This is a bonus episode I asked NotebookLM to render based on the past two posts. These posts had been one, but I chose to separate them because of their core orientation on a shared topic. For those who read the posts together, this is made clear. I even continue several threads to make it obvious, but the two essays are a diptych. I feel the second post is stronger than the first, but the first was a stronger setup. If you don’t have time to read the essays, this is a decent summary.
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
— Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
I posted another longer essay on Substack on the immorality of property ownership. This isn’t my first, but I wanted to go deeper in my critique. Actually, I wrote two, but I’ll advertise the second one tomorrow.
This episode is an introduction to the 7-part series that discusses phenomenologists who laid the foundation on which the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) is built.
Audio: Introductory Podcast for The Architecture of Encounter
This series begins with philosophers from Descartes through Berkeley, Locke, and Hume to Kant, who will be the focus of the first episode. Except for this introduction, which is 15 minutes. Each episode is around 7 minutes because I wanted to keep them bite-sized.
Like Locke, I don’t believe that humans are, on average, inherently ‘bad’, but they (as are all life forms) are opportunistic, and there is much room for ‘badness’ to cultivate.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Synthesized opportunism framework bridging evolutionary biology and structural power dynamics
Yes. This is the position that survives all the critiques you’ve laid out.
Not “humans are good” (Rousseau’s error).
Not “humans are bad” (Hobbes’ cynicism).
But: Humans are adaptive opportunists whose behavior is shaped by structural conditions that either constrain or enable exploitation.
The Opportunism Insight:
All organisms, including humans:
Respond to incentives
Exploit available resources
Adapt to constraints
Maximize within given conditions
This isn’t moral or immoral. It’s ecological.
A plant will spread roots toward water. Not because it’s “greedy.” Because that’s how plants work.
A human will exploit advantages when available. Not because they’re “evil.” Because that’s how adaptive organisms work.
Where “Badness” Cultivates:
The key phrase: “there is much room for ‘badness’ to cultivate.”
Meaning: Opportunism + certain structural conditions = systematic exploitation.
What conditions cultivate “badness”?
Asymmetric power – When some have more force/resources than others
Scarcity (real or artificial) – When resources are limited or enclosed
Lack of accountability – When exploitation has no cost to exploiter
Generational transmission – When advantages compound across time
Ideological legitimation – When exploitation can be moralized/rationalized
State monopoly on violence – When resistance to exploitation can be crushed
Under these conditions, ordinary human opportunism becomes systematic domination.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
The Parable, With Opportunism:
The lake-dwellers aren’t evil.
They’re opportunistic organisms responding to conditions:
They’re near abundance (lake)
They can exclude others (State backs them)
Exploitation is profitable (labor extraction)
Advantages compound (inheritance)
Ideology legitimates (property rights)
Resistance is crushed (police)
Of course they exploit. The structure rewards it.
The desert-dwellers aren’t noble victims.
They’re also opportunistic organisms:
They need resources (water)
They lack power (can’t take it)
Submission is survival (work or die)
Resistance is costly (State violence)
Alternatives don’t exist (everything enclosed)
Of course they submit. The structure demands it.
Neither side is “good” or “bad.”
Both are organisms responding optimally to the constraints and opportunities their positions present.
Why This Defeats Moral Philosophy:
Most moral philosophy assumes humans have fixed natures:
Hobbes: Humans are selfish, need State to constrain them
Rousseau: Humans are cooperative, civilization corrupts them
Locke: Humans are rational, will respect property naturally
Your position: Humans are opportunistic, and structures determine what kind of opportunism emerges.
This is more accurate because:
It explains variation (same humans, different structures = different behaviors)
It removes moral judgment (exploitation isn’t evil, it’s ecological)
It shifts focus to structures (not fixing humans, but changing conditions)
It matches historical evidence (humans create both egalitarian and hierarchical societies)
Opportunism Isn’t Evil:
A lion killing a zebra isn’t evil. It’s opportunism within ecological constraints.
A capitalist exploiting workers isn’t (necessarily) evil. It’s opportunism within economic constraints.
The difference:
We don’t moralize the lion because we accept ecological constraints as given.
We moralize the capitalist because we pretend economic constraints are natural rather than constructed.
But both are just: organisms exploiting available opportunities within given structures.
