My philosophical critique, not of the book Why Democrats Are Dangerous, but of the two warring factions in United States politics β mind you, partisanship not limited to the US β sparked the ire of defenders of their respective turf. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Those other people are either addleheaded or abject evil’ is a consolidation of responses from both sides of the aisle. I’ve crafted a response.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Itβs perfectly true that I occupy a perspective. Everyone does. This isn’t a confession; itβs a structural feature of being human. Consciousness is perspectival by design. We donβt get to hover above the world like disembodied CCTV cameras. We look from somewhere.
But acknowledging oneβs perspective is not the same thing as being trapped in a rut. A rut implies unexamined repetition, reflex, and dogma. A perspective implies angle, interpretation, intellectual stance. The accusation I’m hearing β ‘you’re in a rut too’ β is not actually an argument. Itβs an attempt to delegitimise the analysis without engaging with it.
It says nothing about whether my observation is true, coherent, or well-reasoned; it merely notes that I, like every other speaking organism on the planet, occupy a position. And from this banal fact it attempts to smuggle in a conclusion: that my critique is thereby invalid. Itβs a sleight of hand, and a clumsy one.
If someone believes I’m wrong, they are welcome β encouraged, even β to demonstrate:
where the logic fails
where the evidence contradicts me
where the symmetry is mischaracterised
where the interpretation distorts rather than illuminates
That is argumentation.
What they are offering instead is a sort of epistemic shrug: ‘You’re in a perspective, therefore you have no authority’. This is an ad hominem in a trench coat, pretending to be profundity.
The irony, of course, is that the people making this charge never seem to apply it to themselves. Their own viewpoint, naturally, is not a rut but a ‘stance’, ‘framework’, ‘tradition’, ‘bedrock’, or ‘fact’. Only the critic has perspective; they merely have truth.
But here’s the critical distinction:
Having a perspective does not invalidate an analysis, and pretending not to have one does.
The entire Anti-Enlightenment project rests on this recognition: that all human positions are mediated, situated, incomplete β and yet still capable of meaningful observation. You don’t escape your perspective by denying it; you escape dogma by interrogating it.
If someone wishes to rebut what Iβve written, they should do so directly, with evidence, reasoning, or counterexamples. If all they offer is ‘well, you’re biased too’, then theyβve conceded the argument by refusing to enter it.
A perspective is not a rut. A rut is what happens when you canβt tell the difference.
I’ve taken the day after Thanksgiving in the US to decompress with a less serious post before I get back to indexing. I came up with this concept whilst writing my essay on Homo Normalis, but I felt this was a bit too cheeky for a formal essay. This is where my thoughts led me.
A Brief Field Note from the Department of Bureaucratic Anthropology
Still reeling from the inability to fold some pan into homo, Palaeontologists are seemingly desperate for a new hominid. Some dream of discovering the ‘missing link’; others, more honest, just want something with a jawline interesting enough to secure a grant. So imagine the surprise when the latest species didnβt come out of the Rift Valley but out of an abandoned server farm somewhere outside Reading.
Theyβve named it Homo Legibilis β the Readable Human. Not ‘H. normΔlis’ (normal human), not ‘H. ratiΕnΔlis (rational human), but the one who lived primarily to be interpreted. A species who woke each morning with a simple evolutionary imperative: ensure oneβs dataprints were tidy, current, and machine-actionable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Youβll have seen their skeletons before, though you may not have recognised them as such. They often appear upright, mid-scroll, preserved in the amber of a status update. A remarkable creature, really. Lithe thumbs. Soft cranial matter. Eyes adapted for low-light environments lit primarily by advertisements.
Habitat
The species thrived in densely surveilled ecosystems: corporate intranets, public Wi-Fi, facial-recognition corridors, anywhere with sufficient metadata to form a lasting imprint. They built vast nests out of profiles, settings, dashboards. Territorial disputes were settled not through display or violence but through privacy-policy updates. Their preferred climate? Temperate bureaucracy.
Diet
Contrary to earlier assumptions, H. Legibilis did not feed on information. It fed on interpretation: likes, metrics, performance reviews, and algorithmic appraisal. Some specimens survived entire winters on a single quarterly report. Every fossil indicates a digestive tract incapable of processing nuance. Subtext passed through untouched.
Mating Rituals
Courtship displays involved reciprocal data disclosure across multiple platforms, often followed by rapid abandonment once sufficient behavioural samples were collected. One famous specimen is preserved alongside fourteen dating-app profiles and not a single functional relationship. Tragic, in a way, but consistent with the speciesβ priorities: be seen, not held.
Distinguishing Traits
Where Homo sapiens walked upright, Homo legibilis aimed to sit upright in a chair facing a webcam. Its spine is subtly adapted for compliance reviews. Its hands are shaped to cradle an object that no longer exists: something called ‘a phone’. Ironically, some term these ‘mobiles’, apparently unaware of the tethers.
Researchers note that the creatureβs selfhood appears to have been a consensual hallucination produced collaboratively by HR departments, advertising lobbies, and the Enlightenmentβs long shadow. Identity, for H. legibilis, was not lived but administered.
Extinction Event
The fossil record ends abruptly around the Great Blackout, a period in which visibility β formerly a pillar of the speciesβ survival β became inconvenient. Some scholars argue the species didnβt perish but simply lost the will to document itself, making further study inconvenient.
Others suggest a quieter transformation: the species evolved into rumour, passing stories orally once more, slipping back into the anonymity from which its ancestors once crawled.
