He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.
There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.
In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.
“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially falseβ¦ We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]β¦ So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.
This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.
This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.
When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.
Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.
Image: Foreignsentiment
Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.
When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.
People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of βpower,β as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzscheβs contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.
This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.
The United States borrowed Montesquieuβs separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.
Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.
Carneyβs speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.
What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.
Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.
What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzscheβs crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.
I published A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis this month, and this is one of a series of videos summarising the content. In this segment, Iβm discussing Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency
In this video, I touch on Plato to Barthes and Foucault. Derrida gets no love, and I mention bounded rationality, but not Simon. I discuss Steven Pinker’s dissent in more detail in a later chapter.
Below, I’ve included some artefacts from the book.
Image: Chapter 1: Page 1
And always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you. β Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography
Image: Genealogy of Insufficiency: A Historical TrajectoryImage: Table of Contents
β¦and this one. A clarification that is also a demonstration. If anything, the Americanisms should give it away.
The Preamble as Method
A previous postβthe one with Foucault, Arendt, Sontag, Fish, Mill, and Girard all lined up like theoretical ammunitionβwas drafted entirely by ChatGPT after a conversation about the Dershowitz piece before it. I fed it my argument about moral contamination and asked it to expand the thesis with additional thinkers. It obliged. I posted it unedited.
I mention this not as confession but as method. If my core claim is that truth equals rhetoricβthat there is no unmediated access to reality, only constructed positions negotiated through language, power, and interpretationβthen having an AI mediate my argument while I mediate its output is not a bug. It’s a feature.
The question is never “who really wrote this” but “what work does this text do, and under what conditions?”
This is a non-foundationalist position. There is no neutral ground from which to assess claims. There is no Logic floating above rhetoric, no Reason untouched by affect, no Truth prior to its articulation. What we have are competing rhetorical constructions, each shaped by interests, histories, and power arrangements, each claimingβto varying degrees of honestyβto represent something beyond themselves.
The game is not to transcend this condition. The game is to stop pretending we ever could.
What I’m Actually Arguing
Let me be direct about what those two posts were defending, since the theoretical apparatus apparently obscured more than it clarified.
I am not arguing that:
Age of consent laws should be abolished
The French intellectuals were right to sign those petitions
Association with Epstein is irrelevant
Analysis automatically immunizes anyone from moral judgment
I am arguing that:
Liberal discourse routinely launders emotional and political commitments as self-evident logic, then treats anyone who exposes this process as morally suspect.
Legal thresholds are negotiated rhetorical compromises, not mathematical truths. They reflect harm minimization, cultural anxiety, enforcement pragmatics, and historical contingency. To analyze their construction is not to advocate their abolition.
The “moral contamination reflex” treats inquiry as confessionβnot because the inquiry threatens truth, but because it threatens the claim that certain positions are simply Logic Itself rather than one rhetorical construction among others.
Guilt by association is both a logical fallacy and sometimes a reasonable heuristic. The trick is admitting which one you’re doing at any given moment, rather than claiming your heuristic is deductive proof.
These claims are rhetorical positions. They are not transcendent truths. But neither are the positions they critique.
The Hypocrisy I’m Diagnosing
When someone argues that a 16-year-old capable of choosing abortion should be capable of choosing sex, they are making a rhetorical move. The argument has gapsβabortion concerns bodily autonomy in ways that sex with others does not; capacity for one decision doesn’t automatically transfer to capacity for another; power dynamics matter.
Fine. Point those out. Explain why the analogy fails.
But what actually happens is different. The argument is not refuted. The arguer is diagnosed. Making the argument becomes evidence of desire. Analyzing it becomes evidence of endorsement. Logic is treated as circumstantial proof of guilt.
This is not because the argument is uniquely dangerous. It’s because it threatens a stabilizing fiction: that our current legal thresholds are both pragmatically necessary and philosophically coherent. They are the former. They are not the latter. And the moral panic that greets anyone who points this out is not about protecting children. It’s about protecting the claim that our compromises are something more than compromises.
