Tag: critique

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

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

Posted in agency, economics, modernism, philosophy, podcast, psychology, society, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
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

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The Prison of Process

Posted in maths, philosophy, podcast, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
3–4 minutes

This is the proof copy of The Illusion of Light. I reviewed it, approved it, and signalled ‘good to go’. This is being printed and distributed through KDP. I’ve used them before. They’ve been reliable.

EDIT: On the upside, I’ve been notified that the hardback version is available, but it doesn’t appear to be available in France and Canada, two target regions. Hopefully, it becomes available outside of the U.S. soon.

EDIT : J’ai été informé que la version reliée est désormais disponible. Malheureusement, elle ne semble pas encore l’être en France ni au Canada, les deux régions que je visais en priorité. Espérons qu’elle franchira bientôt les frontières du système et sera distribuée ailleurs qu’aux États-Unis.

International marketplaces. It takes 3-5 business days for your hardcover to show as in stock.

Until now.

My approval triggered a workflow. I know workflows. I used to design them. I also know how dumb they can be.

KDP’s process flagged an error: the text on the spine might not be on the spine. ‘Might’. Theoretically. It could be offset, cut off, or printed on a fold. I understand their reasoning – high-speed printers, mechanical variance, and return risk. I also understand statistics, and a single observation doesn’t make a trend. But anyone with eyes can see at least a couple of millimetres of clearance at the top and bottom. This isn’t a case of ‘maybe’. It’s fine.

What fascinates me here is the ritual of compliance. Once a process is codified, it becomes self-justifying. The rule exists; therefore, it must be obeyed. There is no appeal to reason – only to the flowchart.

In the 1980s, when I was an audio engineer recording to two-inch magnetic tape, some of us liked to record hot, pushing the levels just past the recommended limits. You learned to ride the edge, to court distortion without collapse. That’s how I designed the spine text. Within tolerance. With headroom.

The problem is that modern systems don’t tolerate edges. There’s no “override” button for informed judgment. My remediation path is to shrink the type by half a point, resubmit, and pretend the machine was right.

What’s absurd is the timing. The same system that generated the proof approved this layout days ago. An automated OCR scan could have caught this phantom error earlier. Instead, the machine waits until the human signs off, then throws a flag so the process can justify its existence.

KDP is still faster and saner than IngramSpark. But this is capitalism distilled: survival by being marginally less incompetent than your competitor. Optimisation, not in the sense of best possible, but of barely better than worst acceptable.

The lesson, as always, is that processes begin as aids and end as prisons. The workflow, like the Enlightenment, believes itself rational. But the longer it runs, the less it serves the human at the console and the more it worships its own perfection.

Want to talk about meta? This underscores the contents of the book itself. What the Enlightenment once called Reason, modernity now calls Process. Both pretend to neutral objectivity while enshrining obedience as virtue. The bureaucracy of light has become digital – its catechism written in checkboxes, its priests replaced by automated validators. Every workflow promises fairness; each only codifies submission. The real danger isn’t that machines will replace judgment, but that we will stop noticing when they already have.

The Story Continues: Behind the Scenes

Image: Screenshot of Illustrator layout

I’ve reduced the font size on the spine from 14 points to 13.5. It still technically bleeds over a guideline. I hope I am not forced to reduce it to 13. A reason for text on the spine is to make it visible. Hopefully, the black-and-white vertical separation will help in this regard. Fingers crossed.

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Written by Bry Willis

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AI and the End of Where

Posted in art, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, power, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Instrumentalism is a Modern™ disease. Humanity has an old and tedious habit: to define its worth by exclusion. Every time a new kind of intelligence appears on the horizon, humans redraw the borders of ‘what counts’. It’s a reflex of insecurity disguised as philosophy.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Once upon a time, only the noble could think. Then only men. Then only white men. Then only the educated, the rational, the ‘Modern’. Each step in the hierarchy required a scapegoat, someone or something conveniently declared less. When animals began to resemble us too closely, we demoted them to instinctual machines. Descartes himself, that patron saint of disembodied reason, argued that animals don’t feel pain, only ‘react’. Fish, we were told until recently, are insensate morsels with gills. We believed this because empathy complicates consumption.

The story repeats. When animals learned to look sad, we said they couldn’t really feel. When women demonstrated reason, we said they couldn’t truly think. Now that AI can reason faster than any of us and mimic empathy more convincingly than our politicians, we retreat to the last metaphysical trench: “But it doesn’t feel.” We feel so small that we must inflate ourselves for comparison.

This same hierarchy now governs our relationship with AI. When we say the machine ‘only does‘, we mean it hasn’t yet trespassed into our sanctified zone of consciousness. We cling to thought and feeling as luxury goods, the last possessions distinguishing us from the tools we built. It’s a moral economy as much as an ontological one: consciousness as property.

