Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)
Modernity’s most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Quetelet’s statistical conjuring trick – l’homme moyen, the “average man” –and ending in our age of wearable psychometrics and algorithmic empathy, it traces how normality became both the instrument and the idol of Western governance.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this essay.
Along the way it dissects:
The arithmetic imagination that turned virtue into a mean value.
Psychology™ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
Critical theory’s recursion, where resistance becomes a management style.
The palliative society, in which every emotion is tracked, graphed, and monetised.
Audio: ElevenLabs reading of the whole essay (minus citations, references, and metacontent). NB: The audio is split into chapters on Spotify to facilitate reading in sections.
What begins as a genealogy of statistics ends as an autopsy of care. The normal is revealed not as a condition, but as an administrative fantasy – the state’s dream of perfect legibility. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal of wholeness, a discipline of remaining unsynthesised.
Lucidity, not liberation, may be the only virtue left to us – knowing the apparatus intimately enough to refuse its metaphysics while continuing to breathe within it.
The Myth of Homo Normalis is the sixth instalment in the Anti-Enlightenment Project, joining Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together they map the slow disassembly of reason’s empire – from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.
Read or cite: 🔗 Zenodo DOI 🔗 PhilArchive page – forthcoming link
The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre – insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project I’ve begun – call it my anti-Enlightenment collection – is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the essay underlying this post.
This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenment’s poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment – a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.
It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism – our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.
Why a Collection?
Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenment’s hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenment’s bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism – or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.
Ghost by Ghost
Rational Ghosts – Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcet’s paradox, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
Temporal Ghosts – The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenment’s “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.
There may be more hauntings to come – economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests they’ll linger through Día de Muertos and Hallowe’en; after that, who knows whether they’ll still materialise on the page.
At some point in history – some smoke-filled Enlightenment salon, some powdered wig convention – someone floated the idea that when opinions differ, the “fairest” way forward is to count hands and let the larger number win. On the surface, it feels intuitive. If ten want tea and nine want coffee, surely the tea-drinkers deserve their kettle.
But the trick lies in the numbers. By this logic, 49% of the people get exactly what they did not want, and their consolation prize is the promise of “next time”. What passes as fairness is simply coercion with polite manners.
The problem is structural:
Majority ≠ Mandate. A slim majority is just a statistical accident elevated into divine authority.
Minorities Lose by Default. If you belong to a permanent minority – ethnic, cultural, ideological –you may never taste victory, yet you’re still bound to abide by everyone else’s “consensus.”
Abstainers Become Scapegoats. When two candidates split a third of the population each and the rest sit out, the “winner” is crowned with less than half the electorate behind them. The abstainers are then blamed for “not preventing” the outcome, as though voting for a candidate they disliked would have saved them.
Why did this formula gain traction? Because it looked neat. It gave the appearance of fairness, a clean heuristic: count, declare, move on. Like democracy itself, it was born of Enlightenment rationalism’s obsession with rules, numbers, and abstraction. The premise was that humans are rational agents, and rational agents could submit to a rational procedure. The reality: humans are messy, tribal, irrational.
Majority rule became a ritual of laundering domination into legitimacy. “The people have spoken” is the priestly incantation, even if two-thirds of the people didn’t.
If we strip the veneer, what remains is not fairness but a convenient shortcut – one that was accepted, then sanctified, because it seemed better than monarchy and cheaper than perpetual stalemate. And so we’ve been living under the ghost of that decision ever since, confusing arithmetic with justice.
We are governed by phantoms. Not the fun kind that rattle chains in castles, but Enlightenment rational ghosts – imaginary citizens who were supposed to be dispassionate, consistent, and perfectly informed. They never lived, but they still haunt our constitutions and television pundits. Every time some talking head declares “the people have spoken”, what they really mean is that the ghosts are back on stage.
The conceit was simple: build politics as if it were an engineering problem. Set the rules right, and stability follows. The trouble is that the material – actual people – wasn’t blueprint-friendly. Madison admitted faction was “sown in the nature of man”, Rousseau agonised over the “general will”, and Condorcet managed to trip over his own math. They saw the cracks even while laying the foundation. Then they shrugged and built anyway.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The rational ghosts were tidy. Real humans are not. Our brains run on shortcuts: motivated reasoning, availability cascades, confirmation bias, Dunning–Kruger. We don’t deliberate; we improvise excuses. Education doesn’t fix it – it just arms us with better rationalisations. Media doesn’t fix it either – it corrals our biases into profitable outrage. The Enlightenment drafted for angels; what it got was apes with smartphones.