The same pattern plays out with Epstein associations. Some people knew him socially or professionally in contexts that had nothing to do with his crimes. Some people continued relationships after credible allegations emerged. Some people were directly complicit. These are different categories.
But the discourse collapses them. Everyone in the address book becomes suspect. Association becomes evidence. And anyone who suggests “we should distinguish between these cases” is immediately accused of defending predators.
This is not logic. This is moral theatre. And the fury it provokes when exposed is not righteous. It’s defensive.
The Difference Between Rhetoric and Relativism
Saying “truth equals rhetoric” sounds like relativism. It sounds like I’m claiming all positions are equal, nothing matters, anything goes.
I’m not.
I’m claiming that all positions are constructed through rhetoric, but that doesn’t make them equal. It means we should argue about them on the terms they actually operateβconsequences, values, power, effectsβrather than pretending one side has Logic and the other side has Emotion.
Some rhetorical constructions are more defensible than others. Age of consent laws, as constructed compromises aimed at harm reduction, are defensible. That doesn’t mean they’re philosophically coherent or that analyzing their incoherence is an attack on children.
Maintaining professional relationships with powerful people who were later revealed to be criminals does not make you guilty of their crimes. But it might raise questions about judgment, complicity, or willful blindnessβquestions that should be asked specifically, not universally.
The difference is this: I’m not claiming my position is Logic. I’m claiming it’s a rhetorical construction I find more defensible than the alternatives, for reasons I’m willing to argue about.
What I’m criticizing is the move where liberal discourse presents its rhetorical positions as self-evident moral truths, then treats dissent as pathology.
Why the Theoretical Version Failed
The expanded post tried to universalize the patternβto show that this reflex appears across domains, across thinkers, across history. It succeeded at that. What it failed to do was stay grounded enough for readers to assess whether the pattern I was describing was real or whether I was constructing a persecution narrative.
The problem was strategic evasiveness. By staying abstract, the piece avoided being testable. It gestured at examples without committing to them. It borrowed authority from Foucault and Arendt without doing the work of showing how their critiques apply to the specific cases I had in mind.
This created a gap between what the essay claimed to be doing (defending analysis against moral panic) and what it was actually doing (defending specific controversial figures using theory as cover).
That gap is what critics correctly identified as bad faith.
What I Should Have Said
Here’s the honest version:
The Dershowitz argument is bad. The abortion-sex analogy doesn’t hold. But “the argument is bad” and “making the argument is evidence of pedophilia” are not the same claim. One is logical critique. The other is moral contamination. We should be able to distinguish them.
The 1977 French petitions were misjudged. Calling for the abolition of age of consent laws in that context, with those specific cases, was not wise. But signing a petition is not the same as committing the acts in question, and treating mid-century French intellectual culture as self-evidently monstrous erases the specific debates they were having about law, psychiatry, and state power. We can think they were wrong without treating the question itself as unspeakable.
Epstein’s network matters. Some associations are meaningful. Power enabled his abuse, and understanding how requires looking at who knew what and when. But not every name in a flight log or party photo is evidence of complicity, and the current discourse often treats them as such. We should distinguish between innocent contact, poor judgment, and active enablementβnot flatten everything into “guilt by proximity.”
These are all messy positions. They require distinctions, context, and willingness to live in discomfort. That’s harder than moral certainty. But it’s also more honest.
The Meta-Point About AI Generation
The fact that the previous post was AI-generated does something interesting to all of this.
It was rhetorically effective. It marshaled the right theoretical authorities. It structured the argument coherently. It sounded like philosophy. And it was assembled by a pattern-matching system with no beliefs, no commitments, no stakes.
This should tell us something about the nature of rhetoric itself. The text workedβor didn’tβbased on what it did, not where it came from. Authenticity is not truth. Authorship is not authority. What matters is whether the construction holds, and under what conditions.
I could have hidden the AI involvement. Many would. The disclosure feels like it undermines the argument’s authorityβif a machine wrote it, does it count?
But that reaction itself proves the point. We want arguments to come from authenticated sources, from proper authority, from legitimate speakers. We want to know who’s talking so we can decide whether to trust them. This is not Logic. This is rhetoric all the way down.
The AI wrote a version of my argument that was cleaner and more theoretically sophisticated than I would have produced alone. It was also more evasive, more abstract, less committed. Those aren’t bugs in the process. They’re features of how the system generates textβmaximizing coherence, minimizing controversy, staying in safe abstraction.
That I chose to post it anyway, knowing these limitations, is itself a rhetorical move. It says: “I’m willing to use mediated tools to construct my position, and I’m not pretending otherwise.”
What This Leaves Us With
I started with a claim about moral contaminationβthat liberal discourse treats certain kinds of inquiry as self-incriminating. I then demonstrated this by making precisely the kind of inquiry that provokes that reflex, using examples I knew would be read as defensive rather than analytical.
The responses proved the thesis. Analysis was read as confession. Theory was read as cover. Even asking whether a distinction exists between argument and endorsement was taken as evidence that no such distinction can be maintained.
But here’s what I didn’t make clear enough: I’m not claiming to be above this dynamic. I’m in it too. I have commitments, interests, and positions I’m defending. The difference is I’m naming them as such, rather than claiming they’re simply What Logic Demands.
Truth equals rhetoric. We’re all doing motivated reasoning. The question is not “who has transcended their motivations” but “whose motivations, toward what ends, with what consequences?”
I think the moral contamination reflex produces bad discourseβnot because it’s emotional, but because it claims not to be. I think guilt by association is overusedβnot because association never matters, but because we’ve stopped distinguishing between different kinds of association. I think legal thresholds should be analyzableβnot because they should be abolished, but because unexamined laws are dangerous even when well-intentioned.
These are rhetorical positions. I’m arguing for them. I’m not pretending they’re Logic Itself.
If you disagree, argue back. But argue with what I’m actually saying, not with what analysis supposedly reveals about my secret desires.
That’s all I’m asking for. And apparently, it’s too much.
if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex
In the newspaper clipping above, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz argues that if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex. The argument is presented as sober, rational, and juridical. A syllogism offered as disinfectant.
There are many philosophical problems with the equivalence. I am not interested in most of them.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Iβve written before that age as a proxy for maturity collapses immediately into a Sorites paradox. It assumes commensurability where none exists. It treats human development as discretised and legible, when it is anything but. The law must draw lines. Philosophy does not have that luxury. But that is not why this argument resurfaces now.
What interests me is the moral contamination reflex it reliably provokes. The rule is tacit but rigid: if you reason calmly about a taboo subject, you must be defending it. If you defend it, you must desire it. If you desire it, you must be guilty of it. Logic becomes circumstantial evidence.
This reflex is not new. Nor is it confined to contemporary Anglo-American culture. Half a century ago, it played out publicly in France, with consequences that are now being retrospectively moralised into caricature.
In January and May of 1977, a petition published in Le Monde floated the abrogation of what was then called the βsexual majorityβ. In January of the same year, a separate petition called for the release of three men accused of having sex with boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Among the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.
Today, this episode is typically invoked as a moral mic drop. No argument is examined. No context is interrogated. No distinction is drawn between legal reasoning, political provocation, and moral endorsement. The conclusion is immediate and terminal: these figures were monsters, or fools, or both.
The logic is familiar by now. If they signed, they must have approved. If they approved, they must have desired. If they desired, they must have practised. Analysis collapses into accusation.
None of this requires defending the petitions, the arguments, or the acts in question. It requires only defending a principle that has apparently become intolerable: that an argument can be examined without imputing motive, desire, or personal conduct to the person making it.
This is where liberal societies reveal a particular hypocrisy. They claim to value reasoned debate, yet routinely launder moral intuitions through rationalist language, then react with fury when someone exposes the laundering process. Legal thresholds are treated as if they were moral truths rather than negotiated compromises shaped by fear, harm minimisation, optics, and historical contingency.
Once the compromise hardens into law, the line becomes sacred. To question it is not civic scrutiny but moral trespass. To analyse it is to signal deviance. This is why figures like Foucault are not criticised for being wrong, but for having asked the question at all. The question itself becomes the crime.
It is often said, defensively, that emotion precedes logic. True enough. But this is usually offered as an excuse rather than a diagnosis. The supposed human distinction is not that we feel first, but that we can reflect on what we feel, examine it, and sometimes resist it. The historical record suggests we do this far less than we like to believe.
The real taboo here is not sex, or age, or consent. It is the suggestion that moral reasoning might survive contact with uncomfortable cases. That one might analyse the coherence of a law without endorsing the behaviour it regulates. That one might describe a moral panic without siding with its villains.
Instead, we have adopted a simpler rule: certain questions may not be asked without self-implication. This preserves moral theatre. It also guarantees that our laws remain philosophically incoherent while everyone congratulates themselves for having the correct instincts.
Logic, in this arrangement, is not a virtue. It is a liability. And history suggests that anyone who insists on using it will eventually be posthumously condemned for doing so.
I just finished the writing and editorial parts of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. It still needs cover art and some administrative odds and ends, but I’m taking a day for a breather to share something about myself and my worldview. For this, I share my philosophical influences and how they support my core insights. For dramatic effect, I’ll even try to weight them to 100 per cent, leaving an ‘others’ bucket for the unaccounted ones.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Obviously, this highly scientific accounting is about as useful as a Facebook survey or a fortune cookie, but it should reveal something. I have influences outside of philosophy, but I’ll limit this list at the start. The numbers don’t exactly add to 100% because there is a bit of cross-pollination, say, between Foucault and Nietzsche or Ε½iΕΎek and Hegel β or perhaps I’m just not good at maths. You decide.
Nietzsche (β18)
Nietzsche is likely the uranium core. Haters and detractors like to diminish his contribution β and he didn’t play by the old rules β but they are wrong. He contributes value-creation, anti-moralism, perspectivism, the critique of ressentiment, the demolition of universals.
Nietzsche sits at the centre of the blast radius. Everything else is shrapnel. If thereβs a thinker who detonated the Enlightenmentβs pretensions more elegantly, Iβve not met them. He showed us that values are forged, not found; that morality is a genealogy of grievances; that certainty is the last refuge of the timid. In other words, he cleared the ground so the rest of us could get to work without tripping over Kantian furniture. But after Nietzscheβs uranium core, the next concentric ring becomes murkier.
Foucault (β20%)
Foucault supplies the schematics. Where Nietzsche swung a hammer at the idols, Foucault identified the building codes. He mapped power as a set of subtle, everyday enchantments. He showed how ‘knowledge’ is simply what a society rewards with credibility. He is the patron saint of anyone who suspects normality is an instrument, not a neutral state of affairs. The world looks different once you see the disciplinary fingerprints on everything.
Derrida (β10%)
Derrida gives me language as mischief. Meaning wobbles, slides, cracks; binaries betray themselves; every conceptual edifice contains its own trapdoor. Derrida isnβt a system; heβs an escape artist. And frankly, you canβt write anything about the insufficiency of language without genuflecting in his general direction.
Late Wittgenstein (β15%)
The quiet structural pillar. If Derrida is the saboteur, Wittgenstein is the carpenter who informs you that the house was never stable anyway. Meaning-as-use, language-games, the dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems: his later work underwrites virtually every modern suspicion about fixed categories and timeless essences. He doesnβt shout; he shrugs β and everything collapses neatly.
Rorty (β5%)
Rorty replaces metaphysical longing with cultural pragmatism. He teaches you to stop hunting for capital-T Truth and instead track the vocabularies we actually live in. Heβs the friendly voice whispering, ‘You donβt need foundations. You need better conversations’. His influence is felt mostly in the tone of my epistemic cynicism: relaxed rather than tragic. Besides, we disagree on the better conversations bit.
