My son sent me this. He knows me. I had just spoken to my ex- about the Ship of Theseus.
Also, I love this short AI video from a LinkedIn connexion.
AI videography is getting much better.
Thomas Meets Theseus
Tag: art
When Language Fails – Abstract
3–4 minutes
I set aside some time to design the front cover of my next book. I’m excited to share this – but that’s always the case. It’s substantially complete. In fact, it sidelined another book, also substantially complete, but the content in this might force me to change the other one. It should be ready for February. I share the current state of the Abstract
This book is meant to be an academic monograph, whilst the other, working title: The Competency Paradox, is more of a polemic.
As I mentioned in another post, it builds upon and reorients the works of George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. I’ve already revised and extended Gallie’s essentially contested concepts in A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis in the form of Contestables, but I lean on them again here.
Abstract
Contemporary moral and political discourse is marked by a peculiar frustration: disputes persist even after factual clarification, legal process, and good-faith argumentation have been exhausted. Competing parties frequently agree on what happened, acknowledge that harm occurred, and yet remain irreconcilably divided over whether justice has been served. This persistence is routinely attributed to misinformation, bad faith, or affective polarisation. Such diagnoses are comforting. They are also often wrong.
This paper advances a different claim. Certain conflicts are not primarily epistemic or semantic in nature, but ontological. They arise from incompatible orientations that structure how agents register salience, threat, authority, autonomy, and legitimacy. These orientations are genealogically shaped through enculturation, institutions, and languaged traditions, yet operationally they function prior to linguistic articulation: salience fires before reasons are narrated. Moral vocabulary enters downstream, tasked with reconciling commitments that were never shared.
From this perspective, the instability of concepts such as justice is not the primary problem but a symptom. Justice belongs to a class of Contestables (in Gallie’s sense, PDF): action-authorising terms that appear determinate while remaining untethered from shared reference under ontological plurality. Appeals to clearer definitions, better process, or shared values therefore misfire. They presume a common ontological ground that does not, in fact, exist.
When institutions are nevertheless required to act, they cannot adjudicate between ontologies. They can only select. Courts, juries, regulatory bodies, and enforcement agencies collapse plural interpretations into a single outcome. That outcome is necessarily experienced as legitimate by those whose orientation it instantiates, and as injustice by those whose orientation it negates. No procedural refinement can eliminate this asymmetry. At best, procedure dampens variance, distributes loss, and increases tolerability.
Crucially, the selection itself is constrained but underdetermined. Even within formal structures, human judgment, discretion, mood, confidence, fear, and narrative framing play a decisive role. Following Keynes, this irreducible contingency may be described as animal spirits. In formal terms, institutional outcomes are sampled from a constrained space of possibilities, but the reaction topology remains structurally predictable regardless of which branch is taken.
The consequence is stark but clarifying: outrage is not evidence that a system has failed to deliver justice; it is evidence that plural ontological orientations have been forced through a single decision point. Where semantic reconciliation is structurally unavailable, exogenous power is the dominant near-term mediator. Power does not resolve the conflict; it pauses it and stabilises meaning sufficiently for coordination to continue.
This analysis does not deny the reality of harm, the importance of law, or the necessity of institutions. Nor does it lapse into nihilism or indifference. Rather, it reframes the problem. In ontologically plural environments, the task is not moral convergence but maintenance: containing collision, resisting premature coherence, and designing institutions that minimise catastrophic failure rather than promising final resolution.
The argument developed here predates any particular event. Its value lies precisely in its predictive capacity. Given plural ontologies, untethered contestables, and institutions that must act, the pattern of reaction is invariant. The surface details change; the structure does not.
What follows is not a proposal for reconciliation. It is a diagnosis of why reconciliation is so often a category error, and why pretending otherwise is making things worse.
Legibility Meets Humanity for Xmas
3–4 minutes
Happy Christmas.
I’m no fan of holidays. I neither enjoy nor celebrate Christmas. I’m acutely aware of its commercial excesses and its religious inheritance, two institutions I find, at best, tiresome and, at worst, actively corrosive. Whether that’s abhorrence or simple loathing is a distinction I’ll leave to braver souls.
