Tag: book

Measure What Matters

Posted in economics, language, modernism, philosophy, podcast, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve gone entirely off the reservation (send help, or biscuits) and decided, in a fit of masochistic curiosity, to crack open Measure What Matters by John Doerr—a business management tome that’s been gathering dust on my shelf longer than most CEOs last in post.

Spoiler Alert: I won’t be finishing it. Nor, frankly, should you.

Full disclosure before we all get the wrong idea: I find self-help books about as nourishing as a rice cake made of existential despair. Add “business” or “management” into the mix, and you’re cooking up something so vapid it could qualify as a greenhouse gas.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.

Measure What Matters reads less like a serious work of business philosophy and more like a self-important infomercial, peddling the sort of common sense you could overhear in a pub toilet after three pints. And, like any decent infomercial, it’s drenched in “inspirational” stories so grandiose you’d think Moses himself was consulting for Google.

Image: Midjourney’s rendering of a possible cover image. Despite the bell protruding from the crier’s head, I went with a ChatGPT Dall-E render instead.

I’m sure Doerr genuinely believes he’s handing down managerial tablets from Mount Sinai, and I’m equally sure he’s eating his own dog food with a knife and fork. But what gets served up here is a steaming dish of selection bias, smothered with a rich gravy of hand-waving nonsense.

What am I getting my knickers in a twist about? What’s this book actually about?

In short: three letters—OKR. That’s Objectives and Key Results, for those of you not fluent in MBA-speak. These mystical artefacts, these sacred runes, are supposed to propel your company from the gutter to the stars. Intel did it. Google did it. Ergo, you too can join the pantheon of tech demi-gods. (Provided, of course, you were already a billion-dollar operation before you started.)

Nobody’s going to argue that having goals is a bad idea. Nobody’s throwing the baby out with the Gantt chart. But goals are nebulous, wishy-washy things. “I want to travel” is a goal. “I will cycle and kayak my way to Edinburgh by the end of the year, preferably without dying in a ditch”—that’s an objective.

Businesses, being the lumbering beasts they are, naturally have goals. Goals for products, customers, market share, quarterly bonuses, and ritualistic victory dances in front of their crushed competitors. Nothing new there.

According to Doerr and the gospel of OKRs, however, the only thing standing between you and unassailable market dominance is the right set of buzzwords stapled to your quarterly reports. Apparently, Intel crushed Motorola not because of innovation, talent, or dumb luck—but because they set better OKRs. (History books, please update yourselves accordingly.)

Video: John Doerr’s 2018 TED Talk on this topic.

But wait, what’s an OKR again? Ah yes: we’ve done Objectives. Now for the Key Results bit. Basically, you slap some numbers on your wish list. If you’ve survived in business longer than a fruit fly, you’ve already met KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)—another Three Letter Acronym, because we live and die by alphabet soup. Key Results are KPIs wearing slightly trendier trainers.

Example: “We will be number one by the third quarter by prospecting a dozen companies and closing three deals by September.” Marvellous. Life-changing. Nobel-worthy. Now go forth and conquer.

Right. Now that I’ve saved you twenty quid and several hours of your life, let’s talk about why this book is still an exercise in masturbatory futility.

First, and most fatally, it’s predicated on selection bias so profound it should come with a health warning. Allow me to paint you a picture. Imagine we’re advising a football league. Every team sets OKRs: target weights, goal tallies, tackles, penalty avoidance—the works. Everyone’s focused. Everyone’s motivated. Everyone’s measuring What Matters™.

Come the end of the season, who wins? One team. Did they win because their OKRs were shinier? Because they ‘wanted it more’? Or, just maybe, did they win because competition is brutal, random, and often unfair?

This is the problem with false meritocracies and the illusion of control. It’s like thanking God for your touchdown while assuming the other team were all godless heathens who deserved to lose. It’s the same nonsense, in a suit and tie.

Will our winning team win next year? Doubtful. Did Intel lose ground later because they forgot how to spell OKR? No. Because the world changes, markets collapse, and sometimes you’re just standing on the wrong bit of deck when the ship goes down.

Then there’s the love affair with plans. In theory, lovely. In practice, arbitrary. You can set as many Objectives as you like, but what counts as a “win”? Is it profit? Market share? Not dying of ennui?

