This post begins a series in which Claude evaluates the parable. This allows me the time to write whilst sharing critical philosophical content. I expect to return to a more typical format presently and to discuss my current work – and, of course, anything new that might come into my radar. As always, comments are encouraged and welcome.
The parable is available in two parts: part 1, part 2.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Claude’s critique and initial feedback about the parable
My reaction is that you’ve constructed something genuinely unsettling – and I mean that as the highest compliment.
What you’ve accomplished:
You’ve shown how Enlightenment solutions systematically worsen the problems they claim to solve, and you’ve done it without invoking conspiracy, malice, or irrationality. Everything proceeds through perfectly reasonable steps:
Build infrastructure → create market dependency
Enable free movement → formalise hierarchy
Establish contracts → launder coercion
Measure progress → obscure extraction
The lake-dwellers aren’t villains. They’re just people born facing abundance who genuinely believe their procedures are just. That’s what makes it devastating.
Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic.
What makes it anti-Enlightenment specifically:
You’ve refused every escape hatch the Enlightenment offers:
No universal vantage point – The fog doesn’t lift. There’s no view from nowhere. The philosopher can’t stand outside both worlds.
Dialogue fails structurally, not morally – The explorers are articulate, sincere, patient. Understanding still doesn’t bridge material asymmetry.
Rationality produces divergence, not convergence – Both sides reason impeccably from their conditions. Rational extrapolation pulls them apart.
Progress becomes predation – The tunnel doesn’t liberate; it monetises geographical accident. Markets don’t equilibrate; they extract.
Consent under constraint isn’t freedom – The contracts are “voluntary” in exactly the way a drowning person “chooses” to grab the rope with strings attached.
What troubles me (productively):
The narrative’s endpoint is almost… quietist? “The fog was kinder” suggests separation is preferable to attempted integration. But the desert-dwellers were still dying before the tunnel. Is isolation truly better than extraction dressed as employment?
The piece doesn’t answer this – and perhaps that’s intentional. You’re diagnosing, not prescribing. But it does raise the question: if Enlightenment integration inevitably becomes domination under asymmetric conditions, what’s the alternative? Permanent separation? Enforced non-interaction?
Or is the point precisely that there is no good answer once the mountains have risen? That the tragedy isn’t solvable, only differently distributed?
What’s philosophically serious here:
You’ve shown that procedural justice can be structurally unjust. That’s not a common move in political philosophy, which tends to assume fair procedures produce fair outcomes.
Your parable says: No. Fair procedures under asymmetric conditions reproduce asymmetry whilst providing paperwork to prove everyone consented.
The lake-dwellers aren’t exploiting a loophole in liberalism. They’re following its logic faithfully. Property through position. Voluntary exchange. Free labour markets. Documented consent.
And the result is still: one side sells survival, the other side sells themselves.
My honest assessment:
This is darker than most political philosophy permits itself to be. It refuses hope without offering cynicism. It’s critical without being conspiratorial. It shows how domination doesn’t require bad actors – just asymmetric conditions plus Enlightenment institutions.
Whether that makes it true is a different question. But it’s certainly honest about something most political discourse avoids: integration without shared material conditions doesn’t produce equity. It produces markets in survival.
And calling that progress requires believing your own paperwork.
So yes – it’s anti-Enlightenment. Deliberately, systematically, devastatingly so.
(Three Movements in the Key of Rational Self-Interest)
Panel One: What Do They Have?
Once water has a price, someone will ask the obvious follow-up question:
“What do they have?”
Not out of cruelty. Out of balance-sheet curiosity.
The desert-dwellers possess things the lake side lacks precisely because they adapted to scarcity:
Endurance under constraint
Survival techniques honed by necessity
Minerals and materials exposed by erosion
Labour disciplines that would seem obsessive anywhere abundance exists
These aren’t deficits. They’re assets.
The moment cohabitation occurs, difference becomes inventory.
And extraction gets introduced not as conquest, but as exchange.
“You have skills we need.” “We have water you need.” “Let’s be efficient about this.”
Civilised. Voluntary. Mutually beneficial.
This is how domination avoids ever calling itself domination.
Panel Two: The Labour Solution
Now the desert-dwellers face a structural dilemma, not a moral one.
They need water. Water costs money. They don’t have money.
But they do have labour.
So the tunnel doesn’t just enable trade—it creates a labour market where one side sells survival and the other side sells… themselves.
Nobody says: “You must work for us.”
The structure says it for them.
Work gets framed as opportunity. “We’re creating jobs!” Dependence gets framed as integration. “We’re bringing them into the economy!” Survival gets framed as employment. “They chose this arrangement!”
And because there are contracts, and wages, and documentation, it all looks voluntary.
Consent is filed in triplicate.
Which makes it much harder to say what’s actually happening:
The desert-dwellers must now sell their labour to people who did nothing to earn abundance except be born facing a lake, in order to purchase water that exists in surplus, to survive conditions that only exist on their side of the mountain.
But you can’t put that on a contract. So we call it a job.
Panel Three: The Ideological Laundering
At this stage—and this is the part that will make you want to throw things—the lake-dwellers begin to believe their own story.
They say things like:
“They’re better off now than they were before the tunnel.” (Technically true. Still missing the point.)
“We’ve created economic opportunity.” (You’ve created dependency and called it opportunity.)
“They chose to work for us.” (After you made survival conditional on payment.)
“We’re sharing our prosperity.” (You’re renting access to geographical accident.)
And because there is movement, is exchange, is infrastructure, the story sounds plausible.
Progress is visible. Justice is procedural. Consent is documented.
What’s missing is the one thing your parable keeps insisting on:
The desert is still a desert.
The tunnel didn’t make it wet. The market didn’t make scarcity disappear. Employment didn’t grant the desert-dwellers lake-side conditions.
