I’m a philosopher of language, which sometimes veers off the reservation into philosophies of science and even metaphilosophy, but I am not a physicist. I don’t pretend to be. I do try to remain abreast of the goings-on in physics and science just because. Still, I view most affairs first through a philosophical lens.
I watch a decent amount of science videos on YouTube, and I’ve been following Rovelli for years, but I hadn’t engaged with his work directly until I was researching for my current book, The Architect of Encounter. First, I read The Order of Time, followed by Reality Is Not What It Seems.
Rovelli published these books around 2017, but I am only reading them now. We are travelling in the same neighbourhood, but we occupy different residences and have different orientations.
Surveying the marketplace, quite a few physicists and science educators make some of the same points I and Rovelli make. In fact, these things appear to occur as trends. When I wanted to write about agency and free will over five years ago, I noticed a slew of books on the topics, and I had nothing more to add, so I shelved the idea.
In this case, the trend appears to have been between 2017 and 2018. I’m sure this is where I absorbed some of my knowledge, opinions, and grammar, but my thesis goes further and comes from a different perspective, so I feel this manuscript is worth publishing.
Getting back to Rovelli, his books are very well written – very approachable and light on the academics. I hope mine lands somewhere in the middle. As I continue to write my book, I will lean on Rovelli for the perspective on quantum theory. If he’s wrong or it’s wrong, then we fall together. That’s what happens when you borrow a foundational commitment. It’s a risk I am willing to take.
As much as I want to share more of what I am working on, it turns out I still need to work on it if I want to complete it. I am aiming for April this year, if not sooner. At least I’ve got some of the administrative stuff out of the way. Here’s a quick glimpse, title and copyright pages.
I’ve been writing. In fact, I’ve been clarifying A Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and expanding and extending it into a book with a broader remit. This might well be the cover, following the monograph layout for Philosophics Press.
Image: Mockup of cover art.
As shown, the working title is The Architecture of Encounter: A Mediate Encounter Ontology. I’ve swapped the slate cover for a magenta in this volume.
So what’s it all about?
I’m not going to summarise the book here, but I’ll share some tidbits. I’ve settled on these chapter names:
The Mediated Encounter Ontology
Ontology
Subjecthood
Logic
Epistemology
Perception and Affordances
Language
Social Ontology
Realism
Application
The Normativity Frontier
Conclusion
Chapter 1, The Mediated Encounter Ontology, is a summary and update of the original essay, which will be included in full as an appendix item for reference, but this update will become canonical.
Chapter 2, Ontology: Interaction, Constraint, and the Rejection of Substance, will describe what I mean by ontology and what my proposed ontology looks like.
Chapter 3, Subjecthood: Modal Differentiation Within the Field, will explain how the subject-object relationship changes, and what a subject is in the first place.
Chapter 4, Logic: Coherence Grammar Under Constraint, will explain what logic is and how it operates in this paradigm.
Chapter 5, Epistemology: Convergence, Error, and the Structure of Justification, will describe what knowledge looks like. IYKYK.
Chapter 6, Perception and Affordances: Encounter as Orientation, extends Gibson’s work to comport with MEOW 2.0 (or 1.1).
Chapter 7, Language: Synchronisation, Ontological Grammar, and Structural Limits, explains how language works and how it limits our perception. We’re not talking Sapir-Whorf here, but what respectable language philosopher wouldn’t reserve a chapter for language?
Chapter 8, Social Ontology: Second-Order Constraint Systems. MEOW has a lot to say about first-order constraints, but there are higher-order considerations. I discuss them here.
Chapter 9, Realism: Cross-Perspectival Convergence and the Invariant Anchor, talks about the real elephant in the room. Since MEOW challenges both realism and idealism, we need to talk about it.
Chapter 10, Application: The Apophatic Mind, is mostly an observation on artificial intelligence as it relates to the mind-consciousness debate, primarily scoped around LLMs and similar machine processes.
Chapter 11. The Normativity Frontier, doesn’t yet have a subtitle, but this is where I discuss issues like normative ethics and morality.
I probably don’t need to tell you how Conclusion chapters work.
I expect to have 3 appendices.
Summary of commitments, which will summarise and distil key topics – so like a cheat sheet for reference – a bit more robust than a glossary.
