This short video by Loïc Suberville illustrates the inanity of languages – your language, too.
Universal language: Guinea Pigs
Tag: critique
Boab’s God: Latent Agency in Welsh’s Kafkaesque Metamorphosis
I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.
Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.
Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.
Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:
- Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
- Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Übermensch, but an Über-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
- Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
- Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.
The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.
So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.
Gregor rots. Boab rages. Both end the same way.
Trainspotting
2–3 minutes
I identify strongly with Irvine Welsh’s characters in Trainspotting – the book, not the sanitised film version. Especially with Mark Renton, whose voice strips away illusions with a brutality that borders on honesty.
Consider this passage from the chapter “Bang to Rites” (pp. 86–87), where Renton attends the funeral of his mate Billy. Billy joined the army to escape the dead-end life they all shared, only to be killed on duty in Northern Ireland. Renton’s verdict:
“He died a hero they sais. Ah remember that song: ‘Billy Don’t Be A Hero’. In fact, he died a spare prick in a uniform, walking along a country road Wi a rifle in his hand. He died an ignorant victim ay imperialism, understanding fuck all about the myriad circumstances which led tae his death. That wis the biggest crime, he understood fuck all about it. Aw he hud tae guide um through this great adventure in Ireland, which led tae his death, wis a few vaguely formed sectarian sentiments.
“The cunt died as he lived: completely fuckin scoobied.
“His death wis good fir me. He made the News at Ten. In Warholian terms, the cunt had a posthumous fifteen minutes ay fame. People offered us sympathy, n although it wis misguided, it wis nice tae accept anywey. Ye dinnae want tae disappoint folk.
“Some ruling class cunt, a junior minister or something, says in his Oxbridge voice how Billy wis a brave young man. [1] He wis exactly the kind ay cunt they’d huv branded as a cowardly thug if he wis in civvy street rather than on Her Majesty’s Service. [2] This fucking walking abortion says that his killers will be ruthlessly hunted down. So they fuckin should. Aw the wey tae the fuckin Houses ay Parliament.
“Savour small victories against this white–trash tool of the rich that’s no no no”
[1] Renton doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Not Billy, not the army, not the Oxbridge suits who polish the tragedy into something fit for the News at Ten. The uniform is a costume, a disguise: a working-class lad suddenly deemed “brave” only because he was wearing the right outfit when he died. Strip away the uniform, and he’d have been dismissed as a thug or a waster.
[2] Renton’s root-cause analysis is unsparing. Billy wasn’t killed by the man with the gun so much as by the machine that put him there – the state, the ruling classes, the ones who spin death into “sacrifice” while continuing to shuffle the poor like pawns across the board.
It’s this clarity that makes Welsh’s work more than a drug novel. Trainspotting isn’t just about needles and nods; it’s about seeing through the charade. Renton despises both establishment and rebellion because both are performance, both hollow. His cynicism is the closest thing to honesty in a world that would rather dress up corpses in borrowed dignity.
And maybe that’s why I feel the affinity: because subversion matters more than allegiance, and sometimes the only truthful voice is the one that refuses to be polite at the funeral.
Democracy: The Worst Form of Government, and Other Bedtime Stories
3–5 minutes
Karl Popper’s Paradox of Intolerance has become a kind of intellectual talisman, clutched like a rosary whenever fascists start goose-stepping into the town square. Its message is simple enough: to preserve tolerance, one must be intolerant of intolerance. Shine enough sunlight on bad ideas, and – so the pious hope – they’ll shrivel into dust like a vampire caught out at dawn.
If only.
The trouble with this Enlightenment fairy tale is that it presumes bad ideas melt under the warm lamp of Reason, as if ignorance were merely a patch of mildew waiting for the bleach of debate. But bad ideas are not bacteria; they are weeds, hydra-headed and delighting in the sun. Put them on television, and they metastasise. Confront them with logic, and they metastasise faster, now with a martyr’s halo.
And here’s the part no liberal dinner-party theorist likes to face: the people most wedded to these “bad ideas” often don’t play the game of reason at all. Their critical faculties have been packed up, bubble-wrapped, and left in the loft decades ago. They don’t want dialogue. They want to chant. They don’t want evidence. They want affirmation. The Socratic method bounces off them like a ping-pong ball fired at a tank.
