Tag: books

The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World

Posted in critical theory, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

Philosophers adore two things: inventing problems and then fainting when someone solves them. For decades, we’ve been treated to the realism–idealism tug-of-war, that noble pantomime in which two exhausted metaphysical camps clutch the same conceptual teddy bear and insist the other stole it first. It’s almost touching.

Try out the MEOW GPT language parser.

Enter Nexal Ontology, my previous attempt at bailing water out of this sinking ship. It fought bravely, but as soon as anyone spotted even a faint resemblance to Whitehead, the poor thing collapsed under the weight of process-cosmology PTSD. One throwaway comment about ‘actual occasions’, and Nexal was done. Dead on arrival. A philosophical mayfly.

But MEOW* – The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – did not die. It shrugged off the Whitehead comparison with the indifference of a cat presented with a salad. MEOW survived the metaphysical death match because its commitments are simply too lean, too stripped-back, too structurally minimal for speculative cosmology to get its claws into. No prehensions. No eternal objects. No divine lure. Just encounter, mediation, constraint, and the quiet dignity of not pretending to describe the architecture of the universe.

And that’s why MEOW stands. It outlived Nexal not by being grander, but by being harder to kill.

Image: The Four Mediation Layers – Biological, Cognitive, Conceptual, Cultural – structuring every encounter we mistake for ‘direct’.

This little illustration gives the flavour:
• T0 Biological mediation – the body’s refusal to be neutral.
• T1 Cognitive mediation – the brain, doing predictive improv.
• T2 Linguistic–conceptual – words pretending they’re objective.
• T3 Cultural–normative – the inheritance of everyone else’s mistakes.

The essay argues that what we call ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are just abstractions we extract after the encounter, not the metaphysical scaffolding that produces it. Once you begin with the encounter-event itself – already mediated, already structured, already resistive – the mind–world binary looks about as sophisticated as a puppet show.

Image: NotebookLM Infographic (merges cognitive-linguistic, which I don’t support)

What the essay actually does

The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World is the first framework I’ve written that genuinely sheds the Enlightenment scaffolding rather than rebuking it. MEOW shows:

  • Mediation isn’t an epistemic flaw; it’s the only way reality appears.
  • Constraint isn’t evidence of a noumenal backstage; it’s built into the encounter.
  • Objectivity is just stability across mediation, not a mystical view-from-nowhere.
  • ‘Mind’ and ‘world’ are names for recurring patterns, not metaphysical hotels.
  • And – importantly – MEOW does all of this without drifting into Whiteheadian cosmological fan-fiction.

The full essay is now published and archived:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17685689

If you prefer a soft landing and the sound of a passable human voice explaining why metaphysics keeps tripping over its shoelaces, a NotebookLM discussion is here:

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.

MEOW is the survivor because it does the one thing philosophy is terrible at: it refuses to pretend. No substances, no noumena, no grand metaphysical machinery—just a clean, relational architecture that mirrors how we actually encounter the world.

And frankly, that’s quite enough ontology for one lifetime.

* To be perfectly honest, I originally fled from Michela Massimi’s Perspectival Realism in search of a cleaner terminological habitat. I wanted to avoid the inevitable, dreary academic cross-pollination: the wretched fate of being forever shelved beside a project I have no quarrel with but absolutely no desire to be mistaken for. My proposed replacement, Nexal Ontology, looked promising until I realised it had wandered, by sheer lexical accident, into Whitehead’s garden – an unintentional trespass for which I refused to stick around to apologise. I could already hear the process-metaphysics crowd sharpening their teeth.

Early evasive action was required.

I preferred nexal to medial, but the terminology had already been colonised, and I am nothing if not territorial. Mediated Ontology would have staked its claim well enough, but something was missing – something active, lived, structural. Enter the Encounter.

And once the acronym MEO appeared on the page, I was undone. A philosopher is only human, and the gravitational pull toward MEOW was irresistible. What, then, could honour the W with appropriate pomp? The World, naturally. Thus was born The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World.

Pretentious? Yes. Obnoxious? Also yes.