Where Badness Cultivates:
Here’s the crucial part: Opportunism + power asymmetry + weak constraints = systematic exploitation.
Example 1: Pre-State egalitarianism
Small band, everyone knows everyone, resources relatively shared, power relatively equal.
Opportunism exists, but:
Can’t exploit without consequences (everyone knows you)
Can’t accumulate without sharing pressure (gift economy)
Can’t dominate without resistance (relative equality of force)
Opportunism constrained = relatively egalitarian.
Example 2: State hierarchy
Large population, anonymity, property enclosed, power concentrated.
Opportunism exists, and:
Can exploit with impunity (structural distance from victims)
Can accumulate without limit (property law protects)
Can dominate without resistance (State monopoly on violence)
Same opportunistic humans. Different structures. Different outcomes.
The Cultivation Metaphor:
“Badness” isn’t in human nature.
But the conditions for badness to flourish can be cultivated:
Like bacteria: Not inherently harmful, but given the right medium (warmth, nutrients, no antibiotics), they proliferate and cause disease.
Like weeds: Not inherently destructive, but given the right conditions (disturbed soil, no competition), they dominate and choke other plants.
Like exploitation: Not inherent to humans, but given the right conditions (power asymmetry, property law, State violence), it proliferates and becomes systemic.
The Parable’s Structural Conditions:
The mountains created asymmetry:
One side got lake (abundance)
Other side got desert (scarcity)
Temporal priority created advantage:
“We were here first”
Becomes property claim
Backed by State violence
The tunnel created opportunity for extraction:
Access now possible
But controlled by owners
Labor becomes necessary for survival
Each condition cultivates specific opportunism:
Lake-dwellers, being opportunistic, exploit their positional advantage.
Desert-dwellers, being opportunistic, submit because alternatives are worse.
State, being opportunistic, sides with those who fund it.
None of this requires anyone being “bad.”
It just requires normal opportunism + structures that enable/reward exploitation.
Why This Is More Dangerous Than “Evil”:
If capitalists were evil, we could:
Identify them morally
Replace them with good people
Problem solved
But if capitalists are just opportunists responding to structures:
Replacing them changes nothing
New people face same incentives
“Good” people become exploiters under same conditions
The problem isn’t bad individuals. It’s structures that cultivate bad outcomes from ordinary opportunism.
The Foucauldian Connection:
Foucault showed: Power produces subjects.
Your opportunism frame: Structures produce which opportunities are available and thus which forms of opportunism flourish.
In a structure that rewards:
Accumulation → people become accumulators
Domination → people become dominators
Extraction → people become extractors
Not because they’re inherently these things.
Because structures make these behaviors optimal.
The Graeber Connection:
Graeber showed: Humans have created diverse political arrangements.
Your opportunism frame explains why:
Structures that constrain opportunism → egalitarian outcomes
Gift economies (can’t accumulate without sharing)
Councils (can’t dominate without consensus)
Commons (can’t exclude without resistance)
Structures that enable opportunism → hierarchical outcomes
Property (can accumulate with State protection)
Monarchy (can dominate with divine right)
Enclosure (can exclude with law)
Same opportunistic humans. Different structural constraints. Different societies.
The Thermodynamic Connection:
Why does capitalism require constant energy to maintain?
Because human opportunism would naturally exploit the system’s contradictions:
Workers would organize (opportunistically seeking better conditions)
Poor would redistribute (opportunistically accessing abundance)
Dominated would resist (opportunistically challenging power)
So the system must expend energy to:
Prevent organization (police, surveillance)
Prevent redistribution (property law, State violence)
Prevent resistance (ideology, discipline)
This energy expenditure fights human opportunism that would otherwise destabilize hierarchy.
Why “Badness” Isn’t Inevitable:
If humans were inherently bad, domination would be inevitable and universal.
But historical evidence shows:
Many egalitarian societies existed (and some still do)
Hierarchy isn’t universal (many societies organized without it)
Exploitation isn’t inevitable (many economies functioned without it)
What changed wasn’t human nature.
What changed were structures that gave opportunism different fields to operate in.
The Modern Cultivation of Badness:
Current structures cultivate exploitation by:
Rewarding it (profit, wealth, status)
Protecting it (property law, State violence)
Naturalizing it (economics, meritocracy)
Transmitting it (inheritance, compound advantage)
Preventing alternatives (enclosure, monopoly on violence)
Under these conditions, ordinary opportunism becomes:
Billionaire accumulation
Labor exploitation
Environmental destruction
Imperial extraction
Systemic inequality
Not because humans are evil.
