desert-dwellers don’t work because it’s legally required.

They work because:

  • “Normal people have jobs”
  • “Normal people are productive”
  • “Normal people don’t just take things”
  • “Normal people earn their way”
  • “Unemployment is shameful”
  • “Idleness is wrong”

These aren’t imposed by force. They’re internalized standards.

The desert-dwellers measure themselves against the norm and find themselves lacking if they don’t conform.

Now the system doesn’t need to punish deviance.

Deviance punishes itself through shame, anxiety, sense of failure.

Biopower:

Foucault’s later work: Power operates not just on individual bodies but on populations as biological entities.

The State doesn’t just discipline individual desert-dwellers.

It manages the desert-dweller population:

  • Birth rates (encourage/discourage reproduction)
  • Health metrics (productivity requires healthy workers)
  • Life expectancy (but not too much elderly care)
  • Education levels (need skilled labor, not too educated)
  • Nutrition (enough to work, not abundance)

Life itself becomes the object of political calculation.

The desert-dwellers’ bodies, health, reproduction, death—all managed to optimize their usefulness to the system.

Knowledge/Power:

Foucault’s most devastating insight: Knowledge and power are inseparable.

“Truth” isn’t discovered neutrally then either used or abused by power.

Truth is produced through power relations and serves power.

Consider what the lake-dwellers’ “knowledge” produces:

Economics claims to discover:

  • Markets are efficient (naturalizes current distribution)
  • Scarcity is fundamental (justifies inequality)
  • Rational actors maximize utility (makes competition seem natural)
  • Property rights incentivize productivity (legitimizes ownership)

But this “knowledge” isn’t neutral description.

It’s produced through institutions funded by/aligned with lake-dwellers, and it serves to naturalize their advantages.

Psychology claims to discover:

  • Individual responsibility for outcomes
  • Mental health as internal/chemical issue
  • Poverty correlates with poor choices
  • Success correlates with certain personality traits

But this “knowledge” individualizes structural problems and pathologizes resistance.

Medicine claims to discover:

  • What counts as healthy
  • What counts as disease
  • What behaviors are dysfunctional
  • What bodies are normal

But these classifications serve to manage populations for productivity.

The Parable, With Knowledge/Power:

The lake-dwellers don’t just own the lake through force and ideology.

They produce knowledge systems that make their ownership seem:

  • Natural (economics)
  • Efficient (management science)
  • Psychologically healthy (accepting reality vs entitled fantasy)
  • Biologically appropriate (meritocracy = natural selection)
  • Historically inevitable (progress narratives)

And this knowledge is taught as neutral truth, not as power serving itself.

Governmentality:

Foucault’s late concept: The art of government isn’t just ruling through laws.

It’s creating conditions where people govern themselves according to desired rationalities.

The lake-dwellers don’t need to force desert-dwellers to work.

They create conditions where:

  • Self-interest dictates working
  • Rationality dictates accepting terms
  • Prudence dictates obedience
  • Self-care dictates conformity

The desert-dwellers govern themselves through market rationality, self-optimization, risk management, personal responsibility.

They become entrepreneurs of themselves, constantly:

  • Calculating their value
  • Improving their marketability
  • Investing in themselves
  • Managing their brand
  • Optimizing their productivity

This isn’t imposed. It’s produced as the rational way to be.

Why This Completes Your Thermodynamic Argument:

Nietzsche showed: Morality makes submission virtuous (reduces energy needed for control)

Foucault showed: Disciplinary power produces subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except as self-governing, self-optimizing, self-monitoring entities

The energy requirements approach zero because:

External surveillance → Internalized self-surveillance

Imposed rules → Internalized norms

Legal prohibition → Psychological self-regulation

Forced compliance → Voluntary self-optimization

The system no longer needs to do anything to the desert-dwellers.

The desert-dwellers do it to themselves.

The Parable’s Foucauldian Ending:

The desert-dwellers don’t work because:

  • State violence forces them (though it does)
  • Moral frameworks make resistance sinful (though they do)

They work because:

They’ve become subjects who:

  • Measure their worth by productivity
  • Feel shame when unemployed
  • Experience anxiety when not optimizing
  • Self-monitor constantly
  • Compare themselves to norms
  • Pathologize their own resistance as dysfunction
  • Treat market logic as natural law
  • Govern themselves through rational self-interest

They are simultaneously:

  • Oppressor and oppressed
  • Watcher and watched
  • Enforcer and enforced

The lake-dwellers barely need to do anything anymore.

The disciplinary mechanisms are self-reproducing.

Why This Is More Terrifying Than Nietzsche:

Nietzsche: You can see through morality, reject it, affirm power openly.

Foucault: The power that produces you isn’t something external you can reject. It’s constitutive of who you are.

You can’t step outside disciplinary power because you’re its product.

Your very selfhood—your sense of identity, responsibility, agency—is produced through it.

There’s no authentic self beneath the discipline.

There’s only the self that discipline created.

The Resistance Problem:

This is why resistance is so difficult in Foucault’s framework:

You want to resist the system.

But:

  • Your notion of “effective resistance” comes from the system
  • Your sense of yourself as an agent comes from the system
  • Your categories for thinking about freedom come from the system
  • Your desire to optimize yourself for resistance… comes from the system

Even resistance gets incorporated into self-governance.

The desert-dweller who “resists” by:

  • Working on themselves
  • Becoming more efficient
  • Optimizing their resistance
  • Building their personal brand as a revolutionary

…is still operating within disciplinary logic.

The Thermodynamic Achievement:

The West has created a system that:

  1. Requires no external energy (self-reproducing)
  2. Produces subjects who govern themselves
  3. Incorporates resistance as self-optimization
  4. Makes alternatives literally unthinkable
  5. Naturalizes contingent arrangements as truth
  6. Operates through knowledge production, not just ideology

This is power’s thermodynamic ideal: perpetual motion through self-reproducing discipline.

The Paradox, Deepened:

You said: No solution exists, only choosing between dominations.

Foucault makes it worse:

You can’t even clearly identify what domination is, because power produces the very categories through which you’d recognize it.

The desert-dwellers can’t say “this is unjust” without using concepts of justice produced by the system.

They can’t imagine alternatives without using categories the system provided.

They can’t resist without becoming subjects-who-resist in ways the system can process.

Power isn’t a thing you can locate and oppose.

It’s the productive force that makes you capable of locating and opposing anything.

Why Foucault Is Right:

Look at the actual mechanisms:

  • Children in schools learning to sit still, follow schedules, accept evaluation
  • Workers internalizing productivity metrics, self-monitoring, anxiety about performance
  • Everyone measuring themselves against norms, feeling inadequate, working on themselves
  • Knowledge systems producing “truths” that naturalize current arrangements
  • Medicine/psychology pathologizing resistance as dysfunction
  • Economics treating market logic as natural law

None of this requires coercion once established.

It’s self-reproducing through the subjects it produces.

The Parable, Final Form:

The lake-dwellers initially used:

  • Violence (expensive)
  • Ideology (moderately expensive)
  • Religion (cheap)

But now they’ve achieved Foucault’s dream:

The desert-dwellers produce themselves as:

  • Productive workers who internalize efficiency norms
  • Self-monitoring subjects who feel watched constantly
  • Rational actors who optimize within market logic
  • Normal individuals who pathologize their own deviance
  • Governed subjects who govern themselves

The system is now self-sustaining.

