I don’t like most of Jordan Peterson’s positions. There – I’ve said it. The man, once ubiquitous, seems to have faded into the woodwork, though no doubt his disciples still cling to his every word as if he were a modern-day oracle. But recently, I caught a clip of him online, and it dredged up the same bad taste, like stumbling upon an old, forgotten sandwich at the back of the fridge.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic
Let’s be clear. My distaste for Peterson isn’t rooted in petty animosity. It’s because his material is, in my view, derivative and wrong. And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him – a subtle distinction, but an important one. There’s nothing inherently shameful about being derivative. We all are, to some extent. No thinker sprouts fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The issue is when you’re derivative and act as if you’ve just split the atom of human insight.
Peterson tips his hat to Nietzsche – fair enough – but buries his far greater debt to Jung under layers of self-mythologising. He parades his ideas before audiences, many of whom lack the background to spot the patchwork, and gaslights them into believing they’re witnessing originality. They’re not. They’re witnessing a remixed greatest-hits album, passed off as a debut.
Image: Gratuitous, mean-spirited meme.
Now, I get it. My ideas, too, are derivative. Sometimes it’s coincidence – great minds and all that – but when I trace the thread back to its source, I acknowledge it. Nietzsche? Subjectivity of morality. Foucault? Power dynamics. Wittgenstein? The insufficiency of language. I owe debts to many more: Galen Strawson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss – the list goes on, and I’d gladly share my ledger. But Peterson? The man behaves as though he invented introspection.
And when I say I disagree, let’s not confuse that with some claim to divine epistemic certainty. I don’t mean he’s objectively wrong (whatever that means in the grand circus of philosophy). I mean, I disagree. If I did, well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? That’s the tragicomedy of epistemology: so many positions, so little consensus.
But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth. Take his stance on moral objectivism—possibly his most egregious sin. He peddles this as if morality were some Platonic form, gleaming and immutable, rather than what it is: a human construct, riddled with contingency and contradiction.
And let’s not even get started on his historical and philosophical cherry-picking. His commentary on postmodern thought alone is a masterclass in either wilful misreading or, more likely, not reading at all. Straw men abound. Bogeymen are conjured, propped up, and ritually slaughtered to rapturous applause. It’s intellectually lazy and, frankly, beneath someone of his ostensible stature.
I can only hope we’ve seen the last of this man in the public sphere. And if not? Well, may he at least reform his ways—though I shan’t be holding my breath.
The Enlightenment, we are told, was the age of Reason. A radiant exorcism of superstition. Out went God. Out went angels, miracles, saints, indulgences. All that frothy medieval sentiment was swept aside by a brave new world of logic, science, and progress. Or so the story goes.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But look closer, and you’ll find that Reason didn’t kill God—it absorbed Him. The Enlightenment didn’t abandon metaphysics. It merely privatised it.
From Confessional to Courtroom
We like to imagine that the Enlightenment was a clean break from theology. But really, it was a semantic shell game. The soul was rebranded as the self. Sin became crime. Divine judgement was outsourced to the state.
We stopped praying for salvation and started pleading not guilty.
The entire judicial apparatus—mens rea, culpability, desert, retribution—is built on theological scaffolding. The only thing missing is a sermon and a psalm.
Where theology had the guilty soul, Enlightenment law invented the guilty mind—mens rea—a notion so nebulous it requires clairvoyant jurors to divine intention from action. And where the Church offered Hell, the state offers prison. It’s the same moral ritual, just better lit.
Galen Strawson and the Death of Moral Responsibility
Enter Galen Strawson, that glowering spectre at the feast of moral philosophy. His Basic Argument is elegantly devastating:
You do what you do because of the way you are.
You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are.
Therefore, you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.
Unless you are causa sui—the cause of yourself, an unmoved mover in Calvin Klein—you cannot be held truly responsible. Free will collapses, moral responsibility evaporates, and retributive justice is exposed as epistemological theatre.
In this light, our whole legal structure is little more than rebranded divine vengeance. A vestigial organ from our theocratic past, now enforced by cops instead of clerics.
The Modern State: A Haunted House
What we have, then, is a society that has denied the gods but kept their moral logic. We tossed out theology, but we held onto metaphysical concepts like intent, desert, and blame—concepts that do not survive contact with determinism.
We are living in the afterglow of divine judgement, pretending it’s sunlight.
Nietzsche saw it coming, of course. He warned that killing God would plunge us into existential darkness unless we had the courage to also kill the values propped up by His corpse. We did the first bit. We’re still bottling it on the second.
If Not Retribution, Then What?
Let’s be clear: no one’s suggesting we stop responding to harm. But responses should be grounded in outcomes, not outrage.
Containment, not condemnation.
Prevention, not penance.
Recalibration, not revenge.
We don’t need “justice” in the retributive sense. We need functional ethics, rooted in compassion and consequence, not in Bronze Age morality clumsily duct-taped to Enlightenment reason.
The Risk of Letting Go
Of course, this is terrifying. The current system gives us moral closure. A verdict. A villain. A vanishing point for our collective discomfort.
Abandoning retribution means giving that up. It means accepting that there are no true villains—only configurations of causes. That punishment is often revenge in drag. That morality itself might be a control mechanism, not a universal truth.
But if we’re serious about living in a post-theological age, we must stop playing dress-up with divine concepts. The Enlightenment didn’t finish the job. It changed the costumes, kept the plot, and called it civilisation.
“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a few words to go missing from the bylaws.” — not Edmund Burke, but it ought to be.
The Trump administration—America’s reigning monarch of meaningless bombast—has done it again. This time, with an executive order so linguistically cunning it deserves a Pulitzer for Subtextual Menace.
Issued on 30 January 2025, the decree known as “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” (because, of course, it couldn’t just be called Let’s Erase Legal Protections for People We Don’t Like) removed “political affiliation” and “marital status” from the list of protected classes within certain federal frameworks.
And the result? According to documents unearthed by The Guardian, VA doctors can now legally refuse treatment to patients based on their politics or marital status. You know, because being a Democrat apparently makes you too much of a pre-existing condition.
Naturally, the VA and White House are insisting this means absolutely nothing. “Don’t worry,” they coo. “No one’s actually doing it.” Ah yes, the old Schrödinger’s Protections defence—simultaneously removed and unchanged, invalid but somehow still effective.
But here’s the point—and where it ties to the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis I’ve been peddling like a raving madman at the crossroads of post-structuralism and bureaucratic despair: language isn’t just failing to communicate meaning—it’s being weaponised to obscure it.
The Erosion of Meaning Through Omission
This isn’t the blunt-force idiocy of Orwell’s Newspeak. This is something more elegant—more insidious. This is legislative lacunae. It’s what happens when not saying something says everything.
The words “political affiliation” and “marital status” weren’t replaced. They weren’t clarified. They were simply deleted. Erased like a bad tweet, like a conscience, like a veteran with the wrong bumper sticker.
This is language subtraction as a tool of governance.
We’re not criminalising dissent. We’re just making it legally ignorable.
We’re not discriminating against the unmarried. We’re just no longer required to treat them the same.
It’s the bureaucratic cousin of the dog-whistle: not quite audible in court, but perfectly clear to the base.
The Slippery Slope is Now a Slip-n-Slide
This is how you rewrite civil rights without the fuss of saying so. You just… remove the language that once held the dam in place. Then, when the flood comes, you feign surprise:
“Oh, dear. Who could have guessed that removing protections would result in people being unprotected?”
(Everyone. Everyone could have guessed.)
This is not a bug in the legal language. It’s the feature. The silence is the speech act. The absence is the argument.
This is what I mean by language insufficiency: not merely that our words fail to convey truth, but that their very structure is liable to be gamed—exploited by those who understand that ambiguity is power.
Beyond Intentionality: The Weaponised Void
In philosophy of language, we often debate intentionality—what the speaker meant to say. But here we’re in darker waters. This isn’t about intention. It’s about calculated omission.
The executive order doesn’t declare war on Democrats or single mothers. It simply pulls the thread and lets the tapestry unravel itself.
It’s an act of rhetorical cowardice disguised as administrative efficiency.
This is the Trumpian genius: use language like a stage magician uses sleeves. Distract with one hand, disappear with the other.
Final Diagnosis: Policy by Redaction
We now inhabit a political climate where what is not said carries more legal force than what is. Where bylaw gaps become policy gateways, and where civil rights die not with a bang, but with an elision.
So no, the VA hasn’t yet denied a Democrat a blood transfusion. But the table has been set. The menu revised. The waitstaff told they may now “use discretion.”
Language doesn’t merely fail us. It is being made to fail strategically.
Welcome to the new America: where rights aren’t removed—they’re left out of the memo.
Yet again, ChatGPT renders an odd image. Can’t be bothered to amend it.
ICE is out in force again, dragging brown bodies out of homes in Los Angeles like it’s some righteous carnival of due process. Another day, another federal theatre production titled Law and Order: Ethnic Cleansing Unit, where men with guns and names like Chad or Hank mistake cruelty for patriotism and paperwork for moral clarity.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Naturally, critics of these raids are now being threatened with that great juridical cudgel: “obstructing justice.” Yes, you heard that right. If you interfere – say, by filming, shouting, refusing to roll over like a good little colonial subject – you are obstructing justice. As though justice were something you could actually put your hands on in the United States without a hazmat suit and a decade of appeals.
Let’s be clear. There is no justice here to obstruct. What you are obstructing is bureaucratic violence wrapped in legal latex. You are obstructing a system that functions like a vending machine for state-sanctioned trauma: insert immigrant, extract ruin.
Justice: The Imaginary Friend of Empire
Ah, “justice.” That hallowed ideal trotted out whenever the state wants to put a boot through your front door. The U.S. has long since traded its Justice for Security Theatre and capitalist choreography. The blindfold is still there, sure – but these days, it’s a branded sleep mask from Lockheed Martin, and the scales are rigged to weigh white tears heavier than brown bodies.
Let’s run through the usual suspects:
ICE – America’s own domestic Gestapo, but with better PR and significantly worse fashion.
CBP – Border fetishists whose job seems less about national defence and more about satisfying their Freud-bereft fantasies of control.
SCOTUS – That great moral weather vane, spinning wildly between “originalist necromancy” and outright lunacy, depending on how recently Thomas and Alito read Leviticus.
Congress – An assembly of millionaires cosplaying as public servants, holding hearings on “the threat of immigration” while outsourcing their lawn care.
And of course, the President – whichever septuagenarian husk happens to be in office – offers the usual bromides about order, safety, and enforcement, all while the real crimes (you know, the kind involving tax fraud, corporate pollution, or drone strikes) go entirely unmolested.
Can You Obstruct a Simulation?
If you stand in front of a deportation van, are you obstructing justice, or merely interrupting the bureaucratic excretion of empire? It’s the philosophical equivalent of trying to punch a hologram. The system pretends to uphold fairness while routinely violating its own principles, then charges you with “obstruction” when you call out the sleight of hand.
This is not justice. This is kabuki. A ritual. A performance piece sponsored by Raytheon.
A Modest Proposal
Let’s just be honest and rename the charge. Not “Obstruction of Justice”—too ironic, too pompous. Call it what it is: Obstruction of Procedure, Obstruction of Power, or if we’re being especially accurate: Obstruction of the Industrial Deportation Complex™. Hell, add a corporate sponsor while you’re at it:
You are being charged with Obstruction of Justice, Presented by Amazon Web Services.
Because when justice itself is a ghost, when the rule of law has become the rule of lawfare, the real obscenity is pretending any of this is noble.
Final Thought
So no, dear reader, you’re not obstructing justice. You’re obstructing a machine that mistakes itself for a moral order. And if you’re going to obstruct something, make it that.
Cause and effect: This clip by Jonny Thompson influenced this post.
I’ve written extensively (and, some might say, relentlessly) on the immorality of private property, particularly the theological nonsense that undergirds its supposed legitimacy. Locke’s first-come, first-served logic might have sounded dashing in the 17th century, but it now reads like a boarding queue at Ryanair: desperate, arbitrary, and hostile to basic decency.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this content.
The core problem? Locke’s formulation assumes land was once freely available, as if Earth were a kind of colonial vending machine: insert labour, receive title. But that vending machine was already jammed by the time most of humanity got a look-in. Worse, it bakes in two kinds of chauvinism: temporal (screw the future) and speciesist (screw anything non-human).
Parfit’s long-termism lays bare the absurdity: why should a bit of land or atmospheric stability belong to those who happened to get here first, especially when their stewardship amounts to strip-mining the pantry and then boarding up the exit?
And no, “mixing your labour” with the land does not miraculously confer ownership—any more than a damp bint lobbing a sword at you from a pond makes you sovereign. That’s not philosophy; that’s Arthurian cosplay.
A Sequel to “The Disorder of Saying No” and a Companion to “When ‘Advanced’ Means Genocide”
In my previous post, The Disorder of Saying No, I explored the way resistance to authority is pathologised, particularly when that authority is cloaked in benevolence and armed with diagnostic manuals. When one refuses — gently, thoughtfully, or with a sharp polemic — one is no longer principled. One is “difficult.” Or in my case, oppositional.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
So when I had the gall to call out Bill Maher for his recent linguistic stunt — declaring that a woman is simply “a person who menstruates” — I thought I was doing the rational thing: pointing out a classic bit of reductionist nonsense masquerading as clarity. Maher, after all, was not doing biology. He was playing lexicographer-in-chief, defining a term with centuries of philosophical, sociological, and political baggage as though it were a checkbox on a medical form.
I said as much: that he was abusing his platform, presenting himself as the sole arbiter of the English language, and that his little performance was less about clarity and more about controlling the terms of discourse.
My friend, a post-menopausal woman herself, responded not by engaging the argument, but by insinuating — as others have — that I was simply being contrary. Oppositional. Difficult. Again. (She was clearly moved by When “Advanced” Means Genocide, but may have missed the point.)
So let’s unpack this — not to win the debate, but to show what the debate actually is.
This Isn’t About Biology — It’s About Boundary Maintenance
Maher’s statement wasn’t intended to clarify. It was intended to exclude. It wasn’t some linguistic slip; it was a rhetorical scalpel — one used not to analyse, but to amputate.
And the applause from some cisgender women — particularly those who’ve “graduated” from menstruation — reveals the heart of the matter: it’s not about reproductive biology. It’s about controlling who gets to claim the termwoman.
it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.
Let’s steelman the argument, just for the sport of it:
Menstruation is a symbolic threshold. Even if one no longer menstruates, having done so places you irrevocably within the category of woman. It’s not about exclusion; it’s about grounding identity in material experience.
Fine. But now let’s ask:
What about women who’ve never menstruated?
What about intersex people?
What about trans women?
What about cultures with radically different markers of womanhood?
You see, it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: Applied
This is precisely where the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis earns its keep.
The word woman is not a locked vault. It is a floating signifier, to borrow from Barthes — a term whose meaning is perpetually re-negotiated in use. There is no singular essence to the word. It is not rooted in biology, nor in social role, nor in performance. It is a hybrid, historically contingent construct — and the moment you try to fix its meaning, it slips sideways like a greased Wittgensteinian beetle.
“Meaning is use,” says Wittgenstein, and this is what frightens people.
If woman is defined by use and not by rule, then anyone might claim it. And suddenly, the club is no longer exclusive.
That’s the threat Maher and his defenders are really reacting to. Not trans women. Not intersex people. Not language activists or queer theorists.
The threat is ambiguity.
What They Want: A World That Can Be Named
The push for rigid definitions — for menstruation as membership — is a plea for a world that can be named and known. A world where words are secure, stable, and final. Where meaning doesn’t leak.
But language doesn’t offer that comfort.
It never did.
And when that linguistic instability gets too close to something personal, like gender identity, or the foundation of one’s own sense of self, the defensive response is to fortify the language, as though building walls around a collapsing church.
Maher’s defenders aren’t making scientific arguments. They’re waging semantic warfare. If they can hold the definition, they can win the cultural narrative. They can hold the gates to Womanhood and keep the undesirables out.
That’s the fantasy.
But language doesn’t play along.
Conclusion: Words Will Not Save You — but They Might Soothe the Dead
In the end, Maher’s definition is not merely incorrect. It is insufficient. It cannot accommodate the complexity of lived experience and cannot sustain the illusion of clarity for long.
They are defending nostalgia.
And those who cling to it — friend or stranger, progressive, or conservative — are not defending biology. They are defending nostalgia. Specifically, a pathological nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, and arguably never did: a world where gender roles were static, language was absolute, and womanhood was neatly circumscribed by bodily functions and suburban etiquette.
Ozzy and Harriet loom large here — not as individuals but as archetypes. Icons of a mid-century dream in which everyone knew their place, and deviation was something to be corrected, not celebrated. My friend, of that generation, clings to this fantasy not out of malice but out of a desperate yearning for order. The idea that woman could mean many things, and mean them differently across contexts, is not liberating to her — it’s destabilising.
But that world is gone. And no amount of menstruation-based gatekeeping will restore it.
The Real Scourge Is Ambiguity
Maher’s tantrum wasn’t about truth. It was about fear — fear of linguistic drift, of gender flux, of a world in which meaning no longer obeys. The desire to fix the definition of “woman” is not a biological impulse. It’s a theological one.
And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.
And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.
This is why your Language Insufficiency Hypothesis matters. Because it reminds us that language does not stabilise reality — it masks its instability. The attempt to define “woman” once and for all is not just futile — it’s an act of violence against difference, a linguistic colonisation of lived experience.
So Let Them Rest
Ozzy and Harriet are dead. Let them rest. Let their picket fence moulder. Let their signage decay.
The world has moved on. The language is shifting beneath your feet. And no amount of retroactive gatekeeping can halt that tremor.
The club is burning. And the only thing left to save is honesty.
This post draws on themes from my upcoming book, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. The transcript below is taken from a publicly available exchange, which you can view here. Consider it Exhibit A in language’s ongoing failure to bear the weight of meaning.
KK: I’m saying we were technologically more advanced. DFW: So you’re saying we’re superior to Australian Aboriginals? KK: That’s quite the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m not saying we were superior, I’m saying we were technologically more advanced. DFW: So, how is that the opposite? KK: Superior implies a moral quality. I’m not making any moral implication. You seem to be, but what I’m saying is… DFW: I think most people would hear it that way. KK: No. DFW: Again, you’re a very intelligent man. How would most people hear that? KK: Most people would hear what I’m saying for what I’m saying, which is… DFW: I don’t think they would. KK: You seem to get quite heated about this, which is completely unnecessary. DFW: Um… KK: You think it’s necessary? DFW: I’m a bit stunned by what you’re implying. KK: No, you’re acting in a kind of passive aggressive way which indicates that you’re not happy… DFW: I genuinely… I’m being 100% authentic. My visceral reaction to a white man sitting and saying to me, “And why were we able to commit genocide on them?” and then just pausing— KK: Yes. DFW: …is very visceral to me. KK: Well, let’s go back. First of all, it’s interesting that you brought up my skin colour because I thought that was the exact opposite of the point you’re trying to make in the book.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities
Dissection: Language as Battlefield
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities – especially those laced with power, morality, and history. This transcript is not a debate. It is a linguistic trench war in which every utterance is laced with shrapnel, and each side thinks they’re defending reason.
Let’s pull a few of the shell casings from the mud.
1. Semantic Contamination: “Technologically more advanced”
KK attempts to offer a dry, neutral descriptor. DFW hears supremacist teleology. Why? Because “advanced” is culturally radioactive. It doesn’t merely denote a technical state—it connotes a ladder, with someone inevitably on the bottom rung.
When language carries historical residue, neutrality is a delusion. Words don’t just mean. They echo.
KK is making a semantic distinction. DFW hears a moral claim. Both are right. And both are talking past one another, because language is attempting to cleave affect from description, and it simply can’t.
2. Disambiguation Does Not Save You
KK’s insistence—“I’m not saying we’re superior”—is a textbook example of denotative desperation. He believes clarification will rescue intent. But as any linguist (or postcolonial theorist) will tell you: intent does not sterilise implication.
Language cannot be laundered by explanation. Once spoken, words belong to context, not intention.
KK thinks he’s holding a scalpel. DFW hears a cudgel. And here we are.
3. Phatic Collapse: “Most people would hear…”
This is where the wheels come off. KK argues from semantic specificity. DFW argues from sociolinguistic reception. It’s Saussure versus the TikTok algorithm. Neither will win.
Communication disintegrates not because anyone is lying, but because they are playing incompatible games with the same tokens.
4. Identity as Index: When the Speaker Becomes the Speech
DFW’s invocation of “a white man” is not a derailment—it’s the inevitable endpoint of a system where words no longer float free but are yoked to their utterer. This is the moment the failure of language becomes a failure of interlocution. Argument collapses into indexical entrapment.
At this point, you’re no longer debating ideas. You’re defending your right to use certain words at all.
Which brings us to the final breakdown.
5. Moral Authenticity vs Logical Precision: Unbridgeable Grammars
KK: I am making a logical distinction. DFW: I am having a visceral reaction.
The failure isn’t moral. It isn’t historical. It’s grammatical. One is operating in a truth-function logic game. The other is reacting within a trauma-informed, socially indexed register. These are grammars that do not overlap.
Conclusion: Language Did What It Always Does—It Failed Us
If this brief and brutal dialogue proves anything, it’s this: you cannot extract meaning cleanly from words when the words themselves are sponges for history, hierarchy, and harm. The moment we ask language to do too much—to carry precision, affect, ethics, and identity—it folds in on itself.
And that, dear reader, is precisely the argument of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that meaning does not reside in words, and never has. It lives in the gaps, the silences, the misfires. That’s where the truth—whatever’s left of it—might be hiding.
Follow the wreckage. That’s where the signal lives.
A dear friend — and I do mean dear, though this may be the last time they risk diagnosing me over brunch — recently suggested, with all the benevolent concern of a well-meaning inquisitor, that I might be showing signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
You know the tone: “I say this with love… but have you considered that your refusal to play nicely with institutions might be clinical?”
Let’s set aside the tea and biscuits for a moment and take a scalpel to this charming little pathology. Because if ODD is a diagnosis, then I propose we start diagnosing systems — not people.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
When the Empire Diagnoses Its Rebels
Oppositional Defiant Disorder, for those blissfully unscarred by its jargon, refers to a “persistent pattern” of defiance, argumentativeness, rule-breaking, and — the pièce de résistance — resentment of authority. In other words, it is a medical label for being insufficiently obedient.
What a marvel: not only has resistance been de-politicised, it has been medicalised. The refusal to comply is not treated as an ethical stance or a contextual response, but as a defect of the self. The child (or adult) is not resisting something; they are resisting everything, and this — according to the canon — makes them sick.
One wonders: sick according to whom?
Derrida’s Diagnosis: The Binary Fetish
Jacques Derrida, of course, would waste no time in eviscerating the logic at play. ODD depends on a structural binary: compliant/defiant, healthy/disordered, rule-follower/troublemaker. But, as Derrida reminds us, binaries are not descriptive — they are hierarchies in disguise. One term is always elevated; the other is marked, marginal, suspect.
Here, “compliance” is rendered invisible — the assumed baseline, the white space on the page. Defiance is the ink that stains it. But this only works because “normal” has already been declared. The system names itself sane.
Derrida would deconstruct this self-justifying loop and note that disorder exists only in relation to an order that never justifies itself. Why must the subject submit? That’s not up for discussion. The child who asks that question is already halfway to a diagnosis.
Foucault’s Turn: Disciplinary Power and the Clinic as Court
Enter Foucault, who would regard ODD as yet another exquisite specimen in the taxonomy of control. For him, modern power is not exercised through visible violence but through the subtler mechanisms of surveillance, normalisation, and the production of docile bodies.
ODD is a textbook case of biopower — the system’s ability to define and regulate life itself through classification, diagnosis, and intervention. It is not enough for the child to behave; they must believe. They must internalise authority to the marrow. To question it, or worse, to resent it, is to reveal one’s pathology.
This is not discipline; this is soulcraft. And ODD is not a disorder — it is a symptom of a civilisation that cannot tolerate unmediated subjectivity. See Discipline & Punish.
Ivan Illich: The Compulsory Institutions of Care
Illich would call the whole charade what it is: a coercive dependency masquerading as therapeutic care. In Deschooling Society, he warns of systems — especially schools — that render people passive recipients of norms. ODD, in this light, is not a syndrome. It is the final gasp of autonomy before it is sedated.
What the diagnosis reveals is not a child in crisis, but an institution that cannot imagine education without obedience. Illich would applaud the so-called defiant child for doing the one thing schools rarely reward: thinking.
R.D. Laing: Sanity as a Political Position
Laing, too, would recognise the ruse. His anti-psychiatry position held that “madness” is often the only sane response to a fundamentally broken world. ODD is not insanity — it is sanity on fire. It is the refusal to adapt to structures that demand submission as a prerequisite for inclusion.
To quote Laing: “They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”
ODD is what happens when a child refuses to play the game.
bell hooks: Refusal as Liberation
bell hooks, writing in Teaching to Transgress, framed the classroom as a potential site of radical transformation — if it rejects domination. The child who refuses to be disciplined is often the one who sees most clearly that the system has confused education with indoctrination.
Resistance, hooks argues, is not a flaw. It is a form of knowledge. ODD becomes, in this frame, a radical pedagogy. The defiant student is not failing — they are teaching.
Deleuze & Guattari: Desire Against the Machine
And then, should you wish to watch the diagnostic edifice melt entirely, we summon Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the psyche is not a plumbing system with blockages, but a set of desiring-machines short-circuiting the factory floor of capitalism and conformity.
ODD, to them, would be schizoanalysis in action — a body refusing to be plugged into the circuits of docility. The tantrum, the refusal, the eye-roll: these are not symptoms. They are breakdowns in the control grid.
The child isn’t disordered — the system is. The child simply noticed.
Freire: The Educated Oppressed
Lastly, Paulo Freire would ask: What kind of pedagogy demands the death of resistance? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warns of an education model that treats students as empty vessels. ODD, reframed, is the moment a subject insists on being more than a receptacle.
In refusing the “banking model” of knowledge, the so-called defiant child is already halfway to freedom. Freire would call this not a disorder but a moment of awakening.
Conclusion: Diagnostic Colonialism
So yes, dear friend — I am oppositional. I challenge authority, especially when it mistakes its position for truth. I argue, question, resist. I am not unwell for doing so. I am, if anything, allergic to the idea that obedience is a virtue in itself.
Let us be clear: ODD is not a mirror held up to the subject. It is a spotlight shining from the system, desperately trying to blind anyone who dares to squint.
Now, shall we talk about your compliance disorder?
Full Disclosure: I used ChatGPT for insights beyond Derrida and Foucault, two of my mainstays.
Full Disclosure: I read the first volume of The Hunger Games just before the film was released. It was OK – certainly better than the film. This video came across my feed, and I skipped through it. Near the end, this geezer references how Katniss saves or recovers deteriorated morality. Me being me, I found issue with the very notion that a relative, if not subjective, concept could be recovered.
The OP asks if The Hunger Games are a classic. I’d argue that they are a categorical classic, like Harry Potter, within the category of YA fiction.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.
The Hunger Games doesn’t depict the death of morality — it’s a masterclass in how to twist it into a circus act.
Video: YouTube video that spawned this topic.
Let us dispense with the hand-wringing. The Hunger Games is not a parable of moral decay. It is something far more chilling: a vivid portrait of moral engineering — the grotesque contortion of ethical instincts into instruments of domination and spectacle.
Those who bemoan the “decline of morality” in Panem have rather missed the point. There is no absence of morality in the Capitol — only a different version of it. A rebranded, corporatised, state-sanctioned morality, lacquered in lipstick and broadcast in 4K. It is not immorality that reigns, but a hyperactive ideological morality, designed to keep the masses docile and the elites draped in silk.
This is not moral entropy; it’s moral mutation.
Children are not slaughtered because people have forgotten right from wrong — they are slaughtered because a society has been trained to believe that this is what justice looks like. That blood is penance. That fear is unity. That watching it all unfold with a glass of champagne in hand is perfectly civilised behaviour.
This isn’t the death of morality. It’s a hostile takeover.
The Moral PR Machine
If morality is, as many of us suspect, relative — a cultural construct built on consensus, coercion, and convenience — then it can no more “decline” than fashion trends can rot. It simply shifts. One day, shoulder pads are in. The next, it’s child-on-child murder as prime-time entertainment.
In Panem, the moral compass has not vanished. It’s been forcibly recalibrated. Not by reason or revelation, but by propaganda and fear. The Games are moral theatre. A grim ritual, staged to remind the Districts who holds the reins, all under the nauseating guise of tradition, order, and justice.
The citizens of the Capitol aren’t monsters — they’re consumers. Trained to see horror as haute couture. To mistake power for virtue. To cheer while children are butchered, because that’s what everyone else is doing — and, crucially, because they’ve been taught it’s necessary. Necessary evils are the most seductive kind.
Katniss: Not a Saint, But a Saboteur
Enter Katniss Everdeen, not as the moral saviour but as the spanner in the machine. She doesn’t preach. She doesn’t have a grand theory of justice. What she has is visceral disgust — an animal revulsion at the machinery of the Games. Her rebellion is personal, tribal, and instinctive: protect her sister, survive, refuse to dance for their amusement.
She isn’t here to restore some lost golden age of decency. She’s here to tear down the current script and refuse to read her lines.
Her defiance is dangerous not because it’s moral in some abstract, universal sense — but because it disrupts the Capitol’s moral narrative. She refuses to be a pawn in their ethical pageant. She reclaims agency in a world that has commodified virtue and turned ethics into state theatre.
So, Has Morality Declined?
Only if you believe morality has a fixed address — some eternal North Star by which all human actions may be judged. But if, as postmodernity has rather insistently suggested, morality is a shifting social fiction — then Panem’s horror is not a fall from grace, but a recalibration of what counts as “grace” in the first place.
And that’s the real horror, isn’t it? Not that morality has collapsed — but that it still exists, and it likes what it sees.
Conclusion: The Real Hunger
The Hunger Games is not about a society starved of morality — it’s about a world gorging on it, cooked, seasoned, and served with a garnish of guiltless indulgence. It is moral appetite weaponised. Ethics as edict. Conscience as costume.
If you feel sickened by what you see in Panem, it’s not because morality has vanished.
There is a kind of political necromancy afoot in modern discourse—a dreary chant murmured by pundits, CEOs, and power-drunk bureaucrats alike: “It’s just human nature.” As if this incantation explains, excuses, and absolves all manner of violent absurdities. As if, by invoking the mystic forces of evolution or primal instinct, one can justify the grotesque state of things. Income inequality? Human nature. War? Human nature. Corporate psychopathy? Oh, sweetie, it’s just how we’re wired.
What a convenient mythology.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
If “human nature” is inherently brutish and selfish, then resistance is not only futile, it is unnatural. The doctrine of dominance gets sanctified, the lust to rule painted as destiny rather than deviance. Meanwhile, the quiet, unglamorous yearning of most people—to live undisturbed, to coöperate rather than conquer—is dismissed as naïve, childish, and unrealistic. How curious that the preferences of the vast majority are always sacrificed at the altar of some aggressive minority’s ambitions.
Let us dispense with this dogma. The desire to dominate is not a feature of human nature writ large; it is a glitch exploited by systems that reward pathological ambition. Most of us would rather not be ruled, and certainly not managed by glorified algorithms in meat suits. The real human inclination, buried beneath centuries of conquest and control, is to live in peace, tend to our gardens, and perhaps be left the hell alone.
And yet, we are not. Because there exists a virulent cohort—call them oligarchs, executives, generals, kings—whose raison d’être is the acquisition and consolidation of power. Not content to build a life, they must build empires. Not content to share, they must extract. They regard the rest of us as livestock: occasionally troublesome, but ultimately manageable.
To pacify us, they offer the Social Contract™—a sort of ideological bribe that says, “Give us your freedom, and we promise not to let the wolves in.” But what if the wolves are already inside the gates, wearing suits and passing legislation? What if the protection racket is the threat itself?
So no, it is not “human nature” that is the problem. Cancer is natural, too, but we don’t celebrate its tenacity. We treat it, research it, and fight like hell to survive it. Likewise, we must treat pathological power-lust not as an inevitability to be managed but as a disease to be diagnosed and dismantled.
The real scandal isn’t that humans sometimes fail to coöperate. It’s that we’re constantly told we’re incapable of it by those whose power depends on keeping it that way.
Let the ruling classes peddle their myths. The rest of us might just choose to write new ones.
Philosophics 