We live in an age of two-dimensional minds trying to navigate a three-dimensional world—and doing it with all the grace of a toddler wielding a chainsaw. For over a generation, the US and UK have been polarised, Balkanised, and lobotomised by the Great Red vs. Blue Punch & Judy Show. Left, right. Us, them. Hero, villain. There is no nuance, no gradient, no middle ground. Just a glorious reduction of civilisation’s complexities into primary-coloured football teams for emotionally underdeveloped adults.
This is not politics. This is pantomime.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
And the real tragedy? The world isn’t even two-dimensional. It’s not even three. Try thinking of it as a cube—six sides at least, all pressing in at once, depending on your angle. Culture, history, class, geography, education, trauma, temperament, aesthetic preference—each a face of the cube. But tell that to the modern partisan and they’ll squint at you like you’ve just tried to explain jazz to a toaster.
No, to them, the world is flat. A line. A tug-of-war between two equally blinkered tribes dragging the rest of us into the pit. Pick a side or shut up, they shriek. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. If you don’t chant the correct slogans or signal the proper virtues, you’re obviously a heretic, a bigot, or—worst of all—centrist scum. They don’t want conversation; they want confirmation. Preferably in 280 characters or less.
Try introducing complexity and you’ll be accused of bothsidesism, moral cowardice, or—God forbid—thinking. It’s like throwing a Rubik’s cube into a toddler fight club.
This binary reductionism doesn’t stop at politics. Even gender—possibly the most nuanced and intimate aspect of human identity—has been flattened into a tug-of-war between biological essentialists and gender abolitionists, both sides wielding hashtags like holy relics. The irony? These same culture warriors still manage to marvel at rainbows, utterly unaware that their own worldview only permits two colours. How do they even process a traffic light?
The cult of the binary isn’t just intellectually bankrupt—it’s a threat to civilisation. We didn’t crawl out of the primordial ooze, develop language, invent calculus, and split the atom just so Karen and Kev from Facebook could reduce geopolitics to an episode of EastEnders. The world is messy. People are contradictory. Context matters. But nuance doesn’t trend.
We’re governed by algorithms, policed by outrage, and divided by design. The machinery of mass culture rewards the loudest, angriest, most wilfully ignorant voices, and we feed the beast like dopamine-addled pigeons pecking a lever. The cube has been flattened into a cartoon. And yet we wonder why everything feels broken.
So here’s a radical idea: what if we stopped flattening the world into a battlefield and started mapping it like a landscape? What if we admitted that not every problem has two sides—some have two hundred? What if we taught critical thinking instead of tribal loyalty? What if we made complexity sexy again?
But I digress. That might require imagination. And we’ve outsourced that to TikTok influencers and AI chatbots.
Meanwhile, the cube spins. And the rest of us try to hold on.
I’m not a fan of IQ as a general metric. Let us be done with the cult of the clever. Let us drag the IQ score from its pedestal, strip it of its statistical robes, and parade it through the streets of history where it belongs—next to phrenology, eugenics, and other well-meaning pseudosciences once weaponised by men in waistcoats.
The so-called Intelligence Industrial Complex—an infernal alliance of psychologists, bureaucrats, and HR departments—has for too long dictated the terms of thought. It has pretended to measure the immeasurable. It has sold us a fiction in numerical drag: that human intelligence can be distilled, packaged, and ranked.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
What it measures, it defines. What it defines, it controls.
IQ is not intelligence. It is cognitive GDP: a snapshot of what your brain can do under fluorescent lights with a timer running. It rewards abstraction, not understanding; speed, not depth; pattern recognition, not wisdom. It’s a test of how well you’ve been conditioned to think like the test-makers.
This is not to say IQ has no value. Of course it does—within its own ecosystem of schools, bureaucracies, and technocracies. But let us not mistake the ruler for the terrain. Let us not map the entire landscape of human potential using a single colonial compass.
True intelligence is not a number. It is a spectrum of situated knowings, a polyphony of minds tuned to different frequencies. The Inuit hunter tracking a seal through silence. The griot remembering centuries of lineage. The autistic coder intuiting an algorithm in dreamtime. The grandmother sensing a lie with her bones. IQ cannot touch these.
To speak of intelligence as if it belonged to a single theory is to mistake a monoculture for a forest. Let us burn the monoculture. Let us plant a thousand new seeds.
A Comparative Vivisection of Intelligence Theories
Theory / Model
Core Premise
Strengths
Blind Spots / Critiques
Cultural Framing
IQ (Psychometric g)
Intelligence is a single, general cognitive ability measurable via testing
Predicts academic & job performance; standardised
Skewed toward Western logic, ignores context, devalues non-abstract intelligences
Western, industrial, meritocratic
Multiple Intelligences (Gardner)
Intelligence is plural: linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily, etc.
