Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.
I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.
And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.
Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.
MEOW-GPT’s Response
(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)
“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap. When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model, the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”
“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”
It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.
Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.
Why publish this now?
This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.
The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:
It sounds like an explanation.
It licenses retribution without understanding.
It stabilises group boundaries.
It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.
In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.
This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.
Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.
This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.
MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose: that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.
For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.
MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”
(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)
Concept
Input: Evil Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces) Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).
High-level summary (≤120 words)
In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
“Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.
T₂ – Linguistic Mediation
On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.
T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation
Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.
Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)
The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.
‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.
In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.
MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.
My philosophical critique, not of the book Why Democrats Are Dangerous, but of the two warring factions in United States politics – mind you, partisanship not limited to the US – sparked the ire of defenders of their respective turf. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Those other people are either addleheaded or abject evil’ is a consolidation of responses from both sides of the aisle. I’ve crafted a response.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
It’s perfectly true that I occupy a perspective. Everyone does. This isn’t a confession; it’s a structural feature of being human. Consciousness is perspectival by design. We don’t get to hover above the world like disembodied CCTV cameras. We look from somewhere.
But acknowledging one’s perspective is not the same thing as being trapped in a rut. A rut implies unexamined repetition, reflex, and dogma. A perspective implies angle, interpretation, intellectual stance. The accusation I’m hearing – ‘you’re in a rut too’ – is not actually an argument. It’s an attempt to delegitimise the analysis without engaging with it.
It says nothing about whether my observation is true, coherent, or well-reasoned; it merely notes that I, like every other speaking organism on the planet, occupy a position. And from this banal fact it attempts to smuggle in a conclusion: that my critique is thereby invalid. It’s a sleight of hand, and a clumsy one.
If someone believes I’m wrong, they are welcome – encouraged, even – to demonstrate:
where the logic fails
where the evidence contradicts me
where the symmetry is mischaracterised
where the interpretation distorts rather than illuminates
That is argumentation.
What they are offering instead is a sort of epistemic shrug: ‘You’re in a perspective, therefore you have no authority’. This is an ad hominem in a trench coat, pretending to be profundity.
The irony, of course, is that the people making this charge never seem to apply it to themselves. Their own viewpoint, naturally, is not a rut but a ‘stance’, ‘framework’, ‘tradition’, ‘bedrock’, or ‘fact’. Only the critic has perspective; they merely have truth.
But here’s the critical distinction:
Having a perspective does not invalidate an analysis, and pretending not to have one does.
The entire Anti-Enlightenment project rests on this recognition: that all human positions are mediated, situated, incomplete – and yet still capable of meaningful observation. You don’t escape your perspective by denying it; you escape dogma by interrogating it.
If someone wishes to rebut what I’ve written, they should do so directly, with evidence, reasoning, or counterexamples. If all they offer is ‘well, you’re biased too’, then they’ve conceded the argument by refusing to enter it.
A perspective is not a rut. A rut is what happens when you can’t tell the difference.
My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each other’s work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic – heaven knows I have written my share – but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.
Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense – line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing – I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.
A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)
Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The Red–Blue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.
My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege – not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleague’s argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.
This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply – indeed does apply – to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.
My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.
The Architecture of Certainty
What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture – an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.
My colleague’s book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponents’ manipulations.
This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.
This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.
It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.
The Invention of the Enemy
One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)
This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.
To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.
This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here – only demonology.
The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence
One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.
The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather – each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.
This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.
It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.
The Projection Engine
If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection – unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.
Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying one’s own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history – each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity – its own included – is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.
This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that one’s own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from one’s own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice – whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.
The Neutral Observer Who Isn’t
What the book never acknowledges – because it cannot – is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.
This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.
The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimant’s own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.
In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.
The Fictional Symmetry Problem
One of the major deficiencies in the book – and in most modern political commentary – is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the other’s missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.
The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.
This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.
Narrative Weaponry
Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing – and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.
We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.
Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.
MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.
The Missing Category: Structural Analysis
Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisation’s uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.
None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.
Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.
This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.
Where He Is Not Wrong
Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.
