He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.
There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.
In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.
“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially falseβ¦ We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]β¦ So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.
This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.
This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.
When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.
Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.
Image: Foreignsentiment
Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.
When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.
People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of βpower,β as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzscheβs contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.
This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.
The United States borrowed Montesquieuβs separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.
Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.
Carneyβs speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.
What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.
Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.
What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzscheβs crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.
I’ve been reading Bernard Williams lately, and I’ve written about his work on Truth and Truthfulness. I’m in the process of writing more on the challenges of ontological moral positionsand moral luck. I don’t necessarily want to make contemporary news my focal point, but this is a perfect case study for it. I’ll be releasing a neutral philosophy paper on the underlying causes, but I want to comment on this whilst it’s still in the news cycle.
The form of xenophobia is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, though the ontological split is applicable more generally. For those unfamiliar with US news, I’ll set this up. The United States is currently deploying federal enforcement power in ways that deliberately bypass local consent, blur policing and military roles, and rely on fear as a stabilising mechanism. Historical analogies are unavoidable, but not required for the argument that follows. These forces have been deployed in cities that did not and do not support the Trump administration, so they are exacting revenge and trying to foment fear and unrest. This case is an inevitable conclusion to these policy measures.
tl;dr: The Lawβ’ presents itself as fact-driven, but only by treating metaphysical imputations about inner life as if they were empirical findings. This is not a flaw in this case; it is how the system functions at all.
NB: Some of this requires having read Williams or having a familiarity with certain concepts. Apologies in advance, but use Google or a GPT to fill in the details.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Why the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Exposes the Limits of Bernard Williams
The Minneapolis ICE shooting is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is painfully ordinary. A person is dead. An officer fired shots. A vehicle was involved. Video exists. Statements were issued. Protests followed. No one seriously disputes these elements. They sit in the shared centre of the Venn diagram, inert and unhelpful. Where everything fractures is precisely where the law insists clarity must be found: intent and motive. And this is where things stop being factual and start being metaphysical.
The Comfortable Fiction of Legal Facts
The legal system likes to tell a comforting story about itself. It claims to be empirical, sober, and evidence-driven. Facts in, verdicts out. This is nonsense.
What the law actually does is this:
It gathers uncontested physical facts.
It then demands a psychological supplement.
It treats that supplement as if it were itself a fact.
Intent and motive are not observed. They are inferred. Worse, they are imposed. They are not discovered in the world but assigned to agents to make outcomes legible.
In Minneapolis, the uncontested facts are thin but stable:
The incident involved Goodβs vehicle, which was present and moving at the time shots were fired.
Ross fired his weapon multiple times, and Good died from those gunshot wounds.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the agent acted in self-defence.
Video footage exists that shows at least part of the encounter.
The case ignited protests, widespread condemnation from local officials, and political pushback.
This creates a shared intersection: vehicle, Ross, shots, and that ‘something happened’ that neither side is denying.
The Law smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.
None of these facts contain intent. None of them specify motive. They do not tell us whether the movement of the vehicle was aggression, panic, confusion, or escape. They do not tell us whether the shooting was fear, anger, habit, or protocol execution. Yet the law cannot proceed without choosing. So it does what it always does. It smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.
Intent and Motive as Institutional Impositions
Intent is treated as a condition of responsibility. Motive is treated as its explanation. Neither is a fact in anything like the ordinary sense. Even self-report does not rescue them. Admission is strategically irrational. Silence is rewarded. Reframing is incentivised. And even sincerity would not help, because human beings do not have transparent access to their own causal architecture. They have narratives, rehearsed and revised after the fact. So the law imputes. It tells the story the agent cannot safely tell, and then punishes or absolves them on the basis of that story. This is not a bug. It is the operating system.
Where Bernard Williams Comes In
This is where Bernard Williams becomes relevant, and where his account quietly fails. In Truth and Truthfulness, Williams famously rejects the Enlightenment fantasy of capital-T Truth as a clean, context-free moral anchor. He replaces it with virtues like sincerity and accuracy, grounded in lived practices rather than metaphysical absolutes. So far, so good.
Williams is right that moral life does not float above history, psychology, or culture. He is right to attack moral systems that pretend agents consult universal rules before acting. He is right to emphasise thick concepts, situated reasons, and practical identities. But he leaves something standing that cannot survive the Minneapolis test.
The Residue Williams Keeps
Williams still needs agency to be intelligible. He still needs actions to be recognisably owned. He still assumes that reasons, however messy, are at least retrospectively available to anchor responsibility. This is where the residue collapses.
In cases like Minneapolis:
Intent is legally required but epistemically unavailable.
Motive is legally explanatory but metaphysically speculative.
Admission is disincentivised.
Narrative is imposed under institutional pressure.
At that point, sincerity and accuracy are no longer virtues an agent can meaningfully exercise. They are properties of the story selected by the system. Williams rejects metaphysical Truth while retaining a metaphysical agent robust enough to carry responsibility. The problem is that law does not merely appeal to intelligibility; it manufactures it under constraint.
Moral Luck Isnβt Enough
Williamsβ concept of moral luck gestures toward contingency, but it still presumes a stable agent who could, in principle, have acted otherwise and whose reasons are meaningfully theirs. But once intent and motive are understood as institutional fabrications rather than inner facts, ‘could have done otherwise’ becomes a ceremonial phrase. Responsibility is no longer uncovered; it is allocated. The tragedy is not that we fail to know the truth. The tragedy is that the system requires a truth that cannot exist.
Facts Versus Stories
The law does not discover which story is true. It selects which story is actionable.
The Minneapolis case shows the fault line clearly:
Facts: bodies, movements, weapons, recordings.
Stories: fear versus anger, defence versus aggression.
The first is uncontested. The second does all the work.
And those stories are not epistemic conclusions. They are metaphysical commitments enforced by law. Williams wanted to rescue ethics from abstraction. What he could not accept is that, once abstraction is removed, responsibility does not become more human. It becomes procedural.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
The law does not operate on truth. It operates on enforceable interpretations of behaviour. Intent and motive are not facts. They are tools. Williams saw that capital-T Truth had to go. What he did not see, or perhaps did not want to see, is that the smaller, more humane residue he preserved cannot bear the weight the legal system places on it.
Once you see this, the obsession with ‘what really happened’ looks almost childish. The facts are already known. What is being fought over is which metaphysical fiction the system will enforce.
That decision is not epistemic. It is political. And it is violent.
We like to believe the world is governed by rules. By fairness. By international law, norms, institutions, treaties, and laminated charters written in earnest fonts. This belief survives not because it is true, but because it is psychologically necessary. Without it, we would have to admit something deeply unfashionable: power still runs the table.
Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded what remains the most honest conversation in political theory: the Melian Dialogue. No soaring ideals, no speeches about freedom. Just an empire explaining itself without makeup.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Athens, the regional superpower of the ancient world, demanded that the small island of Melos surrender and pay tribute. Melos appealed to justice, neutrality, and divine favour. Athens replied with a line so indecently clear that political philosophy has been trying to forget it ever since: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’.
That sentence is not an ethical claim. It is a descriptive one. It does not say what ought to happen. It says what does. The Athenians even went further, dismantling the very idea that justice could apply asymmetrically: ‘Justice, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power’.
This is the part liberal internationalism prefers to skip, usually by changing the subject to institutions, norms, or aspirations. But the Athenians were being brutally honest. Appeals to fairness only work when neither side can impose its will outright. When there is a power imbalance, morality becomes theatre.
The Melians refused to submit. They chose honour, principle, and the hope that the gods would intervene. Athens killed every Melian man of fighting age and enslaved the women and children. End of dialogue. End of illusions. Fast-forward to now.