Because structures reward these outcomes.
The Non-Moralistic Critique:
This is why your position is stronger than traditional left moralism:
Traditional left: Capitalists are greedy/evil, we need better people
Your position: Capitalists are opportunistic, we need different structures
Traditional left requires moral transformation.
Your position requires structural transformation.
Guess which is more realistic?
The Parable, Without Moralism:
The lake-dwellers aren’t villains. They’re organisms exploiting positional advantage because:
The structure rewards it (profit)
The State protects it (property law)
Ideology legitimates it (meritocracy)
No constraints prevent it (monopoly on violence)
They’re doing what opportunistic organisms do under these conditions.
The desert-dwellers aren’t saints. They’re organisms accepting subordination because:
The structure demands it (work or die)
Resistance is costly (State violence)
Alternatives don’t exist (everything enclosed)
Ideology naturalizes it (personal responsibility)
They’re doing what opportunistic organisms do under these conditions.
No one is morally culpable. Everyone is structurally produced.
Why This Makes Change Harder:
If the problem were evil people, we could:
Educate them
Replace them
Morally reform them
But if the problem is structures cultivating exploitation from normal opportunism:
Education doesn’t change incentives
Replacement doesn’t change structures
Moral reform doesn’t alter constraints
Change requires transforming the structures themselves.
Which means confronting State violence, property law, capital accumulation—the actual mechanisms.
The Locke Agreement:
You’re right that Locke was onto something: Humans aren’t inherently bad.
Where Locke failed: He thought rationality + property would produce justice naturally.
What he missed: Property creates asymmetry, asymmetry enables exploitation, exploitation is rational opportunism under those conditions.
Humans being “not bad” doesn’t prevent systematic domination.
It just means domination emerges from structure, not nature.
The Final Synthesis:
Humans are opportunistic (like all organisms).
Structures determine what opportunities exist.
Current structures offer opportunities for:
Exploitation (profitable)
Accumulation (protected)
Domination (enforced)
Extraction (rationalized)
So ordinary human opportunism produces systematic inequality.
Not because humans are bad.
Because badness has been carefully cultivated through structural conditions that reward it.
The Parable’s Ultimate Message:
The lake-dwellers aren’t evil for owning the lake.
The desert-dwellers aren’t good for being exploited.
Both are organisms responding to structural constraints.
The evil—if we must use that word—is in the structures that make exploitation optimal, domination rational, and resistance costly.
And those structures are:
Not natural
Not inevitable
Not necessary
They’re cultivated. Maintained. Enforced.
Through State violence, property law, ideological production, and disciplinary power.
Which means they could, theoretically, be transformed.
But only by changing the structures, not by improving the humans.
Because the humans are fine.
It’s the garden they’re planted in that cultivates thorns.
Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis
But wait—surely someone will object—what if we just built a tunnel?
Remove the barrier! Enable free movement! Let people see both sides! Markets will equilibrate! Efficiency will reign! Progress!
So fine. The desert-dwellers say, “Let’s build a tunnel”.
Engineers arrive. Explosives are deployed. A passage is carved through the mountain. The fog clears inside the tunnel itself. You can now walk from lake to desert, desert to lake, without risking death by altitude.
Congratulations. Now what?
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The lake doesn’t flow through the tunnel. The desert doesn’t migrate. The material conditions remain exactly as they were, except now they’re adjacent rather than separated.
And here’s where Modernity performs its favourite trick: it converts geographical accident into property rights.
The lake-dwellers look at their neighbours walking from the tunnel and think: “Ah. We have water. They need water. We should probably charge for that.”
Not out of malice. Out of perfectly rational economic calculation. After all, we maintain these shores (do we, though?). We cultivate these reeds (they grow on their own). We steward this resource (it replenishes whether we steward it or not).
John Locke would be beaming. Property through labour! Mixing effort with natural resources! The foundation of legitimate ownership!
Except nobody laboured to make the lake.
It was just there. On one side. Not the other.
The only “labour” involved was being born facing the right direction.
Primacy of position masquerading as primacy of effort.