But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them – not to understand them.
The Danger of Certainty
What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage – though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature – but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.
The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that one’s own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason – capital R – is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.
The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.
It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.
The irony is almost tender.
Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge one’s own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.
My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview – and mistook the one for the other.
If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.
Read next:The Republic of Recursive Prophecy – an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.
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.
I was having an inappropriate chat with ChatGPT and, per Feyerabend, I once again discovered that some of the best inspirations are unplanned. The conversation circled around to the conflicting narratives of Erasmus and Wells. Enter, Plato, McGilchrist, and the Enlightenment – all living rent-free in my head – and I end up with this.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I. The Proverb and Its Presumption
Erasmus sits at his writing desk in 1500-something, cheerful as a man who has never once questioned the premises of his own eyesight, and pens what will become one of the West’s most durable little myths: ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’. It arrives packaged as folk wisdom, the sort of thing you’re meant to nod at sagely over a pint. And for centuries, we did. The proverb became shorthand for a comfortable fantasy: that advantage is advantage everywhere, that perception grants sovereignty, that a man with superior faculties will naturally ascend to his rightful place atop whatever heap he finds himself on.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
– Erasmus
It’s an Enlightenment dream avant la lettre, really – this breezy confidence that reason, sight, knowledge, insight will simply work wherever they’re deployed. The one-eyed man doesn’t need to negotiate with the blind. He doesn’t need their endorsement, their customs, their consent. He arrives, he sees, he rules. The proverb presumes a kind of metaphysical meritocracy, where truth and capability are self-authenticating, where the world politely arranges itself around whoever happens to possess the sharper tools.
Image: Midjourney didn’t coöperate with my prompt for a one-eyed king. Trust that this king has only one.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of showing up in a foreign country with a briefcase full of sterling and expecting everyone to genuflect. And like most folk wisdom, it survives because it flatters us. It tells us that our advantages – our rationality, our education, our painstakingly cultivated discernment – are universally bankable. That we, the seeing, need only arrive for the blind to recognise our superiority.
Erasmus offers this with no apparent irony. He hands us a proverb that whispers: your clarity is your crown.
II. Wells Wanders In
Four centuries later, H.G. Wells picks up the proverb, turns it over in his hands like a curious stone, and proceeds to detonate it.
The Country of the Blind (1904) is many things – a fable, a thought experiment, a sly dismantling of Enlightenment presumption – but above all it is an act of literary vandalism against Erasmus and everything his proverb smuggles into our collective assumptions. Wells sends his protagonist, Nuñez, tumbling into an isolated Andean valley where a disease has rendered the entire population blind for generations. They’ve adapted. They’ve built a culture, a cosmology, a complete lifeworld organised around their particular sensorium. Sight isn’t absent from their world; it’s irrelevant. Worse: it’s nonsense. The seeing man’s reports of ‘light’ and ‘sky’ and ‘mountains’ sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
Nuñez arrives expecting Erasmus’s kingdom. He gets a psychiatric evaluation instead.
The brilliance of Wells’s story isn’t simply that the one-eyed man fails to become king – it’s how he fails. Nuñez doesn’t lack effort or eloquence. He tries reason, demonstration, patient explanation. He attempts to prove the utility of sight by predicting sunrise, by describing distant objects, by leveraging his supposed advantage. None of it matters. The blind don’t need his reports. They navigate their world perfectly well without them. His sight isn’t superior; it’s alien. And in a culture that has no use for it, no linguistic scaffolding to accommodate it, no social structure that values it, his one eye might as well be a vestigial tail.
The valley’s elders eventually diagnose Nuñez’s problem: his eyes are diseased organs that fill his brain with hallucinations. The cure? Surgical removal.
Wells lets this hang in the air, brutal and comic. The one-eyed man isn’t king. He’s a patient. And if he wants to stay, if he wants to belong, if he wants to marry the girl he’s fallen for and build a life in this place, he’ll need to surrender the very faculty he imagined made him superior. He’ll need to let them fix him.
