Tag: Anti-Enlightenment

Care Without Conquest: Feminist Lessons for the Workaday Philosopher

Posted in identity, language, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–4 minutes

I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed – perhaps too lightly – against my debt to feminist philosophy. It’s time to acknowledge that debt more directly and explain how it spills into the mundane greasework of daily life.

[Scroll to the bottom to see Midjourney’s take on feminists. You won’t be surprised.]

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose

I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but let’s name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects – your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults – I owe much to the feminist philosophers – Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again – and, while we’re at it, the post-colonialists, whose names I’ll not recite for fear of being pompous. Their shared heresy is a suspicion of universals. They expose the myth of neutrality, whether it parades as Reason, Progress, or Civilisation. They remind us that every “universal” is merely someone’s local story told loud enough to drown out the others.

This isn’t a matter of sex or gender, though that’s how the names have been filed. The core lesson is epistemic, not biological. Feminist philosophy re-centres care, interdependence, and the politics of maintenance, not as sentimental virtues but as systems logic. The post-colonialists do the same at a geopolitical scale: maintenance instead of conquest, relation instead of domination.

On Gender, Behaviour, and the Lazy Binary

I don’t buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isn’t people; it’s the linguistic furniture we inherited.

I’m weary of the moral blackmail that calls it misogyny not to vote for a woman, or racism not to vote for a black candidate. These accusations come, paradoxically, from sexists and racists who reduce people to the colour of their skin or the contents of their underwear. Having a vagina doesn’t make one a caretaker; having a penis doesn’t preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.

When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, it’s not because they’re women. It’s because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the player’s gender doesn’t change the rules.

Maintenance as Political Praxis

My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether – the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance I’ve written about, and the philosophy of Dis-Integration I keep harping on, both gesture toward an alternative mode of being: one that prizes endurance over expansion, care over conquest.

This isn’t new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they weren’t shouting in Latin or running empires. I’m merely repackaging and re-contextualising, hoping that bundling these neglected insights together might make them audible again.

Knowledge never comes in a vacuum; it circulates. It leaks, cross-pollinates, mutates. To claim “intellectual property” over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. I’ll spare you the full rant, but suffice it to say that the moment knowledge becomes proprietary, it ceases to breathe.

Conclusion

If I have a creed – and I say this reluctantly – it’s that philosophy should serve as maintenance, not monument-building. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers model that: constant attention, critical care, resistance to the entropy of domination.

I’m just trying to keep the engine running without pretending it’s divine.

Bonus

Image: Feminists, according to Midjourney 7
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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose

Posted in identity, modernism, morality, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–4 minutes

Telos is humanity’s most persistent delusion – the idea that existence is crawling toward some luminous conclusion. From Aristotle’s perfect forms to Nietzsche’s Will to Power to Silicon Valley’s AI salvation, the story barely changes: history, we are told, has direction. But direction is not destiny; it is momentum misinterpreted as meaning. Much of my Anti-Enlightenment attention – and my drive toward Dis-Integration – centres on this notion.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Progress is the Enlightenment’s secular gospel. Its promise – that every change is improvement – keeps the engine of exploitation humming. But change is inevitable; progress is propaganda. The arrow of time doesn’t point toward justice or enlightenment; it just points forward, indifferent to who’s crushed under it.

The Myth of Self-Correcting Systems

We are taught to place faith in systems: markets, democracies, algorithms. If they falter, it’s because of bad actors, not bad architecture. Replace the managers, swap the politicians, tweak the code. But the rot is structural, not moral.

These systems aren’t misfiring; they’re functioning exactly as designed – to preserve their own inertia while leaking meaning, resources, and compassion. The obsession with fixing individuals while sparing the machine is moral sleight of hand. At some point, tightening bolts on a burning engine becomes absurd. What we need is not a tune-up but a renovation.

This is where the philosophy of care and maintenance enters – not as sentimental housekeeping, but as radical engineering. Care is not complacent; it’s insurgent. It means facing the filth under the hood and admitting that the design itself is faulty.

Feminism and the Forgotten Labour of Repair

For centuries, the labour of care has been feminised, dismissed, and exploited – a quiet background hum while men congratulated themselves for building civilisation. Yet it is care, not conquest, that prevents collapse.

Philosophical feminists like Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and María Puig de la Bellacasa saw this long before innovation culture learned to rebrand it as sustainability. They argued that ethical life is not about fulfilment or growth but about tending to fragile systems, material and social. Their revolution is not cosmic; it’s custodial.

The so-called masculine ethos – endless expansion, disruption, will to power – has delivered us burnout disguised as achievement. Its gods are metrics, its sacraments quarterly reports, its apocalypse deferred until after the IPO.

The Maintenance Ethic

Abandon the myth of natural or supernatural telos, and what remains is the duty of upkeep: a civic, psychological, and planetary responsibility. Maintenance is not stagnation; it’s resistance to decay through conscious intervention. It recognises that the world does not move toward betterment but toward breakdown – and that care is the only counter-force we possess.

Progress, as we’ve sold it, is the fever dream of a species mistaking acceleration for evolution. Maintenance is what happens when the dream fades and the mechanic steps in with a wrench.

Societies and cultures are constructs. As with twelve-step programmes, once we recognise this, we can move on to the next step. This is a notion of progress I can endorse: not the myth of inevitable improvement, but the humble acknowledgement that we built these machines and we can rebuild them differently.

The Workshop, Not the Temple

Civilisation doesn’t need another prophet or disruptor. It needs a caretaker with dirty hands. Meaning is not discovered; it is serviced. Systems are not sacred; they are rebuilt.

We can keep worshipping progress and watch the engine seize again, or we can accept the more humbling task of renovation – not of souls or nations, but of the machinery we ourselves assembled. The future, if it exists, will not be a miracle of purpose but a triumph of maintenance.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Prison of Process

Posted in maths, philosophy, podcast, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
3–4 minutes

This is the proof copy of The Illusion of Light. I reviewed it, approved it, and signalled ‘good to go’. This is being printed and distributed through KDP. I’ve used them before. They’ve been reliable.

EDIT: On the upside, I’ve been notified that the hardback version is available, but it doesn’t appear to be available in France and Canada, two target regions. Hopefully, it becomes available outside of the U.S. soon.

EDIT : J’ai été informé que la version reliée est désormais disponible. Malheureusement, elle ne semble pas encore l’être en France ni au Canada, les deux régions que je visais en priorité. Espérons qu’elle franchira bientôt les frontières du système et sera distribuée ailleurs qu’aux États-Unis.

International marketplaces. It takes 3-5 business days for your hardcover to show as in stock.

Until now.

My approval triggered a workflow. I know workflows. I used to design them. I also know how dumb they can be.

KDP’s process flagged an error: the text on the spine might not be on the spine. ‘Might’. Theoretically. It could be offset, cut off, or printed on a fold. I understand their reasoning – high-speed printers, mechanical variance, and return risk. I also understand statistics, and a single observation doesn’t make a trend. But anyone with eyes can see at least a couple of millimetres of clearance at the top and bottom. This isn’t a case of ‘maybe’. It’s fine.

What fascinates me here is the ritual of compliance. Once a process is codified, it becomes self-justifying. The rule exists; therefore, it must be obeyed. There is no appeal to reason – only to the flowchart.

In the 1980s, when I was an audio engineer recording to two-inch magnetic tape, some of us liked to record hot, pushing the levels just past the recommended limits. You learned to ride the edge, to court distortion without collapse. That’s how I designed the spine text. Within tolerance. With headroom.

The problem is that modern systems don’t tolerate edges. There’s no “override” button for informed judgment. My remediation path is to shrink the type by half a point, resubmit, and pretend the machine was right.

What’s absurd is the timing. The same system that generated the proof approved this layout days ago. An automated OCR scan could have caught this phantom error earlier. Instead, the machine waits until the human signs off, then throws a flag so the process can justify its existence.

KDP is still faster and saner than IngramSpark. But this is capitalism distilled: survival by being marginally less incompetent than your competitor. Optimisation, not in the sense of best possible, but of barely better than worst acceptable.

The lesson, as always, is that processes begin as aids and end as prisons. The workflow, like the Enlightenment, believes itself rational. But the longer it runs, the less it serves the human at the console and the more it worships its own perfection.

Want to talk about meta? This underscores the contents of the book itself. What the Enlightenment once called Reason, modernity now calls Process. Both pretend to neutral objectivity while enshrining obedience as virtue. The bureaucracy of light has become digital – its catechism written in checkboxes, its priests replaced by automated validators. Every workflow promises fairness; each only codifies submission. The real danger isn’t that machines will replace judgment, but that we will stop noticing when they already have.

The Story Continues: Behind the Scenes

Image: Screenshot of Illustrator layout

I’ve reduced the font size on the spine from 14 points to 13.5. It still technically bleeds over a guideline. I hope I am not forced to reduce it to 13. A reason for text on the spine is to make it visible. Hopefully, the black-and-white vertical separation will help in this regard. Fingers crossed.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Sane Delusion: Fromm, Beauvoir, and the Cult of Mid-Century Liberation

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2–4 minutes

It’s almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernism’s last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido – good heavens – was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Fromm beams:

“In the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.”

The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.

Fromm’s optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.

“After the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.”

Ah yes, the Jazz Age orgy of liberation – champagne, Freud, and flapper hemlines. The problem, of course, is that every generation mistakes its new neuroses for freedom from the old ones. Fromm’s “sexual revolution” was barely a shuffle in the bourgeois bedroom; Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe arrived the next year, practically shouting across the café table that liberation was still a myth stitched into the same old corset.

Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society – as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.

Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasn’t something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it – half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Fromm’s optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.

The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.

So yes, Fromm’s Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith – this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldn’t see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.

Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Fromm’s dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.

And yet, perhaps it’s precisely that naivety that’s worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion – before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.

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Written by Bry Willis

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L’Illusion de la lumière

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1–2 minutes

Un court message aujourd’hui.

Je travaille à la traduction de The Illusion of Light : Thinking After the Enlightenment (L’Illusion de la lumière : Penser après les Lumières) en français, avec l’aide de quelques outils linguistiques et d’un peu d’intelligence artificielle. J’ai bon espoir que le processus sera fructueux. Souhaitez-moi bonne chance.

Je dois beaucoup aux penseurs français, d’hier comme d’aujourd’hui. Traduire ce texte est donc, à ma manière, une forme de reconnaissance. Mon plus grand défi sera de préserver un français à la fois contemporain et fidèle à ma voix – moins prosaïque que poétique.
Mes excuses d’avance aux Québécois.

Image: “We have confused the act of exposure with the act of understanding.”

In English, I am translating The Illusion of Light into French, so I’m leaving just this short note today.

I don’t know any other languages well enough to attempt a translation myself, but with a few capable software partners, I’m confident the process will end well.

For the record, I’m using these tools:

  • Reverso — I’ve used it for years and still find it helpful. It provides plenty of contextual examples, which helps ensure I’ve captured the right nuance.
  • ChatGPT — My go-to AI partner; it gets the second pass.
  • Claude — I’m consistently impressed with its suggested amendments. Where Reverso is precise, Claude tends to catch idiomatic usage better.
  • Mistral — It’s French, after all. What can I say? A bit pedantic, perhaps, but another set of virtual eyes can’t hurt—can they?

Whilst I’m sure these tools could manage other languages, I want to be able to evaluate what they’re doing. In French, even if I don’t know a particular word, I can verify it, and I understand the grammar. With other languages, I’d simply be trusting a black box.

Besides, French culture and philosophy have influenced me so deeply that the least I can do is offer something back. As this translation is an overview of my English-language essays, I hope it provides some in-language context.

I know how difficult translated works can be to read, so if I’m overseeing the process, at least there’s one fewer filter between my thoughts and the reader.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Film or the Strip? On Freud, Strawson, and the Fiction of Normal Selves

Posted in fiction, identity, language, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Are you a single, solid self – or a collection of selves stitched together?

🎉 200th Philosophics Post in 2025! 🥳
(889 lifetime; over 550,000 words)

Rather than present a dedicated announcement post, I’ll slip the news into a typical post.

Most of us are trained to answer without pause: of course, we are one continuous person. That’s the diachronic instinct – to live life as if it were a seamless film, each day a frame gliding into the next. But not everyone experiences it this way. Some notice the splice. They see the strip: individual frames, each complete in its moment, connected not by essence but by the projector’s hum.

Neither perspective is more real. The film and the strip are two ways of attending to the same apparatus. Yet modern psychology has tended to privilege the film, treating the diachronic self as the “normal” mode, and casting those who live episodically as deviant, deficient, or disordered.

Freud himself warned against this simplification. The “normal ego,” he admitted, is an ideal fiction – a statistical average that no individual actually matches. Every psyche, he observed, splinters somewhere. Normality is arithmetic, not essence. That was the father of psychology speaking, and yet the discipline went on as if he hadn’t. Granite was more comforting than scaffolding.

Philosopher Galen Strawson takes Freud’s candour further. He names himself an episodic: he does not experience his life as one continuous narrative. Yesterday’s “I” is not today’s. His identity is indexed – I⁰, I¹, I² – each momentary, heuristically connected but not naturally fused. Where most people see the movie, Strawson insists on acknowledging the strip. Not abnormal, not broken – just candid.

Psychology responds by pathologising him. Statistically rare becomes synonymous with “abnormal,” a mistake Freud had already flagged. But rarity does not equal falsity. Left-handedness was once a pathology; now it is simply another way of being. If some live as films and others as strips, then the “solid self” is not a human universal but a cultural preference, enforced as truth.

This is where Foucault sharpens the diagnosis. Normality, he argued, is not discovery but power. Institutions prefer diachronic citizens. A continuous self can be counted, educated, employed, prosecuted, or taxed. Episodics slip the net. Easier, then, to declare them “abnormal” and protect the fiction of solidity.

But the projector hums either way. Film or strip, both selves are lived. Neither is marble; both are scaffolding. Pretending otherwise does not make continuity more real. It only makes the creak harder to hear.

Full Disclosure: This post was written weeks ago whilst I was working on some fiction, but since it was ready to go, I figured I would use it for this milestone.

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Positive Disintegration

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1–2 minutes

It’s remarkable what surfaces when one lingers deliberately in a given space. In this case, Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration has drifted into view.

As often happens, we find agreement in the opening movement and parts of the second, but part company in Act III. That’s where Dis-Integration begins. Like many before and after him, Dąbrowski tries to reconstruct atop a compromised foundation. This can only fail. The scaffolding may hold for a time, but reality has a way of reminding us it was never load-bearing. Eventually, the quake comes, and the structure folds in on itself.

Japan, of course, knows this. Earthquakes are not hypothetical there; they are assumed. Traditional builders worked with the instability, designing dwellings that could flex, even collapse, without killing their inhabitants. James Clavell’s Shōgun is not scripture, but it captures the principle: impermanence as an architectural ethic.

Image: Shirakawa-go by Colette English

Then there’s kintsugi – the gold-laced repair of broken pottery. The break is not erased but acknowledged, even exalted. The resulting vessel bears the evidence of its fracture, made stronger not by restoration to an imagined wholeness but by visible accommodation of its failure.

Image: 金継ぎ, [kʲint͡sɯɡʲi], lit. ’golden joinery‘

If Dąbrowski had stopped there – if his ‘positive disintegration’ had remained a celebration of fracture rather than a prelude to rebuilding – we might have been entirely aligned.

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Book Announcement: Illusion of Light

Posted in fiction, identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve just released a new book, The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment, now available in paperback through KDP and distributed via Amazon. In November, a clothbound edition will follow through IngramSpark, extending availability to libraries and independent bookstores worldwide, including Barnes & Noble in the United States.

The Illusion of Light introduces the Anti-Enlightenment Essays series, which includes Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together, these works explore how the Enlightenment’s promise of illumination became the architecture of modern control – and how to think, live, and care in the half-light it left behind.

Image: Front cover of The Illusion of Light. Links to Amazon for purchase.
The ‘Free Preview’ claim is untrue, as there is no Kindle version available. An ebook will be available presently.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

About the Book

The Illusion of Light opens where the Enlightenment’s glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself – after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernity’s metaphors of light and progress became instruments of management: how objectivity hardened into ritual, agency into alibi, normality into control.

Rather than rejecting the Enlightenment outright, the book lingers in its afterimage. It argues for a philosophy practiced in the half-light – a mode of thought that values nuance over certainty, care over mastery, and maintenance over redemption. To read by residual light, as the preface suggests, is to learn to see again when the world stops pretending to be illuminated.

The preface is available on this prior post, written and audio versions.

The Broader Project

The Illusion of Light forms the threshold of the Anti-Enlightenment Project, a series examining the afterlives of modern reason – how its ideals of progress, agency, objectivity, and normality continue to govern our politics, sciences, and selves long after their foundations have cracked. Each volume approaches the same question from a different room in the old House of Reason: Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration.

Taken together, they offer not a manifesto but a practice: philosophy as maintenance work, care as critique, and composure as the only honest response to the ruins of certainty. More to follow.

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Baudrillard in Latex: Why The Matrix Was Right About Everything Except Freedom

Posted in agency, fiction, free will, identity, intelligence, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, power, psychology, reality, science, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

In the late 1990s, the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix – Keanu Reeves as Neo, the Chosen One™, a man so bland he could be anyone, which was the point. Once he realised he was living inside a simulation, he learned to bend its laws, to dodge bullets in slow motion and see the code behind the curtain. Enlightenment, Hollywood-style.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

But here’s the twist, the film itself couldn’t stomach: realising the simulation doesn’t free you from it.

Knowing that race and gender are social constructs doesn’t erase their architecture. Knowing that our economies, legal systems, and so-called democracies are fictions doesn’t get us out of paying taxes or playing our assigned roles. “The social contract” is a collective hallucination we agreed to before birth. That and a dollar still won’t buy you a cup of coffee.

Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation the film name-dropped like a trophy, argued that simulation doesn’t hide reality – it replaces it. When representation becomes indistinguishable from the thing it represents, truth evaporates, leaving only consensus. We don’t live in a system of power; we live in its performance.

The Matrix got the metaphor half right. It imagined the bars of our cage as a digital dream – glossy, computable, escapable. But our chains are older and subtler. Rousseau called them “social”, Foucault diagnosed them as “biopolitical”, and the rest of us just call them “normal”. Power doesn’t need to plug wires into your skull; it only needs to convince you that the socket is already there.

You can know it’s all a fiction. You can quote Derrida over your morning espresso and tweet about the collapse of epistemic certainty. It won’t change the fact that you still have rent to pay, laws to obey, and identities to perform. Awareness isn’t liberation; it’s just higher-resolution despair with better UX.

Neo woke up to a ruined Earth and thought he’d escaped. He hadn’t. He’d only levelled up to the next simulation – the one called “reality”. The rest of us are still here, dutifully maintaining the system, typing in our passwords, and calling it freedom.

NB: Don’t get me wrong. I loved The Matrix when it came out. I still have fond memories. It redefined action films at the time. I loved the Zen messaging, but better mental acuity doesn’t grant you a pass out of the system.

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Post Everything: Notes on Prefix Fatigue

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3–4 minutes

I’m no fan of labels, yet I accumulate them like a cheap suit:

Post-modern. Post-human. Post-enlightenment.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Apparently, I’m so far post that I may soon loop back into prehistoric.

But what’s with the “post” in post? A prefix with delusions of grandeur. A small syllable that believes it can close an epoch. Surely, it’s a declaration – the end of modernity, humanity, enlightenment. The final curtain, with the stagehands already sweeping the Enlightenment’s broken props into the wings.

Sort of. More like the hangover. Post marks the morning after – when the wine’s gone, the ideals have curdled, and the party’s guests insist they had a marvellous time. It’s not the end of the thing, merely the end of believing in it.

Have we ever been modern? Latour asked the same question, though most readers nodded sagely and went back to their iPhones. Modernity was supposed to liberate us from superstition, hierarchy, and bad lighting. Instead, we built glass temples for algorithms and called it progress. We’re not post-modern – we’re meta-medieval, complete with priestly influencers and algorithmic indulgences.

Can a human even be post-human? Only if the machines have the decency to notice. We talk about transcending biology while still incapable of transcending breakfast. We’ve built silicon mirrors and called them salvation, though what stares back is just the same old hunger – quantised, gamified, and monetised.

And post-enlightenment – how does that work? The light didn’t go out; it just got privatised. The Enlightenment’s sun still shines, but now you need a subscription to bask in it. Its universal reason has become a paywalled blog with “premium truth” for discerning subscribers.

The tragedy of post is that it always flatters the speaker. To call oneself post-anything is to smuggle in the claim of awareness: I have seen through the illusion; I am after it. Yet here I am, a serial offender, parading my prefixes like medals for wars never fought.

So, what other posts might I be missing?

  • Post-truth. The phrase itself a confession that truth was a brief, ill-fated experiment. We don’t reject it so much as outsource it.
  • Post-ideological. Usually said by someone with a very loud ideology and a very short memory.
  • Post-colonial. A hopeful label, but the empires still collect rent—digitally, algorithmically, politely.
  • Post-gender. Another mirage: we declared the binary dead and then resurrected it for sport.
  • Post-capitalist. Spoken mostly by people tweeting from iPhones about the end of money.
  • Post-ironic. The point where irony becomes sincerity again out of sheer exhaustion.

We could go on: post-religious, post-political, post-work, post-language, post-reality. Eventually, we’ll arrive at post-post, the Möbius strip of intellectual despair, where each prefix feeds upon the previous until nothing remains but the syntax of self-importance.

Perhaps it’s time to drop the “post” altogether and admit we’re not beyond anything. We’re stuck within—inside the compost heap of our own unfinished projects. Every “post” is a failed obituary. The modern keeps dying but refuses to stay dead, haunting us through progress reports and TED talks.

Maybe what we need isn’t post but inter: inter-modern, inter-human, inter-light—something that acknowledges the mess of entanglement rather than the fantasy of departure.

Because if there’s one thing the “post” reveals, it’s our pathological need for closure. We crave the comfort of endings, the illusion of progress, the satisfaction of having “moved on.” But culture doesn’t move on; it metastasises. The prefix is just morphine for the modern condition—a linguistic palliative to ease the pain of continuity.

So yes, I’m guilty. I’ve worn these risible labels. I’ve brandished post like a scholar’s rosary, invoking it to ward off the naïveté of belief. Yet beneath the cynicism lies a quiet longing—for an actual after, for the possibility that one day something might really end, leaving room for whatever comes next.

Until then, we keep prefixing the apocalypse, hoping to stay ahead of it by one small syllable.

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by Bry Willis

Philosophics