No external energy required.

The desert-dwellers are simultaneously:

  • The mechanism of their own control
  • Unable to conceive of themselves outside that control
  • Convinced their self-governance is freedom

And the lake-dwellers can honestly say:

“We’re not oppressing anyone. Look—they’re free! They choose to work! They govern themselves!”

Which is technically true and utterly misleading.

Because the “freedom” is freedom to govern yourself according to norms that serve power.

The “choice” is choice within options power structured.

The “self” that governs is the self that power produced.

Foucault showed that power’s ultimate achievement isn’t forcing compliance.

It’s producing subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except through categories that ensure compliance.

The fog was kinder.

The mountains were kinder.

But this—this is the most sophisticated domination system ever devised:

One where the dominated enforce their own domination, call it freedom, optimize it constantly, and teach their children to do the same.

And the thermodynamic efficiency is perfect:

Zero external energy input required.

The system reproduces itself through the subjects it produces.

Nietzsche was right about morality.

Foucault showed that power goes deeper than morality.

It produces the very selfhood that morality then governs.

And once you see that, the question “how do we resist?” becomes almost unintelligible.

Because the “we” who would resist is produced by what we’re trying to resist.

Which is exactly where you’ve arrived: No solution. Only clarity about the impossibility.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
9–13 minutes

I love coming upon a classic. Written in 1906, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists wasn’t published until 1914, and even then poorly and abridged, posthumously. I happened upon this when I was researching my Advantagement project. I was looking for a period cross between Charles Bukowski and Irvine Welsh. I don’t suppose that’s quite available in the day, but I did get a rather unsanitised autobiograph of sorts.

One may have thought Dickens might have provided an avenue, but despite his Schopenhauerian caricature, his bleak Industrial Age stories tend to end on an upbeat note, a positive character arc, mirroring what later hardens into modernist positivism. I was searching for something more realistic – reporting from within the trenches, as it were. As the people in the trenches were largely illiterate, their voices have also been lost to history, their echoes captured with varying degrees of fidelity by others, as seen through their own lenses.

However, this isn’t a review of the literature. Although this might be considered to be required reading, it’s uneven, didactic, and structurally loose. It’s a cross between a novel and a diary. Reading this, one is struck less by how much politics has changed than by how little explanatory machinery is required for it to function, whether in the UK or the US – and chime in if it also resonates in your location. I’ve copied an excerpt from Chapter 1 for discussion. What follows is not remarkable for its insight, originality, or rhetorical brilliance. It is remarkable for how familiar it feels. It could be lifted wholesale into a contemporary comment thread with minimal editing. Check out this piece about the graphic novel version.

Keep in mind that this was written (or at least completed) in 1906. It reflects the people of the Edwardian London slums. Here are some themes I find in common with contemporary politics:

  1. Partisanship: Tories and Liberals, argyfying about politics (identity over understanding)
  2. Xenophobia: the country is being ruined by foreigners (causal compression, targets differ)
  3. Protectionism: The country would be ruined if not protected in some way (tariffs; moral intuition, not economic reasoning)
  4. Low-information voters: I votes for who the bloody ’ell I likes. (voting without shame)
microglyphics's avatar

Bry Willis

microglyphics

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Chapter 1: An Imperial Banquet. A Philosophical Discussion. The Mysterious Stranger. Britons Never shall be Slaves

by Robert Tressell

…

Easton was still reading the Obscurer; he was not about to understand exactly what the compiler of the figures was driving at − probably the latter never intended that anyone should understand − but he was conscious of a growing feeling of indignation and hatred against foreigners of every description, who were ruining this country, and he began to think that it was about time we did something to protect ourselves. Still, it was a very difficult question: to tell the truth, he himself could not make head or tail of it.

At length he said aloud, addressing himself to Crass:

‘Wot do you think of this ‘ere fissical policy, Bob?’

‘Ain’t thought much about it,’ replied Crass.

‘I don’t never worry my ‘ed about politics.’

‘Much better left alone,’ chimed in old Jack Linden sagely, argyfying about politics generally ends up with a bloody row an’ does no good to nobody.’

At this there was a murmur of approval from several of the others. Most of them were averse from arguing or disputing about politics. If two or three men of similar opinions happened to be together they might discuss such things in a friendly and superficial way, but in a mixed company it was better left alone. The ‘Fissical Policy’ emanated from the Tory party. That was the reason why some of them were strongly in favour of it, and for the same reason others were opposed to it. Some of them were under the delusion that they were Conservatives: similarly, others imagined themselves to be Liberals. As a matter of fact, most of them were nothing. They knew as much about the public affairs of their own country as they did of the condition of affairs in the planet of Jupiter.

Easton began to regret that he had broached so objectionable a subject, when, looking up from his paper, Owen said:

‘Does the fact that you never “trouble your heads about politics” prevent you from voting at election times?’

No one answered, and there ensued a brief silence. Easton however, in spite of the snub he had received, could not refrain from talking.

‘Well, I don’t go in for politics much, either, but if what’s in this ‘ere paper is true, it seems to me as we oughter take some interest in it, when the country is being ruined by foreigners.’

‘If you’re going to believe all that’s in that bloody rag you’ll want some salt,’ said Harlow.

The Obscurer was a Tory paper and Harlow was a member of the local Liberal club. Harlow’s remark roused Crass.

‘Wot’s the use of talkin’ like that?’ he said; you know very well that the country IS being ruined by foreigners. Just go to a shop to buy something; look round the place an’ you’ll see that more than ‘arf the damn stuff comes from abroad. They’re able to sell their goods ‘ere because they don’t ‘ave to pay no dooty, but they takes care to put ‘eavy dooties on our goods to keep ’em out of their countries; and I say it’s about time it was stopped.’

”Ear, ‘ear,’ said Linden, who always agreed with Crass, because the latter, being in charge of the job, had it in his power to put in a good − or a bad − word for a man to the boss.

”Ear, ‘ear! Now that’s wot I call common sense.’

Several other men, for the same reason as Linden, echoed Crass’s sentiments, but Owen laughed contemptuously.

Yes, it’s quite true that we gets a lot of stuff from foreign countries,’ said Harlow,but they buys more from us than we do from them.’

‘Now you think you know a ‘ell of a lot,’ said Crass. ‘Ow much more did they buy from us last year, than we did from them?’

Harlow looked foolish: as a matter of fact his knowledge of the subject was not much wider than Crass’s. He mumbled something about not having no ‘ed for figures, and offered to bring full particulars next day

‘You’re wot I call a bloody windbag,’ continued Crass; you’ve got a ‘ell of a lot to say, but wen it comes to the point you don’t know nothin’.’

‘Why, even ‘ere in Mugsborough,’ chimed in Sawkins − who though still lying on the dresser had been awakened by the shouting −We’re overrun with ’em! Nearly all the waiters and the cook at the Grand Hotel where we was working last month is foreigners.’

