Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.
I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.
And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.
Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.
MEOW-GPT’s Response
(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)
“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap. When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model, the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”
“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”
It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.
Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.
Why publish this now?
This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.
The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:
It sounds like an explanation.
It licenses retribution without understanding.
It stabilises group boundaries.
It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.
In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.
This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.
Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.
This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.
MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose: that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.
For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.
MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”
(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)
Concept
Input: Evil Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces) Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).
High-level summary (≤120 words)
In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
“Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.
T₂ – Linguistic Mediation
On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.
T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation
Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.
Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)
The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.
‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.
In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.
MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.
What followed was a case study in how not to communicate.
LinkedIn, that self-parody of professional virtue signalling, is essentially a digital networking séance: a place where narcissism wears a tie. So I expected a reaction – just not one quite so unintentionally revealing.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But First…
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
— Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesn’t kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, it’s not an atrocity – it’s ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented – and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern – social media’s endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism – pure, fair, competitive – untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘That’s not capitalism, that’s bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
« Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. »
Image: Mentioned Meme
That’s the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia – functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. It’s a comforting fable that erases the costs – colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapse—folded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘You’re confused,’ ‘You’re a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. It’s a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
That’s precisely the blindness the post was about – the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken – just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘It’s not capitalism; it’s profiteering’.
This is capitalism’s soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isn’t capitalism – it’s people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. It’s a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalism’s most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few – precious few – saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalism’s violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the “cost optimisation” logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration – it’s the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isn’t extinct – merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People don’t read – hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic – all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself – automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesn’t scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesn’t just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity – the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage – the economic expression of the Enlightenment’s original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isn’t that we’ve lost meaning. It’s that we’ve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradise… end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is “decency”? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. I’ll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in “cost optimization” than other businesses. To say that someone’s chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someone’s second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with “capitalism”. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such “adjustments” to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not “capitalism”. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
You’re a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that don’t work and that’s where we’re at. You’re killing the future. You’re an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and you’ll be the one who’s bitching when you’re on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As I’ve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in today’s capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Today’s profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and it’s not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism — where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) describes how “self-regulating” markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call “real capitalism” is, in Polanyi’s terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (1994–2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalism’s algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weber’s early insight into rationalisation—the conversion of moral action into procedural necessity—reaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed “the banality of evil” as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Han’s In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics — the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment — a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of “self-made” success functions as capitalism’s moral camouflage — the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernity’s central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, showing how every human system — political, linguistic, economic — eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly — not construction — is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty — a narrative form of “cost-optimisation ethics.”
Modern liberal democracies still chant the Enlightenment’s refrain: the rational, self-governing individual acting freely within a moral order of their own design. It’s an elegant myth – until the self begins to wobble. Under economic, cultural, and epistemic strain, autonomy curdles into exhaustion, and exhaustion seeks relief in obedience.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this essay. Please note that this audio summarises the entire essay. As such, it’s also longer than most, coming in at just under 40 minutes. I listened to it, and I feel it does a good job of capturing the essences of the essay. Of course, you could read the essay more quickly, but the perspective may still be helpful.
This essay traces that drift – from the Enlightenment’s causa sui complex to the ecstatic submission that defines modern authoritarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it explores how freedom’s rhetoric becomes its opposite: obedience moralised as virtue, conformity sold as courage, submission experienced as pleasure.
At its core, The Will to Be Ruled argues that totalitarianism is not the antithesis of Enlightenment reason but its fulfilment. Once the world is rendered intelligible only through rational mastery, the subject inevitably longs to be mastered in return.
The closing section introduces Dis-Integrationism – a philosophical stance that declines redemption, preferring maintenance over mastery. It offers no cure, only the small ethic of attentiveness: keeping the field responsive while the light fades.
Philosophics 