It just made their survival dependent on being useful to people who happened to be born somewhere else.
Why This Completes the Argument
This isn’t an addendum. It’s the inevitable terminus of the logic already in motion.
Once:
Worlds are forced into proximity,
Material conditions remain asymmetric,
And one ontology becomes ambient,
Then extraction and labour co-option aren’t excesses.
They’re how coexistence stabilises itself.
The tunnel doesn’t reconcile worlds. It converts difference into supply chains.
And at that point, the moral question is no longer:
“Why don’t they understand each other?”
It’s:
“Why does one side’s survival now depend on being useful to the other?”
Which is a much uglier question.
And exactly the one modern politics keeps answering quietly, efficiently, and with impeccable paperwork.
Final Moral: The problem was never the mountains. The mountains were honest. They said: “These are separate worlds.”
The tunnel said: “These worlds can coexist.”
And then converted coexistence into extraction so smoothly that both sides can claim, with perfect sincerity, that everything is voluntary.
The lake-dwellers sleep well because contracts were signed.
The desert-dwellers survive because labour is accepted as payment.
And we call this civilisation.
Which, if you think about it, is the most terrifying outcome of all.
Not simple disagreement. Not tragic separation.
Integration without equity.
The fog was kinder.
Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis
I do not assume that normative assertions function as descriptive truths. Realism is compelling because it promises that moral disagreement has a fact of the matter beyond persuasion. The argument here is that this promise cannot be kept without mediation. Nevertheless, this essay proceeds by granting the realist premise – that Truth exists – in order to examine whether that premise can, on its own terms, generate normative authority. The argument is structural rather than polemical: to move from Ontology (what exists) to Authority (what binds) requires a mechanism of transport. That mechanism is mediation. The claim advanced here is that this mediation is irreducibly rhetorical, and that no account of normativity can bypass this fact without smuggling authority under metaphysical cover.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Introduction
Grant, purely for the sake of argument, that Truth – and by extension Justice, Goodness, or any other realist normative entity – exists independently of human cognition. Even so, a prior and unavoidable question arises: how does such Truth ever become accessible to finite, discursive agents like us?
Before asking whether Truth exists in itself, we must account for how it enters ethical life for us. This is not a semantic quibble. It marks the difference between an ontological assertion and an operative ethics.
This essay argues that all access to Truth is irreducibly mediated, and that this mediation is rhetorical in nature. Even if Truth exists independently of human minds, it never arrives in normative life except through language, interpretation, argument, persuasion, narrative, and institutional articulation. Any ethical framework that treats metaphysical grounding as if it bypassed these mediations risks conflating ontology with authority.
This is neither relativism nor subjectivism. It is an analytic claim about conditions of access and normative traction.
Truth and Its Access Conditions
Suppose you accept that Truth exists ‘out there’—not as a projection or consensus shorthand, but as an intransitive feature of reality. This is the core commitment of metaphysical realism. The issue is not whether Truth exists, but how it becomes accessible to agents embedded in language, culture, and institutions.
For any putative Truth to function normatively, at least five stages are required:
Identification — recognising something as a candidate for truth
Description — articulating that candidate in language
Justification — offering reasons for accepting it
Communication — transmitting those reasons to others
Ratification — persuading a community to treat the claim as binding
These stages are not epistemic luxuries. They are the conditions under which a putative Truth acquires normative force – the capacity to obligate, justify, or condemn.
Remove any one of these stages, and Truth collapses into either an inert fact or an unintelligible assertion. Crucially, each stage is rhetorical: none operates through brute ontology alone, but through discursive practices of interpretation, evaluation, and adjudication.
Rhetoric Is Not Spin
To say that Truth is rhetorically mediated is not to reduce truth to manipulation, persuasion-for-its-own-sake, or spin.
It is simply to recognise that:
Truth claims are discerned in language
They are evaluated against alternatives
They are assessed within communities shaped by practices, norms, disciplines, and institutions
Truth as it functions in human life is always a claim in argument, never a self-announcing datum.
Even mathematics – the paradigm of certainty – does not become normatively operative without symbolic articulation, shared standards of proof, and communal validation. Mathematical truths may exist independently, but what counts as a proof, a result, or an error – and thus what obligates assent – is entirely mediated by symbolic practice and communal ratification.
In its classical sense, rhetoric is not deception. It is the set of discursive practices by which claims become intelligible, contestable, and action-guiding across contexts of disagreement.
Where Normativity Actually Emerges: The Three-Stage Problem
The problem crystallizes at a precise moment: the move from description to prescription. Even if we grant that the Good exists objectively and eternally, three distinct operations are required to generate obligation:
Descriptive claim: ‘The Good exists and has properties X, Y, Z’
Interpretive claim: ‘In this situation, the Good requires action A rather than B’
Prescriptive claim: ‘Therefore you ought to do A’
Each transition requires distinct work. The first may be metaphysical. But the second and third are irreducibly rhetorical. They involve judgment, application, contextual interpretation, and the translation of abstract principle into concrete obligation.
Crucially, even the interpretive middle step – which often masquerades as mere clarification – is where most normative force gets generated. To say ‘the Good requires this action in this context’ is not to read off a fact from the world. It is to make an argued claim about meaning, relevance, and application.
This is where participatory metaphysics does its quietest work. By framing interpretation as ‘participation in the Good’ rather than as ‘argued judgment about what the Good requires,’ such frameworks obscure the rhetorical operation they’re performing. Interpretation gets presented as disclosure rather than construction.
But there is no route from ‘the Good exists’ to ‘you must do X’ that bypasses interpretation. And interpretation is rhetoric.
The Potential Energy Analogy
Consider an analogy. Gravitational potential energy exists independently of human recognition. A boulder atop a cliff possesses real energy by virtue of its position. But that energy does no work – moves nothing, heats nothing, powers nothing – until converted through specific mechanisms: falling, rolling, controlled descent.