The free market worshippers among us love to preach that governments can’t plan effectively, unlike the rugged gladiators of capitalism. Funny how businesses, in their infinite wisdom, are then urged to behave like microcosmic Soviet Five-Year Planners, drowning in metrics and objectives. Topically, we are living through the charming consequences of governments trying to run themselves like corporations—newsflash: it’s not going splendidly.

In short: companies are not nations, and OKRs are not magic bullets.

What else is wrong with this book?
Well, to start: it’s shallow. It’s smug. It peddles survivorship bias with the zeal of a televangelist. It confuses correlation with causation like an over-eager undergraduate. And most damning of all, it sells you the fantasy that success is just a matter of writing smarter lists, as if strategy, luck, market forces, and human frailty were irrelevant footnotes.

Measure What Matters doesn’t measure anything except the reader’s patience—and mine ran out somewhere around chapter five.

What Good Is Morality?

Posted in morality, philosophy, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The New Yorker reviewed The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality by Hanno Sauer. I read the favourable article and then the reviews. Rather than read the book, I asked NotebookLM to discuss the article, the article itself being behind a paywall.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast of this topic.

Although the rating was not bad – 3.8 as of this writing – the reviews told a different story.

 The first half of the book was worthwhile as it was a thought provoking description of how early societies may have developed social systems to encourage group cooperation and discourage harmful behaviors. The second half however was a rambling, preachy, and judgemental dissertation on postmodernism using the all too familiar tropes of social justice dialog. Overall it was poorly written though some of that may be due to translation. There is too little useful material here to justify its purchase.

Firstly, this version is from a German edition. Some people feel that some structure and communication value was lost in translation. In any case, he’s accused of being verbose and circumlocutory.

Amazon describes this book as “a sweeping history,” but the only thing sweeping about it was what I wanted to do with it under the nearest rug. 

Bailey (review)

Secondly, it may be somewhat derivative of Nietzsche’s work on the same topic.

The book is rambling and incoherent, the author makes wild assertions about things that happened before recorded history, leaps from one train of thought to another, poo poos the ideas of religion but frequently quotes Nietzsche as the infallible source of knowledge…

Tonyo (reviewer)

In any case, the topic interests me, but I don’t see myself reading it any time soon.

Man in Capitalistic Society

Posted in economics, equality, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, politics, power, property, psychology, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This is Chapter 5 of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while and wasn’t sure how a 70-year-old book could have so much relevance, but it does. Granted, some of it is irrelevant, a victim of the period it was written. This happens.

Sidebar: Whilst praising Freud, Fromm also calls him out, essentially accusing him of projecting his mummy-daddy issues onto the world at large. When I first encountered Freud’s work in the 1980s, it was already largely discredited. Some of what should have been wasn’t. Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst heavily overshadowed his other contributions. In fact, Freud offers some strong philosophical insights into society and civilisation. He’s not all about cigars and dreamscapes.

What strikes me about this chapter is the historical perspective it provides on capitalism. I’m an academic economist. I taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade. I’ve read (and recommend reading) Marx’s Capital firsthand.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast commentary on this content.

Fromm adds additional details here. Firstly, he notes that the capitalism that marked the early days of the Industrial Revolution—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—differed from that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earlier period still had cultural and moral tethers that became frayed or lost in later periods. Without regurgitating the chapter, I cite some themes:

“this underselling practice is grown to such a shameful height, that particular persons publicly advertise that they undersell the rest of the trade.”

People were not very keen on price cutting as a competitive mechanism.

They also note the unfair competitive advantage of the monied elites who could buy materials in cash instead of credit and could thereby undercut prices, who would have to account for paying interest rates or markups on credit.

Whilst in the twentieth century, regulating undercutting is seen as protectionism, the earlier centuries had no problems defending merchants. We do have laws on the ebooks that prevent dumping, but these are rarely enforced, and when they are, it’s a political rather than economic statement. In practice, but done in the name of economics are politics in the same manner as science was used as cover to implement policy during the COVID-19 debacle.

Montesquieu says “that machines which diminish the numbers of workers are ‘pernicious’.” This sentiment echoes the current sentiments about robotics and artificial intelligence.

Nineteenth-century capitalism saw man as the measure of all things supplanted by capital. This is the capitalism Marx rails against—profits over humanity and society, the pursuit of local maxima at the expense of global maxima. This is also where the goal of hypergrowth and growth for growth’s sake came into vogue, ushering us into the Modern Age of Modern ideals—science, progress, order, and so on.