And so it remains—purring contentedly in its absurdity.

What If the Frege–Geach Problem Isn’t?

Posted in consciousness, free will, language, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

The Frege–Geach problem was one of the impetuses for finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. From the first encounter it felt off, as though someone were trying to conjure depth from a puddle. There was no paradox here; just another case of mistaking the map for the terrain, a habit analytic philosophy clings to with almost devotional zeal. The more time I spend on this project, the more often I find those cartographic illusions doing the heavy lifting.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

For the uninitiated, the Frege–Geach problem is supposed to be the knockout blow against AJ Ayer’s emotivism. Frege’s manoeuvre was simple enough: moral language must behave like descriptive language, so embed it in a conditional and watch the whole thing buckle. Neat on paper. Vacuous in practice. The entire construction only stands if one accepts Frege’s original fiat: that moral utterances and empirical propositions share the same logical metabolism. And why should they? Because he said so.

This is the core of the analytic mistake. It is grammar dressed up as ontology.

The LIH doesn’t ‘solve’ the Frege–Geach problem for the simple reason that there is nothing to solve. What it does instead is reclassify the habitat in which such pseudo-problems arise. It introduces categories the analytic tradition never suspected existed and drafts a grammar for language’s failure modes rather than politely ignoring them. It exposes the metaphysics analytic philosophy has been smuggling under its coat for decades.

The LIH does four things at once:

• It destabilises an alleged Invariant.
• It exposes the Contestable foundations underneath it.
• It shows that many analytic puzzles exist only because of the presuppositions baked into the analytic grammar.
• And it asks the forbidden question: what if this cherished problem simply isn’t one?

Analytic philosophy proceeds as though it were operating on a single, pristine grammar of meaning, truth, and assertion. The LIH replies: charming idea, but no. Different conceptual regions obey different rules. Treating moral predicates as if they were factual predicates is not rigour; it’s wishful thinking.

As my manuscript lays out, instead of one flat linguistic plain, the LIH gives you an ecology:

• Invariants for the things that actually behave.
• Contestables for the concepts that wobble under scrutiny.
• Fluids for notions that change shape depending on who touches them.
• Ineffables for everything language tries and fails to pin down.

The analytic tradition, bless its little heart, tries to stretch classical logic across the entire terrain like clingfilm. The clingfilm snaps because reality never agreed to be wrapped that way.

This taxonomy isn’t jargon for its own sake. It’s a meta-grammar: a way of describing how language breaks, where it breaks, and why it breaks in predictable places. It names the structures analytic philosophy has been tripping over for a century but studiously refused to acknowledge.

Their error is simple: they treat language as flat. The LIH treats language as topographical – scored with ridges, fault lines, and pressure fronts.

They think in one grammar. I wrote a grammar for grammars.

No wonder there’s disquiet. Their tools have been optimised for the wrong terrain. I’m not challenging their competence; I’m pointing out that the conceptual map they’ve been so proudly updating was drawn as if the continent were uniformly paved.

This is why Frege–Geach, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, another irritant, paradoxes, semantic embeddings – so many of their grand intellectual fixtures – appear dramatic inside their grammar yet quietly evaporate once you switch grammars. The LIH isn’t a theory about language; it is a theory of the boundary conditions where language stops being able to masquerade as a theory of anything at all.

And the Frege–Geach problem? In the end, perhaps it isn’t.

Note that the cover image is of the rhinoceros in the animated movie, James and the Giant Peach. The rhino was meant to remind James of the importance of perspective. I feel it’s fitting here.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Apparently, I’ve got more to say on this matter…

Posted in philosophy, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–5 minutes

It seems my latest rant about AI-authorship accusations stirred something in me, that I need to apologise for being a professional writer – or is that a writing professional? Blame the Enlightenment, blame writing and communication courses, whatevs. I certainly do. But since some people are still waving the pitchforks, insisting that anything too coherent must be artificially tainted, I should address the obvious point everyone keeps missing:

The writing structures people attribute to AI aren’t AI inventions. They’re human inventions. Old ones. Codified ones. And we made the machines copy them. Sure, they have a certain cadence. It’s the cadence you’d have if you also followed the patterns you should have been taught in school or opened a book or two on the topic. I may have read one or two over the years.