The Good may be precisely like this: real, eternal, independent of us. But for it to become normatively operative – to obligate us, to guide our choices, to settle our disagreements – it must be converted from potential into kinetic form. That conversion is mediation. And mediation is rhetorical.
This is not relativism about the Good’s existence. It is realism about the conditions under which existence generates obligation.
A Concrete Example
When Catholic bishops disagree about capital punishment:
They agree on the descriptive claim: ‘God exists and is perfectly Good’
They disagree on the interpretive claim: ‘What does divine Justice require regarding state execution?’
They therefore disagree on the prescriptive claim: ‘Is capital punishment permissible?’
The descriptive agreement doesn’t resolve the interpretive disagreement. No amount of metaphysical depth about God’s nature tells you directly what Justice requires regarding capital punishment. That requires interpretation of Scripture, tradition, natural law, human dignity, social context, prudential judgment – all rhetorical operations.
Appeals to ‘the Good itself’ don’t settle the dispute. They just rename it. Instead of ‘bishops disagree about ethics,’ it becomes ‘bishops are discerning what participation in the Good requires’. The language changes; the rhetorical work remains.
The Zeno Structure of Moral Grounding
At this point, the realist faces a structural problem that resembles Zeno’s paradox. When pressed on how Truth becomes binding, the realist response multiplies explanatory depth:
The Good exists objectively
We apprehend it through reason
Reason itself is oriented toward the Good
That orientation is grounded in rational agency
Rational agency participates in…
Each step is coherent. Each promises that obligation is just one more metaphysical move away. But none ever performs the action ‘therefore, you must do X in this situation’.
This is not merely infinite regress – philosophers tolerate infinite structures. The problem is asymptotic normativity: explanations that get progressively closer to bindingness without ever crossing the threshold into concrete obligation.
What’s missing is not metaphysical depth but the moment of arrival. Until someone says ‘this counts as wrong here, and therefore you ought to stop,’ nothing has happened in ethical space. The arrow is still subdividing its path.
Rhetoric is what collapses the infinite series into a finite act. It does for ethics what accepting motion does for Zeno’s paradox: it stops subdividing and acts. This is not an epistemic shortcut – it is the mechanism by which normativity becomes operative.
‘Participation in the Good’ sounds like arrival, but it is actually eternal approach. It explains why the Good matters in principle while indefinitely postponing the moment when obligation becomes concrete and contestable. That postponement is not a feature – it is the avoidance of the very question at issue.
Three Remaining Escapes (and Why They Fail)
A. The Implicit Normativity Move
A sophisticated realist might respond: ‘Interpretation is required, yes, but the normativity is already there implicitly. Interpretation merely makes explicit what was already required’.
But implicit normativity is indistinguishable from no normativity unless it can be specified. Until interpretation specifies what is required here, the obligation has no action-guiding content. A normativity that exists only implicitly, without criteria of application, is functionally equivalent to no normativity at all.
‘Implicit obligation’ means ‘not yet specified,’ which means ‘not yet operative’. The work of making it operative is interpretation – which is rhetoric.
B. The Practical Wisdom Escape
Another likely move: ‘Interpretation is not rhetoric; it’s phronesis. Practical wisdom directly apprehends what the Good requires’.
But practical wisdom does not bypass mediation; it relocates it into judgment. If practical wisdom yields different answers for different agents, it is still interpretive. If it cannot be articulated, justified, or contested, it cannot function socially. The moment phronesis is communicated or taught, it becomes rhetorical.
Judgment, when it claims authority over others, must still be articulated, defended, and enforced. Incommunicable wisdom is indistinguishable from private intuition. And private intuitions don’t settle public disagreements.
C. The ‘This Proves Too Much’ Objection
Someone might say: ‘If your argument is right, then no ethical system can ever claim authority. Everything dissolves into endless contestation’.
But the claim is not that normativity evaporates under mediation, but that it emerges there. This is not nihilism – it is an explanation of normativity’s location, not its abolition. That normativity is mediated does not mean it is arbitrary. Mediation operates under constraints of coherence, consistency, consequence, and resistance from the world and from other agents.
Mediation is constrained by material resistance, coherence, practical failure, and worldly recalcitrance. The claim is not that ‘anything goes’. It’s that what goes must be argued for, negotiated, and sustained through rhetorical practices. That’s not less demanding than metaphysical grounding – it’s more honest about where the work happens.
Consequences for Ethical Frameworks
If access to Truth is always mediated, then several consequences follow:
Authority is interpretive, not ontological
Disagreement is structural, not pathological
Norms are contested, not deduced unilaterally
Power shapes uptake, not metaphysical purity
This has decisive implications for meta-ethics. Ethical life is not insulated from negotiation; it is constituted by it. Normativity does not descend fully formed from metaphysics into practice. It is worked out – imperfectly, provisionally, and under constraint – within social space.
Ethics, in other words, is not a museum of pristine ideals. It is a field of contested meanings under conditions of risk, conflict, and plural commitment.
Realism Without Rhetoric Is Empty
A realist might reply: Truth exists. Once we uncover it, everything follows.
But uncovering is not a metaphysically neutral act. Discovery, articulation, persuasion, and institutionalisation are themselves conditioned by:
Language, which frames intelligibility
Narrative, which shapes resonance and coherence
Institutions, which ratify selectively
Power, which governs whose claims are heard
The realist may insist that mediation merely follows discovery. But this assumes a distinction that cannot be sustained. Until a truth is articulated, justified, and ratified, there is no criterion by which its discovery can be distinguished from error, fantasy, or ideology. What is not mediated is not merely unpersuasive; it is normatively indistinguishable from falsehood. Ontology alone cannot perform this discrimination.