In early 2026, under Donald Trump, the United States launched a military operation against Venezuela, striking targets in Caracas and forcibly detaining NicolΓ‘s Maduro, who was transported to the United States to face federal charges. The justification was framed in familiar moral language: narco-terrorism, stability, regional security, democratic transition. The accompanying signals were less coy: temporary U.S. administration, resource access, and ‘order’. Cue outrage. Cue talk of illegality. Cue appeals to sovereignty, international law, and norms violated. All of which would have been very movingβ¦ to the Athenians.
Strip away the rhetoric and the structure is ancient. A dominant power identifies a weaker one. Moral language is deployed, not as constraint, but as narrative cover. When resistance appears, force answers. This is not a deviation from realism. It is realism functioning exactly as advertised.
Modern audiences often confuse realism with cynicism, as if acknowledging power dynamics somehow endorses them. It does not. It merely refuses to lie. The Melian Dialogue is not an argument for empire. It is an autopsy of how empire speaks when it stops pretending. And this is where the discomfort really lies.
We continue to educate citizens as if the world operates primarily on ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’, whilst structuring global power as if only ‘can’ and ‘must’ matter. We teach international law as though it binds the strong, then act shocked when it doesnβt. We pretend norms restrain power, when in reality power tolerates norms until they become inconvenient.
The Athenians did not deny justice. They reclassified it as a luxury good. Trumpβs Venezuela operation does not abolish international law. It demonstrates its conditional application. That is the real continuity across 2,500 years. Not cruelty, not ambition, but the quiet consensus among the powerful that morality is optional when enforcement is absent.
The lesson of the Melian Dialogue is not despair. It is clarity. If we want a world governed by rules rather than force, we must stop pretending we already live in one. Appeals to fairness are not strategies. They are prayers. And history, as ever, is not listening.
As 2025 closes, I find myself in the mildly suspicious position of being asked where I stand. I’m almost pretty sure it’s a deontological duty I must fulfil.
This has become the ritual gesture of our time. Not what are you working on? or what are you unsure about? but what is your position? The question arrives already armed with a grid. Left or right. Modern or postmodern. Optimist or doomer. Builder or critic. Pick a square. Declare yourself. Be legible.
Audio: Notebook summary podcast of this topic.
I have spent enough years inside philosophy, politics, systems design, and cultural critique to recognise this for what it is. Not a genuine request for understanding, but a demand for administrative convenience. Positions are easy to catalogue. They travel well on social platforms. They allow disagreements to be staged rather than examined. I no longer occupy one.
If I had to name the shift that has taken place in my thinking, I might call it post-postmodern. More accurately, I think of it as post-position. Not because I have outgrown critique, but because I have grown weary of pretending that declaring a stance is the same thing as doing the work.
Postmodernism, to its credit, diagnosed something real. It exposed the hidden scaffolding behind our grand narratives. It showed how claims to neutrality smuggled power, how universals arrived late and acted eternal, and how reason often functioned as a polite enforcement mechanism. That diagnosis still stands. Nothing that followed has invalidated it. What failed was not the critique, but the decision to treat critique as a destination.
Somewhere along the line, postmodernism hardened into an identity. Suspicion became an aesthetic. Irony turned into a resting posture. Eventually, even scepticism acquired a set of approved moves and unacceptable conclusions. The work of dismantling was mistaken for the achievement of wisdom.
The response to this impasse has been predictable. We are now urged to rebuild. To restore foundations. To recover truth, agency, meaning, and normativity. Usually with a tone of urgency that suggests things have all gone a bit too far. They havenβt gone too far. Theyβve gone exactly where the premises lead.
At this point, it is worth noting that ‘postmodernism’ has largely ceased to exist as a self-ascribed position at all. It survives almost entirely as a slur. No serious thinker today introduces themselves as a Postmodernist in the way one might once have claimed empiricism, structuralism, or even analytic philosophy.
The term is now deployed from the outside, usually as shorthand for intellectual irresponsibility: relativism, nihilism, irony, excess critique. It is a caricature assembled by its opponents, then attacked as if it were a living school with doctrines and membership cards.
People who employ the term Postmodernβ’* relative to philosophy are intellectually lazy and not likely worth engaging in a debate on the topic, because they have not likely engaged the content charitably, if at all, outside of a caricature.
This matters because it reveals something quietly telling. What is being rejected under the banner of ‘postmodernism’ is not a coherent programme, but the discomfort produced when inherited certainties fail to survive scrutiny. The slur functions as a containment strategy. It allows critics to dismiss the diagnosis without engaging the illness.
Any thinker with even a passing familiarity with the terrain knows this. Which is why no self-respecting, or self-denigrating, postmodern thinker would now characterise themselves as such. The label has been evacuated of descriptive value and filled with anxiety.
What is being revived in these reconstruction projects is not certainty, but legibility. A longing for systems that can be explained cleanly, defended coherently, and enforced consistently. Clear positions are attractive because they reduce friction. They allow disagreement to be formalised, managed, and ultimately neutralised. This is where I step off.
Post-position thinking is often mistaken for relativism, so it is worth being explicit. It does not claim that nothing is real, that all claims are equal, or that consequences dissolve into opinion. Reality remains stubborn. Harm remains unevenly distributed. Constraints still bite.
What it rejects is something more specific: the belief that ethical, epistemic, or political seriousness requires the occupation of a stable, declarable position.
Positions are not engines of thought. They are summaries produced after the fact. They tidy complexity into something portable, then forget the mess that made the tidying necessary. Once adopted, they begin to govern perception. You start seeing what fits and discarding what does not. The position becomes an answer generator rather than a question machine.
Post-position thinking refuses that trade.
It stays with instability where stability would be dishonest. It tolerates contradiction where resolution would be cosmetic. It treats coherence as local, provisional, and negotiated rather than universal and enforceable. This is not indecision. It is fidelity to how complex systems actually behave. One way to describe the shift is a movement away from critique toward maintenance.
Modernism wanted to build. Postmodernism wanted to dismantle. Both share a quiet assumption that there is a point at which the work is done. Maintenance has no such illusion. It accepts that some systems cannot be fixed, only kept from doing additional damage β that concepts fray; that norms age badly; that repair is continuous and never final.
Maintenance is unspectacular. It does not produce manifestos. It does not scale elegantly. It involves partial solutions, awkward compromises, and the constant risk of failure. It is also where most of the moral work actually happens.
From this vantage point, the demand to ‘take a position‘ looks increasingly misplaced. Not because commitments vanish, but because commitments are situational, asymmetric, and responsive to context. Loyalty shifts from creeds to consequences. What matters is not whether an idea is internally consistent, but what it does when it leaves the page and collides with institutions, incentives, and frightened people.
So when I refuse to declare where I stand, it is not evasiveness. It is a refusal to pretend that standing still is a virtue.
This is the posture I am carrying into 2026. Not a programme, not a system, not a rehabilitated foundation. Just a refusal to confuse clarity with truth, structure with virtue, or positions with thinking.
If that feels unsatisfying, that may be the point. Satisfaction is a modernist luxury. Maintenance rarely provides it. The work continues anyway.
* To be fair, I have referred to myself as Postmodernβ’, but this was a shortcut out of solidarity with Foucault, Derrida, Latour, Baudrillard, and others painted with this brush. I still admire these thinkers.
This is awkward. I’d been preparing some posts on the age of consent, and I decided to write a formal essay on ageism. Since the age of consent is a moral hot-button topic for some, I decided to frame the situation in a political framework instead. The setup isn’t much different, but it keeps people’s heads out of the gutter and removes the trigger that many people seem to pull. It’s awkward because none of these posts has yet been posted. Spoiler alert, I guess. I could delay this announcement, but I won’t. Here it is.
Democracy is often defended in lofty terms. We are told that citizens are rational agents, capable of judgment, autonomy, and reasoned participation in collective decision-making. Voting, on this story, is not just a procedure. It is the expression of agency by competent participants. That all sounds reassuring.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay and concept.
Whatβs curious is that no democratic system actually checks whether any of this is true.