Wait for it… The orthodoxy is ours. I hate to be the one to break it to you.

Video: AI Robot Assistant (no audio)

Professional Writing Has Its Own House Rules (And They’re Older Than AI Neural Nets)

👉 I wrote earlier how even talking about AI is censored in Reddit. 🤷

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic and the last one.

Long before AI arrived to ruin civilisation and steal everyone’s quiz-night jobs, we’d already built an entire culture around ‘proper writing’. The sort of writing that would make a communications lecturer beam with pride. The Sith may come in twos; good writing comes in threes.

  1. Tell them what you’re going to say.
  2. Say it.
  3. Repeat what you told them.

But wait, there’s more:

  • Use linear flow, not intellectual jazz.
  • One idea per paragraph, please.
  • Support it with sources.
  • Conclude like a responsible adult.

These aren’t merely classroom antics. They’re the architectural grammar of academic, corporate, scientific, and policy writing. No poetic flourishes. No existential detours. No whimsical cadence. The aim is clarity, predictability, and minimal risk of misinterpretation. It’s the textual equivalent of wearing sensible shoes to a board meeting. So when someone reads a structured piece of prose and yelps, ‘It sounds like AI!’, what they’re really saying is:

It sounds like someone who was properly trained to write in a professional context.

Je m’accuse. AI Didn’t Invent Structure. We Forced It To Learn Ours. Full stop. The problem is that it did whilst most of us didn’t.

If AI tends toward this style – linear, tidy, methodical, lamentably sane – that’s because we fed it millions of examples of ‘proper writing’. It behaves professionally because we trained it on professional behaviour – surprisingly tautological. Quelle surprise, eh?

Just as you don’t blame a mimeograph for producing a perfectly dull office memo, you don’t blame AI for sounding like every competent academic who’s been beaten with the stick of ‘clarity and cohesion’. It’s imitation through ingestion. It’s mimicry through mass exposure.

And Now for the Twist: My Fiction Has None of These Constraints

My fiction roams freely. It spirals, loops, dissolves, contradicts, broods, and wanders through margins where structured writing fears to tread. It chases affect, not clarity. Rhythm, not rubrics. Experience, not exegesis.

No one wants to read an essay that sounds like Dr Seuss, but equally, no one wants a novel that reads like the bylaws of a pension committee.

Different aims, different freedoms: Academic and professional writing must behave itself. Fiction absolutely should not.

This isn’t a value judgement. One isn’t ‘truer’ or ‘better’ than the other – only different tools for different jobs. One informs; the other evokes. One communicates; the other murmurs and unsettles.

Not to come off like Dr Phil (or Dr Suess), but the accusation itself reveals the real anxiety. When someone accuses a writer of sounding ‘AI-like,’ what they usually mean is:

‘Your writing follows the conventions we taught you to follow – but now those conventions feel suspect because a machine can mimic them’.

And that’s not a critique of the writing. It’s a critique of the culture around writing – a panic that the mechanical parts of our craft are now automated and thus somehow ‘impure’.

But structure is not impurity. Professional clarity is not soullessness. Repetition, sequencing, scaffolding – these aren’t telltale signs of AI; they’re the residue of centuries of human pedagogy.

AI mirrors the system. It didn’t create the system. And if the system’s beginning to look uncanny in the mirror, that’s a problem of the system, not the reflection.

In Short: The Craft Is Still the Craft, Whether Human or Machine

Professional writing has rules because it needs them. Fiction abandons them because it can. AI imitates whichever domain you place in front of it.

The accusation that structured writing ‘sounds artificial’ is merely a confusion between form and origin. The form is ours. The origin is irrelevant.

If clarity is now considered suspicious, I fear for the state of discourse. But then again, I’ve feared for that for some time.

And apparently, I’ve still got more to say on the matter.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Burnout Society – Byung-Chul Han

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
1–2 minutes

🤔 If liberation now feels indistinguishable from exhaustion, what exactly have we been freed from?