Selective extraction only. Being-in-the-world, thrownness, worldhood β the existential scaffolding. His political judgment was catastrophic, of course, but the ontological move away from detached subjectivity remains invaluable. He gives the metaphysics a certain grain.
Existentialists: Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus (β6%)
They provide the atmospheric weather: choice, finitude, absurdity, revolt, the sheer mess of human freedom. They donβt define the system; they give it blood pressure. Besides, I met them before I switched to Team Nietzsche-Foucault.
Ε½iΕΎek, Latour, Baudrillard (β2% combined)
These three are my licensed provocateurs.
Ε½iΕΎek exposes how ideology infiltrates desire.
Latour dismantles the Nature/Society binary with glee.
Baudrillard whispers that representation ate reality while we were looking at our phones.
Theyβre trickster figures, not architects.
Hume, Putnam, Dennett, and the Ancillaries (β1% combined)
These are the seasonings.
Hume is the Scottish acid bath under every epistemic claim.
Putnam gives internal realism its analytic passport.
Dennett offers mechanistic metaphors you can steal even when you disagree.
Kant and Hegel hover like compulsory ghosts.
Rawls remains decorative parsley: included for completeness, consumed by none.
The Others Bucket (β5%)
The unallocated mass: writers, anthropologists, theorists, stray thinkers you absorb without noticing. The ‘residuals’ category for the philosophical inventory β the bit fortune cookies never warn you about.
Enfin
Obviously, these ratios are more for humour than substance, but these are the thinkers I return to β the ones whose fingerprints I keep discovering on my own pages, no matter how many years or detours intervene.
Perhaps more revealing are those who didnβt make the guest list. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle remain outside, smoking in the cold. The Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and his well-meaning self-help descendants, also failed to RSVP. In truth, I admire the posture but have little patience for the consolations β especially when they become the emotional training wheels of neoliberalism.
And then, of course, the Enlightenment patriarchs: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and the rest of the constitutional furniture. I acknowledge their historical necessity the way one acknowledges plumbing β grateful it exists, uninterested in climbing inside the pipes. Rousseau, admittedly, I tolerate with something approaching affection, but only because he never pretended to be tidy.
I forgot Descartes, Voltaire, and Pascal, but itβs too late to scroll back and adjust the ledger. Consider them rounding errors β casualties of the margins, lost to the tyranny of percentages.
If anyone mentions another one β Spinoza comes to mind β I’ll try to figure out where they fit in my pantheon. Were I to render this tomorrow, the results may vary.
I’ve taken the day after Thanksgiving in the US to decompress with a less serious post before I get back to indexing. I came up with this concept whilst writing my essay on Homo Normalis, but I felt this was a bit too cheeky for a formal essay. This is where my thoughts led me.
A Brief Field Note from the Department of Bureaucratic Anthropology
Still reeling from the inability to fold some pan into homo, Palaeontologists are seemingly desperate for a new hominid. Some dream of discovering the ‘missing link’; others, more honest, just want something with a jawline interesting enough to secure a grant. So imagine the surprise when the latest species didnβt come out of the Rift Valley but out of an abandoned server farm somewhere outside Reading.
Theyβve named it Homo Legibilis β the Readable Human. Not ‘H. normΔlis’ (normal human), not ‘H. ratiΕnΔlis (rational human), but the one who lived primarily to be interpreted. A species who woke each morning with a simple evolutionary imperative: ensure oneβs dataprints were tidy, current, and machine-actionable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Youβll have seen their skeletons before, though you may not have recognised them as such. They often appear upright, mid-scroll, preserved in the amber of a status update. A remarkable creature, really. Lithe thumbs. Soft cranial matter. Eyes adapted for low-light environments lit primarily by advertisements.
Habitat
The species thrived in densely surveilled ecosystems: corporate intranets, public Wi-Fi, facial-recognition corridors, anywhere with sufficient metadata to form a lasting imprint. They built vast nests out of profiles, settings, dashboards. Territorial disputes were settled not through display or violence but through privacy-policy updates. Their preferred climate? Temperate bureaucracy.