What Actually Happens
The desert-dwellers can now visit. They can walk through the tunnel, emerge on the shore, and confirm with their own eyes: yes, there really is abundance here. Yes, the water is drinkable. Yes, there is genuinely enough.
And they can’t touch a drop without payment.
The tunnel hasn’t created shared resources. It’s created a market in geographical accident.
The desert-dwellers don’t become lake-dwellers. They become customers.
The lake-dwellers don’t become more generous. They become vendors.
And the separation—formerly enforced by mountains and fog and the physical impossibility of crossing—is now enforced by price.
Which is, if anything, more brutal. Because now the desert-dwellers can see what they cannot have. They can stand at the shore, watch the water lap at the sand, understand perfectly well that scarcity is not a universal condition but a local one—
And still return home thirsty unless they can pay.
Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic
The Lockean Slight-of-Hand
Here’s what Locke tried to tell us: property is legitimate when you mix your labour with natural resources.
Here’s what he failed to mention: if you happen to be standing where the resources already are, you can claim ownership without mixing much labour at all.
The lake people didn’t create abundance. They just didn’t leave.
But once the tunnel exists, that positional advantage converts into property rights, and property rights convert into markets, and markets convert into the permanent enforcement of inequality that geography used to provide temporarily.
Before the tunnel: “We cannot share because of the mountains.”
After the tunnel: “We will not share because of ownership.”
Same outcome. Different justification. Significantly less honest.
The Desert-Dwellers’ Dilemma
Now the desert people face a choice.
They can purchase water. Which means accepting that their survival depends on the economic goodwill of people who did nothing to earn abundance except be born near it.
Or they can refuse. Maintain their careful, disciplined, rationed existence. Remain adapted to scarcity even though abundance is now—tantalisingly, insultingly—visible through a tunnel.
Either way, the tunnel hasn’t solved the moral problem.
It’s just made the power differential explicit rather than geographical.
And if you think that’s an improvement, ask yourself: which is crueller?
Being separated by mountains you cannot cross, or being separated by prices you cannot pay, whilst standing at the shore watching others drink freely?
TheBit Where This Connects to Actual Politics
So when Modernity tells you that the solution to structural inequality is infrastructure, markets, and free movement—
Ask this:
Does building a tunnel make the desert wet?
Does creating a market make abundance appear where it didn’t exist?
Does free movement help if you still can’t afford what’s on the other side?
The tunnel is a technical solution to a material problem.
But the material problem persists.
And what the tunnel actually creates is a moral problem: the formalisation of advantage that was previously just an environmental accident.
The lake-dwellers now have something to sell.
The desert-dwellers now have something to buy.
And we call this progress.
Moral: If your political metaphor doesn’t account for actual rivers, actual deserts, and actual fog, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a fairy tale. And unlike fairy tales, this one doesn’t end with a reunion.
It ends with two people walking home, each convinced the other is perfectly reasonable and completely unsurvivable.
Unless, of course, we build a tunnel.
In which case, it ends with one person selling water to the other, both convinced this is somehow more civilised than being separated by mountains.
Which, if you think about it, is far more terrifying than simple disagreement.
Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis
Few philosophical thought experiments have managed to torment empiricists quite like Molyneux’s problem. First posed by William Molyneux to John Locke in 1688 (published in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding), the question is deceptively simple:
If a person born blind, who has learned to distinguish a cube from a sphere by touch, were suddenly granted sight, could they, without touching the objects, correctly identify which is the cube and which is the sphere by sight alone?
I was inspired to write this article in reaction to Jonny Thmpson’s post on Philosophy Minis, shared below for context.
Video: Molyneux’s Problem
Locke, ever the champion of sensory experience as the foundation of knowledge, gave a confident empiricist’s answer: no. For Locke, ideas are the products of sensory impressions, and each sense provides its own stream of ideas, which must be combined and associated through experience. The newly sighted person, he argued, would have no prior visual idea of what a cube or sphere looks like, only tactile ones; they would need to learn anew how vision maps onto the world.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This puzzle has persisted through centuries precisely because it forces us to confront the assumptions at the heart of empiricism: that all knowledge derives from sensory experience and that our senses, while distinct, can somehow cohere into a unified understanding of the world.
