Democracy: Opiate of the Masses

Aug 12, 2025Aug 12, 2025Posted in identity, intelligence, language, modernism, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged bibles, bollox, critique, democracy, dumocracy, Enlightenment critique, idiocracy, illusion of choice, iq, language, Marx, masses, mediocrity, opiates, perception, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, satire, societyLeave a comment

Democracy is sold, propagandised, really, as the best system of governance we’ve ever devised, usually with the grudging qualifier “so far.” It’s the Coca-Cola of political systems: not particularly good for you, but so entrenched in the cultural bloodstream that to question it is tantamount to treason.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast on this topic.

The trouble is this: democracy depends on an electorate that is both aware and capable. Most people are neither. Worse still, even if they could be aware, they wouldn’t be smart enough to make use of it. And even if they were smart enough, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem strolls in, smirking, to remind us that the whole thing is mathematically doomed anyway.

Even this number is a charade. IQ measures how well you navigate the peculiar obstacle course we’ve designed as “education,” not the whole terrain of human thought. It’s as culturally loaded as asking a fish to climb a tree, then declaring it dim-witted when it flops. We call it intelligence because it flatters those already rewarded by the system that designed the test. In the United States, the average IQ stands at 97 – hardly a figure that instils confidence in votes and outcomes.

Democracy is religion with ballots instead of bibles

The Enlightenment gents who pushed democracy weren’t exactly selfless visionaries. They already had power, and simply repackaged it as something everyone could share, much as the clergy promised eternal reward to peasants if they only kept their heads down. Democracy is merely religion with ballots instead of bibles: an opiate for the masses, sedating the population with the illusion of influence.

Worse still, it’s a system optimised for mediocrity. It rewards consensus, punishes brilliance, and ensures the average voter is, by definition, average. Living under it is like starring in Idiocracy, only without the comedic relief, just the grim recognition that you’re outnumbered, and the crowd is cheering the wrong thing.

Unwilling Steelman, Part III

Apr 25, 2025Apr 26, 2025Posted in consciousness, free will, identity, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, science, societyTagged adaptive cognition, behavioural neuroscience, brain modulation, cognitive bias, critique, determinism, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ethical judgment, free will, illusion of choice, moral manipulation, moral psychology, moral reasoning, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, perception, philosophy, psychology, self-deception, state-dependent behaviour, TMS2 Comments

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

Manipulability as Disproof

If your will can be altered without your consent, was it ever truly yours?

“If a button on the outside of your skull can change your morality,
then where, exactly, is your autonomy hiding?”

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

We’ve heard it all before:

“Sure, I’m influenced — but at the end of the day, I choose.”
But what happens when that influence isn’t influence, but modulation?
What if your very sense of right and wrong — your willingness to forgive, to punish, to empathise — can be dialled like a radio station?

And what if you never know it’s happening?

Your Morality Is Neurochemical

Studies using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) have shown that moral judgments can be shifted by stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).

Turn it up: the subject becomes more utilitarian.
Turn it down: the subject becomes more emotionally reactive.
They make different decisions in the exact same scenarios, depending on which neural pathway is dominant.

The kicker?

They always explain their choices as though they had made them deliberately.

There is no awareness of the manipulation.
Only a retrospective illusion of authorship.

A|B Testing the Soul

Let’s run a thought experiment.

Scenario A: You’re well-fed, calm, unprovoked.
Scenario B: You’re hungry, cortisol-spiked, primed with images of threat.

Same moral dilemma. Different choice.

Query both versions of you, and both will offer coherent post hoc justifications.
Neither suspects that their “will” was merely a biochemical condition in drag.

If both versions feel authentic, then neither can claim authority.

Your will is not sovereign.
It’s state-dependent.
And if it changes without your knowledge, it was never really yours to begin with.

Even the Observer Is a Variable

To make matters worse: the person judging your decision is just as susceptible.

An irritated observer sees you as difficult.
A relaxed one sees you as generous.
The same action — different verdict.