Even if the ghosts had shown up, the math betrayed them. Arrow proved that no voting system can translate preferences without distortion. McKelvey showed that whoever controls the sequence of votes controls the outcome. The “will of the people” is less an oracle than a Ouija board, and you can always see whose hand is pushing the planchette.
Scale finishes the job. Dunbar gave us 150 people as the human limit of meaningful community. Beyond that, trust decays into myth. Benedict Anderson called nations “imagined communities”, but social media has shattered the illusion. The national conversation is now a million algorithmic Dunbars, each convinced they alone are the real people.
Audio: This is a longer (40-minute) NotebookLM podcast on the essay itself.
Why did democracy limp along for two centuries if it was this haunted? Because it was on life-support. Growth, war, and civic myth covered the cracks. External enemies, national rituals, and propaganda made dysfunction look like consensus. It wasn’t design; it was borrowed capital. That capital has run out.
Cue the panic. The defences roll in: Churchill said democracy was the “least bad” system (he didn’t, but whatever). Voters self-correct. Education will fix it. It’s only an American problem. And if you don’t like it, what – authoritarianism? These are less arguments than incantations, muttered to keep the ghosts from noticing the creaks in the floorboards.
The real task isn’t to chant louder. It’s to stop pretending ghosts exist. Try subsidiarity: smaller-scale politics humans can actually grasp. Try deliberation: citizens’ assemblies show ordinary people can think, when not reduced to a soundbite. Try sortition: if elections are distorted by design, maybe roll the dice instead. Try polycentric governance: let overlapping authorities handle mismatch instead of hammering “one will”. None of these are perfect. They’re just less haunted.
Enlightenment democracy was built to fail because it was built for rational ghosts. The ghosts never lived. The floorboards are creaking. The task is ours: build institutions for the living, before the house collapses under its own myths.
The Argument in Skeleton Form
Beneath the prose, the critique of Enlightenment democracy can be expressed as a syllogism: a foundation that assumed rational citizens collides with psychological bias, mathematical impossibility, and sociological limits. The outcome is a double failure – corrupted inputs and incoherent outputs – masked only by temporary props.
Figure: Logical skeleton of “Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail.” For the complete essay, with sources and elaboration, see the open-access preprint on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17250225
Radical Futures Studio’s “7 Signals” deck has been circulating widely. It’s a striking example of Storytelling 101: identify a villain, chart the signs of its decline, and point toward an eventual resolution. In this case, the villain is white supremacy. The signs are its institutional and cultural fray. The resolution is its collapse.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As far as stories go, it’s effective. It provides a framework, some memorable imagery, and the reassurance that the ugliness on display today is a death rattle, not a resurgence. No wonder it resonates. People want to believe the noise means the monster is dying.
Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask
But as analysis, the frame is too tight. Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask. White supremacy is real enough in its effects, but its persistence and decline are contingent. The deeper system – the scaffolding of late-stage capitalism, the Enlightenment’s brittle universalism, the institutions now staggering under their own contradictions – remains the host. When whiteness peels away, the system does not vanish. It simply rebrands.
To point to the peeling paint and say ‘the house is collapsing’ is to mistake surface for structure. Yes, the paint matters; it shapes how people experience the walls. But the real rot lies deeper, in the beams. The Enlightenment project promised seamless cloth: rationality, universality, permanence. Capitalism promised endless expansion and renewal. Both promises are faltering, and the cracks are visible everywhere – climate, finance, governance, identity. Racism, whiteness, supremacy: these are one set of cracks, not the foundation itself.
The risk of the ‘signals’ narrative is that it offers too neat a moral arc. It comforts the audience that the villain is cornered, that justice is baked into the future. But history is rarely so tidy. Supremacy does not die; it changes costumes. One mask slips, another is stitched on. If we mistake the collapse of whiteness for the collapse of the system, we blind ourselves to how easily the scaffolding survives in new guises.