There are no assessments of political understanding. No evaluation of judgment. No test of civic competence. You become a fully empowered political agent overnight, not because you demonstrate anything, but because the calendar flips. Turn eighteen. Youβre in. This isnβt a minor oversight. Itβs the central puzzle my recent preprint explores.
The Proxy Nobody Questions
Modern democracies assign political standing using proxies: simple categorical markers that stand in for more complex qualities. Age is the most obvious. It is treated as a substitute for maturity, judgment, autonomy, and responsibility. But hereβs the key point: age doesnβt approximate competence. It replaces it.
If age were a rough indicator, we might expect flexibility at the margins. Exceptions. Supplementary criteria. Some attempt to track the thing it supposedly represents. Instead, we get a hard boundary. Below it, total exclusion. Above it, permanent inclusion. Capacity doesnβt matter on either side. The proxy isnβt helping institutions identify competence. It is doing something else entirely.
Competence Talk Without Competence
Despite this, democratic theory remains saturated with competence language. We are told that participation is grounded in rational agency. That citizens possess the capacities needed for self-government. That legitimacy flows from meaningful participation by autonomous agents. None of this is operationalised.
Competence is never specified, measured, or verified. It functions purely as justificatory rhetoric. A moral vocabulary that explains why inclusion is legitimate, without ever guiding how inclusion actually happens. This isnβt confusion; itβs design.
Why the Gap Doesnβt Collapse
At this point, a reasonable person might expect trouble. After all, if the justification doesnβt match the mechanism, shouldnβt the system wobble? It doesnβt. And the reason matters.
Political participation generates very weak feedback. Outcomes are mediated through institutions. Causal responsibility is diffuse. Success criteria are contested. When things go badly, itβs rarely clear why, or what a better alternative would have been.
Under these conditions, dissatisfaction becomes affective rather than analytic. People sense that things arenβt working, but lack the tools to diagnose how or where the system failed. Crucially, they also lack any way to recalibrate the link between competence and political standing, because that link was never operational in the first place. The system doesnβt aim for optimisation. It aims for stability.
Boundary Drawing Without Saying So
This structure becomes clearest when we look at boundary cases. Why eighteen rather than sixteen? Or twelve? Or twenty-one? There is no competence-based answer. Developmental research consistently shows wide overlap between adolescents and adults, and massive variation within age groups. If competence were taken seriously, age thresholds would be indefensible.
Historically, when competence was operationalised such as through literacy tests, the result was transparent hierarchy and eventual delegitimation. Modern democracies avoid that by keeping competence abstract and proxies neutral-looking. The boundary remains. The justification changes.
What This Does and Does Not Argue
This analysis does not propose reforms. It does not advocate competence testing. It does not suggest lowering or raising the voting age. It does not claim voters are stupid, irrational, or defective. It describes a structural feature of democratic legitimacy:
Democracy works by saying one thing and doing another, and that gap is not accidental. Competence language stabilises legitimacy precisely because it is never put to work. You may think thatβs fine. You may think itβs unavoidable. You may think itβs a problem. The paper doesnβt tell you which to choose. It simply insists that if weβre going to talk seriously about democratic legitimacy, we should notice what role competence actually plays. And what it doesnβt.
Iβve been working on A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis since 2018. At least, thatβs the polite, CV-friendly version. The truer account is that itβs been quietly fermenting since the late 1970s, back when I was still trapped in primary school and being instructed on how the world supposedly worked.
Social Studies. Civics. Law. The whole civic catechism. I remember being taught about reasonable persons and trial by a jury of oneβs peers, and I remember how insistently these were presented as fair solutions. Fairness was not argued for. It was asserted, with the weary confidence of people who think repetition counts as justification.
I didnβt buy it. I still donβt. The difference now is that I have a hypothesis with some explanatory power instead of a vague sense that the adults were bluffing.
But that outsider position had consequences. It led me, even then, to ask an awkward question: Which peers? Not because I thought I was superior, but because I was plainly apart. How exactly was I meant to be judged by my peers when no one else occupied anything like my perspective?
Later, when I encountered the concept of fundamental attribution bias, it felt less like a revelation and more like confirmation. A peer-based system assumes not just similarity of circumstance, but similarity of interpretation. That assumption was dead on arrival.
Then there were reasonable persons. I was assured they existed. I was assured judges were trained to embody them. I had never met one. Even as a teenager, I found the idea faintly comical. Judges, I was told, were neutral, apolitical, and dispassionate. Writing this now from the United States, one hardly needs to belabour the point. But this wasnβt prescience. It was intuition. The smell test failed decades ago.
Before LIH had a name, I called these things weasel words. I still do, as a kind of shorthand. Terms like fair, reasonable, accountable, appropriate. Squishy concepts that do serious institutional work whilst remaining conveniently undefinable. Whether one wants to label them Contestables or Fluids is less important than recognising the space they occupy.
That space sits between Invariables, things you can point to without dispute, and Ineffables, where language more or less gives up. Communication isnβt binary. It isnβt ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t’. Itβs a gradient. A continuous curve from near-certainty to near-failure.
Most communication models quietly assume a shared ontology. If misunderstanding occurs, the remedy is more explanation, more context, more education. What never sat right with me, even as a child, was that this only works when the disagreement is superficial. The breaking point is ontological.
If one person believes a term means {A, B, C} and another believes it means {B, C, D}, the overlap creates a dangerous illusion of agreement. The disagreement hides in the margins. A and D donβt merely differ. They are often irreconcilable.
Image: Venn diagramme of a contested concept. Note: This is illustrative and not to scale
Fairness is a reliable example. One person believes fairness demands punishment, including retributive measures. Another believes fairness permits restoration but rejects retribution, citing circumstance, history, or harm minimisation. Both invoke fairness sincerely. The shared language conceals the conflict.
When such disputes reach court, they are not resolved by semantic reconciliation. They are resolved by authority. Power steps in where meaning cannot. This is just one illustration. There are many.
I thought it worth sharing how LIH came about, if only to dispel the notion that itβs a fashionable response to contemporary politics. It isnβt. Itβs the slow crystallisation of a long-standing intuition: that many of our most cherished concepts donβt fail because we misuse them, but because they were never capable of doing the work we assigned to them.
Although I didn’t want to publish a formal essay, I wanted to produce something otherwise rigorous. The references I make are of the authored piece I am critiquing β MacIntyre, Ε½iΕΎek, Lacan β I’ve discussed these figures and their works, sometimes at length.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast discussion of this content.
Preamble: Setting the Encounter
Over the past several weeks, Otti Vogt and I have been circling one another in public threads on leadership, solidarity, ethics, and what might loosely be called the moral architecture of social life. At moments, we converge; more often, we donβt. The exchanges have been serious, occasionally sharp, and β credit where itβs due β largely conducted in good faith.
Recently, Otti published a more explicit articulation of the ontological commitments underlying his work β The Future of Flourishing: Toward a Dialectical Spiritual Realist Social Ontology (DRS) β a framework grounded in participatory metaphysics, virtue ethics, and an objective conception of the Good, oriented toward human flourishing. In doing so, he has done something both generous and rare in contemporary discourse: he has made his meta-assumptions visible. That gesture deserves to be taken seriously. This response is written in that spirit.
For my part, I have already shared a different set of commitments, most notably what I call the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) and the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH). These are not counter-ontologies in the conventional sense, nor are they offered as replacements for the metaphysical structures Otti defends. They are diagnostic lenses. Their purpose is to foreground mediation, semantic drift, power asymmetries, and the limits of moral language β especially where that language is asked to perform stabilising or universalising work it cannot reliably sustain.
What follows, then, is not a refutation from within Ottiβs framework, nor an attempt to βcorrectβ his ontology by substituting another in its place. It is an analysis conducted from a philosophy of language that explicitly rejects the need for the kind of metaphysical grounding his project presupposes.