But let’s be generous. Suppose, just for a moment, we had Plato’s dream: a citizenry of Philosopher Kings™, all enlightened, all rational. Would democracy then work? Cue Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, that mathematical killjoy which proves that even under perfect conditions – omniscient voters, saintly preferences, universal literacy – you still cannot aggregate those preferences into a system that is both fair and internally consistent. Democracy can’t even get out of its own way on paper.
Now throw in actual humans. Not the Platonic paragons, but Brexit-uncle at the pub, Facebook aunt with her memes, the American cousin in a red cap insisting a convicted felon is the second coming. Suddenly, democracy looks less like a forum of reasoned debate and more like a lottery machine coughing up numbers while we all pretend they mean “the will of the people.”
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
And this is where the Churchill quip waddles in, cigar smoke curling round its bowler hat: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Ah yes, Winston, do please save us with a quip so well-worn it’s practically elevator music. But the problem is deeper than taste in quotations. If democracy is logically impossible (Arrow) and practically dysfunctional (Trump, Brexit, fill in your own national catastrophe), then congratulating ourselves that it’s “better than the alternatives” is simply an admission that we’ve run out of imagination.
Because there are alternatives. A disinterested AI, for instance, could distribute resources with mathematical fairness, free from lobbyists and grievance-mongers. Nursery schools versus nursing homes? Feed in the data, spit out the optimal allocation. No shouting matches, no demagoguery, no ballots stuffed with slogans. But here the defenders of democracy suddenly become Derrida in disguise: “Ah, but what does fair really mean?” And just like that, we are back in the funhouse of rhetorical mirrors where “fair” is a word everyone loves until it costs them something.
So perhaps democracy doesn’t require an “educated populace” at all; that was always just sugar-paper wrapping. It requires, instead, a population sufficiently docile, sufficiently narcotised by the spectacle, to accept the carnival of elections as a substitute for politics. Which is why calling the devotees of a Trump, or any other demagogue, a gaggle of lemmings is both accurate and impolitic: they know they’re not reasoning; they’re revelling. Your contempt merely confirms the script they’ve already written for you.
The philosopher, meanwhile, is left polishing his lantern, muttering about reason to an audience who would rather scroll memes about pedophile pizza parlours. Popper warned us that tolerance cannot survive if it tolerates its own annihilation. Arrow proved that even if everyone were perfectly reasonable, the maths would still collapse. And Churchill, bless him, left us a one-liner to make it all seem inevitable.
Perhaps democracy isn’t the worst form of government except for all the others. Perhaps it’s simply the most palatable form of chaos, ballots instead of barricades, polling booths instead of pitchforks. And maybe the real scandal isn’t that people are too stupid for democracy, but that democracy was never designed to be about intelligence in the first place. It was always about managing losers while telling them they’d “had their say.”
The Enlightenment promised us reason; what it delivered was a carnival where the loudest barker gets the booth. The rest of us can either keep muttering about paradoxes in the corner or admit that the show is a farce and start imagining something else.
Pinpointing the Messiness of Language
LinkedIn, that carnival of professional self-delusion, has a little diversion called Pinpoint. It pretends to tell you how much you “match” with other people, presumably so you’ll feel less alone as you scroll past thought-leaders peddling snake oil in PowerPoint form. In English, the results arrive in the cold, hard, dating-app idiom: “% match.” Simple, brutal, and bland.
But LinkedIn, ever the polyglot, translates this phrase into other tongues. And here is where a trivial game unmasks the philosophical chaos of language itself. For in one idiom, your soul and another’s are “in correspondence.” In another, you are the product of “coincidence.” Elsewhere, you are a “hit,” a “fit,” a “suitability.” The poor Swedes, apparently exhausted, simply gave up and borrowed “matchning.”
The Romance languages, of course, are the most pedantic. Correspondência, corrispondenza — all very scholastic, as if Aquinas himself were lurking in the backend code. A match is nothing less than the degree to which one proposition mirrors another, as in the correspondence theory of truth. You can be 72% true, like a botched syllogism that half-lands. Elegant, precise, exasperating.
Spanish, on the other hand, opts for coincidencia. A “% coincidence.” Imagine it: you bump into your ex at the market, but only 46% of the way. Coincidence, by definition, is binary; either the train wreck occurs or it does not. And yet here it is, rendered as a gradable metric, as if fate could be quantified. It’s a kind of semantic surrealism: Dalí with a spreadsheet.