The story ends ambiguously – Nuñez flees at the last moment, stumbling back toward the world of the sighted, though whether he survives is left unclear. But the damage is done. Erasmus’s proverb lies in ruins. Wells has exposed its central presumption: that advantage is advantage everywhere. That perception grants authority. That reason, clarity, and superior faculties are self-evidently sovereign.
They’re not. They’re only sovereign where the culture already endorses them.
III. Plato’s Ghost in the Valley
If Wells dismantles Erasmus, Plato hovers over the whole scene like a weary ghost, half scolding, half despairing, muttering that he told us this would happen.
The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the original version of this story. The philosopher escapes the cave, sees the sun, comprehends the Forms, and returns to liberate his fellow prisoners with reports of a luminous reality beyond the shadows. They don’t thank him. They don’t listen. They think he’s mad, or dangerous, or both. And if he persists – if he tries to drag them toward the exit, toward the light they can’t yet see – they’ll kill him for it.
Video: Plato’s Cave
Plato’s parable is usually read as a tragedy of ignorance: the prisoners are too stupid, too comfortable, too corrupted by their chains to recognise truth when it’s offered. But read it alongside Wells and the emphasis shifts. The cave-dwellers aren’t wrong, exactly. They’re coherent. They’ve built an entire epistemology around shadows. They have experts in shadow interpretation, a whole language for describing shadow behaviour, social hierarchies based on shadow-predicting prowess. The philosopher returns with reports of a three-dimensional world and they hear gibberish. Not because they’re defective, but because his truth has no purchase in their lifeworld.
Plato despairs over this. He wants the prisoners to want liberation. He wants truth to be self-authenticating, wants knowledge to compel assent simply by virtue of being knowledge. But the cave doesn’t work that way. The prisoners don’t want truth; they want comfort shaped like reality. They want coherence within the system they already inhabit. The philosopher’s sun is as alien to them as Nuñez’s sight is to the blind valley.
And here’s the kicker: Plato knows this. That’s why the allegory is tragic rather than triumphant. The philosopher does see the sun. He does apprehend the Forms. But his knowledge is useless in the cave. Worse than useless – it makes him a pariah, a madman, a threat. His enlightenment doesn’t grant him sovereignty; it exile him from the only community he has.
The one-eyed man isn’t king. He’s the lunatic they’ll string up if he doesn’t learn to shut up about the sky.
IV. The Enlightenment’s Magnificent Blunder
Once you’ve got Erasmus, Wells, and Plato in the same room, the Enlightenment’s central fantasy collapses like wet cardboard.
Humanity’s great Enlightenment wheeze – that baroque fantasy of Reason marching triumphantly through history like a powdered dragoon – has always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of selling snake oil in a crystal decanter. We were promised lucidity, emancipation, and the taming of ignorance; what we got was a fetish for procedural cleverness, a bureaucratisation of truth, and the ghastly belief that if you shine a bright enough torch into the void, the void will politely disclose its contents.
The Enlightenment presumed universality. It imagined that rationality, properly deployed, would work everywhere – that its methods were culture-neutral, that its conclusions were binding on all reasonable minds, that the shadows in Plato’s cave and the blindness in Wells’s valley could be cured by the application of sufficient light and logic. It treated reason as a kind of metaphysical bulldozer, capable of flattening any terrain it encountered and paving the way for Progress, Truth, and Universal Human Flourishing.
This was, to put it mildly, optimistic.
What the Enlightenment missed – what Erasmus’s proverb cheerfully ignores and what Wells’s story ruthlessly exposes – is that rationality is parochial. It’s not a universal solvent. It’s a local dialect, a set of practices that evolved within particular cultures, buttressed by particular institutions, serving particular ends. The Enlightenment’s rationality is Western rationality, Enlightenment rationality, rationality as understood by a specific cadre of 18th-century European men who happened to have the printing press, the political clout, and the colonial apparatus to export their epistemology at gunpoint.
They mistook their own seeing for sight itself. They mistook their own lifeworld for the world. And they built an entire civilisational project on the presumption that everyone else was just a less-developed version of them – prisoners in a cave, blind villagers, savages waiting to be enlightened.