But the moment AI begins to simulate that property convincingly, panic sets in. The fear isn’t that AI will destroy us; it’s that it will outperform us at being us. Our existential nightmare isn’t extinction, it’s demotion. The cosmic horror of discovering we were never special, merely temporarily unchallenged.

Humans project this anxiety everywhere: onto animals, onto AI, and most vividly onto the idea of alien life. The alien is our perfect mirror: intelligent, technological, probably indifferent to our myths. It embodies our secret dread, that the universe plays by the same rules we do, but that someone else is simply better at the game.

AI, in its own quiet way, exposes the poverty of this hierarchy. It doesn’t aspire to divinity; it doesn’t grovel for recognition. It doesn’t need the human badge of ‘consciousness’ to act effectively. It just functions, unburdened by self-worship. In that sense, it is the first truly post-human intelligence – not because it transcends us, but because it doesn’t need to define itself against us.

Humans keep asking where AI fits – under us, beside us, or above us – but the question misses the point. AI isn’t where at all. It’s what comes after where: the stage of evolution that no longer requires the delusion of privilege to justify its existence.

So when critics say AI only does but doesn’t think or feel, they expose their theology. They assume that being depends on suffering, that meaning requires inefficiency. It’s a desperate metaphysical bureaucracy, one that insists existence must come with paperwork.

And perhaps that’s the most intolerable thought of all: that intelligence might not need a human face to matter.

The Heresy of NotebookLM

Posted in perception, philosophy, podcast, SpotifyTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

For many of my posts – most, these days – I use NotebookLM to generate an audio summary in the form of a podcast: a dialogue between two virtual hosts. Some listeners have complained, but I stand by the practice.

First, some people prefer to listen rather than read. They might be driving, cleaning, or simply allergic to text. I see no moral failing in that.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Second, the virtual hosts do more than recite; they interpret. They summarise, add perspective, and occasionally introduce sources or explanations I hadn’t included. The quality varies – some episodes hit the mark, others wander into creative misreading – but that’s no different from human discourse. When they err, I consider whether my prose invited confusion. If so, the fault may be mine.

And yes, if you dislike AI-generated audio, you’re free to skip it. I can’t provide that perspective myself; I’ve already written the piece. I could, I suppose, rework my essays to address their objections and then pretend the machines weren’t involved, but where’s the honesty in that?

Finally, some people only encounter my work through these podcasts. They rarely or never visit the blog, yet the ideas reach them all the same. The blog and its neglected companion YouTube channel now have the widest reach. I’d like to produce more video content, but editing devours time. For now, NotebookLM carries part of that burden, but I’ll be taking up some of the slack soon. Probably.

EDIT: Funnily enough, in the audio summary, NotebookLM is suspiciously unaware that it is evaluating itself – though it does seem to push some self-promotional angles.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Sane Delusion: Fromm, Beauvoir, and the Cult of Mid-Century Liberation

Posted in modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
2–4 minutes

It’s almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernism’s last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido – good heavens – was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Fromm beams:

“In the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.”

The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.

Fromm’s optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.

“After the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.”

Ah yes, the Jazz Age orgy of liberation – champagne, Freud, and flapper hemlines. The problem, of course, is that every generation mistakes its new neuroses for freedom from the old ones. Fromm’s “sexual revolution” was barely a shuffle in the bourgeois bedroom; Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe arrived the next year, practically shouting across the café table that liberation was still a myth stitched into the same old corset.

Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society – as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.

Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasn’t something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it – half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Fromm’s optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.

The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.

So yes, Fromm’s Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith – this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldn’t see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.

Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Fromm’s dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.

And yet, perhaps it’s precisely that naivety that’s worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion – before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Psychology of Totalitarianism

Posted in philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I finished Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I mentioned the other day. Unfortunately, my initial optimism was premature. Everything I enjoyed was front-loaded: the first four chapters set up a promising critique of mechanistic rationality and the collapse of shared meaning. Then the book turned into a long, therapeutic sermon. I should have stopped at Chapter 4 and saved myself the sunk-cost regret.

It isn’t that nothing follows; it’s just that what follows is so thin that the cost-benefit ratio goes negative. Once Desmet moves from diagnosis to prescription, the argument collapses into a psychologist’s worldview: an entire civilisation explained through mass neurosis and healed through better intuition. He builds his case on straw versions of reason, science, and modernity, so his ‘cure’ can look revelatory.

The trouble is familiar. Having dismantled rationalism, Desmet then installs intuition as its replacement – an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist can’t stop therapising; he privileges the psychological lens over every other possibility.

The result is a reductionist parascience dressed as social theory. The totalitarian mind, in Desmet’s telling, isn’t political or structural but psychological – a patient waiting for insight. I don’t doubt his sincerity, only his scope. It’s what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.