And yet both observers think they are the neutral party.
They are not.
They are chemically calibrated hallucinations, mistaking their reaction for objective truth.

You’re a Vending Machine, Not a Virtuoso

This isn’t metaphor. It’s architecture.

You input a stimulus.
The brain processes it using pre-loaded scripts, shaped by hormones, past trauma, fatigue, blood sugar, social context.
An output emerges.
Then the brain rationalises it, like a PR firm cleaning up after a CEO’s impulse tweet.

Reason follows emotion.
Emotion is involuntary.
Therefore, your reasoning is not yours. It’s a post-event explanation for something you didn’t choose to feel.

TL;DR: If It Can Be Tweaked, It’s Not Yours

Your “moral core” can be adjusted without your awareness.
You justify manipulated choices with total confidence.
Your assessors are equally chemically biased.
There is no neutral version of “you” — just shifting states with internal coherence.
And if your choices depend on state, and your state can be altered, then freedom is a costume worn by contingency.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

The Feedback Loop of False Selves

You are being judged — by others who are also compromised.

Unwilling Steelman, Part I

Apr 23, 2025Apr 24, 2025Posted in free will, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychologyTagged adaptive behaviour, agency, autonomy, behavioural determinism, books, causal determinism, compatibilism, consciousness, critique of free will, determinism, free will, identity, illusion of choice, introspection, metaphysics of mind, moral philosophy, music, neuroethics, neuroscience, perception, philosophical psychology, philosophy, psychology, recursive systems, Self-Awareness, selfhood, spirituality, theory of mind2 Comments

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.

Constraint Is Not Freedom

The ergonomic cage of compatibilist comfort

“You are not playing the piano. You are the piano, playing itself — then applauding.”

Compatibilists — those philosophical locksmiths determined to keep the myth of free will intact — love to say that constraint doesn’t contradict freedom. That a system can still be “free” so long as it is coherent, self-reflective, and capable of recursive evaluation.

In this view, freedom doesn’t require being uncaused — it only requires being causally integrated. You don’t need to be sovereign. You just need to be responsive.

“The pianist may not have built the piano — but she still plays it.”

It sounds lovely.

It’s also false.

You Are the Piano

This analogy fails for a simple reason: there is no pianist. No ghost in the gears. No homunculus seated behind the cortex, pulling levers and composing virtue. There is only the piano — complex, self-modulating, exquisitely tuned — but self-playing nonetheless.

The illusion of choice is merely the instrument responding to its state: to its internal wiring, environmental inputs, and the accumulated sediment of prior events. What feels like deliberation is often delay. What feels like freedom is often latency.

Recursive ≠ Free

Ah, but what about reflection? Don’t we revise ourselves over time?

We do. But that revision is itself conditioned. You didn’t choose the capacity to reflect. You didn’t choose your threshold for introspection. If you resist a bias, it’s because you were predisposed — by some cocktail of education, temperament, or trauma — to resist it.

A thermostat that updates its own algorithm is still a thermostat.

It doesn’t become “free” by being self-correcting. It becomes better adapted. Likewise, human introspection is just adaptive determinism wearing a philosophical hat.

Constraint Isn’t Contradiction — It’s Redefinition

Compatibilists smuggle in a quieter, defanged version of freedom: not the ability to do otherwise, but the ability to behave “like yourself.”

But this is freedom in retrospect, not in action.
If all freedom means is “acting in accordance with one’s programming,” then Roombas have free will.

If we stretch the term that far, it breaks — not loudly, but with the sad elasticity of a word losing its shape.

TL;DR: The Pianist Was Always a Myth

You didn’t design your mental architecture.
You didn’t select your desires or dispositions.
You didn’t choose the you that chooses.

So no — you’re not playing the piano.
You are the piano — reverberating, perhaps beautifully, to stimuli you didn’t summon and cannot evade.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

Continuity Is Not Identity

What if you are not who you were — but simply what you’ve become?