Racism is a systemic lie
None of this is to reject the cause. Racism is a systemic lie, and its decline is worth cheering. But it is not enough to track the noise of its death rattle. To understand the larger story, we need to step back and see the woods for the trees. The true collapse underway is broader: the exhaustion of capitalism’s last stage, the unravelling of Enlightenment’s promises, the loss of legitimacy in institutions that no longer hold. That is the forest in which the tree of whiteness withers.
If we focus only on the tree, we risk missing the landscape. And if we mistake peeling paint for the beams, we risk celebrating cosmetic decline while the house quietly reassembles itself under a different banner.
We live in an era where anyone can beam their thoughts into the ether at the push of a button. This would be a miracle if those thoughts weren’t so reliably idiotic. The internet promised democracy of speech; what it delivered was a landfill of charts no one understands, memes that spread faster than viruses, and the gnawing sense that humans are simply not rational enough to handle the privileges they’ve been given.
“Democracy may trust everyone with a voice, but civilisation can’t survive everyone with a megaphone.”
– I just made this up – smh
The Enlightenment told us we were “rational animals,” armed with Reason, the noble faculty that would lift us out of ignorance and into perpetual progress. What a joke. We aren’t Vulcans; we’re apes with Wi-Fi. We mash the publish button before our brains have caught up, then scream “free speech” when anyone suggests that words might require responsibility.
Imagine if driving worked this way. No test, no licence, no consequences: just a toddler at the wheel, claiming God-given rights to swerve across lanes. That’s social media in its current form. The people most in need of regulation are the least likely to pass even the most basic competency exam. Yet they strut about, convinced that posting a graph about Mississippi’s GDP makes them the second coming of Adam Smith.
5 Brutal facts about Europe’s economy. Europe’s richest countries are now poorer than Mississippi. Americans have way more spending power, their companies are getting crushed, birth rates are tanking, and they’ve been left out of the industries that will define the future. Here are 5 hard truths Europe can’t afford to ignore.
NB: Under any condition, do not assume I endorse the misframed cherry-picking of this smug geezer, the progenitor of this post.
The truth is obvious but inconvenient: rationality is not humanity’s natural state. It’s a rare, costly condition, summoned only with discipline, education, and luck. Most of the time, we prefer shortcuts — tribal loyalties, gut feelings, dopamine hits. And yet we hand out the privileges of unfiltered speech, instantaneous broadcasting, and algorithmic amplification as if every citizen were Kant’s ideal autonomous agent.
The result? Chaos. Outrage machines. “Debates” about whether Europeans are backward barbarians for drinking water without ice cubes. These aren’t signs of liberty. They’re symptoms of a species drunk on its own mythology of reason.
Maybe we don’t need a new Marshall Plan for air conditioning in Europe. Maybe we need one for sanity. Start with a licence to post: a simple exam to prove you know what a source is, can tell a correlation from a cause, and won’t confuse market cap with civilisation itself. Civilization would be quieter. And perhaps, mercifully, a little less stupid.
After revisiting MacIntyre on Nietzsche – with Descartes lurking in the background – I think it’s time for another round on dis-integrationism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Philosophy has a bad renovation habit. Descartes tears the house down to its studs, then nails God back in as a load-bearing beam. Nietzsche dynamites the lot, then sketches a heroic Übermensch strutting through the rubble. MacIntyre sighs, bolts Aristotle’s virtue table to the frame, and calls it load-bearing furniture. The pattern repeats: demolition, followed by reconstruction, always with the insistence that this time the structure is sound.
Video: Jonny Thompson’s take on Nietzsche also inspired this post.
But the error isn’t in tearing down. The error is in rushing to rebuild. That’s where the hyphen in dis-integrationism matters – it insists on the pause, the refusal to immediately re-integrate. We don’t have to pretend the fragments are secretly a whole. We can live with the splinters.
Yes, someone will protest: “We need something.” True enough. But the something is always a construction – provisional, contingent, human. The problem isn’t building; the problem is forgetting that you’ve built, then baptising the scaffolding as eternal bedrock.
Modernity™ is a museum of such floorboards: rationalism, utilitarianism, rights-talk, virtue ethics, each nailed down with solemn confidence, each creaking under the weight of its contradictions. The sane position is not to deny the need for floors, but to remember they are planks, not granite.