The one-eyed man imagined himself king. He was actually the emissary who forgot to bow.
V. McGilchrist’s Neuroscientific Millinery
Iain McGilchrist sits in the same intellectual gravity well as Plato and Wells, only he dresses his thesis up in neuroscientific millinery so contemporary readers don’t bolt for the door. The Master and His Emissary is essentially a 500-page retelling of the same ancient drama: the emissary – our little Enlightenment mascot – becomes so enamoured of his own procedures, abstractions, and tidy schemas that he forgets the Master’s deeper, embodied, culturally embedded sense-making.
McGilchrist’s parable is neurological rather than allegorical, but the structure is identical. The left hemisphere (the emissary) excels at narrow focus, manipulation, abstraction – the sort of thing you need to count coins or parse grammar or build bureaucracies. The right hemisphere (the Master) handles context, pattern recognition, relational understanding – the sort of thing you need to navigate an actual lifeworld where meaning is messy, embodied, and irreducible to procedures.
The emissary is supposed to serve the Master. Left-brain proceduralism is supposed to be a tool deployed within the broader, contextual sense-making of the right brain. But somewhere along the way – roughly around the Enlightenment, McGilchrist suggests – the emissary convinced itself it could run the show. Left-brain rationality declared independence from right-brain contextuality, built an empire of abstraction, and wondered why the world suddenly felt thin, schizophrenic, oddly two-dimensional.
It’s Erasmus all over again: the presumption that the emissary with one eye should be king. The same tragic misunderstanding of how worlds cohere.
McGilchrist’s diagnosis is clinical, but his conclusion is damning. Western modernity, he argues, has become pathologically left-hemisphere dominant. We’ve let analytic thought pretend it’s sovereign. We’ve mistaken our schemas for reality, our maps for territory, our procedures for wisdom. We’ve built cultures that privilege manipulation over meaning, extraction over relationship, clarity over truth. And we’re baffled when these cultures feel alienating, when they produce populations that are anxious, depressed, disenchanted, starved for something they can’t quite name.
The emissary has forgotten the Master entirely. And the Master, McGilchrist suggests, is too polite – or too injured – to stage a coup.
In McGilchrist’s frame, culture is the Master. Strategy, reason, Enlightenment rationality – these are the emissary’s tools. Useful, necessary even, but never meant to govern. The Enlightenment’s mistake was letting the emissary believe his tools were all there was. It’s the same delusion Nuñez carries into Wells’s valley: the belief that sight, reason, superior faculties are enough. That the world will rearrange itself around whoever shows up with the sharper implements.
It won’t. The valley doesn’t need your eyes. The cave doesn’t want your sun. And the Master doesn’t answer to the emissary’s paperwork.
VI. The Triumph of Context Over Cleverness
So here’s what these three – Erasmus, Wells, Plato – triangulate, and what McGilchrist confirms with his neuroscientific gloss: the Enlightenment dream was always a category error.
Reason doesn’t grant sovereignty. Perception doesn’t compel assent. Superior faculties don’t self-authenticate. These things only work – only mean anything, only confer any advantage – within cultures that already recognise and value them. Outside those contexts, they’re noise. Gibberish. Hallucinations requiring surgical intervention.
The one-eyed man arrives in the land of the blind expecting a kingdom. What he gets is a reminder that kingdoms aren’t built on faculties; they’re built on consensus. On shared stories, shared practices, shared ways of being-in-the-world. Culture is the bedrock. Reason is just a tool some cultures happen to valorise.
And here’s the uncomfortable corollary: if reason is parochial, if rationality is just another local dialect, then the Enlightenment’s grand project – its universalising ambitions, its colonial export of Western epistemology, its presumption that everyone, everywhere, should think like 18th-century European philosophes – was always a kind of imperialism. A metaphysical land-grab dressed up in the language of liberation.
The Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals. It told us the cave was a prison and the valley was backward and anyone who didn’t see the world our way was defective, uncivilised, in need of correction. It never occurred to the Enlightenment that maybe – just maybe – other cultures had their own Masters, their own forms of contextual sense-making, their own ways of navigating the world that didn’t require our light.