Afterword
A few renegade anthropologists insist Homo Legibilis is not extinct at all. They claim itβs still out there, refreshing dashboards, syncing calendars, striving to be neatly interpreted by systems that never asked to understand it. But these are fringe theories. The prevailing view is that the species perished under the weight of its own readability. A cautionary tale, really. When your survival strategy is to be perfectly legible, you eventually disappear the moment the lights flicker.
My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each otherβs work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic β heaven knows I have written my share β but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.
Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense β line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing β I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.
A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)
Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of Americaβs warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The RedβBlue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.
My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege β not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleagueβs argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.
This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply β indeed does apply β to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.
My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.
The Architecture of Certainty
What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture β an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that oneβs own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.
My colleagueβs book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponentsβ manipulations.
This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.
This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.
It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.
The Invention of the Enemy
One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)
This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.
To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.
This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here β only demonology.
The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence
One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.
The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather β each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.
This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.
It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.
The Projection Engine
If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection β unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.
Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying oneβs own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history β each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity β its own included β is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.
This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that oneβs own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from oneβs own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice β whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.
The Neutral Observer Who Isnβt
What the book never acknowledges β because it cannot β is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.
This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.
The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimantβs own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.
In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.
The Fictional Symmetry Problem
One of the major deficiencies in the book β and in most modern political commentary β is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the otherβs missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.
The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.
This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.
Narrative Weaponry
Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing β and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.
We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.
Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.
MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.
The Missing Category: Structural Analysis
Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisationβs uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.
None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.
Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.
This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.
Where He Is Not Wrong
Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.
But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them β not to understand them.
The Danger of Certainty
What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage β though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature β but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.
The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that oneβs own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason β capital R β is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.
The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.
It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.
The irony is almost tender.
Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge oneβs own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.
My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview β and mistook the one for the other.
If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.
Read next:The Republic of Recursive Prophecy β an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.
A surprising number of people have been using the MEOW GPT I released into the wild. Naturally, I canβt see how anyone is actually using it, which is probably for the best. If you hand someone a relational ontology and they treat it like a BuzzFeed quiz, thatβs on them. Still, I havenβt received any direct feedback, positive or catastrophic, which leaves me wondering whether users understand the results or are simply nodding like priests reciting Latin they donβt believe.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The truth is uncomfortable: if you havenβt grasped the Mediated Encounter Ontology (of the World), the outputs may feel like a philosophical brick to the face. Theyβre meant to; mediation has consequences. Iβm even considering adding a warning label:
If you hold an unwavering commitment to a concept with any philosophical weight, perhaps donβt input it. There is a non-zero chance the illusion will shatter.
Below is a sampling of the concepts I tested while inspecting the systemβs behaviour. Iβm withholding the outputs, partly to avoid influencing new users and partly to preserve your dignity, such as it is.
authenticity
anattΔ (Buddhist)
character (in Aristotleβs virtue-ethical sense)
consciousness
dignity
freedom
hΓ³zhΓ³ (Navajo)
justice
karma
love
progress
ren ( δ» )
table
tree
truth
I may have tried others, depending on how irritated I was with the world at the time.
(Now that I think of it, I entered my full name and witnessed it nearly have an aneurysm.)
My purpose in trying these is (obviously) to test the GPT. As part of the test, I wanted to test terms I already considered to be weasel words. I also wanted to test common terms (table) and terms outside of Western modalities. I learned something about the engine in each case.
Tables & Trees
One of the first surprises was the humble ‘table’ which, according to the engine, apparently moonlights across half of civilisationβs conceptual landscape. If you input ‘table’, you get everything from dinner tables to data tables to parliamentary procedure. The model does exactly what it should: it presents the full encounter-space and waits for you to specify which world you meant to inhabit.
The lesson: if you mean a table you eat dinner on, say so. Donβt assume the universe is built around your implied furniture.
‘Tree’ behaves similarly. Does the user mean a birch in a forest? A branching data structure? A phylogenetic diagram? MEOW GPT wonβt decide that for you; nor should it. Precision is your job.
This is precisely why I tested ‘character (in Aristotleβs virtue-ethical sense)’ rather than tossing ‘character’ in like a confused undergraduate hoping for luck.
Non-Western Concepts
I also tested concepts well outside the Western philosophical sandbox. This is where the model revealed its real strength.
Enter ‘karma’: it promptly explained that the Western reduction is a cultural oversimplification and β quite rightly β flagged that different Eastern traditions use the term differently. Translation: specify your flavour.
Enter ‘anattΔ’: the model demonstrated that Western interpretations often reduce the concept to a caricature. Which, frankly, they do.
Enter ‘hΓ³zhΓ³’: the Navajo term survives mostly in the anthropological imagination, and the model openly described it as nearly ineffable β especially to those raised in cultures that specialise in bulldozing subtlety. On that score, no notes.
Across the board, I was trying to see whether MEOW GPT would implode when confronted with concepts that resist neat Western categorisation. It didnβt. It was annoyingly robust.
Closing Notes
If you do try the MEOW GPT and find its results surprising, illuminating, or mildly offensive to your metaphysical sensibilities, let me know β and tell me why. It helps me understand what the engine does well and what illusions it quietly pops along the way. Your feedback may even keep me from adding further warning labels, though I wouldnβt count on it.
Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, Iβve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isnβt yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if youβre coming in cold.
This model doesnβt role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0βT3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this post on the MEOW GPT.
I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when itβs out of scope, and when youβve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.