For the religious, the reply is ready-made: God is the foundation, the rock, the alpha and omega. But that is already a construction, no matter how venerable. Belief may provide the feeling of solidity, but it still arrives mediated by language, institutions, rituals, and interpretation. The Decalogue is a case in point: per the lore, God conveyed information directly to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and onward in an unbroken chain. The claim is not only that the foundation exists, but that certain communities possess unique and privileged access to it — through scripture, tradition, and “reasons” that somehow stop short of being just more scaffolding.
Yet history betrays the trick. The chain is full of edits, schisms, rival prophets, councils, translations, and contradictions – each presented not as construction but as “clarification.” The gapless transmission is a myth; the supposed granite is a patchwork of stone and mortar. A dis-integrationist view doesn’t deny the weight these systems carry in people’s lives, but it refuses to mistake architecture for geology. Whatever floor you stand on was built, not found.
Dis-integrationism is simply the refusal to be gaslit by metaphysics.
This clip of Rachel Barr slid into my feed today, fashionably late by a week, and I thought it deserved a little dissection. The video wouldn’t embed directly – Instagram always has to be precious – so I downloaded it and linked it here. Don’t worry, Rachel, I’m not stealing your clicks.
Now, the United States. Or rather, the United States In Name Only – USINO. A nation perpetually rebranding itself as a “union” whilst its citizens claw at each other like alley cats in a bin fire. Yes, divisions abound – economic, racial, ideological, pick your poison – but some fissures cut to the bone. Today’s example: Charlie Kirk and the rabid congregation of defenders he’s managed to cultivate.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Competing Liturgies
To hear one camp tell it, Kirk is no hater at all. He’s a gentle, God-soaked soul, brimming with Christian love and trying – halo tilted just so – to shepherd stray sheep toward Our Lord and Saviour™. A real Sunday-school sweetheart.
But this is not, shockingly, the consensus. The other camp (my camp, if disclosure still matters in a post-truth age) see him as a snarling opportunist, a huckster of hate packaged in the familiar varnish of patriotism and piety. In short: a hate-merchant with a mailing list.
Spectacle as Weapon
I’ve watched Kirk at work. He loves to stage “debates” – quotation marks mandatory – where a token dissenter is dropped into an amphitheatre of loyalists. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of feeding Christians to lions, except the lions roar on cue and the crowd thinks the blood is wine. He laces misogyny, racism, and reheated premodern dogma into cheap soundbites, and the audience laps it up as though they were attending a revival. For the believers, it’s a festival. For everyone else, it’s a hostile takeover of public discourse.
Deaf Ears, Loud Mouths
Here’s the rub: Cohort A doesn’t perceive his words as hate because they already share the operating system. It’s not hate to them – it’s common sense. Cohort B, meanwhile, hears every syllable as the screech of a chalkboard dragged across the public square. Same words, two worlds.
And when I dare to suggest that if you can’t hear the hatred, you might just be complicit in it, the pushback is instantaneous: Stop imposing your worldview! Which is rich, since their worldview is already blaring through megaphones at tax-exempt rallies. If my worldview is one that insists on less hate, less dehumanisation, less sanctified bullying, then fine, I’ll take the charge.
The deeper accusation, though, is almost comic: that I’m hallucinating hate in a man of pure, lamb-like love. That’s the gaslighting twist of the knife – turning critique into pathology. As if the problem isn’t the bile spilling from the stage but my faulty perception of it.
Perspective is everything, yes – but some perspectives reek of wilful blindness.
This isn’t a political post. It’s about language, the insufficiency of it, and the games we play when pretending words carry more weight than they do.
Luigi Mangione is the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. After his arrest, prosecutors stacked the usual charges – murder, firearms, assorted legal bric-a-brac – then added the cherry on top: domestic terrorism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Recently, a pretrial judge cut the cherry loose.
Murder, yes. Terrorism, no. Not because murder is less grotesque, but because the statutory definition won’t stretch that far without breaking.
NEW YORK, Sept 16 (Reuters) – A New York state judge dismissed on Tuesday two terrorism-related counts against Luigi Mangione over the December 2024 killing of health insurance executive Brian Thompson, though the 27-year-old remains charged with second-degree murder and eight other criminal counts in the case.
“There was no evidence presented of a desire to terrorize the public, inspire widespread fear, engage in a broader campaign of violence, or to conspire with organized terrorist groups,” Judge Gregory Carro found in a 12-page written decision (pdf). “Here, the crime – the heinous, but targeted and discrete killing of one person – is very different from the examples of terrorism set forth in the statute.” (source)
The prosecution insisted the label fit. The judge disagreed. Cue outrage, applause, and confusion. The crime is still horrific, but suddenly the word “terrorist” is off-limits.
The Elasticity of Terror
How can two educated parties look at the same set of facts and come to opposite conclusions? Because “terrorism” isn’t a Platonic form. It’s an elastic linguistic category. The prosecutor drags it out because “terrorist” is a magical word in American law: it inflates an already ugly act into a civilisation-level threat, unlocks harsher penalties, and lets politicians posture about national security.
The judge, however, reminded everyone that a bullet in Manhattan does not equal al-Qaeda. Murder, yes. Terrorism, no. Not because murder is less grotesque, but because the statutory definition won’t stretch that far without breaking.
Language Games, Legal Hierarchies
This is where it gets trickier. The judge isn’t merely “pulling rank”—though rank does matter. American jurisprudence is hierarchical: trial judges hand down rulings, appellate judges review them, and nine robed partisans in Washington can one day rewrite the whole script. On paper, these tiers are meant to iron out ambiguity. In practice, they multiply it.
Five minds say ‘constitutional,’ four say ‘unconstitutional,’ and the one-vote margin becomes binding law for 330 million people. That’s not truth; it’s hierarchy dressed in robes.
Even co-equal judges, reading the same facts, can diverge wildly. Split decisions at the Supreme Court prove the point: five minds say “constitutional,” four say “unconstitutional,” and the one-vote margin becomes binding law for 330 million people. That’s not the discovery of truth; it’s the triumph of one language game over another, enforced by hierarchy.
The Insufficiency Laid Bare
So we return to Mangioni. He has been charged with murder – the second degree flavour; that much is uncontested. But is he a “terrorist”? The prosecution said yes, the judge said no, and another judge, higher up or sitting elsewhere, might well say yes again. Each claim is defensible. Each is motivated by language, by politics, and by the institutional pressures of the bench.
And that’s the point. Language doesn’t tether itself to reality; it choreographs our endless arguments about reality. The law tries to tame it with hierarchies and definitions, but the seams always show. Mangioni is a murderer. Whether he is a terrorist depends less on his actions than on which interpretive dance is winning in the courtroom that day.
We humans pride ourselves on being civilised. Unlike animals, we don’t let biology call the shots. A chimp reaches puberty and reproduces; a human reaches puberty and is told, not yet – society has rules. Biologically mature isn’t socially mature, and we pat ourselves on the back for having spotted the difference.
But watch how quickly that distinction vanishes when it threatens the in-group narrative. Bring up gender, and suddenly there’s no such thing as a social construct. Forget the puberty-vs-adulthood distinction we were just defending – now biology is destiny, immutable and absolute. Cross-gender clothing? “Against nature.” Transition? “You can’t be born into the wrong body.” Our selective vision flips depending on whose ox is being gored.
The same trick appears in how we talk about maturity. You can’t vote until 18. You’re not old enough to drink until 21. You’re not old enough to stop working until 67. These numbers aren’t natural; they’re paperwork. They’re flags planted in the soil of human life, and without the right flag, you don’t count.
The very people who insist on distinguishing biological maturity from social maturity when it comes to puberty suddenly forget the distinction when it comes to gender. They know perfectly well that “maturity” is a construct – after all, they’ve built entire legal systems around arbitrary thresholds – but they enforce the amnesia whenever it suits them. Nietzsche would say it plainly: the powerful don’t need to follow the rules, they only need to make sure you do.
So the next time someone appeals to “nature,” ask: which one? The nature that declares you old enough to marry at puberty? The nature that withholds voting, drinking, or retirement rights until a bureaucrat’s calendar says so? Or the nature that quietly mutates whenever the in-group needs to draw a new line around civilisation?
The truth is, “nature” and “maturity” are less about describing the world than about policing it. They’re flags, shibboleths, passwords. We keep calling them natural, but the only thing natural about them is how often they’re used to enforce someone else’s story.
Philosophics 