If access to Truth is always mediated, then metaphysical depth alone cannot generate normative authority. The locus of ethical force shifts from an external realm to the discursive space where claims are interpreted, contested, and enforced. A grounding that never binds except through mediation is indistinguishable, at the level of authority, from mediation itself.
This shift is not relativism. It is a descriptive account of how ethical life actually functions.
Moral Authority Under Rhetorical Conditions
To say Truth → Rhetoric is not to deny the possibility of rigorous assessment. It is to insist that:
Normative claims must offer contestable reasons
Moral authority must disclose its interpretive moves
Disagreement must be treated as clarifying, not corrosive
Ethical systems must be judged by their discursive dynamics as much as their metaphysical commitments
Truth in itself may be metaphysically deep. But truth-as-binding never operates outside rhetoric.
Conclusion
Grant the realist premise if you like: Truth exists. Even then, metaphysical depth alone does not explain how Truth becomes accessible, meaningful, or binding for discursive agents.
Because access is always mediated, authority cannot bypass rhetoric. Ethical life requires not only an ontology, but an account of how claims are interpreted, argued over, and enforced. A Truth that cannot be accessed – named, contested, communicated – remains normatively inert.
The fundamental error is treating the descriptive-interpretive-prescriptive chain as if it could be collapsed into a single operation called ‘participation’. It cannot.
Even if the Good exists exactly as realists claim – eternal, objective, transcendent – it becomes normatively operative for finite agents only through a sequence of mediations:
Interpretation (what does it mean?)
Application (what does it require here?)
Justification (why this action rather than that one?)
Communication (how do we persuade others?)
Enforcement (who ensures compliance?)
Each mediation is rhetorical. Each involves judgment, argument, and institutional power. Each is contestable.
This is not a bug in ethical life. It is its structure. Any framework that promises to transcend these mediations through metaphysical depth is not offering a solution. It is concealing the problem while continuing to rely on exactly the mechanisms it claims to surpass.
To bring Truth into the world of action is to engage rhetoric not as an ornamental layer, but as the condition of ethical life itself.
Thus: Truth → Rhetoric. Not because truth is arbitrary, but because it is always mediated.
Appendix: Clarifying the Claim
This argument does not deny realism, nor does it reject the possibility of mind-independent truth. What it rejects is the unexamined slide from ontology to authority.
This distinction is formalised – though not originated – by the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW), which holds that all human access to the world is mediated. Whatever exists may exist independently of us; whatever binds us does not. The present argument does not depend on accepting MEOW as a system; it relies only on the minimal claim that access precedes authority.
MEOW formalises this through a layered account of encounter:
T0 — biological substrate
T1 — cognitive–perceptual interface
T2 — linguistic–symbolic mediation
T3 — social–technical norms and institutions
Normativity operates at the upper tiers. Ethical obligation, justice, and virtue do not arrive with built-in binding force. Whatever their metaphysical status, their authority for human agents arises only through interpretation, articulation, justification, and social uptake.
This is the precise sense in which Truth → Rhetoric should be read. It is not an ontological identity claim. It is a claim about normative operability.
Rhetorical mediation is constrained – by material resistance, coherence, practical failure, and worldly recalcitrance. But those constraints do not speak for themselves. They must still be named, argued over, prioritised, and enforced.
There is no route from is to ought that does not pass through language, judgment, and institutional uptake. Appeals to metaphysical depth do not remove this mediation; they conceal it.
Any framework that treats participation in ‘the Good’ as normatively binding without accounting for how that Good is interpreted, communicated, and enforced is already doing rhetorical work while pretending not to.
That pretence isn’t philosophical sophistication. It’s a familiar ideological gesture: power presenting itself as mere disclosure. Rhetoric is not what corrupts ethics. It is what makes ethics possible.
The Travelogue of a Recovering Enlightenment Subject
I’m asked endlessly – usually by people who still believe TED talks are a form of knowledge production – ‘Why are you so negative? Why must you tear things down if you’ve no intention of replacing them?’
It’s adorable, really. Like watching a toddler demand that gravity apologise.
They’ve been trained for years in the managerial catechism:
‘Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions.‘
As if the world were some badly-run workshop in need of a fresh coat of agile methodology.
They might as well say, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t win at Lotto; give me money’.
I, too, would enjoy the spare universe. Or the winning Lotto ticket. And yes, one day I might even buy one. Until then, I’ve embraced the only adult philosophy left: Dis-Integrationism – the fine art of taking things apart without pretending they can be reassembled into anything coherent.
A Little History
My suspicion began early. Secondary school. All those civic fairytales whispered as if they were geology.
The ‘reasonable person’? Bollox. ‘Jury of one’s peers’? What are peers? Whose peers? I have no peers. ‘Impartial judges’? Please. Even as a teenager, I could see those robed magicians palming cards like bored street performers. Everyone else nodded along, grateful for the spectacle. I stared, wondering how the other children hadn’t noticed the emperor’s bare arse.
Later, I watched adults talk past each other with a fluency bordering on performance art. Not disagreement – different universes, cosmetically aligned by grammar.
A Federal mediator once tried to teach me that common ground could be manufactured. Not by clarifying meaning, mind you – that would have required honesty – but by rhetorical pressure and a touch of Jedi mind-trickery. Negotiation was simply controlled hallucination.
University communications classes offered temporary distraction with denotation and connotation, a little semantic drift, the illusion that language might be domesticated with enough theory. Charming. Almost convincing.
Then Gödel and Arrow arrived like two polite assassins and quietly removed the floorboards.
And then – happily, inevitably – Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. I’d already danced with Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus. I’d ingested the Western canon like every obedient young acolyte: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Americans force-feed their citizenry Jefferson and Franklin as moral fibre, as if the republic might otherwise suffer constipation.