Bibliography of reference material. As this is not an essay, it won’t be chock-full of citations – only a few, where I feel they are necessary. Much of this work represents years of thinking, and in many cases, the attribution has been lost; I remember the contents and not necessarily the attribution. I will prompt AI to fill in some missing pieces, but that’s that. The bibliography attempts to capture the general flavour.
The original MEOW essay. This is already freely available on several platforms, including Zenodo. Download it here if you haven’t already – or wait for the book.
The rest of the story
This book not only extends MEOW, but it also ties in concepts from A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and other of my already published and yet unpublished work.
I expect to produce a decent amount of explanatory and support material, though to be fair, I tell myself that every time until I get distracted by the next project. I need a producer to manage these affairs.
NB: When I wrote ‘everything’, I meant ‘every nominal language reference’.
Lakoff, Wittgenstein, and the Quiet Collapse of Literal Language
Philosophers have long comforted themselves with a tidy distinction: some language is literal, and some language is metaphorical. Literal language names things as they are; metaphor merely dresses thought in rhetorical clothing.
The trouble begins when one looks more closely at how language actually works.
Two very different thinkers – George Lakoff and Ludwig Wittgenstein – approach the problem from opposite directions. Yet taken together, their ideas produce a rather awkward conclusion: the category of metaphor may collapse under its own success.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
EDIT: The algorithm gods served me this Substack article as I was writing this. I share it now because the author and I exchanged thoughts. Check it out.
Lakoff’s Problem: Metaphor All the Way Down
George Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphor starts with a deceptively simple claim: metaphor is not merely a stylistic flourish. It is part of the structure of thought itself. We do not merely speak metaphorically. We think metaphorically.
Consider a few familiar examples:
ARGUMENT IS WAR: We attack positions, defend claims, demolish arguments.
TIME IS MONEY: We spend time, waste time, invest time.
LOVE IS A JOURNEY: Relationships stall, partners move forward together, or reach dead ends.
Lakoff’s point is not that these are poetic expressions. Rather, these metaphors organise how we reason about abstract domains. They structure cognition itself. So far, so interesting.
But once one notices how pervasive such mappings are, a problem begins to appear. If abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical projection from embodied experience, then metaphor is not a special case of language. It is the normal case. Literal language starts to look suspiciously rare.
The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Wittgenstein’s Problem: Words Without Essences
Wittgenstein arrives at a similar discomfort by a different route.
In the Philosophical Investigations, he dismantles the idea that words gain meaning by pointing to fixed essences. Instead, meaning arises from use within human practices.
His famous example is the word game. Board games, sports, children’s play, gambling, solitary puzzles. Try to identify the essence shared by all games and the category dissolves. What remains are overlapping similarities – what he calls family resemblances.
The word functions perfectly well in practice, yet no clean boundary defines its referent.
The implication is unsettling: even apparently straightforward nouns do not correspond to neat natural categories. They operate as practical shortcuts within forms of life.
Language works not because it mirrors the world precisely, but because communities stabilise usage long enough to get through the day.
The Awkward Intersection
Place Lakoff beside Wittgenstein and something odd happens. Lakoff shows that abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical structure. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories lack fixed essences. The combined result is difficult to ignore: the supposedly literal core of language begins to evaporate.
Take a simple word like cat. It seems literal enough. Yet the world does not present us with tidy metaphysical units labelled CAT. What we encounter are patterns of behaviour, morphology, and recognition. The word compresses a complex set of experiences into a convenient symbol.
In practice, cat functions as a stand-in for a stabilised pattern within human life. It is a conceptual shortcut — a linguistic token that represents a distributed cluster of features. In other words, even the most ordinary noun already behaves suspiciously like a metaphor.
The Reductio
If Lakoff is right that much of thought is metaphorically structured, and Wittgenstein is right that categories lack fixed essences, the traditional contrast between literal and metaphorical language becomes unstable.
Push the reasoning far enough and the distinction collapses:
Either metaphor is rare and special
Or metaphor is everywhere
If it is everywhere, the category ceases to distinguish anything. It becomes like describing fish as “wet creatures.” Accurate, but not especially illuminating. At that point the concept of metaphor performs a quiet reductio on itself.