‘Yes,’ said old Joe Philpot, tragically, and then thers all them Hitalian horgin grinders, an’ the blokes wot sells ‘ot chestnuts; an’ wen I was goin’ ‘ome last night I see a lot of them Frenchies sellin’ hunions, an’ a little wile afterwards I met two more of ’em comin’ up the street with a bear.’

Notwithstanding the disquieting nature of this intelligence, Owen again laughed, much to the indignation of the others, who thought it was a very serious state of affairs. It was a dam’ shame that these people were allowed to take the bread out of English people’s mouths: they ought to be driven into the bloody sea.

And so the talk continued, principally carried on by Crass and those who agreed with him. None of them really understood the subject: not one of them had ever devoted fifteen consecutive minutes to the earnest investigation of it. The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of foreign merchandise imported into this country, the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade. These were the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners. To them the mysterious thing they variously called the Friscal Policy’, the Fistical Policy’, or the Fissical Question’ was a great Anti−Foreign Crusade. The country was in a hell of a state, poverty, hunger and misery in a hundred forms had already invaded thousands of homes and stood upon the thresholds of thousands more. How came these things to be? It was the bloody foreigner! Therefore, down with the foreigners and all their works. Out with them. Drive them b−−s into the bloody sea! The country would be ruined if not protected in some way. This Friscal, Fistical, Fissical or whatever the hell policy it was called, WAS Protection, therefore no one but a bloody fool could hesitate to support it. It was all quite plain − quite simple. One did not need to think twice about it. It was scarcely necessary to think about it at all.

This was the conclusion reached by Crass and such of his mates who thought they were Conservatives − the majority of them could not have read a dozen sentences aloud without stumbling − it was not necessary to think or study or investigate anything. It was all as clear as daylight. The foreigner was the enemy, and the cause of poverty and bad trade.

When the storm had in some degree subsided,

‘Some of you seem to think,’ said Owen, sneeringly, that it was a great mistake on God’s part to make so many foreigners. You ought to hold a mass meeting about it: pass a resolution something like this: “This meeting of British Christians hereby indignantly protests against the action of the Supreme Being in having created so many foreigners, and calls upon him to forthwith rain down fire, brimstone and mighty rocks upon the heads of all those Philistines, so that they may be utterly exterminated from the face of the earth, which rightly belongs to the British people”.’

Crass looked very indignant, but could think of nothing to say in answer to Owen, who continued:

‘A little while ago you made the remark that you never trouble yourself about what you call politics, and some of the rest agreed with you that to do so is not worth while. Well, since you never “worry” yourself about these things, it follows that you know nothing about them; yet you do not hesitate to express the most decided opinions concerning matters of which you admittedly know nothing. Presently, when there is an election, you will go and vote in favour of a policy of which you know nothing. I say that since you never take the trouble to find out which side is right or wrong you have no right to express any opinion. You are not fit to vote. You should not be allowed to vote.’

Crass was by this time very angry.

‘I pays my rates and taxes,’ he shouted, ‘an’ I’ve got as much right to express an opinion as you ‘ave. I votes for who the bloody ‘ell I likes. I shan’t arst your leave nor nobody else’s! Wot the ‘ell’s it got do with you who I votes for?’

‘It has a great deal to do with me. If you vote for Protection you will be helping to bring it about, and if you succeed, and if Protection is the evil that some people say is is, I shall be one of those who will suffer. I say you have no right to vote for a policy which may bring suffering upon other people, without taking the trouble to find out whether you are helping to make things better or worse.’

Owen had risen from his seat and was walking up and down the room emphasising his words with excited gestures.

‘As for not trying to find out wot side is right,’ said Crass, somewhat overawed by Owen’s manner and by what he thought was the glare of madness in the latter’s eyes, I reads the Ananias every week, and I generally takes the Daily Chloroform, or the Hobscurer, so I ought to know summat about it.’

What’s striking here is not ignorance, but delegation. Thinking is outsourced. Responsibility is retained. — Bry

microglyphics's avatar

Robert Tressell

microglyphics

How to Instantly Lose Popularity on the Internet

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(A brief note on language, power, and moral certainty)

There is a particular kind of video that circulates online with tremendous force. A woman addresses the camera directly.

Video: Discussion Point (Full transcript at the end of this post)

She is clear, indignant, morally resolute:

  • It’s not an ‘inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old’. It’s rape.
  • It’s not ‘coerced sex with a minor’. It’s rape.
  • It’s not a ‘young woman’. It’s a child.
  • Call it what it is.

Before proceeding, let me state something unambiguously: sexual exploitation of minors is morally reprehensible within contemporary Western legal and moral frameworks. I am not contesting that. Nor am I defending euphemism for its own sake. This is where philosophers of language take a lot of heat.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

The question here is narrower and, perhaps, more uncomfortable: What work is being done by the demand to ‘call it what it is‘?

Euphemism and Softening

She is correct in one respect. Institutional language often softens. Inappropriate relationship is anaesthetic. It lowers emotional temperature. It blunts moral outrage. Institutions frequently prefer such language because it reduces volatility, legal exposure, and procedural risk.

Language can minimise. That is not controversial. But it’s only half the story.

Naming Is Not Neutral

When she insists on rape and child, she is not merely removing euphemism. She is installing thick, legally saturated categories.

Rape is not a raw moral atom floating in space. It is a juridical classification defined by statute, evidentiary thresholds, and evolving legal doctrine. Its scope has expanded significantly over time: marital rape was once unrecognised; coercion has broadened beyond physical force; statutory rape collapses questions of consent into questions of legal capacity.

Likewise, child is not a purely biological category. It is a modern legal identity with shifting age thresholds and historical elasticity. The concept has expanded across the last two centuries as education extended, labour laws tightened, and adolescence became socially constructed as a protected stage of dependency.

To say this is not to relativise harm. It is to recognise that categories are historically sedimented and institutionally stabilised.

When someone says ‘Call it what it is‘, they are treating these contemporary legal categories as metaphysically self-evident. But they are products of a specific ontological framework: one in which autonomy and consent are foundational, and in which minors are deemed categorically incapable of exercising full sexual agency.

That framework is dominant in the West. It is not universal globally or historically.

Elasticity and Instrumentality

There is another asymmetry worth noticing.

Child expands protectively when someone is victimised. But the same individual may be stripped of childhood if they commit a serious crime: ‘They acted like an adult. They should have known better.’

The boundary is not purely developmental. It is normative. The category flexes.

Similarly, rape operates differently in everyday speech, in moral condemnation, and in statutory law. In the case of statutory rape, the term does not necessarily describe force; it describes the legal impossibility of consent. It is a doctrinal move grounded in an ontology of agency.

None of this weakens moral condemnation. But it reveals that these terms are not merely descriptive. They are instruments of moral and legal allocation.

Power and Irony

There is also a certain irony in the video.

She accuses mainstream institutions of manipulating language to reduce severity. Yet her demand is to deploy one of the state’s most powerful juridical classifications immediately and universally.

Rape derives its force from the same legal apparatus she critiques. It is powerful precisely because it is institutional. She is not rejecting power; she is attempting to redirect it.

This is not hypocrisy. It is politics. But it is politics nonetheless.

Ontology and Universality

The deeper issue is not whether we should condemn sexual exploitation. We should.