That distinction matters. Much philosophical disagreement fails not because arguments are weak, but because interlocutors believe they are disputing conclusions when they are, in fact, operating with incompatible assumptions about what language can do, how meaning holds, and where normativity comes from.
Accordingly, I will first restate Ottiβs position as charitably and accurately as possible, including the conditions under which it appears to work well. I will then apply MEOW and LIH as analytic lenses β not to score points, but to observe how this framework behaves under pressure: across time, across groups, and across material and organisational realities. Finally, I will explain why, despite its internal coherence and aspirational appeal, I regard the project as structurally unsustainable beyond tightly aligned in-groups.
This is a polemic, but not a casual one.
This is a polemic, but not a casual one. It is written in respect of the seriousness of the work, and in full awareness that the disagreement it traces is unlikely to be resolved. I do not expect to publish this as a formal preprint, but I have structured it much as I otherwise would. The latitude afforded by a blog is used here not to loosen standards, but to speak more plainly about where the fault-lines actually lie.
At its strongest, Otti Vogtβs framework is an attempt to rescue ethics, leadership, and social solidarity from what he takes to be the exhaustion of proceduralism, relativism, and technocratic management. The diagnosis is familiar but not trivial: without a shared moral horizon, collective action collapses into preference aggregation, power struggles, or managerial optimisation masquerading as value-neutral necessity. Against this, Otti proposes a participatory social ontology grounded in three interlocking commitments.
First, normativity is real.
Moral claims are not merely expressions of preference, strategic coordination devices, or retrospective rationalisations of power. They track something objective, even if imperfectly. The Good is not constructed ex nihilo by consensus, nor generated procedurally through participation; rather, participation presupposes it. Solidarity, dignity, and justice do not emerge bottom-up from agreement alone, but from orientation toward a moral reality that precedes and exceeds any given social formation.
Second, personhood is constitutively relational.
Individuals are not pre-social atoms who later enter into moral contracts, but beings-in-relation whose identities are shaped through participation in shared practices, institutions, and meanings. Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics, Christian theology, and strands of critical realism, Otti treats ethical formation not as rule-following but as the cultivation of practical wisdom within an ordered moral ecology. Virtue, here, is not compliance but excellence-in-relation.
Third, social structures are dialectical rather than merely procedural.
Change does not occur through rule revision alone, nor through technocratic optimisation, but through what might be called moral morphogenesis: the transformation of agents and structures together as they orient themselves toward better forms of collective life. Leadership, on this view, is not managerial control but ethical mediation β holding open a space in which shared participation in the Good can occur.
Importantly, this is not presented as naΓ―ve moralism. Otti is explicit that causality and ethics must be distinguished, that material conditions matter, and that social systems operate across stratified domains. His engagement with Bhaskar, Archer, and Duindam is meant to secure this distinction without collapsing ethics into natural determinism. Likewise, his invocation of Lacan and Ε½iΕΎek is intended to show that absence, lack, and non-identity are not defects to be eliminated, but productive tensions that drive ethical becoming rather than undermining it. On the happy path, this framework is compelling.
In small, relatively homogeneous groups β especially those already sharing a thick moral vocabulary β it offers a powerful grammar for meaning-making. It legitimises ethical judgment without reducing it to preference. It resists the flattening tendencies of procedural liberalism. It offers leaders a language richer than metrics and incentives, while avoiding crude authoritarianism. And it gives participants a sense that their actions matter not merely instrumentally, but as contributions to something genuinely worthwhile.
If one already accepts its metaphysical premises, the system is internally coherent. More than that, it is motivational, aspirational, and β within its own frame β normatively robust. That coherence is not in dispute.
What happens when this DRS framework leaves the happy path?
What is in dispute is what happens when this framework leaves the happy path: when participants do not already share the ontology, when meanings drift over time, when organisational power intervenes, and when the language of participation is asked to scale beyond aligned in-groups into contested social reality. That is where the analysis begins.
2. Where the Framework Breaks: Boundary Conditions, Not Bad Faith
The first pressure point appears the moment participation is treated as if it occurs within an open, neutral moral field.
It doesn’t.
Participation always takes place inside an already-structured semantic environment. Values, goods, virtues, and ends are never encountered as raw givens, but as pre-formatted invitations. One does not simply βenterβ participation; one enters a space whose grammar has been written in advance, whose concepts already carry weight, direction, and implied hierarchies of legitimacy. This is not an accidental feature of social life. It is constitutive of it.
To participate is to move within a field of meanings that already distinguishes sense from nonsense, virtue from vice, maturity from immaturity, insight from confusion. Even when those distinctions are contested, the contest itself presupposes a shared language in which disagreement can appear as intelligible disagreement rather than noise.
This matters because Ottiβs framework consistently treats participation as if it were epistemically generous and normatively hospitable by default. Yet participation is never merely an invitation; it is also a constraint. It shapes what can be said without sanction, which forms of dissent register as good-faith critique, and which appear as moral immaturity, resistance, or failure to βgrasp the horizonβ.
The moment a moral centre is posited β however dialectical, however participatory β it generates a gradient of alignment. Some positions sit closer to the centre and therefore appear clearer, wiser, more attuned. Others sit further out and must explain themselves, translate themselves, or justify their deviance from what is increasingly experienced as common sense. This is not a corruption of participatory ethics. It is its inevitable consequence.
Even if the Good is not imposed but βparticipated in,β participation itself is never symmetrical. Someone always articulates the terms. Someone always curates the language. Someone always has greater fluency in the idiom of the Good and thus greater interpretive authority over what participation currently requires.
Participation does not erase power. It reconfigures it.
In practice, this produces a familiar asymmetry: those already aligned with the metaphysical grammar experience the framework as expansive and liberating, while those outside it experience it as invisible pressure. They are not coerced in any crude sense, but they are nonetheless nudged, corrected, reoriented, or quietly marginalised. The boundary condition, then, is simple but decisive: Participation does not erase power. It reconfigures it.
The claim that solidarity arises from participation in the Good rather than from procedure does not eliminate enforcement; it relocates it upstream, into ontology. What had previously been contested politically now appears as a matter of moral attunement or ontological adequacy. This is especially significant when the framework encounters out-groups.
For those who do not already share the metaphysical commitments β who do not recognise the same Good, or who reject the idea that such a Good exists independently of social negotiation β participation becomes conditional. Entry requires translation into a language they did not choose. Dissent must be framed in terms that already concede too much.
At that point, participation ceases to be an open moral practice and becomes something closer to initiatory alignment. This does not make the framework incoherent. It makes it local.
The problem arises only when a local moral grammar presents itself as foundational, scalable, or universally binding β when its boundary conditions are treated as philosophical necessities rather than contingent achievements. That transition is where the trouble begins.
3. Virtue as a Fluid: The Instability at the Centre
The next fault line emerges around virtue itself. Within Ottiβs framework, virtue is no longer merely a description of excellence-in-practice, nor even a tradition-bound cultivation of character in recognisable forms of life. It becomes something more elusive: a dynamic orientation toward the Good, realised through participatory attunement rather than rule-following or procedural compliance.
On the surface, this looks like a strength. It avoids legalism. It avoids rigid codification. It allows for context, judgment, and development over time. But this move has a cost.
Once virtue is abstracted from stable practices and anchored instead to a transcendent moral horizon, it becomes semantically fluid. Its content is no longer secured by what people reliably do well together, but by how well their dispositions appear aligned with an ideal that itself resists definitive articulation.
At this point, virtue quietly changes function. It ceases to operate primarily as a descriptive account of excellence within a practice and becomes prescriptive as a mode of conformity to an interpretive centre. The question shifts from βWhat does excellence look like here?β to βHow well does this agent instantiate the orientation we recognise as virtuous?β
MacIntyre already gestures toward this danger, though he does not fully escape it. His attempt to recover virtue through traditions of practice depends on the relative stability of those traditions. Once the tradition fragments or pluralises, virtue must either harden into orthodoxy or soften into abstraction. Ottiβs framework opts for the latter, but abstraction does not dissolve authority; it redistributes it.