Iβm making this public for a simple reason: itβs the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery β how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.
It hasnβt been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but itβs stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it β and I hope you do β Iβd love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didnβt simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.
Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.
Concept
Input: modernity
Type: historicalβsocial formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
Scope check: in-scope β central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)
High-level summary (β€120 words)
Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (βwe are modern, unlike the pastβ).
In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:
T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, βreligionβ vs βscienceβ).
T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).
βModernityβ is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.
T0 β Biological Mediation
Applicability: Applicable
Analysis:
Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a βmodernβ world.
T1 β Cognitive Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, costβbenefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
These patterns make certain experiences βnormalβ (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.
T2 β Linguistic Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast βusβ with βthemβ (the past, βtraditionalβ societies, βthe East,β βthe primitiveβ); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (βsince the 18th centuryβ), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
Itβs also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspectsβemancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
Pairs like βmodern vs traditionalβ or βmodern vs backwardβ compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that βmodernβ is automatically better or more advanced.
Talk of βpost-modernityβ or βlate modernityβ suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by itβan example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
At the most global scale (βthe meaning of modernity,β βthe modern conditionβ), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
Technologiesβsteam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AIβare both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to βseeβ and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject βmodernityβ as a whole.
Limits & failure modes
Language insufficiency notes
Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being βup to dateβ). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: itβs easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issuesβtechnology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracyβunder one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
Experiences of living in βmodern timesβ (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (βtoo fast,β βtoo shallow,β βtoo lonelyβ) that only partially capture what itβs like.
Missing tiers / blind spots
This sketch doesnβt adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
Itβs centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; βmultiple modernitiesβ and non-Western trajectories (where βmodernβ elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernityβs dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations weβre trying to analyse.
With the MEOW thesis now roaming freely across the intellectual savannah, knocking over conceptual furniture and frightening the rationalists, it’s time to walk through a simple example. We’ll stay safely within the realm of conscious perception for now. That way, no one panics, and everyone can pretend they’re on familiar ground.
Our case study: colour.
Or rather, the quite embarrassing misunderstanding of colour that Western philosophy has been peddling for roughly three centuries.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary of this topic, Colour, Perception, and Mediated Ontology.
The Realist’s Apple: A Comedy of Certainty
Picture an apple on a table: plump, unashamedly spherical, wearing its redness like a badge of honour. The traditional Realist swears it’s red in itself, quite independent of anyone wandering in to admire it. The apple has redness the way it has mass, curvature, and that little bruise from the careless shop assistant. When you enter the room, you ‘see’ the red it’s been proudly radiating all along.
Image 0: Subject viewing red apple.
By school age, most of us are told that apples don’t ‘have’ colour; they merely reflect certain wavelengths. A minor complication. A mechanical detail. Nothing to disturb the fundamental metaphysical fantasy: that redness is still ‘out there’, waiting patiently for your eyes to come collect it.
It’s all very straightforward. Very tidy. And very wrong.
Idealists to the Rescue (Unfortunately)
Ask an Idealist about the apple and the entertainment begins.
The Berkeley devotee insists the apple exists only so long as it’s perceived β esse est percipi β which raises awkward questions about what happens when you step out for a cuppa. God, apparently, keeps the universe running as a kind of 24-hour perceptual babysitter. You may find this profound or you may find it disturbingly clingy.
The Kantian, inevitably wearing a waistcoat, insists the apple-in-itself is forever inaccessible behind the Phenomenal Veil of Mystery. What you experience is the apple-for-you, sculpted by space, time, causality, and a toolkit of categories you never asked for. This explains a lot about post-Kantian philosophy, not least the fixation on walls no one can climb.
Contemporary idealists get creative: proto-experience in everything, cosmic consciousness as universal substrate, matter as a sleepy epiphenomenon of Mind. It’s quite dazzling if you ignore the categories they’re smashing together.
What unites these camps is the conviction that mind is doing the heavy lifting and the world is an afterthought β inconvenient, unruly, and best kept in the margins.
The Shared Mistake: An Architectural Catastrophe
Both Realist and Idealist inherit the same faulty blueprint: mind here, world there β two self-contained realms entering into an epistemic handshake.
Realists cling to unmediated access (a fantasy incompatible with biology). Idealists cling to sovereign mentality (a fantasy incompatible with objectivity).
Both take ‘experience’ to be a relation between two pre-existing domains rather than a single structured encounter.
This is the mistake. Not Realism’s claims about mind-independence. Not Idealism’s claims about mental primacy. The mistake is the architecture β the assumption of two separately-existing somethings that subsequently relate.
MEOW β yes, we’re calling it that β puts it bluntly:
The problem isn’t where colour is. The problem is assuming it has to be in something β mind or world β rather than in the event.
Redness isn’t inside your head or inside the apple. It’s co-constituted by biological, cognitive, linguistic, and cultural mediation interacting with persistent constraint patterns.
Time to peel this onion⦠er, apple.
The Four Layers of Mediation (TββTβ)
A Ridiculously Oversimplified Cheat-Sheet That Still Outperforms Most Metaphysics Syllabi
Structure and Sensitivity: the Architecture You Never Asked For
This is where the Enlightenment’s fantasy of ‘raw perception’ goes to die.
Your visual system transforms, filters, enhances, suppresses, and reconstructs before ‘red’ even reaches consciousness. Cone responses, opponent processes, retinal adaptation, spatial filtering β all of it happening before the poor cortex even gets a look-in.
You never perceive ‘wavelengths’. You perceive the output of a heavily processed biological pipeline.