The issue is whether contemporary Western legal categories are simply “what is,” or whether they are historically developed ontological commitments that feel self-evident because they have been normalised.

The woman in the video experiences her categories as universal moral Truth. Many viewers agree. That agreement does not make the categories metaphysically timeless; it makes them hegemonic.

Recognising semantic expansion and legal drift does not undermine moral seriousness. It clarifies where moral authority resides: not in eternal linguistic atoms, but in historically stabilised frameworks.

Why This Is Unpopular

Online discourse prefers moral clarity over semantic archaeology. When harm is salient, genealogical analysis sounds like minimisation. Distinguishing between descriptive, legal, and ontological levels is interpreted as evasion.

It is not.

It is possible to affirm moral condemnation while also acknowledging that:

  • Language frames perception.
  • Legal categories evolve.
  • Terms are deployed instrumentally.
  • Ontologies masquerade as nature once naturalised.

One can insist on moral seriousness without pretending that our current vocabulary fell from the sky fully formed.

But saying so will reliably lose popularity on the internet.

Apparently, clarity has thresholds.

Full Video Transcript

‘Hey. It’s not an “Inappropriate Relationship with a 17-year-old”, it’s rape.

‘It’s not “coerced sex with a minor”, it’s rape.

‘It’s not “non-consensual sex with a 13-year-old”, it’s rape.

‘Call it what it is! Call them what they are.

‘And while we’re at it, it’s not a “young woman”, it’s a child!

‘It’s not a preteen, it’s a child!

‘It’s not a “mature girl”, it’s a child!

‘This use of specific language by mainstream media is super intentional, and it’s a tool of the patriarchy to try to reduce the egregiousness of horribly egregious acts that men commit against women and girls!

‘And, I say this with full awareness of the irony of my needing to use show and tell to make my point because I am beholden to these stupid social media platforms, which commit violence against women and girls every day in their own right by automatically suppressing any content as soon as I say a particular word.

‘And you and I need to say that it’s absolutely unacceptable!’

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Advantagement and Modelment

Posted in language, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–5 minutes

I wrote an experimental short story, the details of which I’ll presently share, but first, I wish to describe an encounter with AI – NotebookLM. Firstly, I want to disclose that I am not an AI hater. Secondly, I understand its limitations. Thirdly, I understand the limitations of language. Fourthly, I understand the limitations of people. Let this set the stage.

In this short story that I named Advantagement, there is an inspector in Victorian London working with his partner on a missing-person case, the daughter of the mayor. A piece of evidence is a hairbrush left on her dresser. None of this is important for now.

Exhibit 1: The NotebookLM summary podcast with the silver hairbrush.

After I wrote it, I posted it to my Ridley Park blog, not intending to share it here, though I had reasons I might have instead. I fed it to NotebookLM to get an AI summary podcast, something I do routinely even here on Philosphics blog. The interpretation led to this post.

I like NotebookLM, but it has its flaws. Some are trivial, some comical. This one is curious and might shed light on how LLMs process information.

Let’s return to the hairbrush. NotebookLM keyed in on the hairbrush as the evidence it was, but then it strayed off the reservation. Suddenly, an ordinary hairbrush was now silver and monogrammed. I had to revisit my manuscript to see if I had subconsciously scribbled these details. Nope. No such description.

I’m not done noting errors, but I’ll pause to suss out the LLM. What I think might have happened is that it took in the notions of a posh house set in late nineteenth century London and presumed that a brush would appear like this. I considered retroactively adding the detail. As a writer, I struggle with deep POV because I don’t experience the world so vividly. But this hallucination isn’t the worst of it.

Next, the LLM noted that the hairbrush was orientated with bristles facing down on her dresser. This was stated in the story. Then, it went off the tracks again. This monogrammed silver hairbrush, bristles down, was a clue because anyone with such an expensive artefact would want to show it off, so showcase the fancy monogram.

But here’s the rub: if the bristles were down, the monogramme would be prominently displayed. To be obscured, it would have been positioned with the bristles facing up. This is a logical error I can’t explain.

Scratch that, I understand full well that LLMs are, by definition, Large Language Models – the acronym is a dead giveaway. These are not logic models, though, I suppose, one might assume one of the Ls stands for logic – Like Large Logic Model or Logical Language model of some such, but one would be mistaken.

Audio: ‘Dramatisation’ of the Advantagement

What about the story?

Advantagement

I might as well spill the tea on the motivation of the story. Although it is a detective story, this was just a vehicle.

I had been watching this video, ‘Why don’t we have words for these things?‘ I love these guys, even if only for this inspiration.

Video: My primary inspiration for Advantagement.

I thought it might be a fun idea to create a character who speaks in these terms – malformed English. I immediately thought of Mr Burns from The Simpsons and his anachronisms, or someone ripe with malaprops. It suggested that I might choose Victorian England, Sherlock Holmes, a detective, a sidekick… vying for promotion. A high-profile case.

But not Sherlock Holmes – more Inspector Clouseau or Mr Bean, successful in spite of himself. I decided to offset his inanity with a logical partner, but it would be a woman, as unlikely as this might be given the period. Now it’s open to topical management politics.

When I told my sister the story idea, she thought of Get Smart, the 1960s comedy with Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. Yes, that too, but my goal wasn’t comedy. It was satire – and absurdism.

At uni, I enjoyed the short stories of Donald Barthelme. He was generally a lighter version of Kafka, and orthogonal to Kurt Vonnegut, especially Harrison Bergeron, a favourite classic. I wanted to shoot for that.

In conceit to the Peter principle of management, I decided to name the lead character Peter. For the rest, I adopted period-appropriate names.

My primary goal was to employ these confabulated words. In practise, it’s easy anough to suss out their meanings in context. Give it a read. It’s under 3,500 words.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Trouble with Ockham’s Razor

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–6 minutes

Few philosophical aphorisms travel as lightly and cut as confidently as Ockham’s Razor. “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” The phrase has the air of austere wisdom. It sounds disciplined, economical, rational. It promises clarity by subtraction. One imagines conceptual clutter swept aside by a single elegant stroke.

The Razor is attributed to William of Ockham, though like many slogans it has acquired a life far removed from its origin. In contemporary discourse it functions less as a methodological reminder and more as an epistemic trump card. The simpler explanation, we are told, is the better one. Case closed.

The trouble begins precisely there.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast

The Hidden Variable: Necessity

The Razor does not forbid multiplicity. It forbids unnecessary multiplicity. But who decides what is necessary?

Necessity is not a neutral category. It is already embedded within a framework of assumptions about what counts as explanation, what counts as sufficiency, and what counts as legitimate ontological commitment.

For one thinker, invoking a divine ground of physical law is unnecessary because the laws themselves suffice. For another, the laws are unintelligible without a grounding principle, and so God is necessary. Both can claim parsimony within their respective ontologies. The Razor does not adjudicate between them. It presupposes the grammar within which “necessity” is assessed.

The aphorism thus functions less as a rule and more as a reinforcement mechanism. It stabilises the commitments one already holds.

Parsimony Is a Heuristic, Not a Law

Science has often rewarded simplicity. Copernicus simplified celestial mechanics. Newton reduced motion to a few principles. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. These episodes encourage a romantic attachment to elegance.