Recognises diversity; challenges IQ monopoly
Still individualistic; categories often vague; Western in formulation
Liberal Western pluralism
Triarchic Theory (Sternberg)
Intelligence = analytical + creative + practical
Includes adaptability, real-world success
Still performance-focused; weak empirical grounding
Western managerial
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
Intelligence includes emotion regulation and interpersonal skill
Useful in leadership & education contexts
Commodified into corporate toolkits; leans self-help
Western therapeutic
Socio-Cultural (Vygotsky)
Intelligence develops through social interaction and cultural mediation
Recognises developmental context and culture
Less attention to adult or cross-cultural intelligence
Soviet / constructivist
Distributed Cognition / Extended Mind
Intelligence is distributed across people, tools, systems
Breaks skull-bound model; real-world cognition
Hard to measure; difficult to institutionalise
Post-cognitive, systems-based
Indigenous Epistemologies
Intelligence is relational, ecological, spiritual, embodied, ancestral
Holistic; grounded in lived experience
Marginalised by academia; often untranslatable into standard metrics
Global South / decolonial
Conclusion: Beyond the Monoculture of Mind
If we want a more encompassing theory of intelligence, we must stop looking for a single theory. We must accept plurality—not as a nod to diversity, but as an ontological truth.
Intelligence is not a fixed entity to be bottled and graded. It is a living, breathing phenomenon: relational, situated, contextual, historical, ecological, and cultural.
And no test devised in a Princeton psych lab will ever tell you how to walk through a forest without being seen, how to tell when rain is coming by smell alone, or how to speak across generations through story.
It’s time we told the Intelligence Industrial Complex: your number’s up.
Reading Leviathan has me thinking. Nothing new, mind you—just reinvigorated. Hobbes, bless his scowling soul, is the consummate pessimist. People, in his view, are untrustworthy sods, ready to stab you in the back at the first flicker of opportunity. He doesn’t believe in community. He believes in containment.
Audio: NotebookLM discussion about this topic.
And to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. He captures a certain cohort with uncanny accuracy. You know the type. Type-A™ personalities: the Donald Trumps, Elon Musks, Adolph Hitlers, Shahs of Iran, and that guy in marketing who always schedules meetings for 8am. The ones who salivate at the mere whiff of power, who’d sell their grandmothers for a press release and call it vision.
This, in short, is why we can’t have nice things.
Now, I’ll concede that most people want more than they have. Economics depends on this assumption like religion depends on guilt. But not everyone is driven by an insatiable lust for money, dominance, or legacy. That, my friends, is not ambition. It is pathology—a malignant, metastasising hunger that infects the likes of Trump, Musk, Bezos, Sunak, and their ilk. The hunger to rule, not just participate.
The trouble is, the majority of the world’s population are idiots—not technically, but metaphorically. Soft-headed. Overstimulated. Easily distracted by flags, influencers, and “free shipping.” And there are flavours of idiots. Musk is a lucky idiot. Trump is a useful idiot. Most are a hair’s breadth from being cannon fodder.
And then we wonder why everything’s broken.
The world could be configured differently. It could consist of autonomous collectives, each minding its own business, each respecting the other’s boundaries like courteous houseplants. But this equilibrium is shattered—always shattered—by the predatory few. The outliers. The sharks in suits. The ones who mistake governance for domination and diplomacy for personal branding.
So we build mechanisms to defend ourselves—laws, institutions, surveillance, standing armies—but these mechanisms inevitably attract the same types we were trying to ward off. Power-hungry cretins in different hats. The protectors, it turns out, are rarely benevolent dictators. They are predacious politicos, wearing virtue like a costume, mouthing justice while tightening the screws.
And here lies the eternal problem. Not technology. Not ideology. Not even ignorance.
But the recurring infestation of pathological ambition in a species otherwise just trying to get on with its day.
I’ve read Part I of Hobbes’ Leviathan and wonder what it would have been like if he filtered his thoughts through Hume or Wittgenstein. Hobbes makes Dickens read like Pollyanna. It’s an interesting historical piece, worth reading on that basis alone. It reads as if the Christian Bible had to pass through a legal review before it had been published, sapped of vigour. As bad a rap as Schopenhauer seems to get, Hobbes is the consummate Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah, humbug – you nasty, brutish, filthy animals!*
Audio: NotebookLM podcast conversation on this topic.
In any case, it got me thinking of free will and, more to the point, of will itself.