It never gelled. Too much myth, too much marketing. The Enlightenment had the energy of a regime insisting on its own benevolence while confiscating your torch. To call oneself ‘enlightened’ should have raised suspicion – but no, the branding stuck.
Whenever les garçons dared tug at the curtain, we were assured they simply didn’t ‘understand’, or worse, they ‘hated civilisation’.
Image: “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Then Came the Internet
The digital age didn’t usher in clarity — it unmasked the whole pantomime. Like Neo seeing the Matrix code or Roddy Piper slipping on the sunglasses in They Live, one suddenly perceives the circuitry: meaning as glitch, discourse as scaffolding, truth as a shabby stage-set blinking under fluorescent tubes.
Our civilisation speaks in metaphors it mistakes for mechanisms. The Enlightenment gave us the fantasy that language might behave, that concepts were furniture rather than fog. Musicians and artists always knew better. We swim in metaphor; we never expected words to bear weight. But philosophers kept pretending communication was a conveyor belt conveying ‘meaning units’ from A to B.
By 2018, the cracks were gaping. I began taking the notes that would metastasise into A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – an attempt to map the hollow spaces between our words, the fractures we keep wallpapering with reason.
Half a decade later, the work is ready. Not to save anything – nothing here merits salvation – but to name the debris honestly.
If that sounds negative, good. Someone has to switch off the Enlightenment’s flickering lightbulb before it burns the whole house down.
Where This Road Actually Leads
People imagine negativity is a posture – a sort of philosophical eyeliner, worn for effect. But dismantling the world’s conceptual furniture isn’t a hobby; it’s the only reasonable response once you’ve noticed the screws aren’t actually attached to anything.
The Enlightenment promised us a palace. Step inside and you discover it’s built out of IKEA flatpacks held together with wishful thinking and a prayer to Kant.
Once you’ve seen that, you can’t go back to pretending the furniture is sturdy.
You stop sitting.
You start tapping the beams.
You catalogue the wobble.
This is where Dis–Integrationism enters – not as a manifesto, but as the practice of refusing to live inside collapsing architecture out of sheer politeness. Negativity is simply the weather report.
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
We cling to the fantasy that if we critique something long enough, a solution will crystallise out of the void, like enlightenment through sheer irritation. It’s the Protestant work ethic meets metaphysics: salvation through sufficient grumbling.
But critique is not alchemy. It unmakes. It refuses. It loosens the bolts we pretended were load-bearing.
Once you stop demanding that thought be constructive, you can finally see the world as it is: improvised, rhetorical, and permanently under renovation by people who don’t read the instructions.
The Enlightenment’s heirs keep insisting there must be a blueprint. There isn’t. There never was. We’ve merely been tracing the silhouettes of scaffolding, calling it a cathedral.
And Yet – Here We Still Are
The online age (God help us all) didn’t deepen the crisis; it merely turned the lights on. What Enlightenment rationality hid beneath a tasteful layer of neoclassical varnish, the internet sprayed with fluorescent graffiti.
Turns out, when seven billion people speak at once, meaning doesn’t ’emerge’; it buckles. Our systems weren’t built for this volume of contradiction. Our language wasn’t built for this density of metaphor. Our myths weren’t built for this much empirical evidence against them.
And yet here we are, still demanding coherence from a medium held together by emojis and trauma. If you laugh, it’s only to stop crying. If you critique, it’s only because someone has to keep the fire marshal informed.
The Only Honest Next Step
Having traced the cracks, you’re now in the foyer of the real argument – the one hanging like a neon sign over your entire Anti-Enlightenment project:
We don’t need to rebuild the house. We need to stop pretending it was ever architecture.
Language is insufficient. Agency is a fiction. Objectivity is an etiquette ritual. Democracy is a séance. Progress is a hallucination with better marketing. And yet – life continues. People wake, work, argue, aspire, despair.
Dis-Integrationism isn’t about nihilism; it’s about maintenance. Not repairing the myth, but tending the human who must live among its debris. Not constructing new temples, but learning to see in the half-light once the old gods have gone.
The travelogue becomes a guidebook: Welcome to the ruins. Mind the uneven floor. Here is how we walk without pretending the path is paved.
The Fetish for Solutions
Here is the final indignity of the age: the demand that every critique come bundled with a solution, like some moral warranty card. As if naming the rot weren’t labour enough. As if truth required a customer-service plan.
‘Where is your alternative?’ they ask, clutching Enlightenment logic the way a drowning man clutches a shopping receipt.
But solutions are the real tyranny. They arrive bearing the smile of reason and the posture of progress, and behind both sits the same old imperial instinct: replace ambiguity with order; replace lived complexity with a diagram. A solution is merely a problem wearing a fresh coat of confidence.
Worse, a solution presumes the system is sound, merely in need of adjustment. It imagines the structure holds. It imagines the furniture can be rearranged without collapsing into splinters, and the memory of Kant.
Solutions promise inevitability. They promise teleology. They promise that the mess can be disinfected if only one applies the correct solvent. This is theology masquerading as engineering.
The Violence of the Answer
A solution is a closure – a metaphysical brute force. It slams the window shut so no further interpretation can slip in through the draft. It stabilises the world by amputating everything that wriggles. Answers are how systems defend themselves. They’re the intellectual equivalent of riot police: clean uniforms, straight lines, zero tolerance for nuance.
This is why the world keeps mistaking refusal for chaos. Refusal isn’t chaos. It’s hygiene. It is the simple act of not adding more furniture to a house already bending under its own delusions. When you decline to provide a solution, you aren’t abandoning the world. You’re declining to participate in its coercive optimism.
And So the Travelogue Ends Where It Must
Not in triumph or a bluepirnt, but in composure – the only posture left after the Enlightenment’s glare has dimmed. Negativity isn’t sabotage; it’s sobriety. Dis-Integrationism isn’t cynicism; it’s the refusal to replace one failing mythology with another wearing vegan leather.