A digital MTG trading card titled “Achievement Token – Condition.” The image shows a human figure shaped like an hourglass, sand flowing through its body as if time and self are draining away. The design echoes the colours of oxidised red and muted graphite, symbolising burnout and the illusion of productivity within modern capitalist culture.
Image: Exhaustion means you’re working hard, and working hard means you’re good.

Han’s slender essay reads like a diagnosis of our psychic economy. The disciplinary society of ‘thou shalt’ has dissolved into the achievement society of ‘yes, I can’. We no longer rebel against authority; we internalise it, polishing our exhaustion until it gleams like ambition. Productivity replaces purpose. Rest becomes guilt. The subject, stripped of exterior constraint, now self-flagellates in the name of freedom.

We exploit ourselves and think we are free.

What Han captures is not mere fatigue but a civilisational pathology: the compulsion to optimise the self as though it were capital. Burnout is not the collapse of will but the logical conclusion of unlimited permission.

If liberation now feels indistinguishable from exhaustion, what exactly have we been freed from?

From the series Readings in Late Exhaustion – a Philosophics reflection on the maladies of modernity.

About the Series — Readings in Late Exhaustion

These cards belong to Readings in Late Exhaustion, a Philosophics project tracing the psychic and cultural costs of late capitalism.

Each card interprets a contemporary work of critical theory through the language of collectable gameplay, where identity, labour, and value become quantified acts.

The format itself is the critique: a system of self-expenditure disguised as achievement, reflection rendered as performance.

Edition: RLE / LCAP — Philosophics Press

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Bry Willis

Philosophics

Editing Is Hard and Propensity

Posted in art, fiction, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Well, not so much hard as not particularly or inherently enjoyable.

I estimate I’ve got about a day left to complete this manuscript – ‘done’ done. When I open InDesign, it shames me – 3 days ago, I last touched this document. It doesn’t feel like 3 days have passed, but time flies.

On the right is an older version. I began reworking it into this new version over the summer, and here I am come autumn. It’s even worse if I use the Chinese calendar. Evidently, 7th November is the first day of winter. They can’t wait until soltace.

Anyway, just a brief update. This isn’t going to edit itself, and I can’t afford to pay an editor for a passion project. Besides – and let’s be honest – I can’t afford an editor in general – or at least can’t cost-justify it – and all my writing is a passion project.

Of course, editors (and cover artists) insist that one would sell more book if only they were edited or professionally rendered. There is an element of truth to this, but I’ve read some gawdawful books that were professionally edited and published through a traditional publisher, because publishers publish.

Me, I operate on razor-thin margins. Most of my publications haven’t even broken even – even if I ignore opportunity costs, which I can’t because I’m an economist. Accountants get to play that trick.

This said, I do hire reviewers, editors, and artists in small doses – homoeopathic as they might be – and I’ve had mixed results.

I’m rambling

Must really be avoiding the editing process…

Recently, I wanted to redesign the cover of one of my Ridley Park fiction books.

Image Comparison: A Tale of Two Propensities

The cover on the left is the original. It is intentionally a minimal 2-D construction – a representation of the first section of the book, the first 15 chapters.

The cover on the right is the update. It is also minimalist, representing the second section of Propensity. I’m not sure how I would depict the third section. If it comes to me, I may render a third version.

There’s a story to this. I reached out to some cover artists and told them I was unhappy with my original design but had no visual ideas. I’d leave this to the artist. It turns out that some artists don’t want full control over the design process. I can understand the hesitation.

They asked for covers that I might like, so I researched some covers and saved them to a Pinterest board.

As it turned out, after some inspiration, I decided to render this one myself, too. Hey, I tried.

What happened to the rest of the time?

OK, so there’s more. I also created a video book trailer in the evening.

It was fun enough. Give it a watch. It also represents part one of Propensity.

OK, this time for real. Let me know what you think…about anything in particular.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Propensity for Simulacra, An Excerpt

Posted in Audio, fiction, free will, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, quote, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

Man starts over again every day,
in spite of all he knows,
against all he knows.
— Emil Cioran

I posted Chapter 26 of my novella, Propensity. I share it here because it invokes Baudrillard’s Simulacra.