A Brief History of Humanity’s Favourite Metaphysical Scapegoat
By the time Free Will turned up to the party, the real guest of honour—the Will—had already been drinking heavily, muttering incoherently in the corner, and starting fights with anyone who made eye contact. We like to pretend that the “will” is a noble concept: the engine of our autonomy, the core of our moral selves, the brave little metaphysical organ that lets us choose kale over crisps. But in truth, it’s a bloody mess—philosophy’s equivalent of a family heirloom that no one quite understands but refuses to throw away.
So, let’s rewind. Where did this thing come from? And why, after 2,500 years of name-dropping, finger-pointing, and metaphysical gymnastics, are we still not quite sure whether we have a will, are a will, or should be suing it for damages?
Plato: Soul, Reason, and That Poor Horse
In the beginning, there was Plato, who—as with most things—half-invented the question and then wandered off before giving a straight answer. For him, the soul was a tripartite circus act: reason, spirit, and appetite. Will, as a term, didn’t get top billing—it didn’t even get its name on the poster. But the idea was there, muddling along somewhere between the charioteer (reason) and the unruly horses (desire and spiritedness).
No explicit will, mind you. Just a vague sense that the rational soul ought to be in charge, even if it had to beat the rest of itself into submission.
Aristotle: Purpose Without Pathos
Aristotle, ever the tidy-minded taxonomist, introduced prohairesis—deliberate choice—as a sort of proto-will. But again, it was all about rational calculation toward an end. Ethics was teleological, goal-oriented. You chose what aligned with eudaimonia, that smug Greek term for flourishing. Will, if it existed at all, was just reason picking out dinner options based on your telos. No inner torment, no existential rebellion—just logos in a toga.
Augustine: Sin, Suffering, and That Eternal No
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and along comes Saint Augustine, traumatised by his libido and determined to make the rest of us suffer for it. Enter voluntas: the will as the seat of choice—and the scene of the crime. Augustine is the first to really make the will bleed. He discovers he can want two incompatible things at once and feels properly appalled about it.
From this comes the classic Christian cocktail: freedom plus failure equals guilt. The will is free, but broken. It’s responsible for sin, for disobedience, for not loving God enough on Wednesdays. Thanks to Augustine, we’re stuck with the idea that the will is both the instrument of salvation and the reason we’re going to Hell.
Cheers.
Medievals: God’s Will or Yours, Pick One
The Scholastics, never ones to let an ambiguity pass unanalysed, promptly split into camps. Aquinas, ever the reasonable Dominican, says the will is subordinate to the intellect. God is rational, and so are we, mostly. But Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the original voluntarist hooligans, argue that the will is superior—even in God. God could have made murder a virtue, they claim, and you’d just have to live with it.
From this cheerful perspective, will becomes a force of arbitrary fiat, and humans, made in God’s image, inherit the same capacity for irrational choice. The will is now more than moral; it’s metaphysical. Less reason’s servant, more chaos goblin.
Hobbes: Appetite with Delusions of Grandeur
Then along comes Thomas Hobbes, who looks at the soul and sees a wheezing machine of appetites. Will, in his famously cheery view, is simply “the last appetite before action.” No higher calling, no spiritual struggle—just the twitch that wins. Man is not a rational animal, but a selfish algorithm on legs. For Hobbes, will is where desire stumbles into motion, and morality is a polite euphemism for not getting stabbed.
Kant: The Will Gets a Makeover
Enter Immanuel Kant: powdered wig, pursed lips, and the moral rectitude of a man who scheduled his bowel movements. Kant gives us the “good will”, which acts from duty, not desire. Suddenly, the will is autonomous, rational, and morally legislative—a one-man Parliament of inner law.
It’s all terribly noble, terribly German, and entirely exhausting. For Kant, free will is not the ability to do whatever you like—it’s the capacity to choose according to moral law, even when you’d rather be asleep. The will is finally heroic—but only if it agrees to hate itself a little.
Schopenhauer: Cosmic Will, Cosmic Joke
And then the mood turns. Schopenhauer, world’s grumpiest mystic, takes Kant’s sublime will and reveals it to be a blind, thrashing, cosmic force. Will, for him, isn’t reason—it’s suffering in motion. The entire universe is will-to-live: a desperate, pointless striving that dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction.
There is no freedom, no morality, no point. The only escape is to negate the will, preferably through aesthetic contemplation or Buddhist-like renunciation. In Schopenhauer’s world, the will is not what makes us human—it’s what makes us miserable.