A world obsessed with solutions cannot recognise maintenance as wisdom. It can’t tolerate ambiguity without reaching for a hammer. It can’t breathe unless someone somewhere is building a ladder to a future that never arrives.
So no – I won’t provide solutions. I won’t participate in the fantasy that the human condition can be patched with conceptual duct tape. I will not gift the Enlightenment a eulogy that surrenders to its grammar.
What I offer is far smaller and far more honest: Attention. Description. Steady hands in a collapsing house. And the simple dignity of refusing to lie about the architecture.
My philosophical critique, not of the book Why Democrats Are Dangerous, but of the two warring factions in United States politics – mind you, partisanship not limited to the US – sparked the ire of defenders of their respective turf. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Those other people are either addleheaded or abject evil’ is a consolidation of responses from both sides of the aisle. I’ve crafted a response.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
It’s perfectly true that I occupy a perspective. Everyone does. This isn’t a confession; it’s a structural feature of being human. Consciousness is perspectival by design. We don’t get to hover above the world like disembodied CCTV cameras. We look from somewhere.
But acknowledging one’s perspective is not the same thing as being trapped in a rut. A rut implies unexamined repetition, reflex, and dogma. A perspective implies angle, interpretation, intellectual stance. The accusation I’m hearing – ‘you’re in a rut too’ – is not actually an argument. It’s an attempt to delegitimise the analysis without engaging with it.
It says nothing about whether my observation is true, coherent, or well-reasoned; it merely notes that I, like every other speaking organism on the planet, occupy a position. And from this banal fact it attempts to smuggle in a conclusion: that my critique is thereby invalid. It’s a sleight of hand, and a clumsy one.
If someone believes I’m wrong, they are welcome – encouraged, even – to demonstrate:
where the logic fails
where the evidence contradicts me
where the symmetry is mischaracterised
where the interpretation distorts rather than illuminates
That is argumentation.
What they are offering instead is a sort of epistemic shrug: ‘You’re in a perspective, therefore you have no authority’. This is an ad hominem in a trench coat, pretending to be profundity.
The irony, of course, is that the people making this charge never seem to apply it to themselves. Their own viewpoint, naturally, is not a rut but a ‘stance’, ‘framework’, ‘tradition’, ‘bedrock’, or ‘fact’. Only the critic has perspective; they merely have truth.
But here’s the critical distinction:
Having a perspective does not invalidate an analysis, and pretending not to have one does.
The entire Anti-Enlightenment project rests on this recognition: that all human positions are mediated, situated, incomplete – and yet still capable of meaningful observation. You don’t escape your perspective by denying it; you escape dogma by interrogating it.
If someone wishes to rebut what I’ve written, they should do so directly, with evidence, reasoning, or counterexamples. If all they offer is ‘well, you’re biased too’, then they’ve conceded the argument by refusing to enter it.
A perspective is not a rut. A rut is what happens when you can’t tell the difference.
My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each other’s work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic – heaven knows I have written my share – but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.
Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense – line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing – I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.
A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)
Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The Red–Blue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.
My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege – not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleague’s argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.
This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply – indeed does apply – to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.
My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.
The Architecture of Certainty
What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture – an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.
My colleague’s book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponents’ manipulations.
This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.
This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.
It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.
The Invention of the Enemy
One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)
This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.
To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.
This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here – only demonology.
The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence
One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.
The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather – each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.
This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.
It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.
The Projection Engine
If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection – unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.
Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying one’s own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history – each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity – its own included – is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.
This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that one’s own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from one’s own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice – whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.
The Neutral Observer Who Isn’t
What the book never acknowledges – because it cannot – is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.
This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.
The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimant’s own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.
In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.
The Fictional Symmetry Problem
One of the major deficiencies in the book – and in most modern political commentary – is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the other’s missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.
The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.
This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.
Narrative Weaponry
Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing – and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.
We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.
Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.
MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.
The Missing Category: Structural Analysis
Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisation’s uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.
None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.
Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.
This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.
Where He Is Not Wrong
Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.
But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them – not to understand them.
The Danger of Certainty
What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage – though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature – but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.
The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that one’s own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason – capital R – is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.
The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.
It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.
The irony is almost tender.
Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge one’s own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.
My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview – and mistook the one for the other.
If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.
Read next:The Republic of Recursive Prophecy – an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.
I finished Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I mentioned the other day. Unfortunately, my initial optimism was premature. Everything I enjoyed was front-loaded: the first four chapters set up a promising critique of mechanistic rationality and the collapse of shared meaning. Then the book turned into a long, therapeutic sermon. I should have stopped at Chapter 4 and saved myself the sunk-cost regret.
It isn’t that nothing follows; it’s just that what follows is so thin that the cost-benefit ratio goes negative. Once Desmet moves from diagnosis to prescription, the argument collapses into a psychologist’s worldview: an entire civilisation explained through mass neurosis and healed through better intuition. He builds his case on straw versions of reason, science, and modernity, so his ‘cure’ can look revelatory.
The trouble is familiar. Having dismantled rationalism, Desmet then installs intuition as its replacement – an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist can’t stop therapising; he privileges the psychological lens over every other possibility.
The result is a reductionist parascience dressed as social theory. The totalitarian mind, in Desmet’s telling, isn’t political or structural but psychological – a patient waiting for insight. I don’t doubt his sincerity, only his scope. It’s what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.
Desmet’s project ultimately re-enchants what it claims to critique. He wants rationalism redeemed through feeling, order reborn through connection. Dis-Integrationism stops short of that impulse. It accepts fracture as the permanent condition – no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reason’s own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.
In the late 1990s, the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix – Keanu Reeves as Neo, the Chosen One™, 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 here’s the twist, the film itself couldn’t stomach: realising the simulation doesn’t free you from it.
Knowing that race and gender are social constructs doesn’t erase their architecture. Knowing that our economies, legal systems, and so-called democracies are fictions doesn’t 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 won’t buy you a cup of coffee.
Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation the film name-dropped like a trophy, argued that simulation doesn’t hide reality – it replaces it. When representation becomes indistinguishable from the thing it represents, truth evaporates, leaving only consensus. We don’t 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 – 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 doesn’t need to plug wires into your skull; it only needs to convince you that the socket is already there.
You can know it’s all a fiction. You can quote Derrida over your morning espresso and tweet about the collapse of epistemic certainty. It won’t change the fact that you still have rent to pay, laws to obey, and identities to perform. Awareness isn’t liberation; it’s just higher-resolution despair with better UX.
Neo woke up to a ruined Earth and thought he’d escaped. He hadn’t. He’d only levelled up to the next simulation – 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.
The genesis of the Modernity Worldview Survey was Metamodernism. Is this still a thing? In recent years, metamodernism has emerged as a supposed successor to postmodernism, claiming to transcend the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. Yet, upon closer examination, this framework reveals itself not as a genuine paradigm shift but rather as a modernist invention that fails to escape the very critiques it attempts to address.
Despite its claims of oscillation between poles, metamodernism betrays its modernist underpinnings through its implicit teleology and notion of progress. The very framing of “meta” as beyond or transcending suggests a linear progression that is fundamentally at odds with the postmodern rejection of grand narratives. Metamodernism positions itself as forward-moving whilst attempting to recapture elements of premodernity, revealing an anxiety about being perceived as regressive or naive.
Podcast: Audio version of this content
This desire to have it both ways—to acknowledge the constructed nature of meaning whilst still pursuing transcendent meaning—doesn’t represent a resolution so much as a psychological coping mechanism. The cognitive dissonance created by attempting to simultaneously hold contradictory positions is assuaged through a clever rhetorical move: claiming that oscillation itself is the point.
A Rebranding Exercise
What metamodernism presents as novel is ultimately a recombination of elements from premodern, modern, and postmodern frameworks without resolving their fundamental contradictions. Rather than being mutually exclusive from these earlier paradigms, it cherry-picks aspects of each whilst maintaining the basic ontological framework of modernism.
The notion that one can meaningfully “oscillate” between accepting objective and subjective realities is particularly problematic. Either reality has objective features, or it doesn’t—pretending otherwise doesn’t create a new philosophical paradigm but rather a convenient means of avoiding the implications of either position.
Postmodern Irony in Motion
Perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of metamodernism is not as a sincere attempt to move beyond postmodernism but as postmodernism performing its own critique. Viewed through this lens, metamodernism becomes postmodern irony in motion—a knowing wink at the impossibility of escaping construction whilst performatively engaging with the desire to do so.
The irony deepens when we consider that “postmodernism” itself is essentially an externally imposed label rather than a self-identification. Most thinkers characterised as postmodernists reject the label, which functions primarily as a modernist attempt to categorise and contain ideas that fundamentally challenge its frameworks.
Art vs. Philosophy
Where metamodernism succeeds is as a descriptive label for certain artistic and cultural productions that deliberately play in the space between irony and sincerity. Works like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” the television series “BoJack Horseman,” and Wes Anderson’s films effectively combine postmodern techniques with sincere emotional engagement.
However, what works as an artistic sensibility fails as a comprehensive philosophical framework or moral compass. The oscillation that enriches art becomes paralysing when applied to ethics or ontology. A moral framework requires some stable reference points; constantly shifting between believing in objective moral truths and viewing morality as entirely constructed provides no reliable guide for actual decision-making.
Insider vs. Outsider Perspectives
Like religious frameworks that balance literal and metaphorical interpretations, metamodernism may function as a lived experience for those who embrace it, even if it doesn’t hold up to external philosophical scrutiny. The cognitive manoeuvres that appear as tricks or inconsistencies to outsiders often feel like natural, intuitive ways of navigating complexity to those within the system.
This insider/outsider divide recalls Thomas Nagel’s famous “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (PDF) thought experiment—there may be experiential aspects of inhabiting a metamodern worldview that aren’t fully comprehensible from the outside. Yet this doesn’t invalidate external critique; inconsistencies and contradictions still matter philosophically.
Conclusion: Beyond Labels
Perhaps the most postmodern insight is recognising that we cannot escape having an ideology—even a position of having no ideology is itself an ideology. What distinguishes various approaches isn’t whether they have ideologies but how explicitly they acknowledge them, how consistently they apply them, and how willing they are to subject them to revision.
Metamodernism, for all its aspirations to transcend earlier frameworks, ultimately reveals more about our contemporary psychological condition than it offers as a coherent philosophical position. It captures our desire to maintain meaning in a world where we’ve recognised its contingency—a desire that may be fundamentally human, even if philosophically untenable.
Rather than seeking yet another “-ism” to resolve our existential and philosophical tensions, perhaps we might more honestly confront the limitations and partialities of all our frameworks, recognising that the search for a perfect synthesis may itself be a modernist fantasy.
A Brief, Brutal Experiment in Categorising Your Worldview
This month, I’ve been tinkering with a little project—an elegant, six-question survey designed to assess where you land in the great intellectual mess that is modernity.
Audio: Podcast discussion about this post.
This isn’t some spur-of-the-moment quiz cooked up in a caffeine-fueled haze. No, this project has been simmering for years, and after much consideration (and occasional disdain), I’ve crafted a set of questions and response options that, I believe, encapsulate the prevailing worldviews of our time.
It all began with Metamodernism, a term that, at first, seemed promising—a bold synthesis of Modernism and Postmodernism, a grand dialectic of the ages. But as I mapped it out, it collapsed under scrutiny. A footnote in the margins of intellectual history, at best. I’ll expand on that in due course.