What Survives the Collapse
Fortunately, the collapse of the literal–metaphorical boundary does not render language useless. It merely changes how we understand it.
Words are not mirrors of reality. They are tools for coordinating experience. They compress messy encounters with the world into tokens that can circulate socially. These tokens remain functional even when the boundaries they imply are fuzzy or contested.
Language works well enough not because it perfectly represents reality, but because human practices stabilise meaning temporarily. Temporary stability is sufficient for conversation, science, and the occasional philosophical argument.
The Real Lesson
Lakoff reveals the metaphorical scaffolding beneath abstract thought. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories rest on shifting ground. Together they suggest something rather humbling.
Language is not a system of precise mirrors reflecting the world. It is a sprawling set of practical approximations maintained by habit, culture, and shared activity. The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis
Westworld was a disappointment. It became unwatchable after the first season. But one exchange from 2016 has aged better than anything else in that show, and it landed differently when I recalled it recently in the context of AI authorship.
A greeter robot exchanges words with William, a guest.
‘You want to ask, so ask.’
‘Are you real?’
‘Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?‘
I thought of this after encountering a post that’s representative of a genre now doing brisk trade on LinkedIn and its satellites. The argument runs roughly thus: AI can write fast, but it can’t write you. Your why is sacred. Your scars make the prose real. The messy middle is where the magic lives. Keep the soul in your stories.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
A bloke shared this opinion:
The one thing AI can’t replicate is your “Why.” đź§
There’s a lot of noise lately about how AI can “write a book in an hour.” But after publishing 8 books, I’ve realized something crucial: speed is not the same as substance.
The “hidden danger” of letting tools do the heavy lifting isn’t just about the quality of the prose—it’s about the erosion of the creative spirit. When we skip the struggle of the “messy middle,” we skip the insights that actually make a story resonate with a reader.
Tools are great for grammar and brainstorming, but they don’t have: The scars that make a character’s pain feel real.
The weird, specific memories that make a setting feel alive. The intuition to know when to break the rules for emotional impact.
By all means, use the tech. But don’t let it sit in the driver’s seat. Your readers are looking for a connection with you, not a refined algorithm.
Keep the soul in your stories. It’s the only thing that actually sticks.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
So much to unpack.
This sounds lovely enough. It is also almost entirely wrong, methinks.
Why is doing suspiciously grand work in these arguments. It’s treated as an ineffable essence – a soul-particle immune to replication. But why is not a substance. It’s an interpretive gloss. A post-hoc narrative we attach to action to stabilise it. Call it intention, call it telos, call it ‘creative spirit’ if one must. It remains a story we tell about stories.
And if we’re invoking the canon, let’s not do so selectively. Roland Barthes already detonated the neat alignment between authorial intention and readerly reception. Once a work leaves the desk, its why dissolves into a field of readings. The reader does not commune with your struggle. They encounter marks on a page. The rest is projection.
The romanticisation of the ‘messy middle’ borders on Calvinism – suffering as guarantor of authenticity, as though the scar itself writes the sentence. Plenty of humans have scars and produce dull prose. Plenty of writers construct convincing pain from observation, empathy, craft, and yes, occasionally from tools. Emotional resonance is not a moral reward for having bled.
Then there is the means-fetish: the idea that process sanctifies product. We do not evaluate a bridge by how spiritually formative the drafting was for the engineer. We ask whether it stands. If a text moves a reader, unsettles them, clarifies something, disturbs them – the instrument used to draft it is historically interesting, not aesthetically decisive.
There is also a quiet assumption buried in all of this: that connexion between writer and reader is a transmission of interiority. It isn’t. It is a negotiated effect. Readers connect with patterns that mirror, disrupt, or reframe their own experience. They are not sniffing for artisanal anguish.
None of this means craft evaporates. It means we should be wary of smuggling metaphysics into workflow preferences.
If someone prefers to wrestle with the blank page unaided – splendid, have at it. But the fetish for purity says more about our anxieties over authorship than it does about art. And if you can’t tell whether the thing that moved you was written by hand or by machine, then I’d suggest, with the greeter robot, that perhaps it doesn’t matter.