Consider it an advert – and a window into Propensity.

Simulacra – When the Camera Becomes the Conscience
Blog Post: Propensity, Chapter 26 – Simulacra
Audio: Propensity, Chapter 2 – Oversight

The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?

No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.

The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.

As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?

This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.

A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.

Editorial Review

“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.

—Reedsy Discovery Review

Meantime, give it a listen.

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Written by Bry Willis AKA Ridley Park

Philosophics

Raison d’être

Posted in philosophy, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.

Philosophy isn’t a mass-market pursuit. Most people are content simply to make it through the day without undue turbulence, and I can hardly blame them. Thinking deeply is not an act of leisure; it’s a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didn’t afford. Even when I’ve been employed, I’ve noticed how wage labour chokes the capacity for art and thought. Warhol may have monetised the tension, but most of us merely survive it.

Video: Sprouting seed. (No audio)

That’s why I value engagement – not the digital pantomime of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, but genuine dialogue. The majority will scroll past without seeing. A few will skim. Fewer still will respond. Those who do – whether to agree, dissent, or reframe – remind me why this space exists at all.

To Jason, Julien, Jim, Lance, Nick, and especially Homo Hortus, who has been conversing beneath the recent Freedom post: your engagement matters. You help me think differently, sometimes introducing writers or ideas I hadn’t encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought – provided I can avoid tumbling into the Dunning-Kruger pit.

And now, a note of quiet satisfaction. A Romanian scholar recently cited my earlier essay, the Metanarrative Problem, in a piece titled Despre cum metanarațiunile construiesc paradigma și influențează răspunsurile emoționale – translation: On How Grand Narratives Shape Paradigms and Condition Our Emotional Responses. That someone, somewhere, found my reflections useful enough to reference tells me this exercise in public thinking is doing what it should: planting seeds in unpredictable soil.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

How to Avoid Reading

Posted in language, modernism, philosophy, podcast, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity
2–3 minutes

Rather, how to optimise your time commitment to reading.

I came across a digital copy of The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by David Ohana as I was purusing titles on PhilArchive. The title piqued my interest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to reading it. What’s a bloke to do? Feed it to ChatGPT, of course.

Let’s just say, M. GPT was not amused.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

My first question: Is this at least tangential to my work?

Yes, it wanders. He tends to smuggle in parallel intellectual developments (Kantian autonomy, Cartesian doubt, social contract theory) even when they’re only indirectly related to his main thread. It’s a common sin in “origins of modernity” texts: the net gets cast so wide that causation and correlation start swapping costumes.

If you’re looking for the through-line, it’s probably his effort to show how early modern conceptions of reason metastasised into a moral and political framework, not just an epistemic one. But, yes — tangential is fair.

Is it more of a superficial survey with some connective tissue?

That’s a precise way to put it. Ohanav’s book reads like a well-informed synthesis—competent, even elegant—but not a deep excavation. He’s stitching together recognizable figures (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hume) into a narrative arc about “modernity” rather than uncovering new terrain. The connective tissue is mostly thematic rather than argumentative: reason → autonomy → secular moral order → political liberalism.

It’s a survey that flatters the reader into thinking they’re tracing the genealogy of modern thought, but it rarely descends into the messy underlayers—say, the theological anxieties, material conditions, or institutional contexts that actually gave those ideas traction. In short: wide lens, thin soil.

Wow. Not a rousing endorsement.

So in a world of publish or perish, he’s publishing something more approachable than academic?

Exactly. It’s the kind of book that keeps tenure committees content and undergrads awake. Respectable citations, accessible prose, and a digestible thesis that flatters modernity while hinting at critique.

He’s not trying to break ground—he’s curating a gallery of the usual suspects and arranging them under good lighting. The prose carries that faint aroma of Routledge house style: serious but safe, just speculative enough to appear bold without alienating reviewers.

In the “publish or perish” economy, it’s survival by synthesis.

So closer to an undergraduate project than a grad school thesis?