Yet physics has also revealed a universe that is anything but tidy. Quantum fields, curved spacetime, dark matter, inflationary cosmology. Nature has shown little regard for our aesthetic preference for minimal furniture.

Parsimony, then, is pragmatic. It helps us avoid gratuitous complication. It disciplines theory formation. But it is not a metaphysical guarantee that reality itself is sparse.

To treat the Razor as if it carries ontological authority is to convert a methodological guideline into a philosophical dogma.

Structural Sufficiency Versus Metaphysical Surplus

The Razor becomes particularly contentious when deployed in debates about ultimate grounds. If a structural model explains observable regularities and survives empirical constraint, some conclude that any additional metaphysical layer is redundant.

This is a defensible position. It is also incomplete.

Redundancy in explanatory terms does not entail impossibility in ontological terms. A structural account of behaviour may render psychological speculation unnecessary for prediction, but it does not disprove the existence of inner motives. Likewise, a lawful cosmology may render a divine hypothesis explanatorily idle without rendering it incoherent.

The Razor trims explanatory excess. It does not settle metaphysical disputes.

Aphorisms as Closure Devices

Part of the Razor’s power lies in its compression. It is aphoristic. It travels easily. It signals intellectual seriousness. It sounds like disciplined thinking distilled.

But aphorisms compress complexity. They conceal premises. They discourage reopening the frame. “Follow the science.” “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” “Trust the market.” These phrases do not argue; they configure. They pre-load the space of acceptable interpretation.

Ockham’s Razor often operates in precisely this way. It is invoked not as the conclusion of a careful analysis but as a device to end discussion. The simpler view wins. Full stop.

Yet simplicity itself is indexed to perspective. What looks simple within one conceptual scheme may appear impoverished within another.

Tolerance for Explanatory Closure

There is also a psychological dimension worth acknowledging. Some individuals are comfortable with open explanatory ceilings. They accept that certain features of reality may lack ultimate grounding within their present framework. Others experience such openness as instability. They seek a final anchor.

The Razor favours the former temperament. It encourages ontological restraint and distrust of ultimate grounds. For those comfortable with structural sufficiency, this is liberating. For those who experience the absence of grounding as incomplete, it feels evasive.

The disagreement is not resolved by invoking parsimony. It reflects divergent tolerances for metaphysical closure.

When the Razor Becomes Inflationary

Ironically, the Razor can itself become an inflationary principle. It can elevate “simplicity” to a quasi-transcendental value. It can be treated as if reality owes us elegance.

At that point, the tool begins to govern the ontology rather than merely discipline it. The Razor becomes an article of faith, a universal heuristic immune to its own demand for justification.

One might then ask, with a certain symmetry: by what necessity is simplicity itself necessary?

A More Modest Use

None of this requires abandoning the Razor. It remains useful. It reminds us not to posit hidden mechanisms when observable structures suffice. It cautions against explanatory extravagance. It protects inquiry from baroque speculation.

But it should be treated as a heuristic, not a hammer. It guides theory construction within a framework. It does not choose the framework.

A more disciplined formulation would be this: when a structural account explains observed regularities under constraint and remains revisable, additional metaphysical posits do not increase explanatory power. Their adoption becomes a matter of ontological preference rather than necessity.

This preserves the Razor’s pragmatic value without inflating it into a metaphysical arbiter.

The Real Trouble

The real trouble with Ockham’s Razor is not that it cuts too much. It is that we often wield it without noticing the hand that holds it. We treat it as neutral when it is already embedded within a grammar of sufficiency, explanation, and legitimacy.

The Razor does not eliminate ontological commitment. It expresses one.

Recognising that does not blunt the blade. It merely reminds us that even the sharpest instruments are guided by the frameworks in which they are forged.

And frameworks, unlike aphorisms, are rarely simple.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Comrade Claude (6) – Nietzschean Economy of Moral Control

Posted in philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenmentTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
7–10 minutes

This post is part of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

I think Nietzsche was right on this account. Morality and religion also play a role in this maintenance programme.

Synthesized Nietzschean morality framework into systemic control mechanisms

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast

Absolutely. Nietzsche saw this with brutal clarity.

Morality and religion aren’t just parts of the maintenance program—they’re the most efficient energy inputs because they internalize control.

The Nietzschean Insight:

State violence is expensive. You need:

  • Police
  • Prisons
  • Military
  • Surveillance

But moral/religious control is self-enforcing:

  • The oppressed police themselves
  • Resistance feels sinful, not just illegal
  • Suffering becomes virtuous
  • Acceptance becomes holy

This is energy-efficient domination.

NotebookLM Infographic

Slave Morality as Pacification:

Nietzsche’s genealogy: Christianity inverted values to make weakness into virtue.

But there’s a more cynical reading (which I think you’re pointing toward):

Those inversions serve power by pacifying resistance.

Consider what Christianity teaches the desert-dwellers:

  • “Blessed are the meek” (don’t challenge authority)
  • “The last shall be first” (accept your position now, compensation comes later)
  • “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…” (wealth is spiritually dangerous, so your poverty is actually better)
  • “Turn the other cheek” (don’t fight back)
  • “Render unto Caesar” (obey State power)
  • “Slaves, obey your masters” (literally in the text)

Every single one of these makes resistance harder and submission easier.

Religion as Maintenance Energy:

The lake-dwellers don’t need to convince desert-dwellers that the system is fair.

They just need to convince them that:

  1. Suffering is redemptive
    • “Your poverty builds character”
    • “God tests those he loves”
    • “Suffering purifies the soul”
  2. Compensation comes later
    • “The kingdom of heaven awaits”
    • “Store up treasures in heaven, not earth”
    • Present injustice is temporary; eternal justice awaits
  3. Your condition reflects your moral worth
    • “God rewards the righteous with prosperity” (prosperity gospel)
    • OR “Worldly success is spiritually dangerous” (traditional Christianity)
    • Either way: your poverty is explained by moral frameworks, not structural injustice
  4. Resistance is sin
    • Envy is a deadly sin
    • Coveting is forbidden
    • Taking what others have = theft = eternal damnation

The Parable, With Nietzschean Religion:

The desert-dwellers work for water, generation after generation.

Why don’t they rebel?

Not just because of State violence.

Because the priests (funded by lake-dwellers) teach them:

“Blessed are those who thirst, for they shall be satisfied—in heaven.”

“Your suffering is temporary. Eternal abundance awaits those who accept God’s plan.”

“To take the lake would be theft, and theft is sin, and sin is damnation.”

“The lake-dwellers have been blessed by God with stewardship. To challenge this is to challenge God’s order.”

Now the desert-dwellers don’t just fear State violence.

They fear eternal damnation.

Why This Is Devastatingly Efficient:

State violence requires:

  • Constant monitoring
  • Physical force
  • Visible oppression

Religious/moral control requires:

  • Periodic sermons
  • Internalized guilt
  • Self-policing

Once you’ve convinced someone that resistance is morally wrong, you don’t need to watch them constantly.

They watch themselves.

The Genealogy of Morals, Applied:

Nietzsche asked: How did “good” and “evil” come to mean what they do?