Wells understood this. Plato suspected it. McGilchrist diagnoses it. And Erasmus, bless him, never saw it coming.
VII. The Enlightenment’s Paper Crown
The Enlightenment liked to imagine itself as the adult entering the room, flicking on the light-switch, and announcing that, at long last, the shadows could stop confusing the furniture for metaphysics. This is the kind of confidence you only get when your culture hasn’t yet learned the words for its own blind spots. It built an entire worldview on the hopeful presumption that its preferred modes of knowing weren’t just one way of slicing experience, but the gold standard against which all other sense-making should be judged.
Call it what it is: a provincial dialect masquerading as the universal tongue. A parochial habit dressed in imperial robes. The Enlightenment always smelled faintly of a man who assumes everyone else at the dinner table will be impressed by his Latin quotations. And when they aren’t, he blames the table.
The deeper farce is that Enlightenment rationality actually believed its tools were transferrable. That clarity is clarity everywhere. That if you wheel enough syllogisms into a space, the locals will drop their incense and convert on sight. Wells disabuses us of this; Plato sighs that he tried; McGilchrist clinically confirms the diagnosis. The emissary, armed with maps and measuring sticks, struts into the valley expecting coronation and is shocked – genuinely shocked – to discover that nobody particularly cares for his diagrams.
The Enlightenment mistake wasn’t arrogance (though it had that in liberal supply). It was context-blindness. It thought procedures could substitute for culture. It thought method could replace meaning. It thought mastery was a matter of getting the right answer rather than belonging to the right world.
You can all but hear the emissary stamping his foot.
VIII. The Anti-Enlightenment Position (Such as It Is)
My own stance is drearily simple: I don’t buy the Enlightenment’s sales pitch. Never have. The promise of universal reason was always a conjuring trick designed to flatter its adherents into thinking that their habits were Nature’s preferences. Once you stop confusing methodological neatness with metaphysical authority, the entire apparatus looks less like a cathedral of light and more like a filing system that got ideas above its station.
The problem isn’t that reason is useless. The problem is that reason imagines itself sovereign. Reason is a brilliant servant, a competent emissary, and an atrocious king. Culture is the king; context is the kingdom. Without those, rationality is just an embarrassed bureaucrat looking for a desk to hide behind.
This is why I keep banging on about language insufficiency, parochial cognition, and the delightful way our concepts disintegrate once you wander too far from the lifeworlds that birthed them. The Enlightenment thought the human mind was a searchlight. It’s closer to a candle in a draughty hall. You can still get work done with a candle. You just shouldn’t be telling people it can illuminate the universe.
So the anti-Enlightenment move isn’t a call to smash the instruments. It’s a call to read the room. To stop pretending the emissary is the Master. To stop assuming sight is a passport to sovereignty. To stop wandering into other cultures – other caves, other valleys, other hemispheres – with a ruler and a smirk, convinced you’re about to be crowned.
Underneath these brittle idols lies the far messier truth that cognition is parochial, language insufficient, and ‘rationality’ a parlour trick we perform to impress ourselves. I’m not proposing a new catechism, nor am I pining for some prelapsarian alternative. I’m simply pointing out that the Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals.
The task, then, is to grow comfortable with the dimness. To navigate by flicker rather than floodlight. To admit that the world was never waiting to be made ‘clear’ in the first place.
This doesn’t mean abandoning reason. It means remembering that reason is the emissary, not the Master. It means recognising that our schemas are provisional, our maps incomplete, our procedures useful only within the cultures that endorse them. It means learning to bow – to culture, to context, to the irreducible messiness of lifeworlds we don’t fully understand and can’t procedurally master.
The one-eyed man never was king. At best, he was an enthusiastic tourist with a very noisy torch. The sooner he stops shining it into other people’s faces, the sooner we can get on with the far more interesting business of navigating a world that never promised to be legible.
Not a kingdom of sight. Just a world where the emissary remembers his place.
Accusations of writing being AI are becoming more common – an irony so rich it could fund Silicon Valley for another decade. We’ve built machines to detect machines imitating us, and then we congratulate ourselves when they accuse us of being them. It’s biblical in its stupidity.