Diet
Contrary to earlier assumptions, H. Legibilis did not feed on information. It fed on interpretation: likes, metrics, performance reviews, and algorithmic appraisal. Some specimens survived entire winters on a single quarterly report. Every fossil indicates a digestive tract incapable of processing nuance. Subtext passed through untouched.
Mating Rituals
Courtship displays involved reciprocal data disclosure across multiple platforms, often followed by rapid abandonment once sufficient behavioural samples were collected. One famous specimen is preserved alongside fourteen dating-app profiles and not a single functional relationship. Tragic, in a way, but consistent with the speciesβ priorities: be seen, not held.
Distinguishing Traits
Where Homo sapiens walked upright, Homo legibilis aimed to sit upright in a chair facing a webcam. Its spine is subtly adapted for compliance reviews. Its hands are shaped to cradle an object that no longer exists: something called ‘a phone’. Ironically, some term these ‘mobiles’, apparently unaware of the tethers.
Researchers note that the creatureβs selfhood appears to have been a consensual hallucination produced collaboratively by HR departments, advertising lobbies, and the Enlightenmentβs long shadow. Identity, for H. legibilis, was not lived but administered.
Extinction Event
The fossil record ends abruptly around the Great Blackout, a period in which visibility β formerly a pillar of the speciesβ survival β became inconvenient. Some scholars argue the species didnβt perish but simply lost the will to document itself, making further study inconvenient.
Others suggest a quieter transformation: the species evolved into rumour, passing stories orally once more, slipping back into the anonymity from which its ancestors once crawled.
Afterword
A few renegade anthropologists insist Homo Legibilis is not extinct at all. They claim itβs still out there, refreshing dashboards, syncing calendars, striving to be neatly interpreted by systems that never asked to understand it. But these are fringe theories. The prevailing view is that the species perished under the weight of its own readability. A cautionary tale, really. When your survival strategy is to be perfectly legible, you eventually disappear the moment the lights flicker.
Itβs 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 Frommβs The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernismβs 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 β good heavens β was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
βIn 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.β
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.
Frommβs optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
βAfter 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.β
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 β 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, wasnβt something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it β half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Frommβs 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, Frommβs Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith β this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldnβt 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. Frommβs dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps itβs precisely that naivety thatβs worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion β before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
I’ve just added a new entry to my Anti-Enlightenment corpus, bringing the total to seven β 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 β The Anti-Enlightenment Project β Published Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay(s)
Epistemic
What counts as βtruthβ?
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 βnormalβ 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 β The Anti-Enlightenment Project β 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 β a consensus mechanism mistaken for truth. This essay maps how βobjectivityβ 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 β imagined citizens who never existed. This essay dissects six contradictions at the foundation of βrationalβ governance and shows why democracyβs collapse was prewritten in its metaphysics. From mathematical impossibility to sociological blindness, it charts the crisis of coherence that modern politics still calls freedom. β Read on Zenodo
3. Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Published October 2025 Modern democracies worship the now. This essay examines presentism β the systemic bias toward immediacy β as a structural flaw of Enlightenment thinking. By enthroning rational individuals in perpetual βdecision time,β modernity erased the unborn from politics. What remains is a political theology of the short term, collapsing both memory and imagination. β Read on Zenodo
4. Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self
Published October 2025 βAgencyβ is not a metaphysical faculty β itβs 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. β Read on Zenodo
5. The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Published October 2025
This essay formalises Dis-Integrationism β a philosophical method that refuses synthesis, closure, and the compulsive need to βmake whole.β It traces how Enlightenment reason, deconstruction, and therapy culture all share a faith in reintegration: the promise that whatβs fractured can be restored. Against this, Dis-Integrationism proposes care without cure, attention without resolution β 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
Modernityβs most persistent myth is the βnormalβ human. This essay excavates how legibility β the drive to measure, categorise, and care β became a form of control. From Queteletβs statistical man to Foucaultβs biopower and todayβs 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 Enlightenmentβs ideal of autonomy contains the seed of its undoing. The rational, self-governing subject β celebrated as the triumph of modernity β 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 β an ethic of maintenance rather than mastery β 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 theologyβs structure without its grace. It might read Spinoza, Kantβs moral law, and modern technocracy as secularised metaphysics β 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 Enlightenmentβs Unconfessed Religion.