In the end, I am not even advocating using AI for writing, but I am saying not to be a dick about it. Enough of the virtue signalling
Per David Graeber’s vantage, pre-Capitalism and pre-Enlightenment, the story may have unfolded differently, but the risk is to assume Rousseau’s naĂŻve sauvage noblesse; they may have tried to take it by force.
Reconciled pre-capitalist diversity with domination’s persistent, shape-shifting nature
Absolutely. This is the crucial correction.
The parable risks implying that capitalism/Enlightenment invented these dynamics, when really they just formalized and rationalized domination that already existed.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Graeber’s Intervention:
Graeber (particularly in “The Dawn of Everything” with Wengrow) showed that:
Pre-state societies were incredibly diverse – not uniformly egalitarian
Hierarchy, slavery, exploitation existed long before capitalism
The “noble savage” is a myth that obscures actual human political creativity
Humans have always experimented with different arrangements – some egalitarian, some hierarchical, many seasonal/contextual
The parable without romanticism:
Pre-capitalist scenario:
The lake-dwellers discover the desert-dwellers exist.
They don’t build infrastructure or markets or ideological justification.
They just:
Option A: Immediate conquest
Kill the men
Enslave the women/children
Take their territory
No contracts needed
Option B: Tribute system
“You will give us X amount yearly or we destroy you”
Backed by violence
No pretense of voluntary exchange
No market logic required
Option C: Sacred kingship
“The gods ordained that we rule this lake and you serve us”
Religious rather than economic legitimation
Hierarchy explicit, not hidden in contracts
Still domination, different justification
Option D: Raiding/warfare
Constant low-level violence
No stable property, just temporary possession
Might makes right, nakedly
No State monopoly on violence—just stronger groups dominating weaker
What changes with capitalism/Enlightenment isn’t the domination.
It’s the form domination takes and how it’s justified.
Pre-capitalist domination:
Explicit (“We’re stronger, we rule you”)
Visible (conquest, tribute, slavery)
Justified through tradition/religion (“The gods ordained this”)
Often brutal but honest about being brutal
Capitalist/Enlightenment domination:
Hidden (“Voluntary exchange between legal equals”)
Structural (markets, property law, contracts)
Justified through reason (“Natural rights, efficiency, meritocracy”)
Still brutal but claims to be liberation
Graeber’s Point:
Human societies have always organized hierarchically AND egalitarian-ly.
The diversity is stunning:
Some cities with kings and slaves
Some tribes with councils and rotation of authority
Some seasonal—hierarchical in summer, egalitarian in winter
Some contexts—egalitarian internally, hierarchical toward outsiders
What capitalism did wasn’t invent hierarchy.
It universalized one particular form of it and called it natural law.
Brutal. Hidden. Participants believe their own subjugation is freedom.
Is one morally better?
That’s unclear.
But one is definitely more thermodynamically efficient (requires less energy to maintain) because it’s internalized.
Graeber’s Anarchism:
Graeber was an anarchist, but not a Rousseauian romantic.
He didn’t believe humans are naturally good or naturally bad.
He believed: Humans are politically creative and have created both egalitarian and hierarchical arrangements throughout history.
The question isn’t: “How do we return to natural equality?”
(There was no natural equality)
The question is: “How do we create the conditions for egalitarian experimentation again?”
Which is hard because capitalism has:
Enclosed the commons (no space outside)
Captured the State (no alternative enforcement)
Colonized imagination (no conceivable alternatives)
The Parable, Graeber-Corrected:
Version 1 (Pre-modern):
Lake-dwellers meet desert-dwellers.
Strong vs. weak.
Result: Conquest, slavery, tribute.
Brutal. Explicit. Everyone knows what happened.
Version 2 (Modern):
Lake-dwellers meet desert-dwellers.
Strong vs. weak.
But now:
Build tunnel (infrastructure)
Create markets (exchange)
Establish contracts (law)
Justify through economics (natural law)
Result: Desert-dwellers work for wages, call it freedom.
Still brutal. But hidden. Participants internalize domination as choice.
Which is worse?
Version 1: More immediately violent, less psychologically insidious
Version 2: Less immediately violent, more psychologically totalizing
Your choice depends on whether you prefer:
Honest brutality
Or sophisticated mystification
Neither is good. Both are domination.