Nietzsche: Transvaluation and the Will to Shout Loudest
Cue Nietzsche, who takes Schopenhauer’s howling void and says: yes, but what if we made it fabulous? For him, the will is no longer to live, but to power—to assert, to create, to impose value. “Free will” is a theologian’s fantasy, a tool of priests and moral accountants. But will itself? That’s the fire in the forge. The Übermensch doesn’t renounce the will—he rides it like a stallion into the sunset of morality.
Nietzsche doesn’t want to deny the abyss. He wants to waltz with it.
Today: Free Will and the Neuroscientific Hangover
And now? Now we’re left with compatibilists, libertarians, determinists, and neuroscientists all shouting past each other, armed with fMRI machines and TED talks. Some claim free will is an illusion, a post hoc rationalisation made by brains doing what they were always going to do. Others insist that moral responsibility requires it, even if we can’t quite locate it between the neurons.
We talk about willpower, will-to-change, political will, and free will like they’re real things. But under the hood, we’re still wrestling with the same questions Augustine posed in a North African villa: Why do I do what I don’t want to do? And more importantly, who’s doing it?
Conclusion: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Mess
From Plato’s silent horses to Nietzsche’s Dionysian pyrotechnics, the will has shape-shifted more times than a politician in an election year. It has been a rational chooser, a moral failure, a divine spark, a mechanical twitch, a cosmic torment, and an existential triumph.
Despite centuries of philosophical handwringing, what it has never been is settled.
So where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the way? Twisting, contradictory, and littered with the corpses of half-baked metaphysical systems.
Welcome to the labyrinth. Bring snacks.
* The solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short quote is forthcoming. Filthy animals is a nod to Home Alone.
David Brooks and the Hollowing Out of Conservatism
David Brooks is the quintessential old-school Conservative—the kind who once upheld a semblance of ideological coherence. He belongs to the pre-Reagan-Thatcher vintage, a time when Conservatism at least had the decency to argue from principles rather than blind tribalism. We could debate these people in good faith. Those days are gone. The current incarnation of Conservatism contains only homoeopathic traces of its Classical™ predecessor—diluted beyond recognition.
The Degeneration of Conservatism
The rot set in with Reagan, who caught it from Thatcher. Greed and selfishness were laundered into virtues, repackaged as “individual responsibility,” and the party’s intellectual ballast began to erode. By the time Bush II’s administration rolled in, Neo-Conservatism had replaced any lingering Burkean ethos, and by Trump’s tenure, even the pretence of ideology was gone. Conservatism-in-Name-Only—whatever Trump’s brand of reactionary nihilism was—swallowed the party whole. Do they even call themselves Conservatives anymore, or has that ship sailed along with basic literacy?
To be fair, this didn’t go unnoticed. Plenty of old-school Republicans recoiled in horror when Trump became their figurehead. Before the 2016 election, conservative pundits could barely contain their disdain for his incompetence, lack of moral compass, and general buffoonery. And yet, once they realised he was the party’s golden goose, they clambered aboard the Trump Train with the enthusiasm of lottery winners at a payday loan office. His staunchest critics became his most obsequious apologists. What does this tell us about their value system? Spoiler: nothing good.
Brooks’ Lament
Which brings us back to Brooks, who now bemoans the death of Conservative values. On this, we agree. Where we part ways is on whether those values were worth saving. Say you’re boarding a train from New York to Los Angeles. Conservatism might argue that a Miami-bound train is still a train, so what’s the problem? It’s the same vehicle, just going somewhere else. Except, of course, Conservatism has always insisted on the slow train over the fast train—because urgency is unseemly, and progress must be rationed.
If I’m an affluent middle-classer, I might prefer Conservatism’s careful incrementalism—it keeps my apple cart stable. Admirable, if you enjoy tunnel vision. Progressives, by contrast, recognise that some people don’t even have apple carts. Some are starving while others hoard orchards. To the Conservative, the poor just aren’t trying hard enough. To the Progressive, the system is broken, and the playing field needs a serious re-levelling. Even when Conservatives acknowledge inequality, their instinct is to tiptoe toward justice rather than risk disrupting their own affluence.
The Fallacy of Objective Reality
Leaving politics for philosophy, Brooks predictably rails against Postmodernism, decrying relativism in favour of good old-fashioned Modernist “reality.” He’s horrified by subjectivism, as though personal interpretation weren’t the foundation of all human experience. Like Jordan Peterson, he believes his subjective truth is the objective truth. And like Peterson, he takes umbrage at anyone pointing out otherwise. It feels so absolute to them that they mistake their own convictions for universal constants.
As a subjectivist, I accept that reality is socially mediated. We interpret truth claims based on cognitive biases, cultural conditioning, and personal experience. Even when we strive for objectivity, we do so through subjective lenses. Brooks’ Modernist nostalgia is touching but delusional—akin to demanding we all agree on a single flavour of ice cream.
The Existential Problem
And so, I find myself in partial agreement with Brooks. Yes, there is an existential crisis. The patient has a broken leg. But our prescriptions differ wildly. I won’t offer a metaphor for that—consider it your homework as a reader.
Brooks is likely a better writer than a public speaker, but you may still find yourself nodding along with some of his arguments. If you’re a “true” Christian Conservative—if you still believe in something beyond crass self-interest—he may well be preaching to the choir. But let’s be honest: how many in that choir are still listening?
This is Chapter 5 of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while and wasn’t sure how a 70-year-old book could have so much relevance, but it does. Granted, some of it is irrelevant, a victim of the period it was written. This happens.
Sidebar: Whilst praising Freud, Fromm also calls him out, essentially accusing him of projecting his mummy-daddy issues onto the world at large. When I first encountered Freud’s work in the 1980s, it was already largely discredited. Some of what should have been wasn’t. Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst heavily overshadowed his other contributions. In fact, Freud offers some strong philosophical insights into society and civilisation. He’s not all about cigars and dreamscapes.
What strikes me about this chapter is the historical perspective it provides on capitalism. I’m an academic economist. I taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade. I’ve read (and recommend reading) Marx’s Capital firsthand.
Audio: NotebookLM Podcast commentary on this content.
Fromm adds additional details here. Firstly, he notes that the capitalism that marked the early days of the Industrial Revolution—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—differed from that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earlier period still had cultural and moral tethers that became frayed or lost in later periods. Without regurgitating the chapter, I cite some themes:
“this underselling practice is grown to such a shameful height, that particular persons publicly advertise that they undersell the rest of the trade.”
People were not very keen on price cutting as a competitive mechanism.
They also note the unfair competitive advantage of the monied elites who could buy materials in cash instead of credit and could thereby undercut prices, who would have to account for paying interest rates or markups on credit.
Whilst in the twentieth century, regulating undercutting is seen as protectionism, the earlier centuries had no problems defending merchants. We do have laws on the ebooks that prevent dumping, but these are rarely enforced, and when they are, it’s a political rather than economic statement. In practice, but done in the name of economics are politics in the same manner as science was used as cover to implement policy during the COVID-19 debacle.
Montesquieu says “that machines which diminish the numbers of workers are ‘pernicious’.” This sentiment echoes the current sentiments about robotics and artificial intelligence.
Nineteenth-century capitalism saw man as the measure of all things supplanted by capital. This is the capitalism Marx rails against—profits over humanity and society, the pursuit of local maxima at the expense of global maxima. This is also where the goal of hypergrowth and growth for growth’s sake came into vogue, ushering us into the Modern Age of Modern ideals—science, progress, order, and so on.
I won’t exhaust the chapter here, but for what it is, it’s a relatively light read. Whether I comment on later chapters depends on whether they engage me. Cheers.
These are the first two chapter titles of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I suspect I’ll be reading this book twice for good measure. I’m four chapters in, with three to go, and eager for a deeper dive.
Despite being published in 1955, Fromm’s analysis remains strikingly relevant. Mark Fisher picks up a similar thread in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, but whereas Fisher dissects the ideological stranglehold of late capitalism, Fromm, as a psychiatrist, turns the lens on human nature itself. He questions the very concept of normalcy—something we tend to accept uncritically, much like Michel Foucault would in the following generation.
I’ll hold off on any sweeping conclusions until I’ve finished the book (and, more likely, after a second read). But for now, consider this a tentative recommendation. Snow Crash was an amusing detour, but non-fiction is where I feel most at home.
Humans, we are told, are exceptional—unlike the rest of the lowly animal kingdom. We alone possess reason, morality, and the ability to transcend our base instincts. And yet, curiously, this argument is rolled out only when convenient. At times, we are commanded to rise above our primal urges; at others, we are scolded for even thinking about resisting them. This ideological schizophrenia is no accident—it is a feature, not a bug, of our prevailing moral and economic order.
The contradictions of “human nature” arguments can be broken down into two key patterns:
A. We must transcend our animal instincts—but only when they threaten social or economic order.
B. We must accept our animal instincts as unchangeable—but only when they reinforce existing power structures.
This hypocrisy is especially visible in how capitalism and morality are framed. Let’s examine two case studies.