Still, calendars exist whether one consents to them or not, and this piece happens to land today. If Christmas is your thing, by all means, have at it. Sincerely. Rituals matter to people, even when their metaphysics don’t survive inspection.
What follows is not a defence of the season, nor a seasonal moral. It’s a small human moment that happens to involve Santa, which is to say a costume, a script, and a public performance. What interests me is not the symbolism, but what happens when the performance yields just enough to allow someone else to be seen on their own terms. If nothing else, that feels like a tolerable use of the day.
What Legibility?
When I use the term legibility, it’s usually as a pejorative. It’s my shorthand for reductionism. For the way human beings are flattened into checkboxes, metrics, market segments, or moral exemplars so they can be processed efficiently by institutions that mistake simplification for understanding.
But legibility isn’t always a vice.
Most of us, I suspect, want to be legible. Just not in the ways we are usually offered. We want to be seen on our own terms, not translated into something more convenient for the viewer. That distinction matters.
In the video above, a deaf child meets Santa. Nothing grand happens. No lesson is announced. No slogan appears in the corner of the screen. Santa simply signs.
The effect is immediate. The child’s posture changes. Her attention sharpens. There’s a visible shift from polite endurance to recognition. She realises, in real time, that she does not need to be adapted for this encounter. The encounter has adapted to her. This is legibility done properly.
Not the synthetic legibility of television advertising, where difference is curated, sanitised, and arranged into a reassuring grid of representation. Not the kind that says, we see you, while carefully controlling what is allowed to be seen. That version of legibility is extraction. It takes difference and renders it harmless. Here, the legibility runs the other way.
Santa, already a performative role if ever there was one, doesn’t stop being performative. The costume remains. The ritual remains. But the performance bends. It accommodates. It listens. The artifice doesn’t collapse; it becomes porous.
I’m wary of words like authenticity. They’ve been overused to the point of meaninglessness. But I do think we recognise performatism when we see it. Not in the technical sense of speech acts, but in the everyday sense of personas that ring hollow, gestures that exist for the camera rather than the people involved. This doesn’t feel like that.
Of course, the child could already connect. Deaf people connect constantly. They persevere. They translate. They accommodate a world that rarely meets them halfway. Nothing here ‘grants’ her humanity. What changes is the tightness of the connexion.
The shared language acts as a verbal proxy, a narrowing of distance. You can see the moment it clicks. He speaks her language. Or rather, he speaks a language that already belongs to her, even if calling it ‘hers’ is technically imprecise. Mother tongue is a slippery phrase. Irony does some of the work here.
The point is not inclusion as spectacle.
It’s recognition without reduction.
Legibility, in this case, doesn’t make her smaller. It makes the interaction larger. And that, inconveniently for our systems and slogans, is what most people have been asking for all along.
Contructivist Lens: Parody Artefact
1–2 minutes
Another faux Magic: The Gathering trading card. I’ve been busy writing an essay on Tatterhood and wondering if I’ve gone off the edge even further into mental masturbation. I made these cards to share on slow news days, as it were.
[EDIT: Oops: Even wore. I already posted something today. Enjoy the bonus post.]
Every philosopher dreams of a device that reveals ‘truth’. The Constructivist Lens does the opposite. When you tap it, the world doesn’t come into focus – it multiplies. Each pane shows the same thing differently, reminding us that knowing is always a form of making – seeing as building.
In The Discipline of Dis-Integration, I wrote that philosophy’s task is ‘to remain within what persists … to study the tension in the threads rather than weave a new pattern’. The Lens embodies that ethic. It is not an instrument of discovery but of disclosure: a way to notice the scaffolding of perception without mistaking it for bedrock.
Flavour text: “Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.” — Richard Rorty
Where Enlightenment optics promised clarity, the Lens trades in parallax. It insists that perspective is not a flaw but the condition of vision itself. Each player who peers through it – artist, scientist, moralist – constructs a different coherence, none final. The card’s rule text captures this tension: replace any keyword on a permanent with a metaphor of your choice until end of turn. Reality bends, language shifts, yet the game continues.
In the Dis-Integration set, the Lens sits alongside Perspectival Realism and Language Game (not yet shared), forming the Blue triad of epistemic doubt. Together they dramatise what the essay calls ‘the hyphen as hinge’: the small pause between integration and its undoing. The Constructivist Lens, then, is not a tool for clearer sight but a reminder that every act of seeing is already an act of construction.
Tatterhood, Makeover Culture, and the Prince Who Earned a Gold Star for Basic Curiosity
3–5 minutes
I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit rummaging through the Jungian undergrowth of fairy tales – reading Marie-Louise von Franz until my eyes crossed, listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estés weave her wolf-women lore, and treating folklore like an archaeological dig through the psychic sediment of Europe. It’s marvellous, really, how much one can project onto a story when one has a doctorate’s worth of enthusiasm and the moral flexibility of a tarot reader.
But every so often, a tale emerges that requires no archetypal lens, no mythopoetic scaffolding, no trip down the collective unconscious. Sometimes a story simply bares its ideological teeth.
Enter Tatterhood – the Norwegian fairy tale so blunt, it practically writes its own critical theory seminar.
I watched Jonny Thomson’s recent video on this tale (embedded below, for those with sufficient tea and patience). Jonny offers a charming reversal: rather than focusing on Tatterhood herself, he offers the moral from the prince’s perspective. In his reading, the story becomes a celebration of the power of asking – the prince’s reward for finally inquiring about the goat, the spoon, the hood, the whole aesthetic calamity before him.
It’s wholesome stuff: a TED Talk dressed as folklore. But – my word – apply the slightest bit of critical pressure, and the whole thing unravels into farce.
The Story No One Tells at the Royal Wedding
Here’s the short version of Tatterhood that Jonny politely sidesteps:
- A fearless, ragged, hyper-competent girl rescues her sister from decapitation.
- She confronts witches, navigates the seas alone, storms a castle, and performs an ad hoc ontological surgical reversal.
- She does all of this without help from the king, the court, the men, or frankly, anyone with a Y chromosome.
And how is she rewarded for her trouble? She’s told she’s too ugly. Not socially acceptable. Not symbolically coherent. Not bride material.
The kingdom gazes upon her goat, her spoon, her hood, her hair, and determines that nothing – nothing – about her qualifies her for legitimacy.
Competence: irrelevant.
Courage: irrelevant.
Loyalty: irrelevant.
But beauty? Beauty is the passport stamp that grants her entry into the social realm.
Jonny’s Prince: A Hero by Low Expectations
Now, bless Jonny for trying to rehabilitate the lad, but this prince is hardly an exemplar of virtue. He sulks through his own wedding procession like a man being marched to compulsory dentistry. He does not speak. He does not ask. He barely manages object permanence.
And suddenly, the moral becomes: Look what wonders unfold when a man asks a single question!
It’s the philosophical equivalent of awarding someone a Nobel Prize for remembering their mother’s birthday.
And what do his questions achieve? Not insight. Not understanding. Not intimacy. But metamorphosis.
Each time he asks, Tatterhood transforms – ugly goat to beautiful horse, wooden spoon to silver fan, ragged hood to golden crown, ‘ugly’ girl to radiant beauty.
Which brings us to the inconvenient truth:
This Isn’t the Power of Asking. It’s the Power of Assimilation.
His questions function as aesthetic checkpoints.
Why the goat?
Translation: please ride something socially acceptable.
Why the spoon?
Translation: replace your tool of agency with a decorative object.
Why the hood?
Translation: cover your unruliness with something properly regal.
Why your face?
Translation: you terrify me; please be beautiful.
And lo, she becomes beautiful. Not because he sees her differently. Because the story cannot tolerate a powerful woman who remains outside the beauty regime.
The prince isn’t rewarded for asking; the narrative is rewarded for restoring normative order.
And Yet… It’s Absurdly Fascinating
This is why fairy tales deserve all the interpretive attention we lavish on them. They’re ideological fossils – compressed narratives containing entire worldviews in miniature.
Part of me admires Jonny’s generosity. Another part of me wants to hand the prince a biscuit for performing the bare minimum of relational curiosity. But mostly, I’m struck by how nakedly the tale reveals the old bargain:
A woman may be bold, brave, clever, loyal, and sovereign – but she will not be accepted until she is beautiful.
Everything else is optional. Beauty is compulsory.
So Here’s My Version of the Moral
Ask questions, yes. Be curious, yes. But don’t let anyone tell you that Tatterhood was waiting for the prince’s epiphany. She was waiting for the world to remember that she ran the plot.
If you’ve made it this far and know my proclivities, you’ll not be shocked that I side with Roland Barthes and cheerfully endorse la mort de l’auteur. Jonny is perfectly entitled to his reading. Interpretive pluralism and all that. I simply find it marvelously puzzling that he strolls past the protagonist galloping through the narrative on a goat, spoon upraised, and instead decides to chase the side-quest of a prince who contributes roughly the energy of a damp sock.
A Key Point of Departure: He Accepts the Folk Psychology I Reject
3–5 minutes
Jason from Philosopher Muse suggested a connexion between Transductive Subjectivity and the work of Stephen Batchelor. I wasn’t familiar with Batchelor, so — as one does these days — I asked a GPT to give me the lay of the land. The machine obliged, and the result was interesting enough that it warranted a post of its own. This is it.
The risk I take is that the GPT gets it wrong. If so, call me out.
Before anyone lights incense: I’m not suddenly a convert. Batchelor’s work and mine merely pass each other on adjacent footpaths. But the overlap is conceptually neat, and the divergence is even more telling.
Stephen Batchelor vs Transductive Subjectivity: A Brief Comparative Note
1. Shared Territory: The Self as Verb, Not Noun
Both Batchelor and Transductive Subjectivity reject the folk notion of a single, continuous metaphysical self.
- Batchelor (Secular Buddhism):
The self is an unfolding activity — impermanent, conditional, and without a stable essence. His “not-self” is a practice of disidentification from the imagined nugget of continuity we cling to. - Transductive Subjectivity:
The self is a finite series: S₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ, each produced through the pressure of relational structures (R). Identity is what results when the world meets the organism. Nothing metaphysical required; just biology, cognition, language, and institutions doing their thing.
Overlap: Both positions dismantle the enduring pearl-of-self. Both frame identity as something generated, not possessed.
2. Divergent Aims: Inner Liberation vs Structural Clarity
This is where the paths fork.
- Batchelor’s Agenda:
Primarily ethical and therapeutic. The point of denying a fixed self is to reduce suffering, ease attachment, and cultivate a more responsive way of being. - TS’s Agenda:
Metaphysical accuracy in the service of ethical clarity. If the self is a serial construction rather than a diachronic monolith, then retributive justice collapses under its own fictions. No self, no desert. No desert, no justification for revenge-based punishment.
Batchelor wants flourishing. I want rigour. Accidental cousins.
3. Methodological Differences: Distillation vs Reconstruction
Batchelor performs what you might call Buddhism sans metaphysics.
A very Western manoeuvre:
- keep impermanence
- keep ethical insight
- jettison karma, rebirth, cosmology
- rebrand the remnants as a secular spiritual practice
Practitioners dislike this because he amputates the structural scaffolding that supported the doctrine.
TS, by contrast, doesn’t distil anything. It reconstructs selfhood from first principles:
- No causa sui
- Episodic, indexical selfhood (Strawson)
- R→S transduction (MEOW)
- No diachronic essence
- No metaphysical ballast
If Buddhism aligns with TS, it’s incidental — the way two different mathematicians can discover the same function by entirely different routes.
4. Conceptual Architecture: Dependent Origination vs MEOW’s Tiers
- Batchelor:
leans on dependent origination as a philosophical metaphor — phenomena arise through conditions. - TS:
models the exact channels of that conditioning via MEOW:
T0 → biological signals
T1 → cognitive architecture
T2 → linguistic formats
T3 → social-technical pressures
Where Batchelor says “everything is contingent,” TS says “yes, and here is the actual machinery.”
5. Different Stakes
- Batchelor: freeing the person from clinging to an imaginary core.
- TS: freeing ethics, law, and social design from pretending that metaphysical core exists.
One is therapeutic; the other is diagnostic.
A Key Point of Departure: Batchelor Works with Folk Psychology; TS Rejects Its Premises
There is one more divergence worth highlighting because it cuts to the bone of the comparison.
Batchelor accepts the phenomenological feel of the continuous self as a legitimate starting point. His work is therapeutic: he begins where the person is, in the lived experience of being “me,” and then encourages a gentle loosening of the grip on that intuition.
Transductive Subjectivity takes a different route entirely.
For TS, the continuous, diachronic self isn’t a psychological obstacle to be softened — it is a category mistake. A narrative compression artefact. A heuristic with pragmatic uses, yes, but no metaphysical legitimacy. Batchelor tries to transform our relation to the folk-self; TS denies that the folk-self was ever more than a convenient fiction.
Batchelor says:
“You seem like a continuous self; now learn to hold that lightly.”
TS says:
“You seem like a continuous self because the system is glossing over discontinuities. The sensation itself is misleading.”
In other words:
- Batchelor redeems the experience.
- TS disassembles the model.
He treats the “self” as something to relate to differently.
TS treats the “self” as an ontological construct to be replaced with a more accurate one.
This is not a difference of ethical aim but of metaphysical foundation.
Batchelor trims the folk psychology; TS declines the invitation altogether.
Closing Note
So yes — the connexion Jason spotted is real. But it’s genealogical, not derivative. We arrive at similar conclusions for different reasons and with different consequences.
Batchelor is pruning a tradition.
Transductive Subjectivity is rebuilding the ontology.
And both, in their own way, make the continuity-self look like the rhetorical placeholder it always was.
Seeing Red – Or, How the Enlightenment Got Colour-Blind
6–9 minutes
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.
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.
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 – esse est percipi – 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 – 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 – 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 – the assumption of two separately-existing somethings that subsequently relate.
MEOW – yes, we’re calling it that – puts it bluntly:
The problem isn’t where colour is. The problem is assuming it has to be in something – mind or world – 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 (T₀–T₃)
A Ridiculously Oversimplified Cheat-Sheet That Still Outperforms Most Metaphysics Syllabi
T₀ – Biological Mediation
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 – 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.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
Prediction and Inference: You See What You Expect (Until Constraint Smacks You)
Your cognitive system doesn’t ‘receive’ colour information – 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.
T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual 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 – constraint patterns stable across cultures.
Roberson et al. gave us the Himba data – 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.
T₃ – Cultural–Normative 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 – even when staring at the same patch of light.
Cultural mediation doesn’t rewrite biology; it reorganises priorities, salience, and interpretive readiness.
What Seeing Red Actually Involves (Step By Exhausting Step)
You walk into a room. Apple on table. Looks red. What just happened?
T₀ – Biological: Long wavelength light hits L-cones harder than M- and S-cones. Opponent channels compute (L−M). Adaptation shifts baseline. Edge detection fires. You don’t have ‘red’ yet – you have transformed photoreceptor output.
T₁ – 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’.
T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual: 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.
T₃ – Cultural–Normative: 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 – 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 – 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.
Editing Is Hard and Propensity
2–3 minutes
Well, not so much hard as not particularly or inherently enjoyable.
I estimate I’ve got about a day left to complete this manuscript – ‘done’ done. When I open InDesign, it shames me – 3 days ago, I last touched this document. It doesn’t feel like 3 days have passed, but time flies.
On the right is an older version. I began reworking it into this new version over the summer, and here I am come autumn. It’s even worse if I use the Chinese calendar. Evidently, 7th November is the first day of winter. They can’t wait until soltace.
Anyway, just a brief update. This isn’t going to edit itself, and I can’t afford to pay an editor for a passion project. Besides – and let’s be honest – I can’t afford an editor in general – or at least can’t cost-justify it – and all my writing is a passion project.
Of course, editors (and cover artists) insist that one would sell more book if only they were edited or professionally rendered. There is an element of truth to this, but I’ve read some gawdawful books that were professionally edited and published through a traditional publisher, because publishers publish.
Me, I operate on razor-thin margins. Most of my publications haven’t even broken even – even if I ignore opportunity costs, which I can’t because I’m an economist. Accountants get to play that trick.
This said, I do hire reviewers, editors, and artists in small doses – homoeopathic as they might be – and I’ve had mixed results.