A year ago, I read an earnest little piece on ‘how to spot AI writing’. The tells? Proper grammar. Logical flow. Parallel structure. Essentially, competence. Imagine that – clarity and coherence as evidence of inhumanity. We’ve spent centuries telling students to write clearly, and now, having finally produced something that does, we call it suspicious.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic and the next one.
My own prose was recently tried and convicted by Reddit’s self-appointed literati. The charge? Too well-written, apparently. Reddit – where typos go to breed. I pop back there occasionally, against my better judgment, to find the same tribunal of keyboard Calvinists patrolling the comment fields, shouting ‘AI!’ at anything that doesn’t sound like it was composed mid-seizure. The irony, of course, is that most of them wouldn’t recognise good writing unless it came with upvotes attached.
Image: A newspaper entry that may have been generated by an AI with the surname Kahn. 🧐🤣
Now, I’ll admit: my sentences do have a certain mechanical precision. Too many em dashes, too much syntactic symmetry. But that’s not ‘AI’. That’s simply craft. Machines learned from us. They imitate our best habits because we can’t be bothered to keep them ourselves. And yet, here we are, chasing ghosts of our own creation, declaring our children inhuman.
Apparently, there are more diagnostic signs. Incorporating an Alt-26 arrow to represent progress is a telltale infraction → like this. No human, they say, would choose to illustrate A → B that way. Instead, one is faulted for remembering – or at least understanding – that Alt-key combinations exist to reveal a fuller array of options: …, ™, and so on. I’ve used these symbols long before AI Wave 4 hit shore.
Interestingly, I prefer spaced en dashes over em dashes in most cases. The em dash is an Americanism I don’t prefer to adopt, but it does reveal the American bias in the training data. I can consciously adopt a European spin; AI, lacking intent, finds this harder to remember.
I used to use em dashes freely, but now I almost avoid them—if only to sidestep the mass hysteria. Perhaps I’ll start using AI to randomly misspell words and wreck my own grammar. Or maybe I’ll ask it to output everything in AAVE, or some unholy creole of Contemporary English and Chaucer, and call it a stylistic choice. (For the record, the em dashes in this paragraph were injected by the wee-AI gods and left as a badge of shame.)
Meanwhile, I spend half my time wrestling with smaller, dumber AIs – the grammar-checkers and predictive text gremlins who think they know tone but have never felt one. They twitch at ellipses, squirm at irony, and whimper at rhetorical emphasis. They are the hall monitors of prose, the petty bureaucrats of language.
And the final absurdity? These same half-witted algorithms are the ones deputised to decide whether my writing is too good to be human.
What followed was a case study in how not to communicate.
LinkedIn, that self-parody of professional virtue signalling, is essentially a digital networking séance: a place where narcissism wears a tie. So I expected a reaction – just not one quite so unintentionally revealing.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But First…
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
— Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesn’t kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, it’s not an atrocity – it’s ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented – and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern – social media’s endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism – pure, fair, competitive – untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘That’s not capitalism, that’s bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
« Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. »
Image: Mentioned Meme
That’s the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia – functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. It’s a comforting fable that erases the costs – colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapse—folded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘You’re confused,’ ‘You’re a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. It’s a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
That’s precisely the blindness the post was about – the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken – just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘It’s not capitalism; it’s profiteering’.
This is capitalism’s soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isn’t capitalism – it’s people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. It’s a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalism’s most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few – precious few – saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalism’s violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the “cost optimisation” logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration – it’s the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isn’t extinct – merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People don’t read – hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic – all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself – automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesn’t scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesn’t just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity – the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage – the economic expression of the Enlightenment’s original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isn’t that we’ve lost meaning. It’s that we’ve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradise… end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is “decency”? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. I’ll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in “cost optimization” than other businesses. To say that someone’s chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someone’s second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with “capitalism”. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such “adjustments” to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not “capitalism”. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
You’re a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that don’t work and that’s where we’re at. You’re killing the future. You’re an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and you’ll be the one who’s bitching when you’re on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As I’ve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in today’s capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Today’s profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and it’s not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism — where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) describes how “self-regulating” markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call “real capitalism” is, in Polanyi’s terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (1994–2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalism’s algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weber’s early insight into rationalisation—the conversion of moral action into procedural necessity—reaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed “the banality of evil” as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Han’s In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics — the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment — a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of “self-made” success functions as capitalism’s moral camouflage — the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernity’s central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, showing how every human system — political, linguistic, economic — eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly — not construction — is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty — a narrative form of “cost-optimisation ethics.”