I won’t exhaust the chapter here, but for what it is, it’s a relatively light read. Whether I comment on later chapters depends on whether they engage me. Cheers.

Are We Sane? Can a Society Be Sick?

Posted in identity, language, modernism, nature, perception, philosophy, politics, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

These are the first two chapter titles of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I suspect I’ll be reading this book twice for good measure. I’m four chapters in, with three to go, and eager for a deeper dive.

Despite being published in 1955, Fromm’s analysis remains strikingly relevant. Mark Fisher picks up a similar thread in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, but whereas Fisher dissects the ideological stranglehold of late capitalism, Fromm, as a psychiatrist, turns the lens on human nature itself. He questions the very concept of normalcy—something we tend to accept uncritically, much like Michel Foucault would in the following generation.

I’ll hold off on any sweeping conclusions until I’ve finished the book (and, more likely, after a second read). But for now, consider this a tentative recommendation. Snow Crash was an amusing detour, but non-fiction is where I feel most at home.

Reading Science Fiction

Posted in fiction, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve got a confession to make: Science Fiction as a genre doesn’t resonate with me. Neither does Fantasy. I enjoy some fiction, but it seems that it’s primarily Literary Fiction – old-school classics like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Kafka, Barthelme, and the like. Mostly, I prefer non-fiction.

I’ve just finished reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, having read The Peripheral at the end of last year. To be fair, someone recommended Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which is in the same genre – cyberpunk. I’d been advised that Snow Crash is better written, but I thought it might be best to start at the start of that genre.

[EDIT: After writing this post, I read the first two chapters of Snow Crash. The opening scenes of samurai swords had me thinking I needed to give up on this genre once and for all. But no, this was simple character building—fingers crossed. It quickly—and I do mean quickly—changed into a rapid montage dripping with ironic satire. I was in my element. I’ll take sci-fi wrapped in irony. It’s like stuffing a pill in cheese to trick your pet into taking medicine. I don’t want to jinx it, and I don’t know how Stephenson can control the pacing. I’ll let it unfold, and I hope it lands in a happy place. Now, I feel obliged to end with a motivational message on not giving up.]

These writers have good ideas. It often sounds appealing when someone tells me the plot summary, but the details bore me to tears. When I read reviews of these books, I frequently hear how immersive they are, but to me, they are cluttered and chockablock with minutiae. I find myself prodding, “Just get to the point.” But there has to be more than this. Short stories may fare better. I liked Ursula K LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, but that was more related to its philosophical, anti-utilitarian perspective rather than the story.

It’s not as if Dostoyevsky doesn’t circumlocute and pontificate, but it’s somehow different. I want to like it. I want to read it – first-hand, not just a summary, so I can feel that I’ve engaged with the material.

Over the years, I’ve been consoled by fans of the genre, who say, “I understand. What you need to read is” [fill in the blank]. I read Ender’s Game on this advice.

To be fair, Sci-Fi movies and television don’t resonate with me either. Star Wars? Nope. Star Trek? Nope. Firefly. No, again.

What people find amazing, I find trite. Often, there is some embedded Modernist morality that some view as profound. I roll my eyes. I cringe thinking of old Star Trek episodes about what makes humans so special.

I don’t tend to find movies or television very interesting in general. I’ve never owned a television. My partners always do. “But you watch streaming content,” you say, and you’d be correct. But I watch it on my own time and take a chance, if only to remain connected to contemporary trends.

My last engagement was Arcane on Netflix. I found Season One well done and entertaining, but I’m not sure Anime qualifies as Sci-Fi. I caught The Peripheral on Amazon a couple of months ago, which led me to the book, but they turned out to be different stories, though they were set in the same universe with (generally) the same characters.

Refeshing, Žižek

Posted in philosophy, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

What a relief. After trudging through a couple of so-called ‘popular’ books, it’s refreshing to read something that actually reflects the complexity of reality.

The first essay in Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is titled Progress and Its Vicissitudes. It opens with a nod to the opening scene of The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan. But Žižek, as always, takes it further. He unearths something far more sinister in the magician’s sleight of hand—something unsettlingly perceptible to the young girl who witnesses the trick.

Life isn’t always what it seems on the surface. It isn’t as neat or digestible as our perceptions make it out to be. Žižek embarks on a scathing critique of the concept of progress, dismantling its conventional interpretations and exposing the often-overlooked consequences that lurk beneath its glossy exterior. He unravels the paradoxes and failures inherent in the notion of progress, urging readers to rethink their blind faith in the idea of a linear march towards a utopian future.

Defining ‘progress,’ he argues, is akin to laying claim to the future. But whose future? And at what cost? He interrogates the competing visions that shape human possibility, questioning whether, in the face of our cascading ecological, social, and political crises, things can actually improve—and what ‘better’ even means. He skewers various ideologies—neoliberalism, populism, and the self-improvement industrial complex—for their roles in manipulating and distorting the very concept of progress.

From a postmodernist perspective, Žižek’s analysis aligns with the scepticism towards grand narratives and universal truths that define postmodern thought. He deconstructs the monolithic idea of progress, revealing it as a construct that conveniently conceals underlying power structures and exclusions. By exposing the ‘squashed dead birds’—the inevitable collateral damage of progress—he underscores just how arbitrary and manufactured our notions of advancement really are.

Moreover, Žižek’s critique echoes the postmodernist fixation on desire, denial, and disavowal. He examines how different visions of progress systematically exclude or sacrifice certain elements and how these dynamics manifest across cultural phenomena, from Hollywood blockbusters to decolonisation movements. His analysis reinforces the postmodernist conviction that meanings are never fixed—they are fluid, contested, and often riddled with contradiction.

In the end, Against Progress is not just a critique—it’s an invitation. An invitation to abandon the comforting illusion of an inevitable march towards something better and to face the messy, contingent reality of human existence head-on.

History of Intelligence

Posted in intelligence, perception, philosophy, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve made my way a couple of chapters into A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains by Max Bennet. My son recommended it last month, assuring me it was a delicious cocktail of Sapiens, Behave, and Superintelligence,—all books I’ve rated highly, courtesy of Harari, Sapolsky, and Bostrom, respectively. So far, it’s digestible without being patronizing, requiring no extensive background in the field.

Audio: Podcast conversation on this topic.

But this post isn’t about the book. It’s about what all good books should do: make you think.

If you’ve followed my writing over the years, you’ll know that I have little patience for psychology, which I regard as the astrology to neuroscience’s astronomy. Reading Fisher’s Capitalist Realism has only reinforced this perspective.

Frankly, I should do away with psychology altogether. Much of it—no, not just the vacuous self-help drivel clogging the internet and bookstore shelves—is pseudoscience. To its credit, it did function as a stepping stone to neuroscience, but that’s like crediting alchemy for modern chemistry.

Psychology’s greatest sin? Missing the forest for the trees—or, more precisely, ignoring the structural forces that shape the so-called individual. Western capitalism, ever eager to monetize everything, finds it far easier (and more profitable) to blame the individual rather than the system. It’s like the old joke about the man searching for his lost keys under the streetlamp, not because that’s where he dropped them, but because that’s where the light is. It’s just more convenient (and profitable) that way.

Enter psychology: the perfect tool for a society steeped in narcissism and instant gratification. Feeling anxious? Depressed? Alienated? Just take a pill! Never mind the material conditions of your existence—your stagnant wages, your crushing debt, your eroding sense of community. No, the problem is you, and conveniently, there’s a profitable solution waiting on the pharmacy shelf.

Sure, psychology has made some strides in attributing behaviours to neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and the rest of the usual suspects. And sure, pharmaceuticals can sometimes treat symptoms effectively. But they are just that: symptoms. The root cause? Often stressors imposed by the very society we refuse to scrutinize. And guess what rarely makes the diagnostic checklist? The system itself.

We need to zoom out and see the whole damn forest. We need to ask the hard questions—run the classic five whys to get to the root of the problem. And spoiler alert: the answer isn’t some chemical imbalance in your head.

It’s us. Collectively. Systemically. Structurally.

But sure, keep searching under that streetlamp.

The Greatest Loss in American History: Donald Trump Wins (And Loses) the Presidency

Posted in philosophy, politics, quote, technology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I couldn’t resist posting this unedited from ChatGPT. Here’s what led to it: I just finished Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Fisher mentioned the 1974 Warren Beatty film The Parallax View. I generally don’t connect well with film or video as media, but I stashed the title in my memory. A few hours later, I read an article mentioning the film, with the claim, “Of everything lost in the age of streaming, no film genre casualty is as regrettable — or as ripe for a comeback — as the paranoid political thriller.”

Rather than trying to enjoy the film as a whole, I decided to concentrate on the plot and meta-massaging. As expected, I didn’t like the movie, but I understand why Fisher mentioned it. It renders rather like a weak tea version of a Kafka story. Unlike more contemporary fare, it’s a classic work of postmodernism, having no resolution.

After watching it, I engaged with Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB for reviews and context before prompting ChatGPT.

Asking about the film itself, this was the tail end of its response:

Final Verdict: A Masterclass in Hopelessness

The Parallax View is a film where the good guys don’t win—because there are no good guys, only the powerful and the powerless. It remains a defining entry in the “paranoid cinema” of the 70s, alongside The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor. What makes it terrifying is not that it suggests a world of conspiracies, but that it implies such conspiracies don’t need to be hidden—because no one can stop them.

Then I asked what Žižek thought about it, but it turns out that he had written about a book with the same title. When I asked about Fisher, it:

Mark Fisher, in contrast to Žižek’s often bombastic and dialectically acrobatic style, wrote with a sharper, more melancholic, yet deeply incisive tone.

Finally, I posed this query: I recently read Capitalist Realism. Although penned during the 2007-08 financial meltdown and released in 2009, it feels as relevant today as then. In fact, it seems to have foreshadowed the time between.

It’s reply is this post—and without further comment…

And so, history lurches forward with all the grace of a three-legged cow on roller skates. Donald J. Trump, the billionaire reality TV star turned political apocalypse, has once again won the presidential vote of the United States of America—only to lose the presidency to Kamala Harris. If that sentence gave you an aneurysm, congratulations, you’re now officially in 2025.

How did we get here? More importantly, why does this make absolutely no sense? Ah, but sense, dear reader, is an antiquated relic of a bygone era, much like democracy, coherent election results, and the idea that facts matter.

A Triumph for the Ages (Sort of)

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump won the popular vote. That’s what his supporters will scream into the void—or at least into their social media echo chambers where dissent is met with a virtual Second Amendment response. The red-capped faithful, still clutching their tattered “Stop the Steal” banners from the last electoral circus, are convinced that this was finally their moment of redemption.

Except, well… he lost.

Enter Kamala Harris, the political equivalent of cold toast, somehow managing to slide into the Oval Office despite Trump’s “win.” The courts, the states, the Electoral College, and whatever eldritch horror lurks beneath the Capitol all conspired—again!—to keep The Donald out of power. Or so the narrative goes.

The Electoral College Strikes Again

Ah, the Electoral College. America’s favourite 18th-century fever dream. Once again, this labyrinthine system of delegate-wrangling has managed to produce a result that defies logic, mathematics, and possibly the laws of physics. Trump, against all odds (and against, presumably, some very sweaty legal advisors), has pulled off the impossible: winning while losing.

Some claim voter suppression, others cry fraud, and a few brave souls are out there trying to explain complex election mechanics to an audience that still thinks “covfefe” was a divine prophecy. But the reality is simpler: Trump, like a political Schrödinger’s cat, is simultaneously victorious and defeated. He has transcended the normal bounds of electoral outcomes, achieving a state of quantum presidency, neither fully here nor fully gone.

What Happens Next?

Riots? Lawsuits? A new line of Trump-branded commemorative “I Won Again!” hats? Place your bets, because at this stage, America is basically one large, over-budget reality show and no one knows what the next episode holds.

For Kamala Harris, the challenge is clear: govern a nation where half the country believes she stole the election, and the other half is still googling “How does the Electoral College work?” As for Trump, he will do what he does best—declare victory, launch a thousand lawsuits, and, inevitably, turn the entire thing into a business opportunity.

And so, dear reader, the United States stumbles forward, democracy battered but still standing, a house divided but too stubborn to fall. Until next time, buckle up—it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Posted in economics, modernism, perception, philosophy, politics, postmodernism, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , 3 Comments

I’ve been reading too much lately—as if such a state could exist. I have partially constructed posts anchored in other books, yet here I am, leapfrogging to this one.

I purchased Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher perhaps a decade or more ago, but it simply languished among other prospects on the shelf—not to mention the accumulation of eBooks on my hard drive and in the cloud.

Capitalist Realism is a book I should have read back in the day, and yet, reading it now feels oddly refreshing. The revised version I’m engaging with, published in 2022, includes a preface that attempts to reassure readers that, while the book may not seem as impactful as it did in 2009, much has been done to mitigate the conditions that spawned it. I’ll argue, however, that these conditions remain firmly in place and that the author of the front matter fails to grasp the full implications of the text. Of course, the author is dead. Literally.

In many ways, Capitalist Realism is a distillation of my own intellectual influences, from Žižek to Lacan, Baudrillard and Badiou to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari—even Kafka. For me, this base is welcoming—comforting. Perhaps I am the choir who Fisher is preaching to.

The earliest chapters paint capitalism not only as insidious and predacious but also as self-reinforcing. Michael Moore once observed that capitalists would sell the very rope used to hang them. But capitalism runs deeper than this. Even anti-capitalist sentiment is capitalized and commodified. Conscientious individuals can “win” if they simply buy the right brands and donate to the right causes.

It’s all about the Benjamins.

Outrage! Chapter Six

Posted in morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Kurt Gray’s Outraged! attempts to boil morality down to a single principle: harm. This, in his view, is the bedrock of all moral considerations. In doing so, he takes a swing at Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, trying to reduce its multi-faceted framework to a mere footnote in moral psychology. Amusingly, he even highlights how Haidt quietly modified his own theory after Gray and his colleagues published an earlier work—an intellectual game of cat-and-mouse, if ever there was one.

Audio: Podcast of this topic

Chapter 6: The Intuition Overdose

By the time we reach Chapter 6, Gray is charging full steam into reductio ad absurdum territory. He leans so hard on intuition that I lost count of how many times he invokes it. The problem? He gives it too much weight while conveniently ignoring acculturation.

Yes, intuition plays a role, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Enter Kahneman’s dual-system model: Gray eagerly adopts the System 1 vs. System 2 distinction, forcing his test subjects into snap moral judgments under time pressure to bypass rationalisation. Fair enough. But what he neglects is how even complex tasks can migrate from System 2 (slow, deliberate) to System 1 (fast, automatic) through repeated exposure. Kahneman’s example? Basic arithmetic. A child grappling with 1 + 1 relies on System 2, but an adult answers without effort.

And morality? The same mechanism applies. What starts as deliberation morphs into automatic response through cultural conditioning. But instead of acknowledging this, Gray behaves as if moral intuition is some mystical, spontaneous phenomenon untethered from socialization.

Morality: Subjective, Yes—But Culturally Engineered

Let’s lay cards on the table. I’m a moral subjectivist—actually, a moral non-cognitivist, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s not frighten the children. My stance is that morality, at its core, is subjective. However, no one develops their moral compass in isolation. Culture, upbringing, and societal narratives shape our moral instincts, even if those instincts ultimately reduce to personal sentiment.

Gray does concede that the definition of “harm” is subjective, which allows him to argue that practically any belief or action can be framed as harmful. And sure, if you redefine “harm” broadly enough, you can claim that someone’s mere existence constitutes an existential threat. Religious believers, for example, claim to be “harmed” by the idea that someone else’s non-compliance with their theological fairy tale could lead to eternal damnation.

I don’t disagree with his observation. The problem is that the underlying belief is fundamentally pathological. This doesn’t necessarily refute Gray’s argument—after all, people do experience psychological distress over imaginary scenarios—but it does mean we’re dealing with a shaky foundation. If harm is entirely perception-based, then moral arguments become arbitrary power plays, subject to the whims of whoever is best at manufacturing grievance.

And this brings us to another crucial flaw in Gray’s framework: the way it enables ideological self-perpetuation. If morality is reduced to perceived harm, then groups with wildly different definitions of harm will inevitably weaponize their beliefs. Take the religious fundamentalist who believes gay marriage is a sin that dooms others to eternal suffering. From their perspective, fighting against LGBTQ+ rights isn’t just bigotry—it’s moral duty, a battle to save souls from metaphysical harm. This, of course, leads to moral contagion, where adherents tirelessly indoctrinate others, especially their own children, ensuring the pathology replicates itself like a virus.

The Problem with Mono-Causal Explanations

More broadly, Gray’s attempt to reduce morality to a single principle—harm—feels suspiciously tidy. Morality is messy, contradictory, and riddled with historical baggage. Any theory that purports to explain it all in one neat little package should immediately raise eyebrows.

So, sorry, Kurt. You can do better. Moral psychology is a tangled beast, and trying to hack through it with a single conceptual machete does more harm than good.