Then we have the Germans: Treffer. A hit. In English, a hit is binary – you score or you miss. But the Germans, ever the statisticians of fate, make Trefferquote into a percentage. You may not have killed the truth outright, but you wounded it respectably. It’s a firing squad turned bar chart.
Indonesians say cocok, which means “appropriate, suitable.” This is not about truth at all, but about fit. A match is not correspondence to reality but pragmatic adequacy: does it work? Does it feel right? The difference is subtle but devastating. Correspondence makes truth a metaphysical mirror; suitability makes it a tailoring problem.
And English? English, with its toddler’s toybox of a vocabulary, just shrugs and says “match.” A word that means as much as a tennis final, a Tinder swipe, or a child’s puzzle book. Adequate, lazy, neutered. Anglo-pragmatism masquerading as universality.
So from a silly HR-adjacent parlour game we stumble into a revelation: truth is not one thing, but a polyglot mess. The Romance tongues cling to correspondence. Spanish insists on coincidence. German goes target practice. Indonesian settles for a good fit. And English floats on ambiguity like an inflatable swan in a corporate swimming pool.
The lesson? Even a “% match” is already lost in translation. There is no stable denominator. We speak not in universals but in parochialisms, in metaphors smuggled into software by underpaid translators. And we wonder why philosophy cannot settle the matter of truth: it is because language itself cheats. It gives us correspondence, coincidence, hits, and fits, all while claiming to say the same thing.
Perhaps LinkedIn should update its UI to something more honest: % mess.
Impostors, Competence, and the HR Hall of Mirrors
I was a professional musician in the 1980s. I played guitar, but this was always a sideline to my real work as a recording engineer and producer. Competence, not virtuosity, was the coin of the realm in the studio, and I was competent. Still, I spent much of my time surrounded by musicians who left me slack-jawed: people who could sight-read Bach at breakfast and bash out Van Halen riffs after lunch without missing a beat. Next to them, I was, charitably, merely competent.
That’s the thing about competence: it doesn’t make you the star, but it keeps the machine running. I knew I wasn’t the flash guitarist or the prodigy bassist, but I could play my parts cleanly and hold a band together. When later groups already had lead guitarists, I played bass. Was I a bassist? No. But I was competent enough to lock in with the drummer and serve the ensemble. Nobody mistook me for a virtuoso, least of all me. I wasn’t an impostor; I was a cog in the machine, good enough to keep the show on the road. That was my ego attachment: not “musician” as identity, but member of a band.
The Hallucination of “Impostor Syndrome”
Much ink is spilt on impostor syndrome, that anxious whisper that one is a fraud who doesn’t belong. The polite story is that it’s just nerves: you are competent, you do belong, you’re simply holding yourself against impossible standards. Nonsense. The truth is darker. Most people are impostors.
The nervous tension is not a malfunction of self-esteem; it’s a moment of clarity. A faint recognition that you’ve been miscast in a role you can’t quite play, but are forced to mime anyway. The Peter Principle doesn’t kick in at some distant managerial plateau; it’s the basic law of organisational gravity. People rise past their competence almost immediately, buoyed not by skill but by connections, bluff, and HR’s obsession with “fit.”
The Consultant’s View from the Cheap Seats
As a Management Consultant™, I met countless “leaders” whose only discernible talent was staying afloat whilst already over their heads. Organisations, too blind or too immature to notice, rewarded them with raises and promotions anyway. Somebody’s got to get them, after all. HR dutifully signed the paperwork, called it “talent management,” and congratulated itself on another triumph of culture-fit over competence.
In music, incompetence is self-correcting: audiences walk out, bands dissolve, the market punishes mediocrity. In corporate life, incompetence metastasises. Bluffers thrive. Mediocrity is embalmed, padded with stock options, and paraded on stage at leadership summits.
Good Enough vs. Bluff Enough
Competence, though, is underrated. You don’t need to be the best guitarist or the savviest CEO. You need to be good enough for the role you’re actually playing, and honest enough not to mistake the role for your identity. In bands, that worked fine. In business and politics, it’s subversive. The whole edifice depends on people pretending to be more than they are, rehearsing confidence in lieu of competence.
No wonder impostor syndrome is rampant. It’s not a pathology; it’s the ghost of truth in a system of lies.
The antidote isn’t TED-talk therapy or self-affirmation mantras. It’s honesty: admit the limits of your competence, stop mistaking ego for ability, and refuse to play HR’s charade. Competence is enough. The rest is noise.