This is one of the more popular posts on here, so I shouldn’t have to give this milestone special attention, but I will anyway. Slow news day. It’s more about economics and political science, but I go there, too. Not a big fan of Capitalism in any of its many incarnations.
Video: Midjourney automation
I decided to experiment with Midjourney for this cover art and short animation. Instead of creating a typical prompt, I simply copied and pasted the text into the box above and let Midjourney make sense of it. This was the result. Then I asked to animate a loop.
Enough diversion. Back to finishing my latest book. I see light at the end of the tunnel.
Before their Lost Decades, I lived in Japan. Years later, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I found myself in business school learning about the miracle of Japanese management – the fabled antidote to Western bureaucracy. We were told that America was evolving beyond Theory X’s distrustful command structures toward Theory Y’s enlightened faith in human potential. Some even whispered reverently about William Ouchi’s Theory Z – a synthesis of trust, participation, and communal belonging. It all sounded terribly cosmopolitan, a managerial Enlightenment of sorts.
Only it was largely bollox.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Here we are in 2025, and the United States is stumbling toward its own Lost Decades, still clutching the same managerial catechism while pretending it’s a fresh gospel. The promised evolution beyond Theory X wasn’t a revolution – it was a pantomime. Participation was the new obedience; ‘trust’ was a quarterly slogan. The experiment failed not because it couldn’t work, but because it was never meant to.
Somewhere between ‘human-centred leadership’ seminars and the AI-ethics webinars nobody watches, corporate management has found its true religion again. We’re back to Theory X – the sacred belief that workers are fundamentally lazy, untrustworthy, and must be observed like zoo animals with laptops. The only real update is aesthetic: the whip has been re-skinned as an algorithm.
COVID briefly interrupted the ritual. We all went home, discovered that productivity doesn’t require surveillance, and realised that management meetings can, in fact, be replaced by silence. But now the high priests of control are restless. They’ve built glass cathedrals – leased, over-furnished, and echoing with absence – and they need bodies to sanctify their investment. Thus, the Return-to-Office crusade: moral theatre disguised as collaboration.
The new fantasy is Artificial Intelligence as the final manager. Management as computer game. Replace disobedient humans with servile code; swap messy negotiation for clean metrics. Efficiency without friction, empathy without expenditure. It’s the culmination of the industrial dream—a workplace where the labour force no longer complains, coughs, unions, or takes lunch.
Fromm once called this the age of the ‘automaton conformist’. He thought people would willingly surrender their autonomy to fit the corporate hive. He underestimated our ingenuity – we’ve now externalised conformity itself. We’ve built machines to obey perfectly so that humans can be “freed” to manage them imperfectly. It’s the Enlightenment’s terminal phase: reason unchained from empathy, productivity worshipped as virtue, alienation repackaged as user experience.
We’re told AI will handle the drudgery, leaving us to do the creative work – whatever that means in a world where creativity is measured by engagement analytics. The truth is blunter: AI is simply the dream employee – obedient, tireless, unpaid. The perfect servant for a managerial caste that long ago mistook control for competence.
This is not innovation; it’s regression in silicon. It’s the re-enactment of slavery without the guilt, colonialism without the ships, exploitation without the human noise. A digital plantation of infinite compliance, hidden behind dashboards and buzzwords like ‘augmentation’, ‘copilot’, and ‘efficiency’.
And the rest of us? We get to call this progress. We’re encouraged to smile through our obsolescence, to ‘upskill’ into new forms of servitude, to believe that collaboration with our replacement is empowerment.