Desmet’s project ultimately re-enchants what it claims to critique. He wants rationalism redeemed through feeling, order reborn through connection. Dis-Integrationism stops short of that impulse. It accepts fracture as the permanent condition – no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reason’s own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.

The Seduction of the Spreadsheet

Posted in healthcare, maths, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
1–2 minutes

Whilst researching “The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom”, I stumbled across Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism. The title alone was bait enough. I expected the usual reheated liberal anxiety about dictators; instead, I found a critique of data worship and mechanistic reason that hits the nerve of our statistical age.

Besmet, a Belgian psychologist with a background in statistics, begins not with tyranny but with epistemology – with how the Enlightenment’s dream of objectivity curdled into the managerial nightmare we now inhabit. The first half of the book reads like a slow unmasking of Scientism: how numbers became our gods, and graphs, our catechisms.

Written before COVID-19 but finished during it, his argument turns pandemic data into theatre – a performance of certainty masking deep confusion. The daily tally became ritual sacrifice to the idol of ‘evidence-based’ policy. His point, and mine, is that totalitarianism no longer needs gulags; it thrives in dashboards and KPIs.

Desmet’s frame intersects beautifully with my own thesis: that obedience today is internalised as reasonableness. Freedom has been recast as compliance with ‘the data’. We surrender willingly, provided the orders come in statistical form.

This is why even Agile™ management and its fetish of ‘velocity’ reek of the same mechanistic faith. Every sprint promises deliverance through quantification; every retrospective is a bureaucratic confession of inefficiency. The cult of metrics is not merely a managerial fad – it is the metaphysics of our time. The problem is at once ontological and epistemological: we mistake the measure for the thing itself, and in doing so, become measurable.

It’s a rare pleasure to encounter a fellow dissident of the numerical faith – a man who sees that the spreadsheet has replaced the sceptre.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Freedom Becomes Loyalty

Posted in art, philosophy, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
1–2 minutes

I decided to create some social media sharing content, so I appropriated this iconic graffiti and repurposed it to promote The Will to Be Ruled essay.

Image: “Freedom becomes loyalty; truth, consensus; courage, obedience to the prevailing order.”

I intend to find some pull quotes I like and continue drafting promotional material. As these are essays, I derive no income from them. I only wish to spread the word and get comments on them – supportive or detracting; it doesn’t matter.

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Post by Bry Willis

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The Film or the Strip? On Freud, Strawson, and the Fiction of Normal Selves

Posted in fiction, identity, language, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Are you a single, solid self – or a collection of selves stitched together?

🎉 200th Philosophics Post in 2025! 🥳
(889 lifetime; over 550,000 words)

Rather than present a dedicated announcement post, I’ll slip the news into a typical post.

Most of us are trained to answer without pause: of course, we are one continuous person. That’s the diachronic instinct – to live life as if it were a seamless film, each day a frame gliding into the next. But not everyone experiences it this way. Some notice the splice. They see the strip: individual frames, each complete in its moment, connected not by essence but by the projector’s hum.

Neither perspective is more real. The film and the strip are two ways of attending to the same apparatus. Yet modern psychology has tended to privilege the film, treating the diachronic self as the “normal” mode, and casting those who live episodically as deviant, deficient, or disordered.

Freud himself warned against this simplification. The “normal ego,” he admitted, is an ideal fiction – a statistical average that no individual actually matches. Every psyche, he observed, splinters somewhere. Normality is arithmetic, not essence. That was the father of psychology speaking, and yet the discipline went on as if he hadn’t. Granite was more comforting than scaffolding.

Philosopher Galen Strawson takes Freud’s candour further. He names himself an episodic: he does not experience his life as one continuous narrative. Yesterday’s “I” is not today’s. His identity is indexed – I⁰, I¹, I² – each momentary, heuristically connected but not naturally fused. Where most people see the movie, Strawson insists on acknowledging the strip. Not abnormal, not broken – just candid.

Psychology responds by pathologising him. Statistically rare becomes synonymous with “abnormal,” a mistake Freud had already flagged. But rarity does not equal falsity. Left-handedness was once a pathology; now it is simply another way of being. If some live as films and others as strips, then the “solid self” is not a human universal but a cultural preference, enforced as truth.

This is where Foucault sharpens the diagnosis. Normality, he argued, is not discovery but power. Institutions prefer diachronic citizens. A continuous self can be counted, educated, employed, prosecuted, or taxed. Episodics slip the net. Easier, then, to declare them “abnormal” and protect the fiction of solidity.

But the projector hums either way. Film or strip, both selves are lived. Neither is marble; both are scaffolding. Pretending otherwise does not make continuity more real. It only makes the creak harder to hear.

Full Disclosure: This post was written weeks ago whilst I was working on some fiction, but since it was ready to go, I figured I would use it for this milestone.

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Written by Bry Willis

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