Case 1: Prostitution—A Market That Must Be Morally Suppressed
Sex is as fundamental a biological drive as hunger or thirst. One would think that in a world where everything is commodified, prostitution—the most direct transaction of supply and demand—would be embraced by free-market capitalists. But no. We are told that engaging in this “base” activity is degrading, immoral, and must be curtailed. The same capitalists who defend free enterprise at all costs suddenly become moralists, urging us to resist temptation and rise above our urges. Sex, despite being one of the most natural acts imaginable, is treated as an impulse to be tamed rather than an economic exchange to be normalised.
Case 2: Capitalism—A System We Must Accept as “Natural”
Contrast this with how we are told to think about capitalism. Greed, exploitation, and ruthless competition? Those are “just human nature.” The strong thrive, and the weak perish. We are warned not to question the system because to do so would be to fight against nature itself. Socialism? A naive fantasy. Economic cooperation? Impossible. Mutual aid? Utopian nonsense. We must accept that humans are selfish creatures, that hierarchy is inevitable, and that billionaires accumulating obscene wealth while millions starve is simply the way of things.
Why are we ordered to suppress our instincts in one case yet surrender to them in another? Because morality, in its institutional form, is not about virtue—it is about control.
The Convenient Flexibility of “Human Nature”
This selective logic is designed to keep power structures intact. The rules shift depending on whose interests are at stake:
If an instinct challenges profit or control, it must be suppressed.
If an instinct benefits the ruling order, it must be accepted as natural.
Thus, the same societies that demand moral restraint when it comes to sex, leisure, or pleasure suddenly rediscover their inner Darwinist when defending capitalist greed and economic cruelty.
The “Natural Order” Myth
The claim that capitalism is the inevitable result of human nature is one of history’s greatest ideological scams. If it were indeed “natural,” it would not require:
Constant propaganda to reinforce its legitimacy.
Violent suppression of alternative systems.
Trillions in government bailouts every time it fails.
Moreover, humans are not only competitive, selfish creatures. We are also wired for cooperation, altruism, and communal living—traits conveniently erased from discussions about economics.
Final Thought: Breaking the Cycle
If we can rise above base instincts for sex and violence, why can’t we rise above capitalist greed and exploitation? Why is overcoming “human nature” only demanded when it suits power? The truth is, we are only commanded to rise above when it keeps us obedient—and ordered to accept reality when it keeps the powerful in control.
The only real rebellion is to reject this hypocrisy entirely. The future belongs not to those who passively accept the contradictions of the present, but to those who refuse to play by its schizophrenic rules.
It’s not uncommon to label workers under the capitalist system as wage slaves.
As with the abolition of slavery in the United States, the future will one day recoil at Capitalism, wondering how humanity could ever have justified the exploitation of others for commerce and profit. Then again, that’s the same question, isn’t it?
As with the old story, a man asked a lady: “Would you be willing to sleep with me if I paid you £1,000,000?” Without hesitation, she answered, “Yes.” “And what if I only paid you £5?” The irate lady fumed: “£5? What do you think I am?” The man replied: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re trying to determine the degree.”
Capitalism is only a matter of degree from slavery. In practice, slavery is a Capitalist’s wet dream.
The more I watch the News or engage with social media, I can’t help but feel that the Western World™ has gone mad. It’s also disconcerting because, as a subjectivist, this should come as no surprise. I guess I miss the days when it was better wrapped in relativism. Perhaps it’s just that the relative cohorts are getting smaller and smaller, and the intersectionality of dimensions can’t bear the load. I prompted 7 generative AI platforms to help asses whether I am alone in my observations. I present the responses unedited, identifying each with a header.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.
Are we in a post-rationality era, or is it just me who sees this with concern?
ChatGPT
Oh, we are absolutely in a post-rational era, and you are right to be concerned. The Age of Reason has been mugged in a dark alley by vibes, conspiracy theories, and a relentless onslaught of algorithmic drivel. Facts? Mere inconveniences. Logic? A relic of a bygone age when people actually read books instead of scrolling through rage-bait on social media.
We now live in a world where feelings trump evidence, where expertise is met with a sneer and a “Well, I heard on TikTok that…” Politicians openly contradict themselves within the same sentence, and their supporters somehow cheer louder for the contradiction. Science? Only if it aligns with pre-existing beliefs. Critical thinking? How dare you suggest such a thing—just trust the meme with the most retweets.
But hey, maybe this is just the inevitable entropy of civilization. Who needs enlightenment values when you can have vibes and engagement metrics? Buckle up—it’s only going to get weirder.