HR’s Neoliberal Mirage: Human Resources Without the Humans
Let us disabuse ourselves of one of the workplace’s most cherished delusions: that Human Resources is there for the humans. HR is not your therapist, not your advocate, not your confessor. HR is an appendage of the organisation, and like all appendages, its nerve endings run straight back to the corporate brain. Its “concern” for your well-being is merely a prophylactic against lawsuits and productivity dips. The error is ours; we persist in mistaking the guard dog for a pet.
Bal and Dóci’s 2018 paper in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology (EJWOP) tears the mask off this charade. They demonstrate how neoliberal ideology has seeped, unseen, into both workplace practice and the very research that pretends to study it objectively. Through the lenses of political, social, and fantasmatic logics, they show that neoliberalism has convinced us of three dangerous fairy tales:
- Instrumentality: people are not people but “resources,” as fungible as printer ink.
- Individualism: you are not part of a collective but a lone entrepreneur of the self, shackled to your CV like a Victorian debtor.
- Competition: you are locked in an endless cage fight with your colleagues, grinning through the blood as you “collaborate.”
These logics are then dressed up in fantasies to keep us compliant: the fantasy of freedom (“you’re free to negotiate your own zero-hours contract”), the fantasy of meritocracy (“you got that promotion because you’re brilliant, not because you went to the right school”), and the fantasy of progress (“growth is good, even if it kills you”).
Those of us with an interest in Behavioural Economics had naively hoped that the mythical homo economicus, that laughable caricature of a rational, utility-maximising automaton, would by now be filed under “anachronistic curiosities.” Yet in corporate domains, this zombie shuffles on, cosseted and cultivated by neoliberal ideology. Far from being discredited, homo economicus remains a protected species, as if the boardroom were some Jurassic Park of bad economics.
The brilliance and the horror is that even the academics meant to be studying work and organisations have been captured by the same ideology. Work and Organisational Psychology (WOP) too often frames employees as variables in a productivity equation, measuring “engagement” only in terms of its effect on shareholder value. The worker’s humanity is rendered invisible; the employee exists only insofar as they generate output.
So when HR offers you a mindfulness app or a “resilience workshop,” remember: these are not gifts but obligations. There are ways of making you responsible for surviving a system designed to grind you down. The neoliberal trick is to convince you that your suffering is your own fault, that if only you had been more proactive, more adaptable, more “employable,” you wouldn’t be so crushed beneath the wheel.
Bal and Dóci are right: the way forward is to re-politicise and re-humanise organisational studies, to see workers as humans rather than performance units. But until then, expect HR to keep smiling while sharpening its knives.
Cogito, Ergo… Who?
Everyone knows the line: cogito ergo sum. Descartes’ great party trick. A man alone in his study, fretting about demons, announces that because he’s doubting, he must exist. Ta-da! Curtain call. Except, of course, it’s less of a revelation than a conjuring trick: he pulls an I out of a hat that was never proved to be there in the first place. Thinking is happening, indeed – but who invited the “thinker”?
And let’s not forget the dramatis personae Descartes smuggles in for atmosphere. A malicious demon, a benevolent God, both necessary props to justify his paranoia and his certainty. Philosophy as melodrama: cue organ music, lightning strike.
Enter the Critics
Spinoza rolls his eyes. Doubt isn’t some heroic starting point, he says – it’s just ignorance, a lack of adequate ideas. To elevate doubt into method is like treating vertigo as a navigational tool. Error isn’t demonic trickery; it’s our own confusion.
Kant arrives next, shaking his head. Descartes thinks he’s proven a substantial “I,” but all he’s actually shown is the form of subjectivity – the empty requirement that experiences hang together. The “I think” is a necessary placeholder, not a discovery. A grammatical “you are here” arrow, not a metaphysical treasure chest.
Hegel, of course, can’t resist upping the disdain. Descartes’ I is an empty abstraction, a hollow balloon floating above reality. The self isn’t given in some solitary moment of doubt; it emerges through process – social, historical, dialectical. The cogito is the philosophical equivalent of a selfie: lots of certainty, zero depth.
The Insufficiency Twist
And yet, maybe all of them are still dancing to the same fiddler. Because here’s the real suspicion: what if the whole problem is a trick of language? English, with its bossy Indo-European grammar, refuses to let verbs stand alone. “Thinking” must have a “thinker,” “seeing” a “seer.” Grammar insists on a subject; ontology obediently provides one.