Pretty much. It’s polished enough to pass for advanced scholarship if you don’t poke too hard, but structurally it’s more akin to a well-executed upper-level survey paper—ambitious in scope, cautious in depth.

He gestures toward big philosophical debates without really committing to any. The text moves like a docent through a museum: “Here we have Descartes, note his influence on Kant; over here, the Enlightenment’s moral optimism, soon to be critiqued by Nietzsche—moving on…”

You can tell he’s read widely, but the apparatus of argument—archival work, textual analysis, theoretical risk—is minimal. It’s competent, not adventurous.

OK, so dodged that bullet. I may still skim it.

Don’t do this to any of my books. 🧐🫠

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Written by Bry Willis and Chat GPT

Philosophics

Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together

Posted in agency, art, fiction, free will, identity, language, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments
Black-and-white illustration of robed figures standing in a forest clearing, forming a circle by linking chains between their hands. The figures appear both united and restrained, illuminated by a pale, radiant light that suggests dawn or revelation. The mood is solemn yet transcendent, symbolising Rousseau’s paradox that freedom and constraint are inseparable. The image appears as a parody Magic: The Gathering card titled “Freedom,” subtitled “Enchantment — Social Contract,” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.” The art captures the tension between community, bondage, and liberation.

Freedom is a word so overused it’s practically anaemic. Everyone wants it; no one agrees on what it means. It’s been weaponised by tyrants and revolutionaries alike, invoked to justify both the breaking of chains and their reforging in a different metal.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

As I write this, I have just finished Erich Fromm’s A Sane Society. Without derailing this post, he cited a scenario – a description of work communities given in All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop – where in post-WW2 France, a group formed a sort of workers’ coöperative – but it was more than that; it was an anarchosyndicalist experiment. As I read it, I had to cringe at the power ‘voluntary’ transfers that immediately got me thinking of Foucault’s biopower – as I often do. Saving this for a separate post.

Black-and-white illustration of robed figures standing in a forest clearing, forming a circle by linking chains between their hands. The figures appear both united and restrained, illuminated by a pale, radiant light that suggests dawn or revelation. The mood is solemn yet transcendent, symbolising Rousseau’s paradox that freedom and constraint are inseparable. The image appears as a parody Magic: The Gathering card titled “Freedom,” subtitled “Enchantment — Social Contract,” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.” The art captures the tension between community, bondage, and liberation.
Image: Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together
Card 006 from the Postmodern Set – Philosophics.blog

This Critical Theory parody card, Freedom, draws its lineage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose paradox still haunts the modern condition: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The card re-enchants that contradiction – an Enchantment – Social Contract that reminds us liberty isn’t a state but a negotiation.

The card reads:

At the beginning of each player’s upkeep, that player may remove a Binding counter from a permanent they control.
Creatures you control can’t be tapped or sacrificed by spells or abilities your opponent controls.

This is Rousseau’s dilemma made mechanical. Freedom is not absolute; it’s procedural. The upkeep represents the maintenance of the social contract—an ongoing renewal, not a one-time event. Every player begins their turn by negotiating what freedom costs. You may remove one Binding counter, but only if you recognise that binding exists.

The flavour text underlines Rousseau’s plea:

“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.”

Freedom, for Rousseau, wasn’t about doing whatever one pleased. It was about participating in the moral and civic order that gives action meaning. To exist outside that order is not liberty; it’s anarchy, the tyranny of impulse.

The card, therefore, resists the naïve libertarian reading of freedom as the absence of restraint. It instead depicts freedom as the capacity to act within and through shared constraints.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of chains,
but the power to choose which ones we wear.

— Philosophics.blog

The art shows a ring of robed figures, hand in hand, their chains forming a circle beneath a clearing sky. It’s a haunting image: freedom through fellowship, bondage through unity. The circle symbolises Rousseau’s idea that true liberty emerges only when individuals subordinate selfish will to the general will – the common interest formed through collective agreement.

Yet there’s also a postmodern irony here: circles can be prisons too. The social contract can emancipate or suffocate, depending on who wrote its terms. The same chains that protect can also bind.