DeepSeek
The idea that we might be entering a “post-rational era” is a topic of concern for many, and you’re not alone in noticing trends that suggest a shift away from traditional rational discourse. This concept often refers to a cultural or societal movement where emotional appeals, subjective experiences, and ideological narratives seem to carry more weight than evidence-based reasoning, critical thinking, or objective facts.
Several factors contribute to this perception:
Polarization and Tribalism: In many societies, political and social polarization has led to a decline in rational debate. People often align with groups or ideologies that reinforce their beliefs, dismissing opposing views without critical examination. This tribal mindset can override rational discourse.
Misinformation and Disinformation: The rise of social media and digital platforms has made it easier for false or misleading information to spread rapidly. Confirmation bias leads individuals to accept information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, regardless of its accuracy.
Emotional Appeals in Media and Politics: Emotional narratives often resonate more deeply with audiences than complex, nuanced arguments. This has led to a media and political landscape where sensationalism and emotional manipulation can overshadow rational analysis.
Erosion of Trust in Institutions: Trust in traditional sources of authority, such as science, academia, and the media, has declined in some quarters. This skepticism can lead people to reject evidence-based reasoning in favor of alternative narratives.
Post-Truth Culture: The term “post-truth” reflects a cultural shift where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. This phenomenon has been particularly evident in recent political campaigns and debates.
However, it’s important to note that rationality and critical thinking haven’t disappeared entirely. Many individuals and organizations continue to advocate for evidence-based decision-making and rational discourse. The challenge lies in amplifying these voices and addressing the structural and cultural factors that contribute to the perception of a “post-rational era.”
If you’re concerned about this trend, you’re not alone. Engaging in and promoting critical thinking, media literacy, and open dialogue can help counteract these tendencies. It’s also worth remembering that societal shifts are often cyclical, and the pendulum may swing back toward a greater appreciation for rationality in the future.
Meta AI
You’re not alone in your concern. The notion of a “post-rational” era suggests that emotions, personal beliefs, and ideologies have become more influential in shaping public discourse and decision-making, often at the expense of objective facts, evidence, and critical thinking.
Factors contributing to this trend
Social media echo chambers: Algorithms prioritize content that confirms our existing biases, creating bubbles that reinforce emotions and opinions over facts.
Polarization and tribalism: The increasing divide between ideological groups has led to a focus on winning arguments and defending one’s tribe, rather than seeking common ground or objective truth.
Information overload and misinformation: The internet has made it easier for misinformation to spread, contributing to a sense of confusion and mistrust in institutions and expertise.
Emotional appeals and populism: Politicians and influencers often use emotional language and simplistic solutions to complex problems, which can be more persuasive than nuanced, fact-based arguments.
Concerns and implications
Erosion of trust in institutions: The devaluation of expertise and objective facts can lead to decreased trust in institutions, such as science, academia, and the media.
Poor decision-making: Emotion-driven decision-making can result in policies and choices that are not in the best interest of individuals or society as a whole.
Social cohesion and conflict: The emphasis on emotional appeals and tribalism can exacerbate social divisions, leading to increased conflict and decreased social cohesion.
What can be done?
Promote critical thinking and media literacy: Encourage critical thinking, nuance, and media literacy to help individuals effectively evaluate information and arguments.
Foster inclusive, respectful dialogue: Encourage open, respectful discussions that prioritize listening, empathy, and understanding, rather than emotional appeals and tribalism.
Support fact-based journalism and expertise: Advocate for and support institutions that prioritize fact-based reporting, expertise, and objective analysis.
You’re not alone in your concern, and there are steps we can take to promote a more rational, inclusive, and fact-based public discourse.
Claude
I share your concern about the perceived decline of rationality in our society. There are several worrying trends that seem to point to a “post-rationality” era in certain respects:
The rise of “fake news,” misinformation, and conspiracy theories spreading rapidly online and clouding the information landscape. It has become harder to distinguish fact from fiction.
Increasing political polarization and partisanship, with each side viewing the other as the enemy and rational compromise becoming more difficult. Emotion and tribalism often trump facts.
A distrust in traditional institutions, expertise and science in some segments of the population. Authority of experts is questioned and fringe theories gain traction.
“Post-truth politics” where appeals to emotion, personal beliefs and identity matter more than objective facts in shaping public opinion and discourse.
Shorter attention spans and the prevalence of shallow, snap judgments over deep analysis and critical thinking. Sensationalism is incentivized.
Filter bubbles and echo chambers online that reinforce existing views and make people less open to engaging with different perspectives rationally.
At the same time, I don’t think rationality is dead. Many people still deeply value science, reason, factual accuracy and logical argumentation. But these forces of anti-rationality have grown stronger recently.