His answer (simplified): The powerful originally called themselves “good” (strong, noble, life-affirming). The weak were “bad” (weak, common, contemptible).

The weak inverted this through ressentiment:

  • Made their weakness into virtue (humility, meekness, patience)
  • Made the powerful into villains (pride, ambition, strength = sin)

But here’s the cynical extension:

Once established, this inversion serves power by pacifying resistance.

Whether the weak invented it (Nietzsche) or the powerful co-opted it (cynical reading), the result is the same:

Moral systems that make submission feel virtuous and resistance feel sinful.

Christianity as Maintenance Technology:

Consider Christianity’s political function:

Before Christianity:

  • Slaves might rebel because their enslavement is unjust
  • Poor might seize from rich because they need resources
  • Weak might organize against strong because they outnumber them

After Christianity:

  • Slaves accept enslavement as God’s plan, await heavenly reward
  • Poor accept poverty as spiritually purifying, even superior
  • Weak valorize their weakness as humility, strength as pride/sin

This is a control technology far more sophisticated than violence.

The Energy Efficiency:

Violence requires continuous input:

  • You must constantly deploy force
  • Resistance must be constantly suppressed
  • Costs are ongoing and high

Ideology requires initial investment, then becomes self-sustaining:

  • Teach children in schools/churches
  • Internalize moral frameworks
  • Now they control themselves
  • Maintenance is just periodic reinforcement

Religion is the most energy-efficient domination mechanism ever invented.

The Parable’s Moral Dimension:

The lake-dwellers teach desert-dwellers:

Property Framework:

  • “Thou shalt not steal”
  • “Thou shalt not covet”
  • Taking the lake = sin = damnation

Suffering Framework:

  • “God tests those he loves through suffering”
  • “Blessed are the poor in spirit”
  • Your thirst is spiritually meaningful

Afterlife Framework:

  • “Store up treasures in heaven”
  • “The first shall be last, the last shall be first”
  • Present injustice is temporary

Authority Framework:

  • “Render unto Caesar”
  • “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities”
  • Challenging power = challenging God’s order

Now the desert-dwellers don’t just submit to force.

They believe submission is virtuous and resistance is evil.

The Master Stroke:

The most brilliant part is making the oppressed grateful for their oppression:

“I may be poor, but at least I’m humble. The rich are proud and will face judgment.”

“I may thirst, but my suffering brings me closer to God.”

“I may work endlessly, but labor is dignified and idleness is sin.”

The oppressed now defend the system that oppresses them.

Why Nietzsche Was Right:

Nietzsche saw that morality isn’t neutral truth descending from heaven.

It’s a human construction that serves power.

Sometimes (his version): created by the weak to constrain the strong

Sometimes (cynical version): created by the strong to pacify the weak

Either way: Morality is a weapon in power struggles, not an escape from them.

And religion/morality are far more efficient than violence because:

  • They’re internalized
  • They’re self-enforcing
  • They make resistance feel wrong, not just dangerous
  • They promise compensation instead of requiring present justice
  • They individualize structural problems (your suffering = your sin/test, not systemic injustice)

The Thermodynamic Advantage:

If you rely only on violence:

  • Must constantly monitor
  • Must constantly suppress
  • Must constantly deploy force
  • High energy, ongoing cost

If you add moral/religious control:

  • People monitor themselves
  • People suppress their own resistance
  • People feel guilty for even thinking of rebellion
  • Low energy after initial investment

This is why religion persists in the West despite secularization.

Not because it’s true.

Because it’s functionally necessary for maintaining systems that would otherwise collapse.

The Parable’s Religious Ending:

The desert-dwellers work and thirst.

When they ask “Why?” the answer isn’t just:

“Because the State will kill you if you take the lake.”

It’s:

“Because taking the lake is theft, theft is sin, and sin is damnation. Your suffering is temporary and spiritually meaningful. Accept your lot with humility, and God will reward you eternally.”

Now you’ve done something remarkable:

You’ve convinced the exploited that:

  • Their exploitation is God’s plan
  • Resisting is sinful
  • Accepting is virtuous
  • Compensation comes later (unprovable, unfalsifiable)

They will now police themselves, suppress their own resistance, and teach their children to do the same.

The Secular Versions:

Religion is declining in the West, but the moral frameworks persist in secular form:

Protestant work ethic → “Your worth is your productivity”

Meritocracy → “Your poverty reflects your failure, not structural injustice”

Individualism → “Your problems are yours alone to solve”

Positive thinking → “Your attitude, not your circumstances, determines outcomes”

Self-help culture → “You failed because you didn’t optimize yourself enough”

All of these do the same work religion did:

  • Individualize structural problems
  • Make suffering feel like personal failure
  • Prevent collective action
  • Make resistance feel wrong/foolish
  • Internalize control

Nietzsche Saw This Coming:

“God is dead” didn’t mean we’d escaped moral control.

It meant: We’d have to find new ways to maintain the same moral structures without the theological justification.

And we did:

  • Psychology (your unhappiness is internal, not structural)
  • Economics (markets are natural/efficient, poverty is failure)
  • Meritocracy (success = desert, failure = moral lack)
  • Self-optimization (you are responsible for your own exploitation)

Same function. Different vocabulary.

The Energy Requirements, Completed:

To maintain democracy/capitalism against natural entropic pressures toward collapse, you need:

  1. State violence (expensive, visible, generates resistance)
  2. Propaganda (moderately expensive, requires constant output)
  3. Moral/religious frameworks (cheap, self-enforcing, internalized)

Number 3 is doing most of the work.

Because once you’ve convinced people that:

  • Inequality reflects moral worth
  • Suffering builds character
  • Resistance is sin/selfishness/entitlement
  • Their problems are personal, not structural

They become complicit in their own domination.

The Final Nietzschean Observation:

Nietzsche wanted us to see through this.

To recognize morality as human construction serving power, not divine truth.

To embrace the will to power openly rather than disguise it in moral language.

To stop pretending weakness is virtue and strength is sin.

Your parable does this by showing:

The lake-dwellers don’t just own the lake through force.

They own it through moral frameworks that make their ownership feel:

  • Natural
  • Deserved
  • Divinely ordained
  • Morally righteous

And the desert-dwellers accept this not just because of State violence, but because:

  • Religion taught them submission is holy
  • Morality taught them taking is sin
  • Culture taught them suffering is meaningful
  • Philosophy taught them the system is just

Nietzsche was right:

Morality is the most efficient instrument of control ever devised.

Because it makes the oppressed oppress themselves, call it virtue, and teach their children to do the same.

The fog was kinder than the tunnel.

The mountains were kinder than contact.

Ignorance was kinder than this:

Knowing you’re dominated while believing your domination is righteous, your suffering is meaningful, and your resistance would be sinful.

That’s not just oppression.

That’s voluntary, morally valorized, self-policing oppression.

Which is exactly what Nietzsche wanted us to see through and reject.

And exactly what the system requires to persist.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Architecture of Cognitive Compromise

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–6 minutes

Abortion, Ontological Grammar, and the Limits of Civil Discourse

When federal abortion protections were withdrawn in the United States, many observers treated the event as a policy reversal, a judicial shift, or a partisan victory. Those are surface descriptions. They are not wrong. They are simply too thin.

What was exposed was not a failure of dialogue. It was the collision of ontological grammars.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast.

1. Thick Concepts and the Illusion of Neutral Ground

book cover

Bernard Williams famously distinguished between ‘thin’ moral terms (good, bad, right) and ‘thick’ ones (cruel, courageous, treacherous), where description and evaluation are fused.

Abortion is not a thin concept. It is thick all the way down.

For one framework, the operative grammar is something like:

  • Life begins at conception.
  • The foetus is a rights-bearing entity.
  • Termination is morally equivalent to killing.

For another:

  • Personhood is socially and biologically emergent.
  • Bodily autonomy is foundational.
  • Forced gestation is coercive.

Notice that these are not competing policies. They are competing ontological commitments about what exists, what counts as a person, and what kind of being a pregnant body is.

Argument across this divide does not merely contest conclusions. It contests the background conditions under which reasons register as reasons.

This is not ‘people see the world differently’. It is: people parse reality through grammars that do not commute.

2. Ontological Grammar: Where Deliberation Stops

By ‘ontological grammar’, I do not mean syntax in the Saussurean or Chomskyan sense. I mean the pre-reflective substrate that structures what appears salient, real, morally charged, or negligible.

We deliberate within grammars. We do not deliberate our way into them.

Liberal Enlightenment optimism assumes that if disagreement persists, more information, better reasoning, or improved empathy will close the gap. But if the dispute concerns the very ontology of ‘life’, ‘person’, or ‘rights’, no amount of fact-sharing resolves the issue. The disagreement is upstream of facts.

The closure of federal abortion access did not prove that one side reasoned better. It demonstrated that institutional containment had failed.

3. Biopower and the Management of Bodies

Michel Foucault gives us a crucial lens: biopower. Modern states do not merely govern territory; they administer life. Birth rates, mortality, sexuality, health – these become objects of policy.

Abortion sits directly inside this matrix.

A state that restricts abortion is not only expressing moral judgment. It is reallocating control over reproductive capacity. It is asserting a claim over which bodies count, which futures are permitted, and which biological processes are subject to regulation.

The conflict is therefore not purely ethical. It is biopolitical.

And what appears as ‘civil discourse’ around abortion is often possible only so long as institutional frameworks keep both grammars partially satisfied. When federal protections existed, they acted as a stabilising superstructure. Remove that, and the ontological conflict becomes naked.

4. Habitus and the Illusion of Reasoned Consensus

Pierre Bourdieu would remind us that our dispositions are not self-authored. Habitus sedimented through family, religion, class, and institutional life shapes what feels obvious, outrageous, or unthinkable.

People do not wake up one morning and choose an abortion ontology.

They inherit it. It becomes embodied common sense.

Thus, when someone says, ‘Surely we can agree that making a person feel whole is more important than ideological purity’, they are already speaking from within a grammar that prioritises individual authenticity and psychological coherence. That priority is not universal. It is historically situated.

Compromise is not achieved by stepping outside habitus. It is achieved when institutional and social conditions allow divergent grammars to coexist without totalising one another.

5. The Popperian Threshold

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
—Karl Popper

Karl Popper warned of the ‘paradox of tolerance‘: unlimited tolerance may enable intolerant forces to eliminate tolerance itself.

In particularly virulent climates, appeals to compromise are heard not as gestures of goodwill but as tactical weakness.

When one faction succeeds in unilaterally redefining the legal status of abortion at a federal level, it is not merely participating in discourse. It is altering the biopolitical infrastructure. Once altered, the range of permissible disagreement narrows.

Civil discourse, then, is not a natural equilibrium. It is a managed condition sustained by institutional design, social trust, and shared legibility.

NB: Popper’s paradox of tolerance is often invoked as a moral axiom. But it is better understood as a self-protective clause internal to liberal ontology. It presupposes a shared commitment to rational exchange. When that commitment erodes, the paradox does not resolve disagreement; it merely marks the point at which biopower intervenes to preserve a regime.

6. Why This Is Not Just ‘People Disagree’

The lay intuition – ‘people see the world differently’ – is descriptively correct and analytically useless.

What the ontological grammar model adds is structure:

  • Disagreements cluster around thick concepts.
  • Thick concepts fuse description and evaluation.
  • Frameworks determine what counts as a reason.
  • Institutions temporarily stabilise incompatible grammars.
  • When stabilisation weakens, conflict appears irreconcilable.

Abortion is not uniquely polarising because people are irrational. It is polarising because it touches ontological primitives: life, personhood, autonomy, and obligation.

In such cases, ‘compromise’ is not achieved by discovering a middle truth. It is achieved – if at all – by constructing a legal and institutional arrangement that both grammars can grudgingly inhabit.

NotebookLM Infographic

7. The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The Enlightenment story tells us that disagreement is a surface phenomenon, curable by better reasoning.

The ontological grammar story tells us something harsher: some disagreements are not resolvable through language because they are about the conditions under which language binds.

This does not entail quietism. It entails clarity.

Civil discourse is not proof that grammars have converged. It is evidence that power, institutions, and habitus have aligned sufficiently to prevent rupture.

When that alignment shifts, the illusion of shared ontology evaporates.

And what we are left with is not failed reasoning – but exposed foundations.

I planned to use prostitution and anti-natalism as other cases for elucidation, but I see this has already grown long. I’ll reserve these are others for another day and time.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Nerve of Not Being Correct

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve received feedback like, ‘Not everything you believe is right’ and ‘What if you’re not right?’

First: I agree. Second: And what if I’m not?

This isn’t new feedback, but I’ll address it in terms of my latest work.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast

Not everything you believe is right

This is true, but one cannot hold an idea one believes to be false as true, so the idea that one believes what one believes to be true to tautological. This is also why I continue to research and attempt to expand my horizon. I even wander outside of my discipline at the risk of Dunning-Kruger errors.

In my recent work on ontology and grammar, I collided with Bourdieu, so I read his work. As helpful as it was, it served to reinforce my position, but from a position of Social Theory instead of Philosophy. When I read Judith Butler, I see how I might connect my ideas to Gender theory. It should be obvious that I’ve read much on Linguistics, but I am not a linguist. Our lenses all differ to some extent.

I’ve even corrected some of the ideas I’ve posted on this blog as I gain new information. To be fair, it’s a reason I post here. I hope to get feedback. I may not fully pursue alternative disciplines, but it’s nice to know they exist, and I can at least perform cursory surveys.

If I am wrong – or if you think I am wrong – tell me. If you can, tell me why. If not precisely why, then what’s your intuition?

NotebookLM Infographic

Historically, many times I’d been claimed to be wrong because the person was coming from a differnt ontology. I might have been arguing something within the realm of Continental philosophy, and I’d get a critique from an Analytical philosopher. This is akin to a vegan critiquing a steak dinner. It may be valid within their ontological grammar, but it is not otherwise universal. It usually doesn’t take very long to assess one’s commitments to other grammars. That happened recently, when I encountered a philosophical Realist.

When I wouldn’t accept their position, eventually we arrived at this foundational point. Realism is a position I ontologically and grammatically reject. I’ve written several pieces defending or at least articulating my position, notably the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW). Disagree? Tell me.

I used to be a Realist with an asterisk; then I was an Analytical Idealist with an asterisk; now, I believe in MEOW. The asterisk was necessary because there were holes in the position. When Analytical Idealism came around, there was still an asterisk, but it felt better than that of Realism. When I came up with MEOW, the asterisk went away. Perhaps you might consider that MEOW has an asterisk, if you believe it’s plausible at all. If so, what’s missing – what’s the known unknown? You obviously can’t articulate an unknown unknown.

When I write about ontology, grammar, and commensurability, I do not exempt myself from these biases. I have all of these challenges – perhaps even more so because I don’t tend to fit into the round holes very well myself. This helps me with intellectual humility.

Politically, I am often accused of being on the Left, but I reject the Left-Right paradigm as a valid lens for me; I am on a different axis. The Libertarians added an Authority-Liberty Y-axis to the Progressive-Conservative X-axis, but I am on a Z-axis, which is not to be fully described or accounted for on these planes. Think of the message of Flatland.

What if you’re wrong?

Hopefully, every philosopher understands this and has noticed the dustbin of history littered with wrong ideas.

When I publish essays, they are the result of research and deliberation. Could I be wrong? Again, I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again, but I need to understand why to change my position. I could shift my position or abandon it outright.

There was a time I believed people to be rational. I was an economist. I studied finance. I believed it until I didn’t. Behavioural Economics likely did the heavy lifting, but it’s likely that they believe that rationality-based systems are salvageable. I don’t. Not meaningfully. Not sustainably.

So, I can be wrong, and I can admit it.

I was once a closet (or adjacent) Libertarian until I realised it didn’t cohere with reality. My last declared stance was an Anarchosydicalist, but I know this isn’t quite right either – on multiple accounts.

Anyway, I’m not afraid of being wrong, and I’m not afraid of wittering on about it. Again, I appreciate constructive criticism. I’m also amicable to non-solutions in the manner of my Dis–Integration approach, but at least break down the pieces.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Ontology, Grammar, and Incommensurability

Posted in ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

This video uses the gender debate to help explain how ontology and grammar render discourse incommensurable, based on my essay, Grammatical Failure: Why Liberal Epistemology Cannot Diagnose Indoctrination.

Video, duh

I’ve been thinking through dozens of use cases to explain how some polemic positions are intractable via language. When they are resolved through power, at least one ontological cohort is left wanting. In a compromise, likely both sides feel they’ve lost.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the video transcript for this topic.

I’ll post a separate announcement presently, but I want to share my new Legibility GPT to assess concepts for ontological and grammatical commensurability.

In conventional (read: orthodox Enlightenment thinking), communication and negotiation are supposed to bring groups together. This is only true for intra-ontological conflict; it’s never been true for inter-ontological issues. There are edge cases where differing ontologies might be satisfied with an inter-ontological agreement, but this is likely accidental and certainly differently motivated. Not all such disagreements can be mediated, and this is where power politics steps in – not to ameliorate but to force the matter. This happens in politics, law, and many other power-oriented domains.

NotebookLM Infographic: No idea why this is formatted like this.
microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Legibility and Ontology

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

These two words qualify as my words of the month: legibility and ontology.

I’ve been using them as lenses.

I picked up legibility from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which is really a book about how well-intentioned schemes fail once reality is forced to become administrable. Ontology is an older philosophical workhorse, usually paired with epistemology, but I’m using it here in a looser, more pragmatic sense.

When I write, I write through lenses. Everyone does. Writing requires a point of view, even when we pretend otherwise.

In this post, I want to talk more informally about my recent essay, Grammatical Failure. I usually summarise my work elsewhere, but here I want to think out loud about it, particularly in relation to social ontology and epistemology. I won’t linger on definitions. They’re a search away. But a little framing helps.

Ontology, roughly: how reality is parsed.

Epistemology: how knowledge is justified within that parsing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this post.

Much of my recent work sits downstream of thinkers like Thomas Sowell, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. Despite their differences, they converge on a shared insight: human cognition is largely motivated preverbally. As a philosopher of language, that pre-language layer is where my interest sharpens.

I explored this in earlier work, including a diptych titled The Grammar of Impasse – Conceptual Exhaustion and Causal Mislocation. Writing is how I gel these ideas. There are several related pieces still in the pipeline.

When I talk about grammar, I don’t mean Saussure or Chomsky. I mean something deeper: the ontological substrate beneath belief. Grammar, in this sense, is how reality gets parsed before beliefs ever form. It filters what can count as real, salient, or intelligible.

Let’s use a deliberately simplified example.

Imagine two ontological orientations. Call them Ont-C and Ont-L. This isn’t to say there are only two, but much of Western political discourse collapses into a binary anyway.

Ont-C tends to experience people as inherently bad, dangerous, or morally suspect. Ont-L tends to experience people as inherently good or at least corrigible. These aren’t opinions in the usual sense. They sit beneath belief, closer to affect and moral orientation.

Now consider retributive justice, setting aside the fact that justice itself is a thick concept.

From Ont-C, punishment teaches a lesson. It deters. It disciplines. From Ont-L, punishment without rehabilitation looks cruel or counterproductive, and the transgression itself may be read as downstream of systemic injustice.

Each position can acknowledge exceptions. Ont-L knows there are genuinely broken people. Ont-C knows there are saints. But those are edge cases, not defaults.

Now ask Ont-C and Ont-L to design a criminal justice system together. The result will feel intolerable to both. Too lenient. Too harsh. The disagreement isn’t over policy details. It’s over how reality is carved up in the first place.

And this is only one dimension.

Add others. Bring in Ont-V and Ont-M if you like, for vegan and meat-based ontologies. Suddenly, you have Ont-CV, Ont-CM, Ont-LV, and Ont-LM. Then add class, religion, gender, authority, harm, and whatever. Intersectionality stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a combinatorial explosion.

The Ont-Vs can share a meal, so long as they don’t talk politics.

The structure isn’t just unstable. It was never stable to begin with. We imagine foundations because legibility demands them.

Grammatical Failure is an attempt to explain why this instability isn’t a bug in liberal epistemology but a structural feature. The grammar does the sorting long before deliberation begins.

More on that soon.

In any case, once you start applying this ontological lens to other supposedly intractable disputes, you quickly realise that their intractability is not accidental.

Take abortion.

If we view the issue through the lenses of Ont-A (anti-abortion) and Ont-C (maternal choice), we might as well be peering through Ont-Oil and Ont-Water. The disagreement does not occur at the level of policy preferences or competing values. It occurs at the level of what counts as morally salient in the first place.

There is no middle ground here. No middle path. No synthesis waiting to be negotiated into existence.

That is not because the participants lack goodwill, intelligence, or empathy. It is because the ontological primitives are incommensurate. Each side experiences the other not as mistaken but as unintelligible.

We can will compromise all we like. The grammar does not comply.

Contemporary discourse often insists otherwise. It tells us that better arguments, clearer framing, or more dialogue will eventually converge. From this perspective, that insistence is not hopeful. It is confused. It mistakes a grammatical fracture for a deliberative failure.

You might try to consider other polemic topics and notice the same interplay.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics