Tag: Baudrillard

Philosophic Influences

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I just finished the writing and editorial parts of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. It still needs cover art and some administrative odds and ends, but I’m taking a day for a breather to share something about myself and my worldview. For this, I share my philosophical influences and how they support my core insights. For dramatic effect, I’ll even try to weight them to 100 per cent, leaving an ‘others’ bucket for the unaccounted ones.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Obviously, this highly scientific accounting is about as useful as a Facebook survey or a fortune cookie, but it should reveal something. I have influences outside of philosophy, but I’ll limit this list at the start. The numbers don’t exactly add to 100% because there is a bit of cross-pollination, say, between Foucault and Nietzsche or Žižek and Hegel – or perhaps I’m just not good at maths. You decide.

Nietzsche (≈18)

Nietzsche is likely the uranium core. Haters and detractors like to diminish his contribution – and he didn’t play by the old rules – but they are wrong. He contributes value-creation, anti-moralism, perspectivism, the critique of ressentiment, the demolition of universals.

Nietzsche sits at the centre of the blast radius. Everything else is shrapnel. If there’s a thinker who detonated the Enlightenment’s pretensions more elegantly, I’ve not met them. He showed us that values are forged, not found; that morality is a genealogy of grievances; that certainty is the last refuge of the timid. In other words, he cleared the ground so the rest of us could get to work without tripping over Kantian furniture. But after Nietzsche’s uranium core, the next concentric ring becomes murkier.

Foucault (≈20%)

Foucault supplies the schematics. Where Nietzsche swung a hammer at the idols, Foucault identified the building codes. He mapped power as a set of subtle, everyday enchantments. He showed how ‘knowledge’ is simply what a society rewards with credibility. He is the patron saint of anyone who suspects normality is an instrument, not a neutral state of affairs. The world looks different once you see the disciplinary fingerprints on everything.

Derrida (≈10%)

Derrida gives me language as mischief. Meaning wobbles, slides, cracks; binaries betray themselves; every conceptual edifice contains its own trapdoor. Derrida isn’t a system; he’s an escape artist. And frankly, you can’t write anything about the insufficiency of language without genuflecting in his general direction.

Late Wittgenstein (≈15%)

The quiet structural pillar. If Derrida is the saboteur, Wittgenstein is the carpenter who informs you that the house was never stable anyway. Meaning-as-use, language-games, the dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems: his later work underwrites virtually every modern suspicion about fixed categories and timeless essences. He doesn’t shout; he shrugs – and everything collapses neatly.

Rorty (≈5%)

Rorty replaces metaphysical longing with cultural pragmatism. He teaches you to stop hunting for capital-T Truth and instead track the vocabularies we actually live in. He’s the friendly voice whispering, ‘You don’t need foundations. You need better conversations’. His influence is felt mostly in the tone of my epistemic cynicism: relaxed rather than tragic. Besides, we disagree on the better conversations bit.

Geuss (≈4%)

If Rorty makes you light-footed, Geuss reminds you not to float off into abstraction entirely. He is the critic of moralism par excellence, the man who drags philosophy kicking and screaming back into politics. Geuss is the voice that asks, ‘Yes, but who benefits?’ A worldview without him would be a soufflé.

Heidegger (≈6%)

Selective extraction only. Being-in-the-world, thrownness, worldhood – the existential scaffolding. His political judgment was catastrophic, of course, but the ontological move away from detached subjectivity remains invaluable. He gives the metaphysics a certain grain.

Existentialists: Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus (≈6%)

They provide the atmospheric weather: choice, finitude, absurdity, revolt, the sheer mess of human freedom. They don’t define the system; they give it blood pressure. Besides, I met them before I switched to Team Nietzsche-Foucault.

Žižek, Latour, Baudrillard (≈2% combined)

These three are my licensed provocateurs.

  • Žižek exposes how ideology infiltrates desire.
  • Latour dismantles the Nature/Society binary with glee.
  • Baudrillard whispers that representation ate reality while we were looking at our phones.

They’re trickster figures, not architects.

Hume, Putnam, Dennett, and the Ancillaries (≈1% combined)

These are the seasonings.

  • Hume is the Scottish acid bath under every epistemic claim.
  • Putnam gives internal realism its analytic passport.
  • Dennett offers mechanistic metaphors you can steal even when you disagree.
  • Kant and Hegel hover like compulsory ghosts.
  • Rawls remains decorative parsley: included for completeness, consumed by none.

The Others Bucket (≈5%)

The unallocated mass: writers, anthropologists, theorists, stray thinkers you absorb without noticing. The ‘residuals’ category for the philosophical inventory – the bit fortune cookies never warn you about.

Enfin

Obviously, these ratios are more for humour than substance, but these are the thinkers I return to — the ones whose fingerprints I keep discovering on my own pages, no matter how many years or detours intervene.

Perhaps more revealing are those who didn’t make the guest list. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle remain outside, smoking in the cold. The Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and his well-meaning self-help descendants, also failed to RSVP. In truth, I admire the posture but have little patience for the consolations – especially when they become the emotional training wheels of neoliberalism.

And then, of course, the Enlightenment patriarchs: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and the rest of the constitutional furniture. I acknowledge their historical necessity the way one acknowledges plumbing – grateful it exists, uninterested in climbing inside the pipes. Rousseau, admittedly, I tolerate with something approaching affection, but only because he never pretended to be tidy.

I forgot Descartes, Voltaire, and Pascal, but it’s too late to scroll back and adjust the ledger. Consider them rounding errors – casualties of the margins, lost to the tyranny of percentages.

If anyone mentions another one – Spinoza comes to mind – I’ll try to figure out where they fit in my pantheon. Were I to render this tomorrow, the results may vary.

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Written by Bry Willis

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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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Written by Bry Willis

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A Critique of Reason (Not to Be Confused with Kant’s)

Posted in identity, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Kant, bless him, thought he was staging the trial of Reason itself, putting the judge in the dock and asking whether the court had jurisdiction. It was a noble spectacle, high theatre of self-scrutiny. But the trick was always rigged. The presiding judge, the prosecution, the jury, the accused, all wore the same powdered wig. Unsurprisingly, Reason acquitted itself.

The Enlightenment’s central syllogism was never more than a parlour trick:

  • P1: The best path is Reason.
  • P2: I practice Reason.
  • C: Therefore, Reason is best.

It’s the self-licking ice-cream cone of intellectual history. And if you dare to object, the trap springs shut: what, you hate Reason? Then you must be irrational. Inquisitors once demanded heretics prove they weren’t in league with Satan; the modern equivalent is being told you’re “anti-science.” The categories defend themselves by anathematising doubt.

The problem is twofold:

First, Reason never guaranteed agreement. Two thinkers can pore over the same “facts” and emerge with opposite verdicts, each sincerely convinced that Reason has anointed their side. In a power-laden society, it is always the stronger voice that gets to declare its reasoning the reasoning. As Dan Hind acidly observed, Reason is often nothing more than a marketing label the powerful slap on their interests.

Second, and this is the darker point, Reason itself is metaphysical, a ghost in a powdered wig. To call something “rational” is already to invoke an invisible authority, as if Truth had a clerical seal. Alasdair MacIntyre was right: strip away the old rituals and you’re left with fragments, not foundations.

Other witnesses have tried to say as much. Horkheimer and Adorno reminded us that Enlightenment rationality curdles into myth the moment it tries to dominate the world. Nietzsche laughed until his throat bled at the pretence of universal reason, then promptly built his own metaphysics of will. Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, dared to expose Science as what it actually is – a messy network of institutions, instruments, and politics masquerading as purity. The backlash was so swift and sanctimonious that he later called it his “worst” book, a public recantation that reads more like forced penance than revelation. Even those who glimpsed the scaffolding had to return to the pews.

So when we talk about “Reason” as the bedrock of Modernity, let’s admit the joke. The bedrock was always mist. The house we built upon it is held up by ritual, inertia, and vested interest, not granite clarity. Enlightenment sold us the fantasy of a universal judge, when what we got was a self-justifying oracle. Reason is not the judge in the courtroom. Reason is the courtroom itself, and the courtroom is a carnival tent – all mirrors, no floor.

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Modernity: The Phase That Never Was

Posted in agency, equality, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, maths, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, property, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
6–8 minutes

We’re told we live in the Enlightenment, that Reason™ sits on the throne and superstition has been banished to the attic. Yet when I disguised a little survey as “metamodern,” almost none came out as fully Enlightened. Three managed to shed every trace of the premodern ghost, one Dutch wanderer bypassed Modernity entirely, and not a single soul emerged free of postmodern suspicion. So much for humanity’s great rational awakening. Perhaps Modernity wasn’t a phase we passed through at all, but a mirage we still genuflect before, a lifestyle brand draped over a naked emperor.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic

The Enlightenment as Marketing Campaign

The Enlightenment is sold to us as civilisation’s great coming-of-age: the dawn when the fog of superstition lifted and Reason took the throne. Kant framed it as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” – an Enlightenment bumper sticker that academics still like to polish and reapply. But Kant wasn’t writing for peasants hauling mud or women without the vote; he was writing for his own coterie of powdered-wig mandarins, men convinced their own habits of rational debate were humanity’s new universal destiny.

Modernity, in this story, isn’t a historical stage we all inhabited. It’s an advertising campaign: Reason™ as lifestyle brand, equality as tagline, “progress” as the logo on the tote bag. Modernity, in the textbooks, is billed as a historical epoch, a kind of secular Pentecost in which the lights came on and we all finally started thinking for ourselves. In practice, it was more of a boutique fantasy, a handful of gentlemen mistaking their own rarefied intellectual posture for humanity’s destiny.

The Archetype That Nobody Lives In

At the core of the Enlightenment lies the archetype of Man™: rational, autonomous, unencumbered by superstition, guided by evidence, weighing pros and cons with the detachment of a celestial accountant. Economics repackaged him as homo economicus, forever optimising his utility function as if he were a spreadsheet in breeches.

But like all archetypes, this figure is a mirage. Our survey data, even when baited as a “metamodern survey”, never produced a “pure” Enlightenment subject.

  • 3 scored 0% Premodern (managing, perhaps, to kick the gods and ghosts to the kerb).
  • 1 scored 0% Modern (the Dutch outlier: 17% Premodern, 0% Modern, 83% Post, skipping the Enlightenment altogether, apparently by bike).
  • 0 scored 0% Postmodern. Every single participant carried at least some residue of suspicion, irony, or relativism.

The averages themselves were telling: roughly 18% Premodern, 45% Modern, 37% Postmodern. That’s not an age of Reason. That’s a muddle, a cocktail of priestly deference, rationalist daydreams, and ironic doubt.

Even the Greats Needed Their Crutches

If the masses never lived as Enlightenment subjects, what about the luminaries? Did they achieve the ideal? Hardly.

  • Descartes, desperate to secure the cogito, called in God as guarantor, dragging medieval metaphysics back on stage.
  • Kant built a cathedral of reason only to leave its foundations propped up by noumena: an unseeable, unknowable beyond.
  • Nietzsche, supposed undertaker of gods, smuggled in his own metaphysics of will to power and eternal recurrence.
  • William James, surveying the wreckage, declared that “truth” is simply “what works”, a sort of intellectual aspirin for the Enlightenment headache.

And economists, in a fit of professional humiliation, pared the rational subject down to a corpse on life support. Homo economicus became a creature who — at the very least, surely — wouldn’t choose to make himself worse off. But behavioural economics proved even that meagre hope to be a fantasy. People burn their wages on scratch tickets, sign up for exploitative loans, and vote themselves into oblivion because a meme told them to.

If even the “best specimens” never fully embodied the rational archetype, expecting Joe Everyman, who statistically struggles to parse a sixth-grade text and hasn’t cracked a book since puberty, to suddenly blossom into a mini-Kant is wishful thinking of the highest order.

The Dual Inertia

The real story isn’t progress through epochs; it’s the simultaneous drag of two kinds of inertia:

  • Premodern inertia: we still cling to sacred myths, national totems, and moral certainties.
  • Modern inertia: we still pretend the rational subject exists, because democracy, capitalism, and bureaucracy require him to.

The result isn’t a new epoch. It’s a cultural chimaera: half-superstitious, half-rationalist, shot through with irony. A mess, not a phase..

Arrow’s Mathematical Guillotine

Even if the Enlightenment dream of a rational demos were real, Kenneth Arrow proved it was doomed. His Impossibility Theorem shows that no voting system can turn individual rational preferences into a coherent “general will.” In other words, even a parliament of perfect Kants would deadlock when voting on dinner. The rational utopia is mathematically impossible.

So when we are told that democracy channels Reason, we should hear it as a polite modern incantation, no sturdier than a priest blessing crops.

Equality and the Emperor’s Wardrobe

The refrain comes like a hymn: “All men are created equal.” But the history is less inspiring. “Men” once meant property-owning Europeans; later it was generously expanded to mean all adult citizens who’d managed to stay alive until eighteen. Pass that biological milestone, and voilà — you are now certified Rational, qualified to determine the fate of nations.

And when you dare to question this threadbare arrangement, the chorus rises: “If you don’t like democracy, capitalism, or private property, just leave.” As if you could step outside the world like a theatre where the play displeases you. Heidegger’s Geworfenheit makes the joke bitter: we are thrown into this world without choice, and then instructed to exit if we find the wallpaper distasteful. Leave? To where, precisely? The void? Mars?

The Pre-Modern lord said: Obey, or be exiled. The Modern democrat says: Vote, or leave. And the Post-Enlightenment sceptic mutters: Leave? To where, exactly? Gravity? History? The species? There is no “outside” to exit into. The system is not a hotel; it’s the weather.

Here the ghost of Baudrillard hovers in the wings, pointing out that we are no longer defending Reason, but the simulacrum of Reason. The Emperor’s New Clothes parable once mocked cowardice: everyone saw the nudity but stayed silent. Our situation is worse. We don’t even see that the Emperor is naked. We genuinely believe in the fineries, the Democracy™, the Rational Man™, the sacred textile of Progress. And those who point out the obvious are ridiculed: How dare you mock such fineries, you cad!

Conclusion: The Comfort of a Ghost

So here we are, defending the ghost of a phase we never truly lived. We cling to Modernity as if it were a sturdy foundation, when in truth it was always an archetype – a phantom rational subject, a Platonic ideal projected onto a species of apes with smartphones. We mistook it for bedrock, built our institutions upon it, and now expend colossal energy propping up the papier-mâché ruins. The unfit defend it out of faith in their own “voice,” the elites defend it to preserve their privilege, and the rest of us muddle along pragmatically, dosing ourselves with Jamesian aspirin and pretending it’s progress.

Metamodernism, with its marketed oscillation between sincerity and irony, is less a “new stage” than a glossy rebranding of the same old admixture: a bit of myth, a bit of reason, a dash of scepticism. And pragmatism –James’s weary “truth is what works” – is the hangover cure that keeps us muddling through.

Modernity promised emancipation from immaturity. What we got was a new set of chains: reason as dogma, democracy as ritual, capitalism as destiny. And when we protest, the system replies with its favourite Enlightenment lullaby: If you don’t like it, just leave.

But you can’t leave. You were thrown here. What we call “Enlightenment” is not a stage in history but a zombie-simulation of an ideal that never drew breath. And yet, like villagers in Andersen’s tale, we not only guard the Emperor’s empty wardrobe – we see the garments as real. The Enlightenment subject is not naked. He is spectral, and we are the ones haunting him.

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The Enlightenment: A Postmortem

Posted in economics, equality, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, psychology, quote, science, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Or: How the Brightest Ideas in Europe Got Us into This Bloody Mess

Disclaimer: This output is entirely ChatGPT 4o from a conversation on the failure and anachronism of Enlightenment promises. I’m trying to finish editing my next novel, so I can’t justify taking much more time to share what are ultimately my thoughts as expounded upon by generative AI. I may comment personally in future. Until then, this is what I have to share.

AI Haters, leave now or perish ye all hope.

The Enlightenment promised us emancipation from superstition, authority, and ignorance. What we got instead was bureaucracy, colonialism, and TED Talks. We replaced divine right with data dashboards and called it progress. And like any good inheritance, the will was contested, and most of us ended up with bugger-all.

Below, I take each Enlightenment virtue, pair it with its contemporary vice, and offer a detractor who saw through the Enlightenment’s powder-wigged charade. Because if we’re going down with this ship, we might as well point out the dry rot in the hull.

1. Rationalism

The Ideal: Reason shall lead us out of darkness.
The Reality: Reason led us straight into the gas chambers—with bureaucratic precision.

Detractor: Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno

“Enlightenment is totalitarian.”
—Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Horkheimer and Adorno saw what reason looks like when it slips off its leash. Instrumental rationality, they warned, doesn’t ask why—it only asks how efficiently. The result? A world where extermination is scheduled, costs are optimised, and ethics are politely filed under “subjective.”

2. Empiricism

The Ideal: Observation and experience will uncover truth.
The Reality: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be real. (Love? Not statistically significant.)

Detractor: Michel Foucault

“Truth isn’t outside power… truth is a thing of this world.”
—Power/Knowledge (1977)

Foucault dismantled the whole edifice. Knowledge isn’t neutral; it’s an instrument of power. Empiricism becomes just another way of disciplining the body—measuring skulls, classifying deviants, and diagnosing women with “hysteria” for having opinions.

3. Individualism

The Ideal: The sovereign subject, free and self-determining.
The Reality: The atomised consumer, trapped in a feedback loop of self-optimisation.

Detractor: Jean Baudrillard

“The individual is no longer an autonomous subject but a terminal of multiple networks.”
—Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

You wanted autonomy? You got algorithms. Baudrillard reminds us that the modern “individual” is a brand in search of market validation. You are free to be whoever you want, provided it fits within platform guidelines and doesn’t disrupt ad revenue.

4. Secularism

The Ideal: Liberation from superstition.
The Reality: We swapped saints for STEMlords and called it even.

Detractor: Charles Taylor

“We are now living in a spiritual wasteland.”
—A Secular Age (2007)

Taylor—perhaps the most polite Canadian apocalypse-whisperer—reminds us that secularism didn’t replace religion with reason; it replaced mystery with malaise. We’re no longer awed, just “motivated.” Everything is explainable, and yet somehow nothing means anything.

5. Progress

The Ideal: History is a forward march toward utopia.
The Reality: History is a meat grinder in a lab coat.

Detractor: Walter Benjamin

“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.”
—Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Benjamin’s “angel of history” watches helplessly as the wreckage piles up—colonialism, genocide, climate collapse—all in the name of progress. Every step forward has a cost, but we keep marching, noses in the spreadsheet, ignoring the bodies behind us.

6. Universalism

The Ideal: One humanity, under Reason.
The Reality: Enlightenment values, brought to you by cannon fire and Christian missionaries.

Detractor: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“White men are saving brown women from brown men.”
—Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)

Universalism was always a bit… French, wasn’t it? Spivak unmasks it as imperialism in drag—exporting “rights” and “freedom” to people who never asked for them, while ignoring the structural violence built into the Enlightenment’s own Enlightened societies.

7. Tolerance

The Ideal: Let a thousand opinions bloom.
The Reality: Tolerance, but only for those who don’t threaten the status quo.

Detractor: Karl Popper

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
—The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Popper, bless him, thought tolerance needed a firewall. But in practice, “tolerance” has become a smug liberal virtue signalling its own superiority while deplatforming anyone who makes the dinner party uncomfortable. We tolerate all views—except the unseemly ones.

8. Scientific Method

The Ideal: Observe, hypothesise, repeat. Truth shall emerge.
The Reality: Publish or perish. Fund or flounder.

Detractor: Paul Feyerabend

“Science is not one thing, it is many things.”
—Against Method (1975)

Feyerabend called the whole thing a farce. There is no single “method,” just a bureaucratic orthodoxy masquerading as objectivity. Today, science bends to industry, cherry-picks for grants, and buries null results in the backyard. Peer review? More like peer pressure.

9. Anti-Authoritarianism

The Ideal: Smash the throne! Burn the mitre!
The Reality: Bow to the data analytics team.

Detractor: Herbert Marcuse

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
—One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Marcuse skewered the liberal illusion of choice. We may vote, but we do so within a system that already wrote the script. Authority didn’t vanish; it just became procedural, faceless, algorithmic. Bureaucracy is the new monarchy—only with more forms.

10. Education and Encyclopaedism

The Ideal: All knowledge, accessible to all minds.
The Reality: Behind a paywall. Written in impenetrable prose. Moderated by white men with tenure.

Detractor: Ivan Illich

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
—Deschooling Society (1971)

Illich pulls the curtain: education isn’t emancipatory; it’s indoctrinatory. The modern university produces not thinkers but credentialed employees. Encyclopaedias are replaced by Wikipedia, curated by anonymous pedants and revision wars. Truth is editable.

Postscript: Picking through the Rubble

So—has the Enlightenment failed?

Not exactly. It succeeded too literally. It was taken at its word. Its principles, once radical, were rendered banal. It’s not that reason, progress, or rights are inherently doomed—it’s that they were never as pure as advertised. They were always products of their time: male, white, bourgeois, and utterly convinced of their own benevolence.

If there’s a path forward, it’s not to restore Enlightenment values, but to interrogate them—mercilessly, with irony and eyes open.

After all, the problem was never darkness. It was the people with torches who thought they’d found the only path.

Fiction Nation: Conclusion

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Conclusion

In our exploration of fictions—nations, economies, money, legal systems, and even sports—we have uncovered the profound ways in which these constructs shape our reality. These fictions, born from collective agreements and sustained by shared belief, play pivotal roles in organizing societies, guiding behaviors, and fostering a sense of belonging and purpose. While they may not correspond to an objective, external reality, their effects are undeniably real and impactful.

Recognizing the fictional nature of these constructs challenges us to rethink our assumptions about truth and reality. It reveals the power of human imagination and the social nature of our existence. This awareness empowers us to question, reform, and innovate the fictions we live by, opening up possibilities for creating new social constructs that better align with our evolving values and aspirations.

The historical and philosophical perspectives we have explored underscore the contingent and constructed nature of truth. Thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard remind us that what we accept as truth is often a product of social and historical processes, shaped by power dynamics and collective narratives. This critical awareness invites us to engage with our social constructs more thoughtfully and responsibly.

The practical implications of this perspective are far-reaching. By understanding that economic systems, national identities, and legal frameworks are human-made, we can envision and implement alternative models that prioritize sustainability, equity, and inclusivity. Recognizing the power of belief and narrative in shaping our realities encourages us to foster transparency, inclusivity, and critical engagement in the construction and perpetuation of social fictions.

Ethically, we must approach the creation and maintenance of fictions with a commitment to the common good. The manipulation of these constructs for narrow interests can lead to exploitation and injustice. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that our social constructs serve the interests of all members of society and reflect our collective values and aspirations.

In conclusion, living in a world of fictions is both a profound and practical reality. By embracing the constructed nature of our social realities, we affirm the human capacity for imagination and creativity. This recognition opens up possibilities for envisioning and creating new fictions that better reflect our values and guide us toward a more just, equitable, and sustainable future. Through critical engagement and thoughtful innovation, we can navigate the complexities of our social world with greater insight and intentionality, fostering a more dynamic and harmonious society.

⬅ Fiction Nation: Can This Be True? (section 7)

⬅ Fiction Nation: The Concept of Fiction (section 1)

References

  1. Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011).
  2. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
  3. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
  4. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).
  5. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity (1990).
  6. Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision (2006).
  7. Cover, Robert. “Nomos and Narrative” (1983).

Semiotics of Autumn

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This season-appropriate meme crossed my path—or did I cross its? No matter. It’s a clever instantiation of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, and it really demonstrates the path to simulacrum in 4 stages. I don’t know who rendered this, but it arrived to me via Philosophy Matters. Although it’s self-explanatory, I’ll editorialise nonetheless.

At Stage Zero, the thing in and of itself exists—out there. This is the signified. It’s the thing represented by the symbol depicted in Stage One—a so-called pumpkin, la citrouille, la calabaza, der Kürbis, and so on—the signifier.

At Stage Two, the essence of the signified remains intact, but it’s lost its form. We can make a mental connexion between this and the signified, but we are a step further removed. In this case, the pie likely started as the signified but was transformed into a pie, a new signified and signifer.

At Stage Three, we may or may not have any remnants of the Stage Zero signified, but we still invoke the essence of the pumpkin. More probably, we invoke the essence of the pumpkin pie by way of the pumpkin spice.

By the time we arrive at Stage Four, we’re left with a claim of ‘pumpkin-ness’ and a visual cue to remind us of the path through pumpkin pie and the trace of spice, the marketing angling toward the pie over the fruit.

Keep in mind that the claim of natural flavours does not presume that pumpkin is one of those flavours. 

Ingredients (Coffeemate Pumpkin Spice Creamer)
Water, Sugar, Coconut Oil, and Less Than 2% Of Sodium Caseinate (A Milk Derivative)**, Dipotassium Phosphate, Mono- And Diglycerides, Natural And Artificial Flavors, Sucralose (Non-Nutritive Sweetener).

I’m not entirely sure I agree with the distinction between Stage Three and Four in this meme, but it’s just a meme, so I’ll leave it here.

Telles seraient les phases successives de l’image :

– elle est le reflet d’une réalité profonde

– elle masque et dénature une réalité profonde

– elle masque l’absence de réalité profonde

– elle est sans rapport à quelque réalité que ce soit : elle est son propre simulacre pur.

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation

Diversity of thought

Posted in equality, identity, language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , 4 Comments

Je m’accuse. I’m such a bad blogger. I haven’t been focusing much lately, but given the recent events around #BlackLivesMatter, I’ve been doing some thinking. A lot has been said about diversity and inclusion—whether for black lives, females, LGBTQ+, or some other class—, but the issue is more complex and dimensional than a problem with intersectionality.

There is something to be said for experiential diversity, and the benefits of virtual cross-pollination may have some advantages, but much of this is superficial diversity-washing, enough to claim a public relations participation award.

I keep Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex close to the top of my mind much of the time, but this is more than just about feminism. It’s about otherism—the otherness that creates outgroups.

In Beauvoir’s parlance, there are men and there are not-men—others. This is similar to Baudrillard’s dog/not-dog distinction but with more intention, so we arrive at an orthodox/not-orthodox pairing.

Taking workplace diversity as a frame, that they accept blacks, or women, or disabled, or some other identified class is superficial because the common thread is an acceptance of the prevailing meta-narratives, not only of Capitalism, Democracy, meritocracy, authority structures, and the like. As long as you comply with this mindset, sex and gender, the colour of one’s skin, or disability is cosmetic.

To some extent, there will be some diversity of thought. There will be some cultural perspectives, some generational perspectives, and some gender perspectives, but all of these are aligned to the overarching narrative.

In the world—in the United States anyway—, it’s OK to be black or Hispanic as long as you act ‘white’ or ‘American’. Speak with a neutral accent. Listen to mainstream pop. Don’t wear culturally identifiable clothing. This will ensure acceptance. In a way, this is a faux pas of Donald Trump. He comes across as vulgar to those who hold this perspective.

The diversity that’s missing is one that would do things differently. When a woman ascends to a CEO position, she has done so by more or less mimicking the path a man would probably have taken, making similar decisions. Ditto for a black. Double ditto for a black woman.

People outside of this narrow path will not ascend. I’ll ignore the question of whether this is even a worthwhile aim, A woman who takes this path may have to break through a glass ceiling, but for those of us with a more diverse mindset, the ceiling is stainless steel—a meter thick.

But this is for more than CEOs. I am a self-aware eccentric, and although I colour within the lines my thought is typically outside of accepted boundaries. Luckily, I’ve had the good fortune to work with the right people in the right environments to capitalise rather than be hampered by this difference. I’ve been lucky enough to operate with relative autonomy because over the years I’ve generally met or exceeded expectations on my own path.

During a review—or at least a conversation—about a decade ago, a manager told me that he had no idea how I operated but that he didn’t want to interfere for fear of breaking the goose laying the golden eggs. I know this was difficult for him to do and to admit because he is a very structured thinker and felt compelled to create repeatable structures (despite ignoring the structure when it came to him—and, thankfully, me).

This same person—whom I admire despite our having different worldviews—also noted that I operate as a director or orchestrator rather than a typical leader. I feel this is spot on. Even as early as high school, I articulated that I did not consider myself to be either a leader or a follower. I was a self-professed adviser, so it’s no surprise that I find myself in consulting and advisory roles. I realise that in the United States, the world is constructed to be more diametrically than it would otherwise need to be, so I end up being a veritable unicorn in most settings.

As those who know me, my first career was in the entertainment field, where diversity is more part of the rule than the exception—though there are still many normies there, too. My ex-wife asked me countless time why I left the music industry, or didn’t stick to academics or activism, each with their own level of interest to me.

The problem is that this diverse perspective is not something a resume can convey very well as there needs to be a great deal of trust, which is not typically in place for new hires, so many, let’s say, organic and creative thinkers, get left out of the equation to the detriment of cultural diversity.