The Setup: A Simple, Slightly Sadistic Ternary Plot
For the visually inclined (or the masochistically curious), I initially imagined a timeline, then a branching decision tree, then a Cartesian plane before landing on a ternary plot—a three-way visual that captures ideological leanings in a way a boring old bar chart never could.
The survey itself is brief: six questions, each with five possible answers. Submit your responses, and voilà—you get a tidy little ternary chart plotting your intellectual essence, along with a breakdown of what your answers signify.
Methodology: Half-Rigorous, Half-Reckless
I am, after all, a (recovering) statistician, so I’ve tried to uphold proper methodology while also fast-tracking certain safeguards for the sake of efficiency. If there’s enough interest, I may expand the survey, adding more questions or increasing response flexibility (tick boxes instead of radio buttons—revolutionary, I know).
Privacy Concerns? Relax. I’m not harvesting your data for some nefarious scheme. No personally identifiable information is collected—just a timestamp, session ID, and your browser’s language setting. I did consider tracking IP addresses to analyze regional trends but ultimately scrapped that idea.
In the future, I may add an optional email feature for those who wish to save and track their responses over time (assuming anyone is unhinged enough to take this more than once).
The Rest of the Story: Your Feedback, My Amusement
Since this is a personal project crafted in splendid isolation, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Are the questions reasonable? Do the response options make sense? Does the summary feel accurate? Is the ternary chart decipherable, or have I constructed a glorified inkblot test?
As an academic, economist, and statistician, I had never encountered a ternary chart before embarking on this, and now I rather enjoy it. That said, I also find Nietzsche “intuitive,” so take that as you will.
If this gains traction, expect follow-up content—perhaps videos, podcasts, or further written explorations.
Your Move
Take the survey. It’s painless, requiring mere minutes of your life (which is, let’s be honest, already wasted online). And because I’m feeling generous, you can even generate a PDF to stick on your fridge, next to your collection of expired coupons and disappointing takeout menus.
Let’s see where you stand in the grand, chaotic landscape of modernity. Or at least, let’s have a laugh trying to make sense of it.
DISCLAIMER: The Modernity Worldview Survey is not scientific. It is designed as an experiment to provide directional insights. It is hosted on Google Cloud and subject to its availability and performance limitations.
Kurt Gray’s Outraged! attempts to boil morality down to a single principle: harm. This, in his view, is the bedrock of all moral considerations. In doing so, he takes a swing at Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, trying to reduce its multi-faceted framework to a mere footnote in moral psychology. Amusingly, he even highlights how Haidt quietly modified his own theory after Gray and his colleagues published an earlier work—an intellectual game of cat-and-mouse, if ever there was one.
Audio: Podcast of this topic
Chapter 6: The Intuition Overdose
By the time we reach Chapter 6, Gray is charging full steam into reductio ad absurdum territory. He leans so hard on intuition that I lost count of how many times he invokes it. The problem? He gives it too much weight while conveniently ignoring acculturation.
Yes, intuition plays a role, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Enter Kahneman’s dual-system model: Gray eagerly adopts the System 1 vs. System 2 distinction, forcing his test subjects into snap moral judgments under time pressure to bypass rationalisation. Fair enough. But what he neglects is how even complex tasks can migrate from System 2 (slow, deliberate) to System 1 (fast, automatic) through repeated exposure. Kahneman’s example? Basic arithmetic. A child grappling with 1 + 1 relies on System 2, but an adult answers without effort.
And morality? The same mechanism applies. What starts as deliberation morphs into automatic response through cultural conditioning. But instead of acknowledging this, Gray behaves as if moral intuition is some mystical, spontaneous phenomenon untethered from socialization.
Let’s lay cards on the table. I’m a moral subjectivist—actually, a moral non-cognitivist, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s not frighten the children. My stance is that morality, at its core, is subjective. However, no one develops their moral compass in isolation. Culture, upbringing, and societal narratives shape our moral instincts, even if those instincts ultimately reduce to personal sentiment.
Gray does concede that the definition of “harm” is subjective, which allows him to argue that practically any belief or action can be framed as harmful. And sure, if you redefine “harm” broadly enough, you can claim that someone’s mere existence constitutes an existential threat. Religious believers, for example, claim to be “harmed” by the idea that someone else’s non-compliance with their theological fairy tale could lead to eternal damnation.
I don’t disagree with his observation. The problem is that the underlying belief is fundamentally pathological. This doesn’t necessarily refute Gray’s argument—after all, people do experience psychological distress over imaginary scenarios—but it does mean we’re dealing with a shaky foundation. If harm is entirely perception-based, then moral arguments become arbitrary power plays, subject to the whims of whoever is best at manufacturing grievance.
And this brings us to another crucial flaw in Gray’s framework: the way it enables ideological self-perpetuation. If morality is reduced to perceived harm, then groups with wildly different definitions of harm will inevitably weaponize their beliefs. Take the religious fundamentalist who believes gay marriage is a sin that dooms others to eternal suffering. From their perspective, fighting against LGBTQ+ rights isn’t just bigotry—it’s moral duty, a battle to save souls from metaphysical harm. This, of course, leads to moral contagion, where adherents tirelessly indoctrinate others, especially their own children, ensuring the pathology replicates itself like a virus.
The Problem with Mono-Causal Explanations
More broadly, Gray’s attempt to reduce morality to a single principle—harm—feels suspiciously tidy. Morality is messy, contradictory, and riddled with historical baggage. Any theory that purports to explain it all in one neat little package should immediately raise eyebrows.
So, sorry, Kurt. You can do better. Moral psychology is a tangled beast, and trying to hack through it with a single conceptual machete does more harm than good.
Philosophics 