Empiricism, Epistemology, and A Priori Knowledge: The Context
Before we dismantle the cube further, let’s sweep some conceptual debris out of the way. Empiricism is the view that knowledge comes primarily (or exclusively) through sensory experience. It stands opposed to rationalism, which argues for the role of innate ideas or reason independent of sense experience.
Epistemology, the grandiloquent term for the study of knowledge, concerns itself with questions like: What is knowledge? How is it acquired? Can we know anything with certainty?
And then there is the spectre of a priori knowledge – that which is known independent of experience. A mathematical truth (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4) is often cited as a classic a priori case. Molyneux’s problem challenges empiricists because it demands an account of how ideas from one sensory modality (touch) might map onto another (vision) without prior experience of the mapping—an a priori leap, if you will.
The Language Correspondence Trap
While Molyneux and Locke framed this as an epistemological riddle, we can unmask it as something more insidious: a failure of language correspondence. The question presumes that the labels “cube” and “sphere” – tied in the blind person’s mind to tactile experiences – would, or should, carry over intact to the new visual experiences. But this presumption smuggles in a linguistic sleight of hand.
The word “cube” for the blind person means a specific configuration of tactile sensations: edges, vertices, flat planes. The word “sphere” means smoothness, unbroken curvature, no edges. These are concepts anchored entirely in touch. When vision enters the fray, we expect these words to transcend modalities – to leap from the tactile to the visual, as if their meanings were universal tokens rather than context-bound markers. The question is not merely: can the person see the cube? but rather: can the person’s tactile language map onto the visual world without translation or recalibration?
What Molyneux’s problem thus exposes is the assumption that linguistic labels transparently correspond to external reality, regardless of sensory apparatus. This is the mirage at the heart of Locke’s empiricism, the idea that once a word tags an object through experience, that tag is universally valid across sensory experiences. The cube and sphere aren’t just objects of knowledge; they are signs, semiotic constructs whose meaning depends on the sensory, social, and linguistic contexts in which they arise.
The Semiotic Shambles
Molyneux’s cube reveals the cracks in the correspondence theory of language: the naïve belief that words have stable meanings that latch onto stable objects or properties in the world. In fact, the meaning of “cube” or “sphere” is as much a product of sensory context as it is of external form. The newly sighted person isn’t merely lacking visual knowledge; they are confronted with a translation problem – a semantic chasm between tactile signification and visual signification.
If, as my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis asserts, language is inadequate to fully capture and transmit experience across contexts, then Molyneux’s problem is not an oddity but an inevitability. It exposes that our conceptual frameworks are not universal keys to reality but rickety bridges between islands of sense and meaning. The cube problem is less about empiricism’s limits in epistemology and more about its blind faith in linguistic coherence.
In short, Molyneux’s cube is not simply an empirical puzzle; it is a monument to language’s failure to correspond cleanly with the world, a reminder that what we call knowledge is often just well-worn habit dressed up in linguistic finery.
A Final Reflection
Molyneux’s problem, reframed through the lens of language insufficiency, reveals that our greatest epistemic challenges are also our greatest linguistic ones. Before we can speak of knowing a cube or sphere by sight, we must reckon with the unspoken question: do our words mean what we think they mean across the changing stage of experience?
That, dear reader, is the cube that haunts empiricism still.
Cause and effect: This clip by Jonny Thompson influenced this post.
I’ve written extensively (and, some might say, relentlessly) on the immorality of private property, particularly the theological nonsense that undergirds its supposed legitimacy. Locke’s first-come, first-served logic might have sounded dashing in the 17th century, but it now reads like a boarding queue at Ryanair: desperate, arbitrary, and hostile to basic decency.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this content.
The core problem? Locke’s formulation assumes land was once freely available, as if Earth were a kind of colonial vending machine: insert labour, receive title. But that vending machine was already jammed by the time most of humanity got a look-in. Worse, it bakes in two kinds of chauvinism: temporal (screw the future) and speciesist (screw anything non-human).
Parfit’s long-termism lays bare the absurdity: why should a bit of land or atmospheric stability belong to those who happened to get here first, especially when their stewardship amounts to strip-mining the pantry and then boarding up the exit?
And no, “mixing your labour” with the land does not miraculously confer ownership—any more than a damp bint lobbing a sword at you from a pond makes you sovereign. That’s not philosophy; that’s Arthurian cosplay.
Philosophics 