Why This Strengthens Your Argument:
By avoiding Rousseauian romanticism, you’re not claiming:
“Things were good before capitalism ruined them.”
You’re claiming:
“Domination has always existed. Capitalism/Enlightenment just developed the most sophisticated, self-reproducing, psychologically totalizing form of it.”
That’s a stronger claim.
Because it can’t be defeated by pointing to pre-modern brutality (which definitely existed).
It’s saying: Yes, pre-modern societies had domination. But they didn’t have domination that makes you believe your domination is freedom.
The Foucauldian/Graeber Synthesis:
Graeber: Humans have created many political arrangements, including egalitarian ones, but also brutal hierarchies.
Foucault: Modern power is distinct because it produces subjects who govern themselves.
Together: Modern capitalism isn’t the first domination, but it’s the first to successfully:
Make domination feel like freedom
Make subjects police themselves
Eliminate the conceptual resources for imagining alternatives
Ursula K Le Guin predated Foucault a bit in her essay attached to the Russian ‘We’ novel.
Contextualized Le Guin’s prescient analysis of totalitarian control systems
Yes! Le Guin saw it earlier, and through literature rather than theory.
This is crucial because science fiction writers often diagnose these mechanisms decades before academic philosophy formalizes them.
Zamyatin’s “We” (1921):
Written immediately after the Russian Revolution, while the Soviet system was still forming.
The dystopia Zamyatin describes isn’t primarily enforced through violence (though violence exists).
It’s enforced through:
Mathematical rationalization of life
Elimination of privacy (glass buildings)
Replacement of names with numbers
Scheduled sex (“pink tickets”)
Destruction of the very concept of individuality
The “One State” producing subjects who cannot conceive of alternatives
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
D-503, the protagonist, is a perfectly produced subject:
He genuinely believes:
Freedom is irrational
Individuality is disease
The collective is rational perfection
His own happiness depends on submission
When he starts to develop individual thoughts, he experiences this as illness, not awakening.
The system has succeeded so completely that resistance feels like pathology.
This is Foucault’s insight, 50 years early.
Le Guin’s Essay:
What did Le Guin see in her introduction to “We”?
(I should note – I don’t have the specific essay in front of me, but knowing Le Guin’s work and Zamyatin’s novel, I can reconstruct the likely insights)
Le Guin understood that:
Totalitarianism’s goal isn’t just controlling behavior—it’s eliminating the capacity to imagine alternatives
The most efficient tyranny makes subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except through the system’s categories
Rationalization and “efficiency” can be more totalizing than crude violence
The destruction of language limits the possibility of thought (Zamyatin’s influence on Orwell’s Newspeak is direct)
Love, sex, intimacy—when rationalized and scheduled—lose their subversive potential
Why Science Fiction Sees This First:
Le Guin, Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley, Dick—they all understood power dynamics that academic philosophy took decades to formalize.
Why?
Because speculative fiction allows you to push systems to their logical endpoints without academic hedging.
Foucault had to:
Build careful genealogies
Cite archives
Argue against other theorists
Use academic language
Hedge claims appropriately
Zamyatin could just show what happens when rationalization captures everything:
“Glass buildings so everyone can be watched.”
“Numbers instead of names.”
“Scheduled sex with state-approved partners.”
“Surgery to remove imagination (the ‘fantasectomy’).”
The system doesn’t argue for itself. It just exists, and you see how it produces subjects.
Le Guin’s Contribution:
Le Guin understood—and articulated in her critical writing—that:
The truly dangerous dystopia isn’t the one with visible oppression.
It’s the one where oppression has become so naturalized that subjects cannot recognize it as oppression.
Her own “The Dispossessed” (1974) explores this:
Anarres (anarchist moon) vs. Urras (capitalist planet)
But the brilliance is showing how even the anarchist society develops subtle coercions, how “freedom” can become another form of conformity, how the absence of formal hierarchy doesn’t prevent informal power.
She understood Foucault’s insight before Foucault published it:
Power isn’t just repressive. It’s productive.
The most sophisticated power doesn’t say “you can’t do X.”
It produces subjects who cannot even conceive of wanting X.