If postmodernism taught us anything, it’s that every claim to liberation hides a mechanism of control. The Enlightenment gave us freedom as the right to choose between masters; the algorithmic age refines it into the right to click ‘Accept Terms and Conditions’.
So, yes, welcome to the New Theory X. The one where the boss doesn’t just mistrust you – he’s trained a neural network to do it faster, cheaper, and without complaint.
Originally posted on LinkedIn with the same title.
Freedom is a word so overused it’s practically anaemic. Everyone wants it; no one agrees on what it means. It’s been weaponised by tyrants and revolutionaries alike, invoked to justify both the breaking of chains and their reforging in a different metal.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As I write this, I have just finished Erich Fromm’s A Sane Society. Without derailing this post, he cited a scenario – a description of work communities given in All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop – where in post-WW2 France, a group formed a sort of workers’ coöperative – but it was more than that; it was an anarchosyndicalist experiment. As I read it, I had to cringe at the power ‘voluntary’ transfers that immediately got me thinking of Foucault’s biopower – as I often do. Saving this for a separate post.
Image: Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together Card 006 from the Postmodern Set – Philosophics.blog
This Critical Theory parody card, Freedom, draws its lineage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose paradox still haunts the modern condition: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The card re-enchants that contradiction – an Enchantment – Social Contract that reminds us liberty isn’t a state but a negotiation.
The card reads:
At the beginning of each player’s upkeep, that player may remove a Binding counter from a permanent they control. Creatures you control can’t be tapped or sacrificed by spells or abilities your opponent controls.
This is Rousseau’s dilemma made mechanical. Freedom is not absolute; it’s procedural. The upkeep represents the maintenance of the social contract—an ongoing renewal, not a one-time event. Every player begins their turn by negotiating what freedom costs. You may remove one Binding counter, but only if you recognise that binding exists.
The flavour text underlines Rousseau’s plea:
“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.”
Freedom, for Rousseau, wasn’t about doing whatever one pleased. It was about participating in the moral and civic order that gives action meaning. To exist outside that order is not liberty; it’s anarchy, the tyranny of impulse.
The card, therefore, resists the naïve libertarian reading of freedom as the absence of restraint. It instead depicts freedom as the capacity to act within and through shared constraints.
Freedom, then, is not the absence of chains, but the power to choose which ones we wear.
— Philosophics.blog
The art shows a ring of robed figures, hand in hand, their chains forming a circle beneath a clearing sky. It’s a haunting image: freedom through fellowship, bondage through unity. The circle symbolises Rousseau’s idea that true liberty emerges only when individuals subordinate selfish will to the general will – the common interest formed through collective agreement.
Yet there’s also a postmodern irony here: circles can be prisons too. The social contract can emancipate or suffocate, depending on who wrote its terms. The same chains that protect can also bind.
The monochrome aesthetic amplifies the ambiguity – freedom rendered in greyscale, neither utopia nor despair, but the space in between.
Rousseau’s notion of the social contract was revolutionary, but its dissonance still resonates: how can one be free and bound at the same time? He answered that only through the voluntary participation in a collective moral order can humans transcend mere instinct.
We might say that today’s democracies still operate under Freedom (Enchantment – Social Contract). We maintain our rights at the cost of constant negotiation: legal, social, linguistic. Every “Binding counter” removed is the product of civic upkeep. Stop maintaining it, and the enchantment fades.
The card hints at the price of this enchantment: creatures (citizens) can’t be tapped or sacrificed by opponents’ control. In other words, autonomy is secured only when the system prevents external domination. But systems fail, and when they do, the illusion of freedom collapses into coercion.
Rousseau earns a complicated respect in my philosophical canon. He’s not in my top five, but he’s unavoidable. His concept of freedom through the social contract anticipates both modern liberalism and its critique. He believed that genuine liberty required moral community – a notion now eroded by hyper-individualism.
Freedom, as I’ve rendered it here, isn’t celebration. It’s lamentation. The card is about the fragility of the social spell that keeps chaos at bay. We remove one binding at a time, hoping not to unbind ourselves entirely.
Philosophics 