The biology isn’t the barrier.The biology is the view.
Image 2: Chromatic processing pathway (TββTβ): the layered biological transformations that make βredβ possible long before consciousness gets involved.
Tβ β Cognitive Mediation
Prediction and Inference: You See What You Expect (Until Constraint Smacks You)
Your cognitive system doesn’t ‘receive’ colour information β it predicts it and updates the guess when necessary.
Memory colour biases perception toward canonical instances. Attentional gating determines what gets processed intensively and what gets summary treatment. Top-down modulation shapes what counts as signal versus noise.
There is no percept without mediation. There is no ‘raw data’ waiting underneath.
The Enlightenment liked to imagine perception as a passive window. Cognition turns that window into a heavily editorialised newsfeed.
Image 3: Expectation and input co-determine the percept: βredβ emerges from the encounter, not from either source alone.
Tβ β LinguisticβConceptual Mediation
Categories and Symbols: How Words Carve the Spectrum
Enter the famous Whorf skirmishes. Do words change perception? Do they merely label pre-existing distinctions? Do Russians really ‘see’ blue differently?
Berlin & Kay gave us focal colour universals β constraint patterns stable across cultures. Roberson et al. gave us the Himba data β linguistic categories reshaping discrimination and salience.
The correct answer is neither universalism nor relativism. It’s MEOW’s favourite refrain:
Mediation varies; constraint persists.
Words don’t invent colours. But they do reorganise the perceptual field, changing what pops and what hides.
Image 4: Different languages carve the same physical continuum differently: English imposes a blue/green split; Himba divides the region into several greens with no blue boundary at all.
Tβ β CulturalβNormative Mediation
Shared Practices: The Social Life of Perception
Your discipline, training, historical context, and shared norms tell you:
which distinctions matter
which differences ‘count’
which patterns get ignored
A Himba herder, a Renaissance painter, and a radiologist do not inhabit the same perceptual world β even when staring at the same patch of light.
Cultural mediation doesn’t rewrite biology; it reorganises priorities, salience, and interpretive readiness.
Image 5: Three observers confronting the same stimulus yet extracting different distinctions: the scientist tracks wavelength, the artist tracks hue and value, and the Himba pastoralist tracks ecologically salient greens. Same object, different salience hierarchies. Not arbitrary β just mediated.
What Seeing Red Actually Involves (Step By Exhausting Step)
You walk into a room. Apple on table. Looks red. What just happened?
Tβ β Biological: Long wavelength light hits L-cones harder than M- and S-cones. Opponent channels compute (LβM). Adaptation shifts baseline. Edge detection fires. You don’t have ‘red’ yet β you have transformed photoreceptor output.
Tβ β Cognitive: Your brain predicts ‘apple, probably red’ based on shape and context. Memory colour pulls toward canonical apple-red. Attention allocates processing resources. Prediction matches input (roughly). System settles: ‘yes, red apple’.
Tβ β LinguisticβConceptual: The continuous gradient gets binned: ‘red’, not ‘crimson’ or ‘scarlet’ unless you’re a designer. The category provides stability, ties this instance to others, makes it reportable.
Tβ β CulturalβNormative: Does the exact shade matter? Depends whether you’re buying it, photographing it, or painting it. Your practical context determines which distinctions you bother tracking.
And through all of this: Constraint. Metameric matches stay stable. Focal colours persist cross-culturally. Wavelength sensitivities don’t budge. The encounter isn’t arbitrary β but it’s not unmediated either.
What happened wasn’t: Mind Met World. What happened was: an encounter-event unfolded, organised through four mediational layers, exhibiting stable constraint patterns that made it this and not that.
Where This Leaves Us
Colour is not ‘out there’. Colour is not ‘in here’.
Colour is the structured relational event of encounter.
Four mediation layers shape what appears. Constraint patterns stabilise the encounter so we aren’t hallucinating wildly divergent rainbows.
There is no ‘apple as it really is’ waiting behind the encounter. Nor is there a sovereign mind constructing its own private theatre.
There is only the event β where biological structure, cognitive dynamics, conceptual categories, and cultural histories co-emerge with the stable patterns of constraint we lazily call ‘the world’.
The apple was never red ‘in itself’. You were never seeing it ‘as it really is’. And the Enlightenment can finally take off its colour-blind uncle glasses and admit it’s been squinting at the wrong question for three hundred years.
Next time: Why visual illusions aren’t perception failing, but perception revealing itself.
Until then: stop asking where colour ‘really’ lives.
It lives in the event. And the event is mediated, constrained, and real enough.
I was having an inappropriate chat with ChatGPT and, per Feyerabend, I once again discovered that some of the best inspirations are unplanned. The conversation circled around to the conflicting narratives of Erasmus and Wells. Enter, Plato, McGilchrist, and the Enlightenment β all living rent-free in my head β and I end up with this.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I. The Proverb and Its Presumption
Erasmus sits at his writing desk in 1500-something, cheerful as a man who has never once questioned the premises of his own eyesight, and pens what will become one of the Westβs most durable little myths: βIn the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kingβ. It arrives packaged as folk wisdom, the sort of thing youβre meant to nod at sagely over a pint. And for centuries, we did. The proverb became shorthand for a comfortable fantasy: that advantage is advantage everywhere, that perception grants sovereignty, that a man with superior faculties will naturally ascend to his rightful place atop whatever heap he finds himself on.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
β Erasmus
Itβs an Enlightenment dream avant la lettre, really β this breezy confidence that reason, sight, knowledge, insight will simply work wherever theyβre deployed. The one-eyed man doesnβt need to negotiate with the blind. He doesnβt need their endorsement, their customs, their consent. He arrives, he sees, he rules. The proverb presumes a kind of metaphysical meritocracy, where truth and capability are self-authenticating, where the world politely arranges itself around whoever happens to possess the sharper tools.
Image: Midjourney didn’t coΓΆperate with my prompt for a one-eyed king. Trust that this king has only one.
Itβs the intellectual equivalent of showing up in a foreign country with a briefcase full of sterling and expecting everyone to genuflect. And like most folk wisdom, it survives because it flatters us. It tells us that our advantages β our rationality, our education, our painstakingly cultivated discernment β are universally bankable. That we, the seeing, need only arrive for the blind to recognise our superiority.
Erasmus offers this with no apparent irony. He hands us a proverb that whispers: your clarity is your crown.
II. Wells Wanders In
Four centuries later, H.G. Wells picks up the proverb, turns it over in his hands like a curious stone, and proceeds to detonate it.
The Country of the Blind (1904) is many things β a fable, a thought experiment, a sly dismantling of Enlightenment presumption β but above all it is an act of literary vandalism against Erasmus and everything his proverb smuggles into our collective assumptions. Wells sends his protagonist, NuΓ±ez, tumbling into an isolated Andean valley where a disease has rendered the entire population blind for generations. Theyβve adapted. Theyβve built a culture, a cosmology, a complete lifeworld organised around their particular sensorium. Sight isnβt absent from their world; itβs irrelevant. Worse: itβs nonsense. The seeing manβs reports of βlightβ and βskyβ and βmountainsβ sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
NuΓ±ez arrives expecting Erasmusβs kingdom. He gets a psychiatric evaluation instead.
The brilliance of Wellsβs story isnβt simply that the one-eyed man fails to become king β itβs how he fails. NuΓ±ez doesnβt lack effort or eloquence. He tries reason, demonstration, patient explanation. He attempts to prove the utility of sight by predicting sunrise, by describing distant objects, by leveraging his supposed advantage. None of it matters. The blind donβt need his reports. They navigate their world perfectly well without them. His sight isnβt superior; itβs alien. And in a culture that has no use for it, no linguistic scaffolding to accommodate it, no social structure that values it, his one eye might as well be a vestigial tail.
The valleyβs elders eventually diagnose NuΓ±ezβs problem: his eyes are diseased organs that fill his brain with hallucinations. The cure? Surgical removal.
Wells lets this hang in the air, brutal and comic. The one-eyed man isnβt king. Heβs a patient. And if he wants to stay, if he wants to belong, if he wants to marry the girl heβs fallen for and build a life in this place, heβll need to surrender the very faculty he imagined made him superior. Heβll need to let them fix him.
The story ends ambiguously β NuΓ±ez flees at the last moment, stumbling back toward the world of the sighted, though whether he survives is left unclear. But the damage is done. Erasmusβs proverb lies in ruins. Wells has exposed its central presumption: that advantage is advantage everywhere. That perception grants authority. That reason, clarity, and superior faculties are self-evidently sovereign.
Theyβre not. Theyβre only sovereign where the culture already endorses them.
III. Platoβs Ghost in the Valley
If Wells dismantles Erasmus, Plato hovers over the whole scene like a weary ghost, half scolding, half despairing, muttering that he told us this would happen.
The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the original version of this story. The philosopher escapes the cave, sees the sun, comprehends the Forms, and returns to liberate his fellow prisoners with reports of a luminous reality beyond the shadows. They donβt thank him. They donβt listen. They think heβs mad, or dangerous, or both. And if he persists β if he tries to drag them toward the exit, toward the light they canβt yet see β theyβll kill him for it.
Video: Plato’s Cave
Platoβs parable is usually read as a tragedy of ignorance: the prisoners are too stupid, too comfortable, too corrupted by their chains to recognise truth when itβs offered. But read it alongside Wells and the emphasis shifts. The cave-dwellers arenβt wrong, exactly. Theyβre coherent. Theyβve built an entire epistemology around shadows. They have experts in shadow interpretation, a whole language for describing shadow behaviour, social hierarchies based on shadow-predicting prowess. The philosopher returns with reports of a three-dimensional world and they hear gibberish. Not because theyβre defective, but because his truth has no purchase in their lifeworld.
Plato despairs over this. He wants the prisoners to want liberation. He wants truth to be self-authenticating, wants knowledge to compel assent simply by virtue of being knowledge. But the cave doesnβt work that way. The prisoners donβt want truth; they want comfort shaped like reality. They want coherence within the system they already inhabit. The philosopherβs sun is as alien to them as NuΓ±ezβs sight is to the blind valley.
And hereβs the kicker: Plato knows this. Thatβs why the allegory is tragic rather than triumphant. The philosopher does see the sun. He does apprehend the Forms. But his knowledge is useless in the cave. Worse than useless β it makes him a pariah, a madman, a threat. His enlightenment doesnβt grant him sovereignty; it exile him from the only community he has.
The one-eyed man isnβt king. Heβs the lunatic theyβll string up if he doesnβt learn to shut up about the sky.
IV. The Enlightenmentβs Magnificent Blunder
Once youβve got Erasmus, Wells, and Plato in the same room, the Enlightenmentβs central fantasy collapses like wet cardboard.
Humanityβs great Enlightenment wheeze β that baroque fantasy of Reason marching triumphantly through history like a powdered dragoon β has always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of selling snake oil in a crystal decanter. We were promised lucidity, emancipation, and the taming of ignorance; what we got was a fetish for procedural cleverness, a bureaucratisation of truth, and the ghastly belief that if you shine a bright enough torch into the void, the void will politely disclose its contents.
The Enlightenment presumed universality. It imagined that rationality, properly deployed, would work everywhere β that its methods were culture-neutral, that its conclusions were binding on all reasonable minds, that the shadows in Platoβs cave and the blindness in Wellsβs valley could be cured by the application of sufficient light and logic. It treated reason as a kind of metaphysical bulldozer, capable of flattening any terrain it encountered and paving the way for Progress, Truth, and Universal Human Flourishing.
This was, to put it mildly, optimistic.
What the Enlightenment missed β what Erasmusβs proverb cheerfully ignores and what Wellsβs story ruthlessly exposes β is that rationality is parochial. Itβs not a universal solvent. Itβs a local dialect, a set of practices that evolved within particular cultures, buttressed by particular institutions, serving particular ends. The Enlightenmentβs rationality is Western rationality, Enlightenment rationality, rationality as understood by a specific cadre of 18th-century European men who happened to have the printing press, the political clout, and the colonial apparatus to export their epistemology at gunpoint.
They mistook their own seeing for sight itself. They mistook their own lifeworld for the world. And they built an entire civilisational project on the presumption that everyone else was just a less-developed version of them β prisoners in a cave, blind villagers, savages waiting to be enlightened.
The one-eyed man imagined himself king. He was actually the emissary who forgot to bow.
V. McGilchristβs Neuroscientific Millinery
Iain McGilchrist sits in the same intellectual gravity well as Plato and Wells, only he dresses his thesis up in neuroscientific millinery so contemporary readers donβt bolt for the door. The Master and His Emissary is essentially a 500-page retelling of the same ancient drama: the emissary β our little Enlightenment mascot β becomes so enamoured of his own procedures, abstractions, and tidy schemas that he forgets the Masterβs deeper, embodied, culturally embedded sense-making.
McGilchristβs parable is neurological rather than allegorical, but the structure is identical. The left hemisphere (the emissary) excels at narrow focus, manipulation, abstraction β the sort of thing you need to count coins or parse grammar or build bureaucracies. The right hemisphere (the Master) handles context, pattern recognition, relational understanding β the sort of thing you need to navigate an actual lifeworld where meaning is messy, embodied, and irreducible to procedures.
The emissary is supposed to serve the Master. Left-brain proceduralism is supposed to be a tool deployed within the broader, contextual sense-making of the right brain. But somewhere along the way β roughly around the Enlightenment, McGilchrist suggests β the emissary convinced itself it could run the show. Left-brain rationality declared independence from right-brain contextuality, built an empire of abstraction, and wondered why the world suddenly felt thin, schizophrenic, oddly two-dimensional.
Itβs Erasmus all over again: the presumption that the emissary with one eye should be king. The same tragic misunderstanding of how worlds cohere.
McGilchristβs diagnosis is clinical, but his conclusion is damning. Western modernity, he argues, has become pathologically left-hemisphere dominant. Weβve let analytic thought pretend itβs sovereign. Weβve mistaken our schemas for reality, our maps for territory, our procedures for wisdom. Weβve built cultures that privilege manipulation over meaning, extraction over relationship, clarity over truth. And weβre baffled when these cultures feel alienating, when they produce populations that are anxious, depressed, disenchanted, starved for something they canβt quite name.
The emissary has forgotten the Master entirely. And the Master, McGilchrist suggests, is too polite β or too injured β to stage a coup.
In McGilchristβs frame, culture is the Master. Strategy, reason, Enlightenment rationality β these are the emissaryβs tools. Useful, necessary even, but never meant to govern. The Enlightenmentβs mistake was letting the emissary believe his tools were all there was. Itβs the same delusion NuΓ±ez carries into Wellsβs valley: the belief that sight, reason, superior faculties are enough. That the world will rearrange itself around whoever shows up with the sharper implements.
It wonβt. The valley doesnβt need your eyes. The cave doesnβt want your sun. And the Master doesnβt answer to the emissaryβs paperwork.
VI. The Triumph of Context Over Cleverness
So hereβs what these three β Erasmus, Wells, Plato β triangulate, and what McGilchrist confirms with his neuroscientific gloss: the Enlightenment dream was always a category error.
Reason doesnβt grant sovereignty. Perception doesnβt compel assent. Superior faculties donβt self-authenticate. These things only work β only mean anything, only confer any advantage β within cultures that already recognise and value them. Outside those contexts, theyβre noise. Gibberish. Hallucinations requiring surgical intervention.
The one-eyed man arrives in the land of the blind expecting a kingdom. What he gets is a reminder that kingdoms arenβt built on faculties; theyβre built on consensus. On shared stories, shared practices, shared ways of being-in-the-world. Culture is the bedrock. Reason is just a tool some cultures happen to valorise.
And hereβs the uncomfortable corollary: if reason is parochial, if rationality is just another local dialect, then the Enlightenmentβs grand project β its universalising ambitions, its colonial export of Western epistemology, its presumption that everyone, everywhere, should think like 18th-century European philosophes β was always a kind of imperialism. A metaphysical land-grab dressed up in the language of liberation.
The Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals. It told us the cave was a prison and the valley was backward and anyone who didnβt see the world our way was defective, uncivilised, in need of correction. It never occurred to the Enlightenment that maybe β just maybe β other cultures had their own Masters, their own forms of contextual sense-making, their own ways of navigating the world that didnβt require our light.
Wells understood this. Plato suspected it. McGilchrist diagnoses it. And Erasmus, bless him, never saw it coming.
VII. The Enlightenmentβs Paper Crown
The Enlightenment liked to imagine itself as the adult entering the room, flicking on the light-switch, and announcing that, at long last, the shadows could stop confusing the furniture for metaphysics. This is the kind of confidence you only get when your culture hasnβt yet learned the words for its own blind spots. It built an entire worldview on the hopeful presumption that its preferred modes of knowing werenβt just one way of slicing experience, but the gold standard against which all other sense-making should be judged.
Call it what it is: a provincial dialect masquerading as the universal tongue. A parochial habit dressed in imperial robes. The Enlightenment always smelled faintly of a man who assumes everyone else at the dinner table will be impressed by his Latin quotations. And when they arenβt, he blames the table.
The deeper farce is that Enlightenment rationality actually believed its tools were transferrable. That clarity is clarity everywhere. That if you wheel enough syllogisms into a space, the locals will drop their incense and convert on sight. Wells disabuses us of this; Plato sighs that he tried; McGilchrist clinically confirms the diagnosis. The emissary, armed with maps and measuring sticks, struts into the valley expecting coronation and is shocked β genuinely shocked β to discover that nobody particularly cares for his diagrams.
The Enlightenment mistake wasnβt arrogance (though it had that in liberal supply). It was context-blindness. It thought procedures could substitute for culture. It thought method could replace meaning. It thought mastery was a matter of getting the right answer rather than belonging to the right world.
You can all but hear the emissary stamping his foot.
VIII. The Anti-Enlightenment Position (Such as It Is)
My own stance is drearily simple: I donβt buy the Enlightenmentβs sales pitch. Never have. The promise of universal reason was always a conjuring trick designed to flatter its adherents into thinking that their habits were Natureβs preferences. Once you stop confusing methodological neatness with metaphysical authority, the entire apparatus looks less like a cathedral of light and more like a filing system that got ideas above its station.
The problem isnβt that reason is useless. The problem is that reason imagines itself sovereign. Reason is a brilliant servant, a competent emissary, and an atrocious king. Culture is the king; context is the kingdom. Without those, rationality is just an embarrassed bureaucrat looking for a desk to hide behind.
This is why I keep banging on about language insufficiency, parochial cognition, and the delightful way our concepts disintegrate once you wander too far from the lifeworlds that birthed them. The Enlightenment thought the human mind was a searchlight. Itβs closer to a candle in a draughty hall. You can still get work done with a candle. You just shouldnβt be telling people it can illuminate the universe.
So the anti-Enlightenment move isnβt a call to smash the instruments. Itβs a call to read the room. To stop pretending the emissary is the Master. To stop assuming sight is a passport to sovereignty. To stop wandering into other cultures β other caves, other valleys, other hemispheres β with a ruler and a smirk, convinced youβre about to be crowned.
Underneath these brittle idols lies the far messier truth that cognition is parochial, language insufficient, and βrationalityβ a parlour trick we perform to impress ourselves. Iβm not proposing a new catechism, nor am I pining for some prelapsarian alternative. Iβm simply pointing out that the Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals.
The task, then, is to grow comfortable with the dimness. To navigate by flicker rather than floodlight. To admit that the world was never waiting to be made βclearβ in the first place.
This doesnβt mean abandoning reason. It means remembering that reason is the emissary, not the Master. It means recognising that our schemas are provisional, our maps incomplete, our procedures useful only within the cultures that endorse them. It means learning to bow β to culture, to context, to the irreducible messiness of lifeworlds we donβt fully understand and canβt procedurally master.
The one-eyed man never was king. At best, he was an enthusiastic tourist with a very noisy torch. The sooner he stops shining it into other peopleβs faces, the sooner we can get on with the far more interesting business of navigating a world that never promised to be legible.
Not a kingdom of sight. Just a world where the emissary remembers his place.
Only teasing. It reads as pejorative unless you catch the self-inflicted mockery baked in. This chap Tom has for film what I seem to have for language: an alarming degree of enthusiasm paired with the creeping suspicion that most of civilisation is determined to ruin the very medium we love.
I donβt actually share his fondness for film, mind you. I merely recognise the feral passion. What pulled me into this clip wasnβt cinema but dissection. The language of his breakdown dropped me neatly into my natural habitat.
I seldom watch films, television, or whatever corporate imagination-by-committee is calling itself these days. Besides being an outrageous time-sink, Sturgeonβs Law doesnβt just hold; itβs juiced up as if someone ran it through a cheap VFX plug-in. The decline in visual quality Tom describes feels depressingly familiar.
A similar aesthetic rot crept in during the digital audio shift of the β80s. Vast new possibilities, yes, but a certain grain, a certain breath, went missing. I remember an engineering mate in β84 being asked to record a well-known jazz artist using Sonyβs shiny new digital system. He refused on technical principle, writing a blistering hand-delivered letter explaining why the end result would sound worse. He was right, of course. The label didnβt care, of course. And he walked.
The problem then resembles the problem now. Most people arenβt experiencing media in the environment it was built for. We consume films on phones, tablets, monstrous living-room billboards, or, in my case, a knackered 32-inch monitor. Half the audience barely looks at the screen anyway. They want distraction, not discernment. Some, like Tom β and to a lesser degree, me β actually notice that something in the visual vocabulary has been quietly amputated.
Perhaps thatβs why I avoid the form: the predictability, the shallow craft, the sense that the whole affair is engineered for attention-drifting multitudes rather than people who actually, well, look.
Anyway, the whole point was to share the video. Naturally, I ended up editorialising. I learnt something from it. You might too.
How might the indexicality of Charles Peirce relate to Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity?
Thought Process
This is an interesting philosophical question that connects two different thinkers and concepts. Let me think through this carefully.
Charles Peirce’s indexicality refers to his theory of indexical signs – signs that point to or indicate their objects through a direct, existential connection (like “this,” “here,” “now,” “I”). These are part of his broader semiotics, where he distinguished between icons, indexes, and symbols.
Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity relates to his work on the phenomenology of the self. Strawson distinguishes between “Diachronic” and “Episodic” self-experience. Diachronic individuals experience themselves as continuous over time, with a narrative extending into past and future. Episodic individuals (like Strawson claims to be) experience themselves more in terms of discrete, present-centered episodes, without a strong sense of narrative continuity.
How might these relate?
The indexical “I”: Peirce’s indexicality is crucial for how the “I” functions. The first-person pronoun is paradigmatically indexical – it picks out the speaker/thinker in the moment of utterance. For Strawson’s episodic self, each moment’s “I” might be more purely indexical, pointing to the present subject without necessarily carrying thick narrative continuity.
Temporal indexicals: “Now” is also indexical. Episodic self-experience emphasizes the “now” of experience over temporal extension. The indexical nature of present-tense self-reference might support episodic rather than diachronic self-conception.
Existential connection vs narrative construction: Indexical signs work through direct, causal-existential connection, not through resemblance or convention. Similarly, episodic self-experience might be more immediately indexical (this experience, now) rather than mediated through narrative construction.
This is a sophisticated question that deserves a nuanced response.
Video: “Maintenance” Midjourney render of the cover image for no reason in particular.
As many have been before me, I find metaphysical claims to be incredulous. I read these people tear down edifices, yet they seem to have a habit of replacing one for another β as if renaming it makes it disappear. Perhaps Lacan would be curious how this persists at this stage of our supposed development.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the underlying essay, The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics
Because of this, I performed a survey β and then a genealogy β to trace the history of substitution. It began as a side note in The Discipline of Dis-Integration, but the pattern grew too large to ignore. Every time someone proclaims the end of metaphysics, a new one quietly takes its place. Theology becomes Reason. Reason becomes History. History becomes Structure. Structure becomes Data. The names change; the grammar doesnβt.
This essay, The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics, tracks that recursion. It argues that modern thought has never killed its gods β it has merely rebranded them. Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Harari β each announced emancipation, and each built a new altar. We like to imagine that progress freed us from metaphysics, but what it really did was automate it. The temples are gone, but the servers hum.
The argument unfolds across ten short sections: from the limits of knowing, through the linguistic machinery of belief, to the modern cults of scientism, economics, psychology, and dataism. The closing sections introduce Dis-Integration β not a cure but a posture. Maintenance, not mastery. Thinking without kneeling.
If the Enlightenment promised illumination, weβve spent the past three centuries staring directly into the light and calling it truth. This essay is my attempt to look away long enough to see what the glare has been hiding.
The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics
βThe Enlightenment didnβt free us from superstition; it mechanised it.β We built reason into a machine, called it capitalism, and let it think for us.
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
β Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesnβt kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, itβs not an atrocity β itβs ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented β and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern β social mediaβs endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism β pure, fair, competitive β untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘Thatβs not capitalism, thatβs bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
Β« Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. Β»
Image: Mentioned Meme
Thatβs the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonaldβs.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia β functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. Itβs a comforting fable that erases the costs β colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapseβfolded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘Youβre confused,’ ‘Youβre a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. Itβs a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
Thatβs precisely the blindness the post was about β the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken β just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘Itβs not capitalism; itβs profiteering’.
This is capitalismβs soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isnβt capitalism β itβs people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. Itβs a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalismβs most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few β precious few β saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalismβs violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the βcost optimisationβ logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration β itβs the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isnβt extinct β merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People donβt read β hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic β all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself β automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesnβt scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesnβt just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity β the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage β the economic expression of the Enlightenmentβs original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isnβt that weβve lost meaning. Itβs that weβve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradise⦠end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is βdecencyβ? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. Iβll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in βcost optimizationβ than other businesses. To say that someoneβs chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someoneβs second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with βcapitalismβ. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such βadjustmentsβ to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not βcapitalismβ. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
Youβre a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that donβt work and thatβs where weβre at. Youβre killing the future. Youβre an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and youβll be the one whoβs bitching when youβre on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As Iβve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in todayβs capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Todayβs profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and itβs not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeberβs The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism β where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyiβs The Great Transformation (1944) describes how βself-regulatingβ markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call βreal capitalismβ is, in Polanyiβs terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stieglerβs Technics and Time (1994β2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalismβs algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weberβs early insight into rationalisationβthe conversion of moral action into procedural necessityβreaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembeβs Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendtβs Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed βthe banality of evilβ as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debordβs Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Hanβs In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics β the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzscheβs Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment β a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenmentβs faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of βself-madeβ success functions as capitalismβs moral camouflage β the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernityβs central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the EffectivenessβComplexity Gradient, showing how every human system β political, linguistic, economic β eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly β not construction β is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty β a narrative form of βcost-optimisation ethics.β
Philosophics 