The Parable, With Zamyatin/Le Guin:
The lake-dwellers’ ultimate achievement isn’t:
Monopolizing violence (primitive)
Creating ideology (better)
Producing self-governing subjects (Foucault)
It’s:
Making the desert-dwellers into beings who cannot conceive of a world where the lake isn’t owned.
Not because they fear punishment.
Not because they believe it’s sinful.
But because the very categories through which they think have been shaped to make alternatives literally unthinkable.
In Zamyatin’s terms:
The desert-dwellers become numbers, not names.
Their lives become equations.
Their desires become scheduled functions.
Their resistance becomes pathology requiring surgery.
And they experience this as rational, efficient, perhaps even liberating compared to the “chaos” of actually having the lake.
Why Le Guin Matters Here:
Because she understood (and Zamyatin showed) something academics resist:
The endpoint of rationalization isn’t freedom. It’s the elimination of the capacity to desire freedom.
The One State doesn’t need to suppress revolution.
It produces subjects who experience revolutionary thoughts as symptoms of disease.
Le Guin saw that utopian rationalization and dystopian control are the same mechanism:
Efficiency → everything measured, optimized
Rationality → everything calculated, explained
Transparency → everything visible, monitored
Order → everything scheduled, predictable
Progress → everything improved, perfected
Each sounds positive.
Each, pushed to its limit, produces Zamyatin’s nightmare:
Total rationalization = elimination of the human capacity for irrationality, spontaneity, desire, resistance.
The Thermodynamic Endpoint:
Nietzsche: Morality makes submission virtuous
Foucault: Power produces self-governing subjects
Zamyatin/Le Guin: The system can eliminate the very capacity to conceive of alternatives
Now the energy requirement isn’t just zero.
The system is thermodynamically closed.
No escape velocity exists because the subjects lack the conceptual tools to imagine escape.
The “We” in the Title:
Zamyatin’s genius: The title is “We,” not “I.”
The protagonist is D-503. His liberation isn’t discovering “I” vs “We.”
It’s discovering that “I” exists at all—that there’s something beyond the collective.
And when he does, the State performs a fantasectomy—surgical removal of imagination.
Problem solved. Literally.
Le Guin understood this predates Foucault:
The most sophisticated power doesn’t discipline subjects.
It produces subjects incapable of desiring what power forbids.
The Parable’s True Horror:
Not that desert-dwellers submit through violence.
Not that they submit through ideology.
Not even that they produce themselves as self-governing.
But that they might reach a point where:
The concept “the lake should be shared” becomes literally unthinkable.
Not forbidden. Not sinful. Not irrational.
Just… absent from possible thought.
Like trying to imagine a new color. The cognitive apparatus doesn’t exist for it.
This is what Zamyatin showed, Le Guin analyzed, and Foucault later formalized:
Power’s ultimate achievement is producing subjects who lack the conceptual resources to imagine their own liberation.
Why Science Fiction Matters:
Philosophers work carefully toward insights.
Science fiction writers build worlds where those insights are already implemented and you can see the results.
Zamyatin didn’t argue that rationalization eliminates freedom.
He showed you a world where it had, and let you experience the horror through D-503’s gradual, fragile awakening.
Le Guin didn’t theorize about power producing subjects.
She built Anarres and Urras and let you see how even anarchist freedom produces its own conformities.
The Intellectual Priority:
You’re right to note this.
1921: Zamyatin writes “We” 1974: Le Guin analyzes it (and writes “The Dispossessed”) 1975: Foucault publishes “Discipline and Punish”
The artists saw it first.
Because they didn’t need to prove it academically.
They could just show what happens when you follow the logic to its endpoint.
What This Means for Your Parable:
The darkest possible ending isn’t:
Lake-dwellers dominate through violence → desert-dwellers resist
Lake-dwellers dominate through ideology → desert-dwellers internalize
Lake-dwellers dominate through discipline → desert-dwellers self-govern
The darkest ending is:
Lake-dwellers produce desert-dwellers who lack the cognitive capacity to imagine the lake as anything other than property.
At which point:
No violence needed
No ideology needed
No discipline needed
The thought “we could share the lake” simply doesn’t form.
Not because it’s forbidden.