I’m rambling
Must really be avoiding the editing process…
Recently, I wanted to redesign the cover of one of my Ridley Park fiction books.
The cover on the left is the original. It is intentionally a minimal 2-D construction – a representation of the first section of the book, the first 15 chapters.
The cover on the right is the update. It is also minimalist, representing the second section of Propensity. I’m not sure how I would depict the third section. If it comes to me, I may render a third version.
There’s a story to this. I reached out to some cover artists and told them I was unhappy with my original design but had no visual ideas. I’d leave this to the artist. It turns out that some artists don’t want full control over the design process. I can understand the hesitation.
They asked for covers that I might like, so I researched some covers and saved them to a Pinterest board.
As it turned out, after some inspiration, I decided to render this one myself, too. Hey, I tried.
What happened to the rest of the time?
OK, so there’s more. I also created a video book trailer in the evening.
It was fun enough. Give it a watch. It also represents part one of Propensity.
OK, this time for real. Let me know what you think…about anything in particular.
Propensity for Simulacra, An Excerpt
1–2 minutes
Man starts over again every day,
in spite of all he knows,
against all he knows.
— Emil Cioran
I posted Chapter 26 of my novella, Propensity. I share it here because it invokes Baudrillard’s Simulacra.
Consider it an advert – and a window into Propensity.
The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?
No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
Editorial Review
“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.
—Reedsy Discovery Review
Meantime, give it a listen.
The Sane Society, Revisited: Why Work Still Drives Us Mad
4–6 minutes
Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society turns seventy this year, and like a ghost of reason past, it refuses to leave. His target was Capitalism™ – not merely as an economic system, but as a psychic infection. Replace the word factory with Zoom call, and his diagnosis reads like yesterday’s corporate newsletter. We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana
Aside from its psychobabble, The Sane Society, published in 1954, reads almost like it could have been written in 2024. I’d go out on a limb and claim it will still be relevant in 2054 – because Capitalism™ and the relationship it creates between humans and machines, and humans and other humans. It’s a divisive ideology. I’ve read a lot of content on employee engagement in the past decade. I’d been exposed to it in my Organisational Behaviour courses in the late ’80s. Things were going to change. We’d plotted a future.
Only nothing material has changed. We pretended to notice the problem and fix it, but the people reporting the issue and the people in charge did not share a worldview. And the young managers who were taught about the challenge were either not promoted or changed their tune to facilitate their own promotion. Funny how the selection process favours groupthink over diversity of opinion.
On balance, most people tend to hate or be otherwise dissatisfied with their jobs. This is nothing new. It was true before Fromm’s book, and it is true now. I published a series of posts on prostitution in 2018 and discovered that escorts had better job satisfaction than the larger population. Let that sink in.
‘…the vast majority of the population work as employees with little skill required, and with almost no chance to develop any particular talents, or to show any outstanding achievements. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part of their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed.
‘Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. But the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensations for his inner vacuity, not because these desires are the “natural” or most important incentives for work.‘
Fromm, ever the optimist, thought alienation might be cured through self-awareness and communal values. The twentieth century politely ignored him, opting instead for mindfulness apps and performance reviews.
We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
I’ve excised the psychobabble, but he continues…
‘But even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and enjoyment of their job was expressed by 85 per cent of the professionals and executives, by 64 per cent of whitecollar people, and by 41 per cent of the factory workers. In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 per cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per cent of the commercial employees, 56 per cent of the skilled, and 48 per cent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction.
‘We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfied—among the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 per cent of “satisfied” professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied persons who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate.
‘As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illnesses are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 per cent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment.’
In the twenty-first century, job dissatisfaction has increased even more. To me, it’s interesting to consider how many people harken back to the ‘good old days’, yet there is little evidence to support the view. Almost schizophrenically, others look to the promise of the future and technology, yet this is simply another narrative with no basis in fact.
The irony is that we’ve automated everything except fulfilment. Even our dissatisfaction has become efficient – streamlined, quantified, and monetised. Fromm warned that the sickness of society was its sanity. On that front, we’re positively thriving.
Stand by for more sanity to follow…
Philosophics 