9. The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Axis: Aesthetic / Affective Core Question: How did beauty become moral instruction?
Concept: From Kantβs 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 β 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 β 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 β 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 Arendtβs notion of the world between us or to indigenous and feminist relational models. Goal: To imagine a non-totalitarian togetherness β 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.
Iβve just released a new book, The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment, now available in paperback through KDP and distributed via Amazon. In November, a clothbound edition will follow through IngramSpark, extending availability to libraries and independent bookstores worldwide, including Barnes & Noble in the United States.
Image: Front cover of The Illusion of Light. Links to Amazon for purchase. The ‘Free Preview’ claim is untrue, as there is no Kindle version available. An ebook will be available presently.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
About the Book
The Illusion of Light opens where the Enlightenmentβs glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself β after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernityβs metaphors of light and progress became instruments of management: how objectivity hardened into ritual, agency into alibi, normality into control.
Rather than rejecting the Enlightenment outright, the book lingers in its afterimage. It argues for a philosophy practiced in the half-light β a mode of thought that values nuance over certainty, care over mastery, and maintenance over redemption. To read by residual light, as the preface suggests, is to learn to see again when the world stops pretending to be illuminated.
The preface is available on this prior post, written and audio versions.
The Broader Project
The Illusion of Light forms the threshold of the Anti-Enlightenment Project, a series examining the afterlives of modern reason β how its ideals of progress, agency, objectivity, and normality continue to govern our politics, sciences, and selves long after their foundations have cracked. Each volume approaches the same question from a different room in the old House of Reason: Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration.
Taken together, they offer not a manifesto but a practice: philosophy as maintenance work, care as critique, and composure as the only honest response to the ruins of certainty. More to follow.
In the late 1990s, the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix β Keanu Reeves as Neo, the Chosen Oneβ’, a man so bland he could be anyone, which was the point. Once he realised he was living inside a simulation, he learned to bend its laws, to dodge bullets in slow motion and see the code behind the curtain. Enlightenment, Hollywood-style.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But hereβs the twist, the film itself couldnβt stomach: realising the simulation doesnβt free you from it.
Knowing that race and gender are social constructs doesnβt erase their architecture. Knowing that our economies, legal systems, and so-called democracies are fictions doesnβt get us out of paying taxes or playing our assigned roles. “The social contract” is a collective hallucination we agreed to before birth. That and a dollar still wonβt buy you a cup of coffee.
Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation the film name-dropped like a trophy, argued that simulation doesnβt hide reality β it replaces it. When representation becomes indistinguishable from the thing it represents, truth evaporates, leaving only consensus. We donβt live in a system of power; we live in its performance.
The Matrix got the metaphor half right. It imagined the bars of our cage as a digital dream β glossy, computable, escapable. But our chains are older and subtler. Rousseau called them “social”, Foucault diagnosed them as “biopolitical”, and the rest of us just call them “normal”. Power doesnβt need to plug wires into your skull; it only needs to convince you that the socket is already there.
You can know itβs all a fiction. You can quote Derrida over your morning espresso and tweet about the collapse of epistemic certainty. It wonβt change the fact that you still have rent to pay, laws to obey, and identities to perform. Awareness isnβt liberation; itβs just higher-resolution despair with better UX.
Neo woke up to a ruined Earth and thought heβd escaped. He hadnβt. Heβd only levelled up to the next simulation β the one called “reality”. The rest of us are still here, dutifully maintaining the system, typing in our passwords, and calling it freedom.
NB: Don’t get me wrong. I loved The Matrix when it came out. I still have fond memories. It redefined action films at the time. I loved the Zen messaging, but better mental acuity doesn’t grant you a pass out of the system.
Philosophics 