In the great hall of the palace, at the centre of a circle of polished stone, stood what the kingdom called the Last Unicorn.
No one had ever seen it. No one was permitted to try.
The Founders had decreed that direct observation would profane the creature’s ‘purity’. To see it was to diminish it; to touch it was to collapse its ‘essential nature’ into some accidental form. Thus, the unicorn could be approached only through instruments – never through hands, eyes, or unmediated judgement.
It was the Last not because others had died, but because it remained the final remnant of an age that still believed truths stood on stone.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary of this topic.
The Instruments
To preserve the unicorn’s nature, the Keepers constructed an evolving array of devices.
The Spiral Gauge, oldest and most revered, hung from silk threads above the empty circle. It detected one possible configuration of the horn’s curvature – never the horn itself.
The Echo Clock measured hoofbeats. The hall was silent, yet the wires vibrated all the same, yielding intervals that corresponded (according to the ledgers) to modes of unicornic motion: walking, standing, contemplative stillness.
The Mane Spectrometer mapped disturbances in candlelight to infer the density of a mane that existed only in theory.
The Temperament Dial synthesised these readings into a single number – currently 1.618: serene alertness.
The instruments never disagreed; they could not disagree, because each was calibrated against the others.
‘Truth is coherence’, the Master Keeper taught.
The Scaffolding Expands
Over centuries, ledgers multiplied into an archive wing. Scholars journeyed from distant kingdoms to admire the rigour of the data.
A visiting philosopher once said, ‘Your measurements form the most complete record of unicornic behaviour ever assembled’.
The apprentices beamed. No one asked why no other kingdom kept such records.
Schools taught the unicorn’s anatomy. Artists painted its likeness. The quarterly update of the Temperament Dial was read aloud in public squares. Children traced the golden spiral, believed to mirror the creature’s horn.
When dissidents questioned the absence of hoofprints, they were told what everyone knew:
‘The Last Unicorn is beyond crude contact. Only refined instruments can reveal its truth’.
Consensus deepened. With it grew the need for further instruments.
A Quiet Realisation
Sometimes, on night watch, a Keeper would stand above the empty stone. The Spiral Gauge quivered. The Echo Clock murmured. The Proportion Engine hummed, harmonising the system.
And in that stillness, the Keeper would feel a thought rise and evaporate instantly:
that the instruments described one another more faithfully than anything else.
That their perfect coherence reflected the architecture of the scaffolding, not any creature the scaffolding purported to measure.
Such thoughts were structural, not heretical – and no less dangerous.
The Last Unicorn
The Minister liked to call it the Last Unicorn. He never explained why it was last or what fate had befallen the others. He did not need to. The title served its purpose:
If it is the Last, no comparison is possible. No contradiction can emerge. No counterexample can survive.
Its uniqueness proved its necessity.
What else could unify a kingdom but a creature no one could touch, see, or disbelieve?
The Closing Line
And so the unicorn remained – in measurements, in ratios, in ledgers, in rhetoric.
A fiction made coherent by instruments, maintained by tradition, sanctified by those who needed it to be real.
The Last Unicorn was not the final creature of its kind. It was the last foundation still standing. And in that sense – it was more real than anything that had ever lived.
How the Trump Era Rewrote Time, Truth, and the Very Idea of a Common World
Politics in the Trump era wasn’t merely a spectacle of bad manners and worse epistemology; it was the moment the United States stopped pretending it shared a common world – when politics ceased to be a quarrel over facts and became a quarrel over the very conditions that make facts possible. This essay is part of an ongoing project tracing how post-Enlightenment societies lose their shared grammar of verification and retreat into parallel narrative architectures that demand allegiance rather than assessment.
And before anyone hyperventilates about implied asymmetry: the recursive logic described here is not exclusive to the right. The progressive cosmology, though stylistically different, exhibits the same structural features – prophetic claims about impending catastrophe or salvation, retrospective reinterpretations to maintain coherence, and an insistence on possessing privileged interpretive tools. The Trump era didn’t invent this recursive mode; it simply accelerated it, stripped it naked, and pumped it through a 24-hour media bloodstream until everyone could see the circuitry sparking.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Welcome to the new cosmology.
1. The Death of a Common Grammar
Once the shared grammar of verification dissolves, political discourse stops unfolding in empirical time. It migrates into suspended futurity – a realm of conditional wagers:
If this, then that. Just wait. You’ll see. The future will vindicate us.
But the horizon keeps receding. When reality refuses to comply, factions rewrite the past to preserve the equilibrium between prophecy and outcome. Truth becomes less a matter of correspondence and more an act of narrative self-maintenance. Where the world diverges from the story, the world is adjusted.
Political time becomes pliable; the narrative must be kept intact, whatever the cost.
2. Mimetic Prophecy and the Absence of Catharsis
A Girardian lens clarifies what’s happening beneath the surface. The factions are not simply disagreeing; they are locked in mimetic rivalry, each imitating the other’s claim to prophetic vision. Insight becomes the mimetic object: each camp insists it alone can decode the approaching shape of events.
As the rivalry escalates, differentiation collapses. Both sides perform identical moves – warnings of authoritarianism, narratives of national peril, promises of historical vindication – whilst insisting the other’s prophecies are delusional.
In classic Girardian fashion, this symmetry produces a crisis: a collapse of distinction between rivals, accompanied by a desperate hunt for a stabilising sacrifice. In the Trump era, the scapegoat was not a person but a category: truth itself. Doubt, verification, shared reality – these were sacrificed at the altar of maintaining internal cohesion.
Yet unlike the societies Girard studied, the American polity achieves no catharsis. The sacrificial mechanism fails. No cleansing moment restores order. The cycle loops endlessly, forcing the community to reenact the ritual without the relief of resolution.
Prophecy, rivalry, crisis – repeat.
3. From Chronology to Mythic Temporality
Once prediction and remembrance collapse into one another, political time becomes mythic rather than chronological. The present becomes a hinge between two versions of the world: the one the faction already believes in and the one it insists the future will confirm.
The future becomes partisan property. The past becomes commentary. The present becomes maintenance.
Each faction edits its cosmology to preserve coherence, producing a recursive temporality in which prophecy and memory reinforce one another. Narrative supplants chronology; plausibility is subordinated to coherence. The factions are not lying; they are mythologising.
This is what a society does when it cannot stabilise truth but cannot abandon truth-claims either.
4. Madison’s Diagnosis, Reversed
James Madison, in his republican optimism, believed factions were inevitable but containable. Pluralism, he argued, would safeguard the republic by ensuring no faction could elevate its partial vision into a universal claim. The sheer scale and diversity of the republic would generate cross-pressure strong enough to check epistemic domination.
He assumed a shared evidentiary world.
He did not imagine a polity in which factions construct discrete epistemic universes – self-sealing interpretive systems with their own temporal orders, myths of origin, and theories of legitimacy. Under such conditions, pluralism no longer disciplines factional excess; it shelters it. It becomes a buffer that prevents contact, not a mechanism that fosters correction.
Madison feared that factions might mistake their partial view for the whole. Our moment dissolves the very idea of the whole.
Pluralism, once a remedy, becomes the architecture of epistemic secession.
5. The Theatre of Recursive Narration
What remains is not deliberation but theatre—political communities sustained by the perpetual reenactment of their own certainties. Each faction maintains itself through narrative recursion, chanting the same incantation of retrospective rightness, performing the same rites of interpretive renewal.
The republic no longer hosts disagreement; it hosts parallel cosmologies.
In the republic of recursive prophecy, truth is no longer what grounds politics – it’s what politics performs.
Afterword
This article followed a chat with ChatGPT. For what it’s worth, I now style myself a post-postmodern, post-critical theorist – though these labels are as pointless as the ones they replace.
The conversation began with Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, which was already on my mind. In Appendix 1 he writes:
“After all, in a democracy ‘reason’ has just as much right to be heard and to be expressed as ‘unreason’, especially in view of the fact that one man’s ‘reason’ is the other man’s insanity.”
That set me wondering, again, how one discerns signal from noise. As a statistician, separating wheat from chaff is my daily bread, but how does one do it politically without pretending to possess privileged access to truth? In this environment, each faction insists it has such access. The other side, naturally, is deluded. Ignore the fact that there are more than two sides; binary thinking is the fashion of the day.
I leaned on ChatGPT and asked for sources on this lemma – what to read, where to dig. It replied with books I’d already read, save for one:
I hadn’t read Laclau & Mouffe. ChatGPT summarised them neatly:
“Politics is the contest over the very conditions for meaning. The signal/noise split is hegemonic construction, not metaphysical reality.”
Right up my street. (I still need to read it.)
That, in turn, brought Madison’s Federalist No. 10 to mind – his warning that factional division, particularly the two-party structure the United States later perfected, would one day become corrosive.
Then Girard entered the chat. And so on. We followed the thread a little longer until this essay took shape. I didn’t feel compelled to polish it into a formal academic piece. A blog seems a far better home for now, and the essay version can remain an open question.
Written by Bry Willis with assistance from ChatGPT 5.1
Philosophics 