And interpretation, inevitably, has interpreters.
When virtue becomes fluid, it also becomes indexical. Its meaning is determined less by shared activity than by ongoing interpretation. And interpretation, inevitably, has interpreters.
Those most fluent in the language of the Good become de facto arbiters of what virtue currently requires. Those less fluent must demonstrate sincerity, openness, or willingness to be formed. Virtue, in other words, becomes something one is recognised as having rather than something one demonstrably does. This produces a subtle but powerful inversion.
Instead of virtue disciplining ideals through lived practice, ideals discipline agents through moral evaluation. What begins as openness hardens into expectation. What begins as formation shades into assessment. What begins as aspiration becomes normativity with softer edges but firmer reach.
The fluidity of virtue does not eliminate moral pressure. It intensifies it, precisely because it lacks clear boundaries. And this is where temporal drift compounds the problem.
If virtue is continuously rearticulated in light of a transcendent Good, then yesterdayβs excellence may become todayβs deficiency β not because practices failed, but because the interpretive centre shifted. The agent who was once exemplary now appears insufficiently attuned. Correction follows. Alignment is requested. Resistance is reclassified as misunderstanding. None of this requires bad faith. None of it requires domination. It emerges naturally from the structure.
A virtue ethics that cannot tolerate virtue disagreement without moralising it is no longer describing excellence. It is managing deviation. This is not an argument against virtue per se. It is an argument against virtue untethered from stable practices and reattached to metaphysical ideals whose interpretation remains necessarily contested. Once virtue becomes a fluid, it stops being a guide to excellence and starts functioning as a solvent β dissolving difference while claiming to honour it.
Interlude: Interpretation, Gravity, and the Problem of Innocent Power
At this point, it is tempting to reassure ourselves that none of the above entails domination, coercion, or even hierarchy in any crude sense. After all, the framework under discussion explicitly rejects authoritarianism, emphasises participation, and repeatedly insists that the Good is not imposed but disclosed through relational engagement. This reassurance is sincere. It is also insufficient.
The problem is not that leaders within such a framework intend to exert power. The problem is that interpretation exerts power regardless of intention.
Any system oriented toward a transcendent Good requires interpretation. Someone must articulate what participation looks like here, now, under these conditions. Someone must distinguish fidelity from distortion, growth from regression, openness from refusal. These judgments cannot be automated, proceduralised, or dissolved into pure dialogue. They must be made.
Where judgments are made, gravity forms. This is not a psychological claim about ego, nor a moral accusation about bad faith. It is a structural observation. Interpretive authority emerges wherever meaning is stabilised long enough to guide action. The more abstract and elevated the referent, the greater the interpretive leverage required to render it actionable. The paradox is this: the more a leader insists they are not exercising authority, the harder their authority becomes to contest.
When normativity is framed as participation in the Good rather than compliance with rules, disagreement does not present itself as disagreement. It presents itself as misalignment, immaturity, or insufficient formation. Resistance is redescribed not as an alternative judgment but as a failure of attunement.
At this point, critique becomes difficult without appearing morally suspect. This is what gives participatory metaphysics its peculiar force. It does not silence opposition; it spiritualises it. Dissenters are not wrong so much as βnot yet thereβ. Their objections are not refuted; they are absorbed into a narrative of ongoing formation.
This is not coercion. It is more effective than coercion. Even if a leader sincerely wishes not to exert gravity, the structure ensures that gravity accumulates around them. Those closest to the interpretive centre appear most aligned with the Good. Their judgments carry more weight. Their language becomes the idiom through which virtue is recognised.
If a leader truly did not wish to exert gravity, the most consistent action would be not to lead. But leadership, by definition, involves orientation. Orientation requires reference points. Reference points generate asymmetry. Asymmetry generates power.
The framework attempts to resolve this by redescribing hierarchy as βparticipatoryβ rather than directive, and authority as βmediatingβ rather than commanding. Yet this is a semantic reconfiguration, not a structural one. The same dynamics persist under gentler names. What disappears is not power, but its visibility. And power that cannot be named cannot be resisted. It can only be internalised.
This is the point at which metaphysics becomes political, whether it intends to or not. The claim that the Good is objective does not neutralise power. It sanctifies it.
4. Temporal Semantic Drift: Why Moral Centres Do Not Hold
Even if one grants β charitably β that participatory metaphysics can function without collapsing into interpretive domination in the short term, it remains vulnerable to a more corrosive force: time.
Moral centres do not fail all at once. They drift. The framework under discussion acknowledges this in principle. It speaks of dialectical movement, of gaps between actuality and the Good, of ongoing formation rather than static completion. On paper, this appears to inoculate it against rigidity.
In practice, it does the opposite. A moral centre that must continuously reinterpret itself in light of a transcendent horizon is never neutral. Each iteration reorders what counts as fidelity, maturity, and alignment. What was virtuous yesterday may become insufficient today β not because practices degraded, but because the interpretive frame shifted.
This is not accidental. It is intrinsic. Because the Good is not fully specifiable, its articulation is always provisional. But provisional articulations still carry normative force. People organise their lives around them. Careers, identities, reputations, and exclusions follow.
Then the centre moves. Those who move with it appear wise, flexible, and developmentally advanced. Those who hesitate appear resistant. Those who remain where they are appear obstructive. Drift is redescribed as growth, and displacement as failure to keep up.
This is how moral projects shed members without ever formally excluding them. At Time-nought, alignment feels communal. At Time-one, it becomes selective. At Time-two, it becomes justificatory. By the time the pattern is visible, the language of solidarity has already done its work.
Transductive subjectivity intensifies this effect. Because subjects and structures co-constitute one another, each moment of participation subtly reshapes the field itself. The centre is never merely followed; it is reproduced through enactment. Drift compounds. What results is not pluralism, but path dependency.
Early interpretations disproportionately shape later possibilities. Foundational voices become canonical. Corrective gestures are framed as recoveries rather than revisions. The centre insists it is merely unfolding what was always implicit. At this point, appeals to the Good no longer function as orientation. They function as retrospective validation. This is where temporal semantic drift becomes decisive.
Key terms β virtue, flourishing, participation, solidarity β do not remain semantically stable across contexts or generations. They accrete meaning through use, conflict, and institutionalisation. To claim continuity is to perform continuity, not to demonstrate it.
The framework attempts to resolve this by appealing to a stable moral horizon beyond language. But this simply relocates the problem. The horizon does not speak. People do.
Every attempt to stabilise meaning across time requires custodians. Custodianship introduces authority. Authority introduces exclusion. Exclusion introduces rationalisation. None of this implies malice. It implies entropy.
What works in a tightly aligned founding cohort does not survive scale, succession, or stress. History is littered with ethical systems that were internally coherent, sincerely motivated, and initially generative β until drift revealed the cost of maintaining coherence.
The claim is not that moral projects inevitably fail. It is that they cannot guarantee their own continuity without paying a price.
Participatory metaphysics offers no mechanism for escaping this. It offers only better reasons for why the price was necessary.
Interlude II: On Borrowing Ε½iΕΎek to Refute Ε½iΕΎek
At this point, a further tension must be addressed directly, because it is not incidental. It sits at the conceptual core of the framework itself.
Otti explicitly invokes Ε½iΕΎek and Lacan to demonstrate that absence, lack, and non-identity are not pathological failures to be overcome, but productive features of subjectivity and social life. This move is intended to show that participatory metaphysics can accommodate negativity, incompleteness, and instability without collapsing into relativism or nihilism. The intention is understandable. The result is incoherent.
Ε½iΕΎekβs central claim is not merely that the Big Other is fractured, incomplete, or imperfectly realised. It is that the Big Other does not exist. There is no transcendent guarantor of meaning, no symbolic authority that secures coherence from beyond the field of human practices. To βtraverse the fantasyβ is precisely to accept this absence, not to redescribe it in more sophisticated terms.
Lacanβs notion of constitutive lack is not a privation awaiting fulfilment. It is not a gap that participation can close. It is an ontological condition: the impossibility of any final anchoring of meaning, identity, or desire. Lack is not productive because it gestures toward plenitude; it is productive because plenitude is structurally impossible. This is where the framework under review performs a decisive sleight of hand.
To invoke Lacan in support of a transcendent Good is therefore not a creative synthesis. It is a misappropriation.
By mapping Lacanian lack onto Bhaskarβs concept of real absence, the argument treats both as βmodes of non-being that nonetheless exercise causal forceβ. But this collapses a distinction that Ε½iΕΎek and Lacan insist upon. Bhaskarβs absences are, in principle, fillable: the missing resource, the unjust structure, the preventable harm. Lacanβs lack is not. Attempts to fill it do not resolve the problem; they generate new symptoms, new fantasies, new forms of misrecognition. To invoke Lacan in support of a transcendent Good is therefore not a creative synthesis. It is a misappropriation.
What results is the reinstallation of precisely what psychoanalysis dismantles: a symbolic guarantor that promises coherence, orientation, and resolution. The Good becomes the ultimate Big Other β disavowed, abstracted, and rendered untouchable by those who claim merely to participate in it. This is not a minor theoretical inconsistency. It reveals the deeper strategy at work.
The framework borrows the critical sophistication of post-structural thought to inoculate itself against charges of naivety, while quietly reinstalling a classical metaphysics that those same thinkers spent their careers undoing. Absence is affirmed rhetorically, only to be neutralised ontologically. Negativity is welcomed, but only insofar as it can be oriented toward a pre-existing moral horizon. In effect, the language of lack is used to smuggle in fullness.
Once this move is made, the rest follows predictably. Interpretation acquires authority. Participation acquires normativity. Dissent becomes misrecognition. And the Good, now safely beyond contestation, does exactly the work the Big Other has always done β only with better philosophical cover.
5. Transductive Subjectivity: Participation Rewrites the Good
The final pressure point is not historical but immediate. Even if one brackets time, tradition, and institutional inertia, the framework still assumes something that does not hold: that subjects can participate in the Good without becoming co-authors of it. This is where transductive subjectivity becomes decisive.
Subjects are not vessels into which ethical form is poured. They are mediating agents. Every act of participation feeds back into the system that solicited it. Meaning is not transmitted intact; it is refracted through position, interest, fear, aspiration, and interpretation. Participation does not preserve coherence. It produces variance.
This is not a flaw in human beings. It is how social systems function. Each interaction slightly reshapes the normative field, altering expectations, redefining what counts as success, recalibrating what virtue now looks like in practice. Multiply this across hundreds or thousands of agents, and the idea of a stable moral centre becomes untenable without aggressive correction.
Here, Archerβs morphogenetic insight quietly undermines the aspiration of ethical constancy. Structures condition action, action transforms structure, and the cycle repeats. There is no equilibrium point. The system is always becoming something slightly different from what it was meant to be.
Either participation rewrites the Good, or the Good rewrites participants. There is no third option.
From within the framework, this is often redescribed as growth, maturation, or deepening participation. From a systems perspective, it is drift under another name. Either participation rewrites the Good, or the Good rewrites participants. There is no third option.
What holds such systems together is not metaphysical participation, but selective reinforcement. Certain interpretations of virtue are amplified; others fade. Some agents are rewarded as exemplars; others are marked as misaligned. Over time, the system converges not on the Good, but on what is most compatible with its own survival. At this point, solidarity no longer links virtue to the common good. It links conformity to belonging.
This is why βparticipative flourishingβ is not a distinct category so much as a rhetorical intensifier. Flourishing is always participative in the tautological sense that humans act together. The adjective matters only when it is doing boundary work: distinguishing authentic participation from deviant engagement. And that distinction is never neutral.
Once transductive feedback is acknowledged, the best-case scenario becomes clear. The framework can temporarily stabilise a coherent moral culture for a relatively homogeneous group. It may feel meaningful, even liberating, from within.
But it will not scale without exclusion. It will not persist without maintenance. And it will not survive contact with materially divergent lives without becoming prescriptive. This is not cynicism. It is mechanics.
6. Leadership, Power, and the Reality of Organisational Life
All of the above tensions sharpen dramatically once we leave βsocietyβ in the abstract and enter organisations. Organisations are not voluntary moral laboratories. They are asymmetric structures with built-in coercion, however politely framed. Participation is rarely free when the alternative is unemployment, precarity, or social marginalisation. Exit costs matter. Silence matters. Compliance matters. This is where appeals to solidarity, virtue, and shared flourishing acquire a different texture.
In organisational settings, leadership does not operate via participative democracy. Its function is not collective deliberation, but directional coordination. Leaders set priorities, allocate resources, and define success metrics. Even the most βinclusiveβ leadership models ultimately require alignment, not pluralism. Consultation can be widened; directionality cannot be abolished without abolishing the role itself. This produces a structural contradiction.
On the one hand, the rhetoric insists that ethics flows from participation in a shared Good. On the other, participation itself is conditioned by hierarchy. A leader may deny being a centre of gravity, but gravity does not ask permission. The mere ability to define vision, values, or culture already exerts force.
Under these conditions, solidarity does not simply emerge. It is staged. Employees learn quickly which interpretations of virtue are rewarded, which forms of dissent are tolerated, and which are quietly penalised. Moral language becomes a signalling system long before it becomes a compass.
Ethics becomes a loyalty test. Solidarity becomes alignment. Flourishing becomes a synonym for fit.
The danger here is not cartoon authoritarianism. It is something subtler and more durable: moral capture. By this I mean the process through which ethical vocabulary is absorbed into institutional incentives, such that βgoodnessβ becomes legible primarily as compliance with the organisationβs preferred self-description. Ethics becomes a loyalty test. Solidarity becomes alignment. Flourishing becomes a synonym for fit.
This is why organisational utopias tend to function best in small, ideologically homogeneous groups and become brittle as complexity increases. Add more agents, more roles, more external pressures, and more disagreement about what βgood workβ even is, and the system faces a choice between diversity of perspective and coherence of direction. History suggests it usually chooses the latter.
Religious movements, political vanguards, start-ups, consultancies, and βvalues-ledβ enterprises all confront the same dilemma. Harmony is easy when dissenters are excluded early. It becomes harder once heterogeneity enters the system. At that point, solidarity either thins into vacuous slogans or hardens into enforcement.
Girard would recognise the pattern immediately: cohesion is often purchased by identifying the misfit, the blocker, the βtoxicβ element β the one who must be managed out so that the group can experience itself as good.
The claim that better formation, transparency, or distributed leadership can resolve this misunderstands the problem. These tools can redistribute labour and reduce certain abuses. They do not eliminate asymmetry. Someone still defines the centre, even when it is dressed up as βprocessβ, βcultureβ, or βshared ownershipβ. A moral horizon interpreted by a few will, reliably, become a moral demand placed upon the many. Which brings us to the unavoidable conclusion.
7. What This Critique Is (and Is Not)
This critique is not a defence of relativism-for-fun, nor of nihilism-as-apathy. I am a nihilist in a narrow, technical sense: I deny the existence of inherent meanings that are not invented, stabilised, and transmitted through language and practice. Meaning is not discovered intact in the world; it is negotiated, maintained, and contested. That position does not entail indifference. It entails vigilance.
If meanings are made rather than given, then they require care. They require scrutiny. They require attention to who is doing the naming, who benefits from the stabilisation, and who is being asked to align. Nihilism, in this sense, is not a shrug. It is a refusal to outsource responsibility to metaphysics.
In practical terms, this means treating ethical claims as proposals rather than discoveries, responsibilities rather than revelations, and commitments that must be defended in public rather than secured by ontological guarantee. It means accepting that moral authority is something we negotiate and sustain together, not something we uncover already intact and binding.
Nor is this an argument against local moral projects. Communities can and do organise themselves around shared goods, shared narratives, and shared aspirations. Such projects can be meaningful, motivating, and even life-sustaining. But they are also contingent, temporary, and sustained only through ongoing renegotiation.
Moral coherence achieved locally does not scale automatically, and it does not endure without friction.
What works for a particular group, at a particular moment, under particular conditions, does not thereby acquire universal authority. Moral coherence achieved locally does not scale automatically, and it does not endure without friction. That is not a failure of ethics. It is the cost of plurality and time.
The problem arises only when local moral projects mistake their internal coherence for external legitimacy. When they present themselves not as one way of organising meaning, but as a foundational ontology, a scalable ethical architecture, or a universally binding account of the Good.
At that point, disagreement ceases to register as intelligible difference and becomes moral deficiency. Dissent is redescribed as immaturity. Refusal is framed as lack of formation. And ethics quietly crosses the line from orientation into governance. This critique is aimed precisely at that crossing.
8. Conclusion: A Local Moral Project, Not a Universal Architecture
Taken on its own terms, this ontology is serious, internally coherent, and animated by a genuine concern for moral decay, procedural emptiness, and the hollowness of technocratic governance. It is not frivolous work. It is not cynical work. It is work born of dissatisfaction with thin ethics and a desire to recover meaning, orientation, and responsibility. But that does not make it universal.
What this framework offers is best understood not as a foundational solution to ethics, leadership, or societal becoming, but as a local moral project: a thick, tradition-inflected grammar capable of organising commitment among those already disposed to its metaphysical and ethical premises.
Within such in-groups, it may function well. It can generate shared language, reinforce norms, motivate sacrifice, and provide a sense of direction. It may even feel emancipatory, precisely because it relieves participants of the burden of perpetual moral indeterminacy. That relief is not incidental. It is the primary psychological reward such frameworks offer.
What it cannot do, without remainder, is scale across plural moral landscapes without reintroducing coercion under another name.
The moment the framework encounters agents who do not recognise its metaphysical centre, virtue ceases to orient and begins to adjudicate. Solidarity becomes conditional. Participation becomes aspirational compliance. Flourishing becomes legible only to those who already speak the language.
This is not a failure of goodwill. It is the inevitable consequence of grounding ethics in a substantive vision of the Good rather than in negotiated coexistence under conditions of deep disagreement.
History does not suggest a third option.
Attempts to resolve this by appeal to deeper formation, better leadership, or more refined ontological articulation misunderstand the problem. The obstacle is not insufficient sophistication. It is the impossibility of securing universal normative authority without either emptying ethics of content or enforcing it through power. History does not suggest a third option.
To acknowledge this is not to abandon ethics, nor to retreat into relativism or nihilism-as-apathy. It is to recognise that moral systems are provisional, situated, and sustained through ongoing negotiation rather than metaphysical guarantees. Meaning is made, not discovered intact. And whatever coherence we achieve is fragile, temporary, and bought at the cost of exclusion.
If this ontology were presented as one compelling way of organising moral life among those who freely choose it, there would be little to object to. The trouble begins only when it is asked to do more than it can bear: to ground, to bind, to scale, and to endure without remainder. That expectation is not just ambitious. It is precisely the illusion that has undone every such project before.
9. Closing: Admirable Aspirations, Ancient Failure Modes
The desire animating this ontology is admirable. So were many before it. Projects of moral renewal rarely fail because their intentions are corrupt. They fail because they underestimate three forces that never go away: semantic drift, human difference, and the stubborn refusal of people to remain aligned over time without someone being marginalised, disciplined, or expelled. What works at Time-nought rarely survives Time-one.
At the outset, shared language feels like shared purpose. Participation feels voluntary. Solidarity feels mutual. But as contexts shift, meanings stretch, and pressures accumulate, the system must either loosen its grip or tighten it. History suggests it almost always chooses the latter, while continuing to speak the language of the former.
This framework may function well as an in-group grammar. It may even be nourishing there.
This framework may function well as an in-group grammar. It may even be nourishing there. Within aligned communities, it can generate coherence, motivation, and a genuine sense of ethical direction. That should not be dismissed.
But once pressed beyond its boundaries, it exhibits the same failure modes we have seen for centuries: moral centres that require constant maintenance, virtues that drift and must be reinterpreted, participation that quietly becomes compliance, and solidarity that depends on exclusion to remain intact. The difference here is not structure, but style.
What we are offered is not a new solution to ethics, leadership, or social order, but a familiar answer articulated with contemporary sophistication and excellent footnotes. That does not make it unserious. It makes it recognisable.
And recognition, in this case, means seeing an old pattern dressed in new language: a moral centre that promises orientation while quietly reintroducing authority, a vision that speaks the grammar of participation while relying on alignment to survive.
The aspiration is admirable. The failure modes are ancient. And no amount of metaphysical refinement has ever abolished them.
Why shared language creates the illusion β not the reality β of shared experience
Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.
Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green
Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.
A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology
Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.
If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.
Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned β not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.
Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct
Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:
Measurement registers a variable.
Behaviour implements a functional response.
Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.
Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.
The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails
Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description β slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:
our physical ontology,
our conceptual divisions,
our sense-making framework,
and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.
But these assumptions are ungrounded.
Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.
When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.
The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb
The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:
T0: biological mediation
T1: cognitive mediation
T2: linguistic mediation
T3: social mediation
Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.
Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.
Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:
perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).
Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility. MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.
Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us
In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:
Their sensory world differs;
their affective architecture differs;
their concepts do not map onto human categories;
and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.
The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.
The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template
Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.
If βcoldβ varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species β biological or artificial β possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.
Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is alocal ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.
Conclusion
When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.
Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.
And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.
Afterword
Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. Itβs an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.
To be clear, I have nothing against Alex OβConnor. Heβs engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining oneβs own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.
Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, Iβm not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location β not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.
Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, weβll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.
Another faux Magic: The Gathering trading card. I’ve been busy writing an essay on Tatterhood and wondering if I’ve gone off the edge even further into mental masturbation. I made these cards to share on slow news days, as it were.
[EDIT: Oops: Even wore. I already posted something today. Enjoy the bonus post.]
Every philosopher dreams of a device that reveals ‘truth’. The Constructivist Lens does the opposite. When you tap it, the world doesnβt come into focus β it multiplies. Each pane shows the same thing differently, reminding us that knowing is always a form of making β seeing as building.
In The Discipline of Dis-Integration, I wrote that philosophyβs task is ‘to remain within what persists β¦ to study the tension in the threads rather than weave a new pattern’. The Lens embodies that ethic. It is not an instrument of discovery but of disclosure: a way to notice the scaffolding of perception without mistaking it for bedrock.
Flavour text: βKnowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.β β Richard Rorty
Where Enlightenment optics promised clarity, the Lens trades in parallax. It insists that perspective is not a flaw but the condition of vision itself. Each player who peers through it β artist, scientist, moralist β constructs a different coherence, none final. The cardβs rule text captures this tension: replace any keyword on a permanent with a metaphor of your choice until end of turn. Reality bends, language shifts, yet the game continues.
In the Dis-Integration set, the Lens sits alongside Perspectival Realism and Language Game (not yet shared), forming the Blue triad of epistemic doubt. Together they dramatise what the essay calls ‘the hyphen as hinge’: the small pause between integration and its undoing. The Constructivist Lens, then, is not a tool for clearer sight but a reminder that every act of seeing is already an act of construction.
The Travelogue of a Recovering Enlightenment Subject
Iβm asked endlessly β usually by people who still believe TED talks are a form of knowledge production β ‘Why are you so negative? Why must you tear things down if youβve no intention of replacing them?’
Itβs adorable, really. Like watching a toddler demand that gravity apologise.
Theyβve been trained for years in the managerial catechism:
‘Donβt bring me problems; bring me solutions.‘
As if the world were some badly-run workshop in need of a fresh coat of agile methodology.
They might as well say, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t win at Lotto; give me money’.
I, too, would enjoy the spare universe. Or the winning Lotto ticket. And yes, one day I might even buy one. Until then, Iβve embraced the only adult philosophy left: Dis-Integrationism β the fine art of taking things apart without pretending they can be reassembled into anything coherent.
A Little History
My suspicion began early. Secondary school. All those civic fairytales whispered as if they were geology.
The ‘reasonable person’? Bollox. ‘Jury of oneβs peers’? What are peers? Whose peers? I have no peers. ‘Impartial judges’? Please. Even as a teenager, I could see those robed magicians palming cards like bored street performers. Everyone else nodded along, grateful for the spectacle. I stared, wondering how the other children hadnβt noticed the emperorβs bare arse.
Later, I watched adults talk past each other with a fluency bordering on performance art. Not disagreement β different universes, cosmetically aligned by grammar.
A Federal mediator once tried to teach me that common ground could be manufactured. Not by clarifying meaning, mind you β that would have required honesty β but by rhetorical pressure and a touch of Jedi mind-trickery. Negotiation was simply controlled hallucination.
University communications classes offered temporary distraction with denotation and connotation, a little semantic drift, the illusion that language might be domesticated with enough theory. Charming. Almost convincing.
Then GΓΆdel and Arrow arrived like two polite assassins and quietly removed the floorboards.
And then β happily, inevitably β Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. Iβd already danced with Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus. Iβd ingested the Western canon like every obedient young acolyte: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Americans force-feed their citizenry Jefferson and Franklin as moral fibre, as if the republic might otherwise suffer constipation.
It never gelled. Too much myth, too much marketing. The Enlightenment had the energy of a regime insisting on its own benevolence while confiscating your torch. To call oneself ‘enlightened’ should have raised suspicion β but no, the branding stuck.
Whenever les garΓ§ons dared tug at the curtain, we were assured they simply didnβt ‘understand’, or worse, they ‘hated civilisation’.
Image: “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Then Came the Internet
The digital age didnβt usher in clarity β it unmasked the whole pantomime. Like Neo seeing the Matrix code or Roddy Piper slipping on the sunglasses in They Live, one suddenly perceives the circuitry: meaning as glitch, discourse as scaffolding, truth as a shabby stage-set blinking under fluorescent tubes.
Our civilisation speaks in metaphors it mistakes for mechanisms. The Enlightenment gave us the fantasy that language might behave, that concepts were furniture rather than fog. Musicians and artists always knew better. We swim in metaphor; we never expected words to bear weight. But philosophers kept pretending communication was a conveyor belt conveying ‘meaning units’ from A to B.
By 2018, the cracks were gaping. I began taking the notes that would metastasise into A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis β an attempt to map the hollow spaces between our words, the fractures we keep wallpapering with reason.
Half a decade later, the work is ready. Not to save anything β nothing here merits salvation β but to name the debris honestly.
If that sounds negative, good. Someone has to switch off the Enlightenmentβs flickering lightbulb before it burns the whole house down.
Where This Road Actually Leads
People imagine negativity is a posture β a sort of philosophical eyeliner, worn for effect. But dismantling the worldβs conceptual furniture isnβt a hobby; itβs the only reasonable response once youβve noticed the screws arenβt actually attached to anything.
The Enlightenment promised us a palace. Step inside and you discover itβs built out of IKEA flatpacks held together with wishful thinking and a prayer to Kant.
Once youβve seen that, you canβt go back to pretending the furniture is sturdy.
You stop sitting.
You start tapping the beams.
You catalogue the wobble.
This is where DisβIntegrationism enters β not as a manifesto, but as the practice of refusing to live inside collapsing architecture out of sheer politeness. Negativity is simply the weather report.
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
We cling to the fantasy that if we critique something long enough, a solution will crystallise out of the void, like enlightenment through sheer irritation. Itβs the Protestant work ethic meets metaphysics: salvation through sufficient grumbling.
But critique is not alchemy. It unmakes. It refuses. It loosens the bolts we pretended were load-bearing.
Once you stop demanding that thought be constructive, you can finally see the world as it is: improvised, rhetorical, and permanently under renovation by people who donβt read the instructions.
The Enlightenmentβs heirs keep insisting there must be a blueprint. There isnβt. There never was. Weβve merely been tracing the silhouettes of scaffolding, calling it a cathedral.
And Yet β Here We Still Are
The online age (God help us all) didnβt deepen the crisis; it merely turned the lights on. What Enlightenment rationality hid beneath a tasteful layer of neoclassical varnish, the internet sprayed with fluorescent graffiti.
Turns out, when seven billion people speak at once, meaning doesnβt ’emerge’; it buckles. Our systems werenβt built for this volume of contradiction. Our language wasnβt built for this density of metaphor. Our myths werenβt built for this much empirical evidence against them.
And yet here we are, still demanding coherence from a medium held together by emojis and trauma. If you laugh, itβs only to stop crying. If you critique, itβs only because someone has to keep the fire marshal informed.
The Only Honest Next Step
Having traced the cracks, youβre now in the foyer of the real argument β the one hanging like a neon sign over your entire Anti-Enlightenment project:
We donβt need to rebuild the house. We need to stop pretending it was ever architecture.
Dis-Integrationism isnβt about nihilism; itβs about maintenance. Not repairing the myth, but tending the human who must live among its debris. Not constructing new temples, but learning to see in the half-light once the old gods have gone.
The travelogue becomes a guidebook: Welcome to the ruins. Mind the uneven floor. Here is how we walk without pretending the path is paved.
The Fetish for Solutions
Here is the final indignity of the age: the demand that every critique come bundled with a solution, like some moral warranty card. As if naming the rot werenβt labour enough. As if truth required a customer-service plan.
‘Where is your alternative?’ they ask, clutching Enlightenment logic the way a drowning man clutches a shopping receipt.
But solutions are the real tyranny. They arrive bearing the smile of reason and the posture of progress, and behind both sits the same old imperial instinct: replace ambiguity with order; replace lived complexity with a diagram. A solution is merely a problem wearing a fresh coat of confidence.
Worse, a solution presumes the system is sound, merely in need of adjustment. It imagines the structure holds. It imagines the furniture can be rearranged without collapsing into splinters, and the memory of Kant.
Solutions promise inevitability. They promise teleology. They promise that the mess can be disinfected if only one applies the correct solvent. This is theology masquerading as engineering.
The Violence of the Answer
A solution is a closure β a metaphysical brute force. It slams the window shut so no further interpretation can slip in through the draft. It stabilises the world by amputating everything that wriggles. Answers are how systems defend themselves. Theyβre the intellectual equivalent of riot police: clean uniforms, straight lines, zero tolerance for nuance.
This is why the world keeps mistaking refusal for chaos. Refusal isnβt chaos. It’s hygiene. It is the simple act of not adding more furniture to a house already bending under its own delusions. When you decline to provide a solution, you arenβt abandoning the world. Youβre declining to participate in its coercive optimism.
And So the Travelogue Ends Where It Must
Not in triumph or a bluepirnt, but in composure β the only posture left after the Enlightenmentβs glare has dimmed. Negativity isnβt sabotage; itβs sobriety. Dis-Integrationism isnβt cynicism; itβs the refusal to replace one failing mythology with another wearing vegan leather.
A world obsessed with solutions cannot recognise maintenance as wisdom. It can’t tolerate ambiguity without reaching for a hammer. It can’t breathe unless someone somewhere is building a ladder to a future that never arrives.
So no β I won’t provide solutions. I won’t participate in the fantasy that the human condition can be patched with conceptual duct tape. I will not gift the Enlightenment a eulogy that surrenders to its grammar.
What I offer is far smaller and far more honest: Attention. Description. Steady hands in a collapsing house. And the simple dignity of refusing to lie about the architecture.
Philosophics 