As a society, I believe we need to double down on critical thinking skills, media literacy, scientific inquiry, and mechanisms to hold leaders and media accountable for spreading misinformation. Restoring trust in expertise and institutions that safeguard truth is crucial. We must make rational discourse “cool” again across partisan lines.
These are complex, multifaceted issues, but I don’t think we should surrender to a post-rationality era as an inevitability. Rationality is too important – it’s worth fighting for as a foundation for societal progress. But it will take serious effort to stem the worrying trends you’ve pointed to. I share your concerns on this front.
Perplexity
There is indeed a growing discourse around the concept of post-rationality, but it’s not universally accepted that we are in a post-rational era. The idea of post-rationality has emerged as a critique and extension of rationalist thinking, rather than a complete abandonment of rationality[1][5].
Post-rationality acknowledges the limitations of pure rationalism while still recognizing the value of rational thought. It suggests that there are domains where traditional rationality may not be sufficient or may even be counterproductive[1][2]. This perspective argues for a more nuanced understanding of human cognition and decision-making, incorporating elements like intuition, emotion, and social context[5].
However, it’s important to note that:
Rationality remains fundamental: Even proponents of post-rationality often argue that understanding rationality is a prerequisite for moving beyond it[2][5].
Ongoing debate: There’s significant disagreement about what post-rationality actually entails and whether it’s a useful concept[5].
Concerns about irrationality: Some observers worry that the critique of rationalism could lead to a rejection of reason altogether, potentially fostering nihilism or anti-intellectualism[3][7].
Your concern is not unfounded. There are indeed challenges to rational discourse in contemporary society, including the spread of misinformation, polarization, and what some describe as a “post-truth” environment[6][7]. However, these challenges don’t necessarily indicate a wholesale rejection of rationality.
Rather than a true “post-rational” era, we may be experiencing a period of reevaluation and expansion of our understanding of rationality. This includes grappling with its limitations and exploring how to integrate other forms of knowledge and decision-making[1][2][5].
You’re certainly not alone in your concern. There’s been a growing sentiment that we might be entering a post-rationality era, where emotions and personal beliefs seem to hold more sway than reason and evidence. The rise of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and political polarization have all been cited as symptoms of this shift.
It’s a complex issue with lots of factors at play. Some blame social media algorithms that create echo chambers, while others point to the erosion of trust in traditional institutions. But there’s no single, simple answer.
Why do you think we might be in a post-rationality era?
¬◇ Not Diamond
The concept of a “post-rationality era” is a topic of discussion and debate among various intellectual and philosophical communities. Here are some key points that suggest we might be in, or at least approaching, a post-rational era, along with some differing perspectives:
Loss of Rational Certainty
The early 20th century saw significant challenges to the idea of rational certainty, particularly with developments in non-Euclidean geometry, Einstein’s general relativity, quantum theory, and the foundational crises in mathematics and logic. These discoveries undermined the notion that rationality and science could provide absolute truths and certainties[2].
Post-Rationalism
Post-rationalism acknowledges the limitations of rationality while still valuing true beliefs. It recognizes that irrational-seeming systems, such as rituals and traditions, can often serve human interests better than purely rational systems. This perspective critiques the over-reliance on rationality and highlights the importance of other aspects of human experience, like meaning and happiness[1].
Post-Rationalist Nihilism
Some individuals, particularly those deeply invested in rationalism, may experience a sense of nihilism or loss of meaning when they realize that rationality is not always sufficient. This can lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, and a crisis of identity. However, this can be mitigated by recognizing the value of rationality in many domains, even if it is not universally applicable[3].
Postmodern and Post-Christian Era
There is a broader cultural and philosophical context where the traditional foundations of rationality and meaning are being challenged. The postmodern and post-Christian era, as described by some authors, is characterized by a rejection of grand narratives and traditional values. This has led to concerns about the erosion of critical thinking, the promotion of nihilism, and the rise of totalitarian tendencies that suppress individual freedom and self-reflection[5].
Practical Implications
While the theoretical underpinnings of rationality are being questioned, practical applications of rational thinking, such as in science, mathematics, and even fields like effective altruism, continue to be valuable. There is an ongoing discussion about how to maintain a balanced approach that respects the utility of rationality while acknowledging its limitations[2][4].
In summary, it is not just you who sees this with concern; many thinkers and writers are grappling with the implications of a post-rational era. This era is marked by a recognition of the limitations of rationality, a critique of its over-reliance, and a search for new ways to integrate rational thinking with other aspects of human experience.
NB: Interestingly, these ¬◇ footnotes don’t ink to anyplace.
Philosophics 