Other languages don’t always play this game. Sanskrit or Pali can shrug and say simply, “it is seen.” Japanese leaves subjects implied, floating like ghosts. Some Indigenous languages describe perception as relational events – “seeing-with-the-tree occurs” – no heroic subject required. So perhaps the real villain here isn’t Descartes or even metaphysics, but syntax itself, conscripting us into a subject-shaped theatre.
Now, I don’t want to come off like a one-trick pony, forever waving the flag of “language insufficiency” like some tired philosopher’s catchphrase. But we should be suspicious when our limited grammar keeps painting us into corners, insisting on perceivers where maybe there are only perceptions, conjuring selves because our verbs can’t tolerate dangling.
Curtain Call
So in the end, Descartes’ famous “I” might be no more than a grammatical fiction, a casting error in the great play of philosophy. The cogito isn’t the foundation of modern thought; it’s the world’s most influential typo.
If You Don’t Understand How Language Works, You Should Lose Your Licence to Comment on LLMs
The air is thick with bad takes. Scroll for five minutes and you’ll find someone announcing, usually with the pomp of a TEDx speaker, that “AI has no emotions” or “It’s not really reading.” These objections are less profound insights than they are linguistic face-plants. The problem isn’t AI. It’s the speakers’ near-total ignorance of how language works.
Language as the Unseen Operating System
Language is not a transparent pane of glass onto the world. It is the operating system of thought: messy, recursive, historically contingent. Words do not descend like tablets from Sinai; they are cobbled together, repurposed, deconstructed, and misunderstood across generations.
If you don’t understand that basic condition, that language is slippery, mediated, and self-referential, then your critique of Large Language Models is just noise in the system. LLMs are language machines. To analyse them without first understanding language is like reviewing a symphony while stone deaf.
The Myth of “Emotions”
Critics obsess over whether LLMs “feel.” But feeling has never been the measure of writing. The point of a sentence is not how the author felt typing it, but whether the words move the reader. Emotional “authenticity” is irrelevant; resonance is everything.
Writers know this. Philosophers know this. LLM critics, apparently, do not. They confuse the phenomenology of the writer with the phenomenology of the text. And in doing so, they embarrass themselves.
The Licence Test
So here’s the proposal: a licence to comment on AI. It wouldn’t be onerous. Just a few basics:
- Semiotics 101: Know that words point to other words more than they point to things.
- Context 101: Know that meaning arises from use, not from divine correspondence.
- Critical Theory 101: Know that language carries baggage, cultural, historical, and emotional, that doesn’t belong to the machine or the individual speaker.
Fail these, and you’re not cleared to drive your hot takes onto the information superhighway.
Meta Matters
I’ve explored some of this in more detail elsewhere (link to Ridley Park’s “Myth of Emotion”), but the higher-level point is this: debates about AI are downstream of debates about language. If you don’t grasp the latter, your pronouncements on the former are theatre, not analysis.
Philosophy has spent centuries dismantling the fantasy of words as perfect mirrors of the world. It’s perverse that so many people skip that homework and then lecture AI about “meaning” and “feeling.”
Je m’accuse
I am a terrible blogger. Not “oops-forgot-to-post-this-week” terrible. Industrial-scale, negligent landlord of my own contact form, terrible.
When I set up this blog in 2017, I created a “Contact” page. A tidy little form for readers to reach out – to me, the attentive host. Today, moments ago, I opened it for the first time since launch.
The inbox was an archaeological dig: the oldest message dated February 2019, the freshest stamped yesterday. Mixed strata: a few spammers, several earnest souls, some quite lovely – and now quite abandoned – overtures.
Links from the patient (or long-since embittered) include:
- coffeewithkierkgaardhome.wordpress.com (Julian)
- metaphysicaldiscourse.wordpress.com (Jason)
- culturico.com (Simone)
Others left no forwarding address. Perhaps that’s for the best.
I won’t be answering five-year-old requests for commentary. The ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and rests peacefully in the Mariana Trench. I might still look at some under the “too little, too late” amnesty programme.
I could promise to reform, but you and I both know recidivism rates. Still, I apologise – sincerely, even. These transgressions are mine. The others? They’ll keep.
Philosophics 