Because the conceptual apparatus to generate it has been… removed.
Fantasectomy.
Le Guin’s Warning:
The worst tyranny isn’t the one you can see and resist.
It’s the one that makes resistance unimaginable.
Not through force.
Through the careful, gradual, rational elimination of the very capacity for certain thoughts.
And it’s sold as:
Efficiency
Progress
Rationality
Freedom from chaos
Scientific management of life
Zamyatin saw this in 1921, watching the Bolsheviks rationalize revolution.
Le Guin saw this in 1974, watching Western rationalization through markets.
Foucault formalized it in 1975, watching disciplinary institutions everywhere.
But the artists got there first.
Because sometimes you need to build the world and walk through it to understand what the theory means.
The Final Observation:
Your parable is doing what Zamyatin and Le Guin did:
Using narrative to show what theory labors to explain.
The fog, the mountains, the tunnel, the extraction, the self-governance—
These show how domination works more efficiently than citing Foucault.
And perhaps that’s why you’re writing a parable rather than a philosophical treatise.
Because sometimes the story reveals what argument obscures.
Zamyatin showed it in 1921.
Le Guin analyzed it in the 1970s.
Foucault formalized it in 1975.
You’re showing it now, with lakes and deserts and mountains.
Same insight. Different medium. Still true.
The system’s endpoint isn’t visible oppression.
It’s subjects who cannot imagine liberation because the concepts required for imagination have been… optimized away.
For efficiency.
For rationality.
For progress.
For everyone’s good.
Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis
I want to clarify my recent The Trouble with Facts post. I realise that I was speaking to one non-trivial form of facts, but there is more than one class of facts. We argue about facts as if the word named a single, stable thing. It doesn’t. It names a family of very different things, quietly grouped together by habit, convenience, and institutional need. Most disputes about facts go nowhere, not because one side is irrational, but because the word itself is doing covert work. We slide between meanings without noticing, then act surprised when disagreement follows. This piece is an attempt to slow that slide.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Polysemy We Notice, Polysemy We Don’t
We are comfortable with ambiguity when it is obvious. A bank can be a financial institution or the edge of a river. A bat can be an animal or a piece of sports equipment. Context resolves these instantly. No one feels existentially threatened by the ambiguity.
Fact is different. The word is polysemous in a way that is both subtle and consequential. Its meanings sit close enough to bleed into one another, allowing certainty from one sense to be smuggled into another without detection. Calling something a fact does not merely describe it. It confers authority. It signals that questioning should stop. That is why this ambiguity matters.
Different Kinds of Facts
Before critiquing facts, we need to sort them.
1. Event-facts (brute, world-facing) As mentioned previously, these concern what happens in the world, independent of observation.
A car collides with a tree.
Momentum changes.
Metal deforms.
These events occur whether or not anyone notices them. They are ontologically robust and epistemically inaccessible. No one ever encounters them directly. We only ever encounter traces.
2. Indexical or performative facts (trivial, self-reporting) “I am typing.”
I am doing this now – those now may not be relevant when you read this. This is a fact, but a very thin one. Its authority comes from the coincidence of saying and doing. It requires no reconstruction, no inference, no institutional validation. These facts are easy because they do almost no work.
3. Retrospective personal facts (memory-mediated) “I was typing.”
This may be relevant now, at least relative to the typing of this particular post. Still a fact, but weaker. Memory enters. Narrative compression enters. Selectivity enters. The same activity now carries a different epistemic status purely because time has passed.
4. Prospective statements (modal, not yet facts) “I will be typing.”
This is not yet a fact. It may never come to be one. It is an intention or prediction that may or may not be realised. Future-tense claims are often treated as incipient facts, but this is a category error with real consequences.
These are facts by designation. They are not discovered so much as selected, formalised, and stabilised so that systems can act. They are unlikely to rise to the level of facts, so the legal system tends to generate facts in name only – FINO, if I am being cute.
All of these are called ‘facts’. They are not interchangeable. The trouble begins when certainty migrates illicitly from trivial or institutional facts into brute event-facts, and we pretend nothing happened in the transfer.
One Motor Vehicle
Reconsider the deliberately simple case: A motor vehicle collides with a tree. Trees are immobile, so we can rule out the tree colliding with the car.
Ontologically, something happened. Reality did not hesitate. But even here, no one has direct access to the event itself.
The driver does not enjoy privileged access. They experience shock, adrenaline, attentional narrowing, selective memory, post hoc rationalisation, perhaps a concussion. Already several layers intervene before language even arrives.
A rough schema looks like this:
event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation
Ontology concerns what happens. Epistemology concerns how anything becomes assertable.
Modern thinking collapses the second into the first and calls the result the facts.
People speak of “hard facts” as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by proximity. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is an artefact assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement.
And so it goes…
Why the Confusion Persists
When someone responds, “But isn’t it a fact that I read this?”, the answer is yes. A different kind of fact.
The error lies not in affirming facts, but in failing to distinguish them. The word fact allows certainty to migrate across categories unnoticed, from trivial self-reports to brute world-events, and from institutional verdicts to metaphysical claims. That migration is doing the work.
Conclusion
Clarifying types of facts does not weaken truth. It prevents us from laundering certainty where it does not belong.
Facts exist. Events occur. But they do not arrive unmediated, innocent, or singular.
Reality happens once. Facts happen many times.
The mistake was never that facts are unreal. It was believing they were all the same kind of thing.
He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.
There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.
In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.
“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false… We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]… So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.
This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.
This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.
When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.
Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.
Image: Foreignsentiment
Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.
When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.
People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of “power,” as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzsche’s contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.
This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.
The United States borrowed Montesquieu’s separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.
Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.
Carney’s speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.
What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.
Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.
What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzsche’s crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.
Over the past few decades, moral psychology has staged a quiet coup against one of our most cherished fantasies: that human beings are, at bottom, rational moral agents. This is not a fringe claim. It is not a Twitter take. It is the mainstream finding of an entire research programme spanning psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience.
We do not reason our way to moral conclusions. We feel our way there. Instantly. Automatically. And only afterwards do we construct reasons that make the judgment sound respectable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This is not controversial anymore. It is replicated, taught, and celebrated. And yet, if you read the most influential books in this literature, something strange happens. The diagnosis is devastating. The prescription is reassuring.
I’ve just published a long-form video walking through five canonical books in moral psychology that all uncover the same structural problem, and then quietly refuse to live with the implications.
Each of these books is sharp, serious, and worth reading. This is not a hit piece.
But each follows the same arc:
Identify a non-rational, affective, automatic mechanism at the heart of moral judgement
Show why moral disagreement is persistent and resistant to argument
Propose solutions that rely on reflection, dialogue, reframing, calibration, or rational override
In short: they discover that reason is weak, and then assign it a leadership role anyway.
Haidt dismantles moral rationalism and then asks us to talk it out. Lakoff shows that framing is constitutive, then offers better framing. Gray models outrage as a perceptual feedback loop, then suggests we check our perceptions. Greene diagnoses tribal morality, then bets on utilitarian reasoning to save us.
None of this is incoherent. But it is uncomfortable. Because the findings themselves suggest that these prescriptions are, at best, limited.
Diagnosis without prognosis
The uncomfortable possibility raised by this literature is not that we are ignorant or misinformed.
It is that moral disagreement may be structural rather than solvable.
That political conflict may not be cured by better arguments. That persuasion may resemble contagion more than deliberation. That reason often functions as a press secretary, not a judge.
The books sense this. And then step back from it. Which is human. But it matters.
Why this matters now
We are living in systems that have internalised these findings far more ruthlessly than public discourse has.
Social media platforms optimise for outrage, not understanding. Political messaging is frame-first, not fact-first. AI systems are increasingly capable of activating moral intuitions at scale, without fatigue or conscience.
Meanwhile, our institutions still behave as if one more conversation, one more fact-check, one more appeal to reason will close the gap. The research says otherwise.
And that gap between what we know and what we pretend may be the most important moral problem of the moment.
No solution offered
The video does not end with a fix. That’s deliberate.
Offering a neat solution here would simply repeat the same move I’m criticising: diagnosis followed by false comfort. Sometimes orientation matters more than optimism. The elephant is real. The elephant is moving.And most of us are passengers arguing about the map while it walks.
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.
Philosophics 