The monochrome aesthetic amplifies the ambiguity – freedom rendered in greyscale, neither utopia nor despair, but the space in between.

Rousseau’s notion of the social contract was revolutionary, but its dissonance still resonates: how can one be free and bound at the same time? He answered that only through the voluntary participation in a collective moral order can humans transcend mere instinct.

We might say that today’s democracies still operate under Freedom (Enchantment – Social Contract). We maintain our rights at the cost of constant negotiation: legal, social, linguistic. Every “Binding counter” removed is the product of civic upkeep. Stop maintaining it, and the enchantment fades.

The card hints at the price of this enchantment: creatures (citizens) can’t be tapped or sacrificed by opponents’ control. In other words, autonomy is secured only when the system prevents external domination. But systems fail, and when they do, the illusion of freedom collapses into coercion.

Rousseau earns a complicated respect in my philosophical canon. He’s not in my top five, but he’s unavoidable. His concept of freedom through the social contract anticipates both modern liberalism and its critique. He believed that genuine liberty required moral community – a notion now eroded by hyper-individualism.

Freedom, as I’ve rendered it here, isn’t celebration. It’s lamentation. The card is about the fragility of the social spell that keeps chaos at bay. We remove one binding at a time, hoping not to unbind ourselves entirely.

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written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Sane Society, Revisited: Why Work Still Drives Us Mad

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4–6 minutes

Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society turns seventy this year, and like a ghost of reason past, it refuses to leave. His target was Capitalism™ – not merely as an economic system, but as a psychic infection. Replace the word factory with Zoom call, and his diagnosis reads like yesterday’s corporate newsletter. We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana

Aside from its psychobabble, The Sane Society, published in 1954, reads almost like it could have been written in 2024. I’d go out on a limb and claim it will still be relevant in 2054 – because Capitalism™ and the relationship it creates between humans and machines, and humans and other humans. It’s a divisive ideology. I’ve read a lot of content on employee engagement in the past decade. I’d been exposed to it in my Organisational Behaviour courses in the late ’80s. Things were going to change. We’d plotted a future.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Only nothing material has changed. We pretended to notice the problem and fix it, but the people reporting the issue and the people in charge did not share a worldview. And the young managers who were taught about the challenge were either not promoted or changed their tune to facilitate their own promotion. Funny how the selection process favours groupthink over diversity of opinion.

Video: Apathetic Office Worker

On balance, most people tend to hate or be otherwise dissatisfied with their jobs. This is nothing new. It was true before Fromm’s book, and it is true now. I published a series of posts on prostitution in 2018 and discovered that escorts had better job satisfaction than the larger population. Let that sink in.

‘…the vast majority of the population work as employees with little skill required, and with almost no chance to develop any particular talents, or to show any outstanding achievements. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part of their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed.

‘Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. But the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensations for his inner vacuity, not because these desires are the “natural” or most important incentives for work.‘

Fromm, ever the optimist, thought alienation might be cured through self-awareness and communal values. The twentieth century politely ignored him, opting instead for mindfulness apps and performance reviews.

We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.

I’ve excised the psychobabble, but he continues…

‘But even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and enjoyment of their job was expressed by 85 per cent of the professionals and executives, by 64 per cent of whitecollar people, and by 41 per cent of the factory workers. In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 per cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per cent of the commercial employees, 56 per cent of the skilled, and 48 per cent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction.

‘We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfied—among the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 per cent of “satisfied” professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied persons who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate.

‘As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illnesses are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 per cent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment.’

In the twenty-first century, job dissatisfaction has increased even more. To me, it’s interesting to consider how many people harken back to the ‘good old days’, yet there is little evidence to support the view. Almost schizophrenically, others look to the promise of the future and technology, yet this is simply another narrative with no basis in fact.

The irony is that we’ve automated everything except fulfilment. Even our dissatisfaction has become efficient – streamlined, quantified, and monetised. Fromm warned that the sickness of society was its sanity. On that front, we’re positively thriving.

Stand by for more sanity to follow…

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics