I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.
Philosophy isnât 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; itâs a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didnât afford. Even when Iâve been employed, Iâve 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)
Thatâs why I value engagement â 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 â whether to agree, dissent, or reframe â 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 hadnât encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought â 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 metanaraÈiunile construiesc paradigma Èi influenÈeazÄ rÄspunsurile emoÈionale â 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.
I’ve just added a new entry to my Anti-Enlightenment corpus, bringing the total to seven â not counting my latest book, The Illusion of Light, that summarises the first six essays and places them in context. This got me thinking about what aspects of critique I might be missing. Given this, what else might I be missing?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussion of this topic.
So far, I’ve touched on the areas in the top green table and am considering topics in the bottom red/pink table:
Summary Schema â The Anti-Enlightenment Project â Published Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay(s)
Epistemic
What counts as âtruthâ?
Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
Political
What holds power together?
Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail; Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Psychological
Why do subjects crave rule?
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self; The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Anthropological
What makes a ânormalâ human?
The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Ethical
How to live after disillusionment?
The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Summary Schema â The Anti-Enlightenment Project â Unpublished Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay
Theological (Metaphysical)
What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?
The Absent God: Metaphysics After Meaning
Aesthetic (Affective)
How did beauty become moral instruction?
The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Ecological (Post-Human)
What happens when the world refuses to remain in the background?
1. Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
Published September 2025
Objectivity, in the social and moral sense, is a performance â a consensus mechanism mistaken for truth. This essay maps how âobjectivityâ operates as a scaffold for Enlightenment rationality, masking moral preference as neutral judgment. It introduces a five-premise model showing that what we call objectivity is merely sustained agreement under shared illusions of coherence. The argument reframes moral reasoning as provisional and participatory rather than universal or fixed.
2. Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail
Published October 2025 The Enlightenment built democracy for rational ghosts â imagined citizens who never existed. This essay dissects six contradictions at the foundation of ârationalâ governance and shows why democracyâs collapse was prewritten in its metaphysics. From mathematical impossibility to sociological blindness, it charts the crisis of coherence that modern politics still calls freedom. â Read on Zenodo
3. Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Published October 2025 Modern democracies worship the now. This essay examines presentism â the systemic bias toward immediacy â as a structural flaw of Enlightenment thinking. By enthroning rational individuals in perpetual âdecision time,â modernity erased the unborn from politics. What remains is a political theology of the short term, collapsing both memory and imagination. â Read on Zenodo
4. Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self
Published October 2025 âAgencyâ is not a metaphysical faculty â itâs an alibi. This essay dismantles the myth of the autonomous self and reframes freedom as differential responsiveness: a gradient of conditions rather than a binary of will. Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and decolonial thought, it argues for ethics as maintenance, not judgment, and politics as condition-stewardship. â Read on Zenodo
5. The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Published October 2025
This essay formalises Dis-Integrationism â a philosophical method that refuses synthesis, closure, and the compulsive need to âmake whole.â It traces how Enlightenment reason, deconstruction, and therapy culture all share a faith in reintegration: the promise that whatâs fractured can be restored. Against this, Dis-Integrationism proposes care without cure, attention without resolution â a discipline of maintaining the broken as broken. It closes the Anti-Enlightenment loop by turning critique into a sustained practice rather than a path to redemption.
6. The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Published October 2025
Modernityâs most persistent myth is the ânormalâ human. This essay excavates how legibility â the drive to measure, categorise, and care â became a form of control. From Queteletâs statistical man to Foucaultâs biopower and todayâs quantified emotion, Homo Normalis reveals the moral machinery behind normalisation. It ends with an ethics of variance: lucidity without repair, refusal without despair.
7. The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Published October 2025
This essay examines how the Enlightenmentâs ideal of autonomy contains the seed of its undoing. The rational, self-governing subject â celebrated as the triumph of modernity â proves unable to bear the solitude it creates. As freedom collapses into exhaustion, the desire for direction re-emerges as devotion. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, The Will to Be Ruled traces the psychological gradient from fear to obedience, showing how submission is moralised as virtue and even experienced as pleasure. It concludes that totalitarianism is not a deviation from reason but its consummation, and that only through Dis-Integrationism â an ethic of maintenance rather than mastery â can thought remain responsive as the light fades.
Axis: Theological / Metaphysical Core Question: What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?
Concept: This essay would trace how Enlightenment humanism replaced God with reason, only to inherit theologyâs structure without its grace. It might read Spinoza, Kantâs moral law, and modern technocracy as secularised metaphysics â systems that still crave universal order. Goal: To show that disenchantment never erased faith; it simply redirected worship toward cognition and control. Possible subtitle:The Enlightenmentâs Unconfessed Religion.
9. The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Axis: Aesthetic / Affective Core Question: How did beauty become moral instruction?
Concept: From Kantâs Critique of Judgment to algorithmic taste cultures, aesthetic judgment serves social order by rewarding harmony and punishing dissonance. This essay would expose the politics of form â how beauty trains attention and regulates emotion. Goal: To reclaim aesthetics as resistance, not refinement. Possible subtitle:Why Modernity Needed the Beautiful to Behave.
10. The Uncounted World: Ecology and the Non-Human
Axis: Ecological / Post-Human Core Question: What happens when the world refuses to remain background?
Concept: Here you dismantle the Enlightenment split between subject and nature. From Cartesian mechanism to industrial rationalism, the natural world was cast as resource. This essay would align Dis-Integrationism with ecological thinking â care without mastery extended beyond the human. Goal: To reframe ethics as co-maintenance within an unstable biosphere. Possible subtitle:Beyond Stewardship: Ethics Without Anthropos.
11. The Fractured Tongue: Language Against Itself
Axis: Linguistic / Semiotic Core Question: How does language betray the clarity it promises?
Concept: Every Anti-Enlightenment text already hints at this: language as both the instrument and failure of reason. Drawing on Nietzsche, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and modern semiotics, this essay could chart the entropy of meaning â the collapse of reference that makes ideology possible. Goal: To formalise the linguistic fragility underlying every rational system. Possible subtitle:The Grammar of Collapse.
12. The Vanished Commons: Between Isolation and Herd
Axis: Communal / Social Ontology Core Question: Can there be community without conformity?
Concept: This would return to the psychological and political threads of The Will to Be Ruled, seeking a space between atomised autonomy and synchronized obedience. It might turn to Arendtâs notion of the world between us or to indigenous and feminist relational models. Goal: To imagine a non-totalitarian togetherness â a responsive collective rather than a collective response. Possible subtitle:The Ethics of the Incomplete We.
* These essays may never be published, but I share this here as a template to further advance the Anti-Enlightenment project and fill out the corpus.
If youâre reading this, chances are youâre mortal. Bummer. Even worse, you may not be maximizing your odds of wringing every last drop out of your limited lifespan. But fear not! Science has some answers. And the answer, at least in the United States, is shockingly unsecular: religious people, on average, live longer than their non-religious counterparts. They also tend to be happier. But donât rush to your nearest house of worship just yetâbecause itâs not God, the afterlife, or divine intervention at work. Itâs something far more mundane: people.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Religion-Longevity Link: A Holy Miracle or Just Good Networking?
Multiple studies have confirmed what might seem an inconvenient truth for secular folks like myself: religious participation is associated with longer lifespans. A 2018 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that attending religious services more than once a week was associated with a roughly 33% lower risk of mortality. Thatâs a pretty solid statistical incentive to at least pretend to enjoy Sunday sermons.
Why the boost in longevity? No, itâs not divine reward points. It boils down to a few key factors:
Community and Social Support: Regularly showing up to church, temple, mosque, or synagogue means interacting with the same people repeatedly, forming strong social bonds. When life gets tough, these people tend to notice and lend support.
Healthier Lifestyles: Many religious traditions frown upon self-destructive behaviours like smoking, heavy drinking, and drug use.
Lower Stress Levels: Religious belief systems provide coping mechanisms for hardship, instilling a sense of meaning and reducing existential dread.
Volunteerism and Purpose: Many religious folks engage in community service, which has been linked to greater happiness and longevity.
The Not-So-Spiritual Catch: Why Atheists and the âSpiritual but Not Religiousâ Miss Out
Hereâs the kicker: itâs not belief in a deity that grants these benefits. Itâs participation in a structured, tight-knit community. Thatâs why merely identifying as âspiritualâ doesnât deliver the same effectsâwithout a committed social framework, spirituality becomes a solo endeavour. And whilst atheists can certainly find meaning in other ways, they often lack equivalent institutions providing routine, real-world social engagement.
To put it bluntly, God isnât keeping people alive longer. Other people are. Having a tribe that notices when you donât show up, checks in when youâre sick, and nags you into a healthier lifestyle has tangible benefits.
The Scandinavian Exception: Thriving Without Religion
âBut wait,â you may say, âwhat about those blissfully secular Scandinavian countries? Theyâre barely religious, yet they consistently rank among the happiest and longest-living people on Earth.â Good point. The key difference? They have successfully replaced the social function of religion with other strong communal institutions.
Nordic nations boast robust social safety nets, well-funded public spaces, and a culture prioritising collective well-being. They donât need church groups to function as makeshift welfare systems because the state ensures no one falls through the cracks. They also have thriving clubs, hobby groups, and worker associations that provide built-in social support.
Conclusion: What This Means for Longevity-Seeking Atheists and Introverts
If you, like me, are an atheist and also an introvert who prefers solitude, writing, and the company of generative AI, this presents a bit of a conundrum. How does one reap the benefits of social integration without enduring the horror of group activities?
The lesson here isnât that you need to feign religious belief or force yourself into suffocating social obligations. But if you want to maximize your lifespan and well-being, some form of consistent, meaningful connection with others is essential. Whether thatâs through a socialist co-op, a local philosophy club, a structured hobby group, or even just a tight circle of like-minded misanthropes, the key is to avoid total isolation.
Religion isnât the magic ingredientâitâs just a well-tested delivery system. And in a society where other forms of community are fraying, itâs not surprising that religious folks seem to be winning the longevity lottery. The real takeaway? Find your people. Even if youâd rather be alone.
Here are some key points from the concept of decolonising the mind:
Language is intimately tied to culture and worldview: Language shapes how individuals perceive and understand the world. When colonised people are forced to adopt the language of the coloniser, they are also compelled to adopt their cultural framework and values.
Colonial education systems perpetuate mental control: By privileging the coloniser’s language and devaluing indigenous languages, colonial education systems reinforce the dominance of the coloniser’s culture and worldview. This process results in colonised children being alienated from their own cultural heritage and internalising a sense of inferiority.
Reclaiming indigenous languages is crucial for decolonisation: wa Thiong’o advocates for a return to writing and creating in indigenous African languages. He sees this as an act of resistance against linguistic imperialism and a way to reconnect with authentic African cultures. He further argues that it’s not enough to simply write in indigenous languages; the content must also reflect the struggles and experiences of the people, particularly the peasantry and working class.
The concept extends beyond literature: While wa Thiong’o focuses on language in literature, the concept of decolonising the mind has broader implications. It calls for a critical examination of all aspects of life affected by colonialism, including education, politics, and economics.
It is important to note that decolonising the mind is a complex and ongoing process. There are debates about the role of European languages in postcolonial societies, and the concept itself continues to evolve. However, wa Thiong’o’s work remains a seminal text in postcolonial studies, raising crucial questions about the enduring legacy of colonialism on thought and culture.
I was commenting elsewhere on morals and was directed to Jonathan Haidt and his work. Notably, the questionnaire at YourMorals.org, where you can get your own assessment and contribute data points to the body of work.
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of this type of survey, as I’ve mentioned previously. Still, I made an attempt. Better still, I’ve copied the questions to critique. There are 36 all tolled. Perhaps, I’ll respond to a dozen at a time. The next dozen responses are here. Generally speaking, they present each question and provide a Likert scale as follows:
Does not describe me at all
Slightly describes me
Moderately describes me
Describes me fairly well
Describes me extremely well
Standard fare. It starts off bad:
1. Caring for people who have suffered is an important virtue.
Why include an abstract concept like virtue? I don’t ascribe to the notion of virtue, so it’s an empty set. Given that, my response would be a 1. If I ignore the offensive nomenclature and assume it translates idiomatically into ‘beneficial for some target society’, then I still have to question what is meant by suffering, and how far does caring extend. Is it enough to feel bad about the homeless person, or does one have to care enough to provide sustenance and shelter? Talk is cheap.
2. The effort a worker puts into a job ought to be reflected in the size of a raise they receive.
This is fraught with all sorts of problems. In fact, it’s a reason why I consider myself to be a Postmodern. The inherent metanarrative is that societies are effectively money-based. I don’t happen to believe that, so I am again faced with responding to an empty set. Even if I attempt to abstract the ‘raise’ aspect to mean that effort represents input and output is a direct and (perhaps) proportional function, I am still left to wrestle with how this effort is measured and what could have been achieved had the others not been present.
Using a sports analogyâalways a dangerous domain for me to play inâ, what if LeBron James was to play an opposing team by himself? He needs the other team members. Of course, his teammates are compensated, too. But in his case, his salary is not only based on his athletic talent but on his celebrity powerârent in economic parlance. Perhaps LeBron makes a lot of baskets, but without the assists, he’d have fewer. And because he is the go-to guy, some other teammates might be sacrificing baskets as part of their winning strategy.
Finally, how do you measure the effort of an accountant, a janitor, and an executive? The question is fundamentally bollox.
3. I think people who are more hard-working should end up with more money.
On a related note, I can abbreviate my commentary here. Again, what is harder? Are we asking if construction workers should earn more than CEOs? More bollox.
4. Everyone should feel proud when a person in their community wins in an international competition.
Yet, again, an empty set and a sort of mixed metaphor. I don’t agree with the notion of identity and even less at scaleâstates, countries, and nationalities. Putting that aside, why should I derive pride (that cometh before the fall) because someone succeeds at some event anywhere? It’s facile. If the question was focused on whether I would be happy for that person, the answer might shift up the scale, but where would I have derived pride for that person’s achievements?
5. I think it is important for societies to cherish their traditional values.
First off, why? What values? Not to beat a dead horse, but what if my tradition is slavery? Should I cherish that? This is really asking should I cherish the traditions of my society. Clearly, it’s not asking if other societies should enjoy the privilege of cherishing theirs? From the standard Western vantage, many want to cherish their own, but not Eastern values of eating dogs or Middle Eastern values of burqaed women and turbans. Is this asking should the world subscribe to my society’s values? I’m not sure.
6. I feel that most traditions serve a valuable function in keeping society orderly
Speaking of tradition… We are not only dealing with the vague notion of tradition, we are discussing another vague concept, order, and elevating order over (presumably) disorder. Order connotes a status quo. And why is the superlative most present? Has someone inventoried traditions? I believe I am supposed to translate this as ‘I feel that the traditions I am familiar with and agree with help to create a society that I am content with’. Again, this betrays the privileged perspective of the observers. Perhaps those disenfranchised would prefer traditions like Capitalism and private property to be relics of the pastâor traditions of two-party rule, partisan high court judges, or money-influenced politics, or politicians serving themselves and their donors over the people or Christmas.
7. We all need to learn from our elders
Learn what exactly from our elders? Which elders? The bloke down the block? That elderly Christian woman at the grocery mart? The cat who fought in some illegal and immoral war? The dude who hordes houses, cars, and cash at the expense of the rest of society? Or the guy who tried to blow up Parliament. I believe this is asking should we learn how to remain in place as taught by the privileged wishing to maintain their places.
8. Everyone should try to comfort people who are going through something hard
Define hard, and define comfort? This harkens back to the first question. Enough said. As far as lying is concerned, we should by now all be familiar with the adage trying is lying. Or as Yoda would restate it, do or do not, there is no try.
9. I think the human body should be treated like a temple, housing something sacred within
Obviously, this one is total rubbish. Here, I don’t have a structure that makes it difficult to answer. I may have sprained my eye rolling it, though. This said, what is a temple treated like?
10. I get upset when some people have a lot more money than others in my country
This one is interesting. Whilst I don’t believe that countries or money should exist. In practice, they do. So on its face, I can say that I get upset when we are thrown into a bordered region and told we need to exchange paper, metal, plastic, and bits for goods and servicesâthat some people have more and others have less primarily through chance.
11. I feel good when I see cheaters get caught and punished
Which cheaters? Cheating requires perspective and a cultural code. It can privilege the individualist over the communalist. This reminds me of the cultures that are more interested in ensuring that all of their members finish a contest than having any one win.
Academically, it is considered to be cheating to work together on an exam because the individual is being tested. Of course, the exam is on certain content rather than on the contribution of the human being.
Again, the question feels targeted at cheaters getting caught circumventing something we value. If someone cheats becoming assimilated into some military-industrial society, I will encourage and support them. If they get caught and punished, my ire would more likely be directed toward the power structure that created the need to cheat.
12. When people work together toward a common goal, they should share the rewards equally, even if some worked harder on it
I’ll end this segment here on another question of meritocracy. I think it’s fair to judge the authors as defenders of meritocracy, though I could be wrong. This feels very similar to some other questions already addressed. The extension here is about sharing the rewards, whatever that means. Are we baking a cake? Did we build a house for a new couple? Did we plant trees in a public park? Did we clean up litter on a parkway? Did we volunteer to feed the homeless? And what was the work? Again, how are we measuring disparate work? Did the chicken farmer work harder than the cow farmer? Did the carpenter work harder than the organiser?
If the remainder of these questions is different enough, I’ll comment on them as well. Meantime, at least know you know more why I have little faith in the field of morals. This does nothing to change my opinion that morals are nothing more than emotional reactions and subsequent prescriptions. I don’t mean to diminish emotions, and perhaps that might be a good central pillar to a vibrant society. I’ll need more convincing.
Philosophics 