I want to clarify my recent The Trouble with Facts post. I realise that I was speaking to one non-trivial form of facts, but there is more than one class of facts. We argue about facts as if the word named a single, stable thing. It doesn’t. It names a family of very different things, quietly grouped together by habit, convenience, and institutional need. Most disputes about facts go nowhere, not because one side is irrational, but because the word itself is doing covert work. We slide between meanings without noticing, then act surprised when disagreement follows. This piece is an attempt to slow that slide.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Polysemy We Notice, Polysemy We Don’t
We are comfortable with ambiguity when it is obvious. A bank can be a financial institution or the edge of a river. A bat can be an animal or a piece of sports equipment. Context resolves these instantly. No one feels existentially threatened by the ambiguity.
Fact is different. The word is polysemous in a way that is both subtle and consequential. Its meanings sit close enough to bleed into one another, allowing certainty from one sense to be smuggled into another without detection. Calling something a fact does not merely describe it. It confers authority. It signals that questioning should stop. That is why this ambiguity matters.
Different Kinds of Facts
Before critiquing facts, we need to sort them.
1. Event-facts (brute, world-facing) As mentioned previously, these concern what happens in the world, independent of observation.
A car collides with a tree.
Momentum changes.
Metal deforms.
These events occur whether or not anyone notices them. They are ontologically robust and epistemically inaccessible. No one ever encounters them directly. We only ever encounter traces.
2. Indexical or performative facts (trivial, self-reporting) “I am typing.”
I am doing this now – those now may not be relevant when you read this. This is a fact, but a very thin one. Its authority comes from the coincidence of saying and doing. It requires no reconstruction, no inference, no institutional validation. These facts are easy because they do almost no work.
3. Retrospective personal facts (memory-mediated) “I was typing.”
This may be relevant now, at least relative to the typing of this particular post. Still a fact, but weaker. Memory enters. Narrative compression enters. Selectivity enters. The same activity now carries a different epistemic status purely because time has passed.
4. Prospective statements (modal, not yet facts) “I will be typing.”
This is not yet a fact. It may never come to be one. It is an intention or prediction that may or may not be realised. Future-tense claims are often treated as incipient facts, but this is a category error with real consequences.
5. Institutional facts (designated, procedural) “The court finds…” “The report concludes…”
These are facts by designation. They are not discovered so much as selected, formalised, and stabilised so that systems can act. They are unlikely to rise to the level of facts, so the legal system tends to generate facts in name only – FINO, if I am being cute.
All of these are called ‘facts’. They are not interchangeable. The trouble begins when certainty migrates illicitly from trivial or institutional facts into brute event-facts, and we pretend nothing happened in the transfer.
One Motor Vehicle
Reconsider the deliberately simple case: A motor vehicle collides with a tree. Trees are immobile, so we can rule out the tree colliding with the car.
Ontologically, something happened. Reality did not hesitate. But even here, no one has direct access to the event itself.
The driver does not enjoy privileged access. They experience shock, adrenaline, attentional narrowing, selective memory, post hoc rationalisation, perhaps a concussion. Already several layers intervene before language even arrives.
A rough schema looks like this:
event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation
Ontology concerns what happens. Epistemology concerns how anything becomes assertable.
Modern thinking collapses the second into the first and calls the result the facts.
People speak of “hard facts” as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by proximity. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is an artefact assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement.
And so it goes…
Why the Confusion Persists
When someone responds, “But isn’t it a fact that I read this?”, the answer is yes. A different kind of fact.
The error lies not in affirming facts, but in failing to distinguish them. The word fact allows certainty to migrate across categories unnoticed, from trivial self-reports to brute world-events, and from institutional verdicts to metaphysical claims. That migration is doing the work.
Conclusion
Clarifying types of facts does not weaken truth. It prevents us from laundering certainty where it does not belong.
Facts exist. Events occur. But they do not arrive unmediated, innocent, or singular.
Reality happens once. Facts happen many times.
The mistake was never that facts are unreal. It was believing they were all the same kind of thing.
What we call facts are not discoveries of an unfiltered world. They are the end-products of mediation.
Let’s walk through an example.
Image: Autosmash example. An observer arrives with experience – from genetic predisposition to childhood trauma to winning the lottery. Whatever it might be. Of course, they have many cognitive deficits, biases and filters. Then, there’s the immediate problem of attention. When did they notice the event? Did they turn to look after hearing the noise, or were they meditating on the tree in that moment?
Apparently, a motor vehicle has collided with a tree. Trees are immobile objects, so we can safely rule out the tree colliding with the car.*
So what, exactly, are the facts?
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Ontology (the boring bit)
Ontologically, something happened.
A car struck a tree. Metal deformed. Momentum stopped.
Reality did not hesitate. It did not consult witnesses. It did not await interpretation.
This is the part Modernity likes to gesture at reverently before immediately leaving it behind.
Image: Requisite NotebookLM infographic on this content.
The Witness
Even the driver does not enjoy privileged access to “what really happened”.
They get:
proprioceptive shock
adrenaline distortion
attentional narrowing
selective memory
post hoc rationalisation
possibly a concussion
Which is already several layers deep before language even arrives to finish the job.
We can generalise the structure:
event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation
Ontology: events occur. States of affairs obtain. Something happens whether or not we notice.
Epistemology: observation is always filtered through instruments, concepts, language, habits, and incentives.
Modern sleight of hand: collapse the second into the first and call the result the facts.
People love the phrase “hard facts”, as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by osmosis. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is not.
Facts are artefacts. They are assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement. They function. They do not reveal essence.
Reality happens once. Facts happen many times, differently, depending on who needs them and why.
Filtration
An event occurred. A car struck a tree.
Then an observer arrives. But observers never arrive empty-handed.
They arrive with history: genetics, upbringing, trauma, habits, expectations, incentives. They arrive already filtered.
Were they already looking, or did the noise interrupt something else entirely?
Reality happens once. Facts happen many times, differently, depending on who needs them and why.
Here Comes the Law
This is where the legal system enters, not because truth has been found, but because closure is required.
Courts do not discover facts. They designate versions of events that are good enough to carry consequences. They halt the cascade of interpretations by institutional force and call the result justice.
At every epistemic level, what we assert are interpretations of fact, never access to ontological essence.
Intent, negligence, recklessness. These are not observations. They are attributions. They are stopping rules that allow systems to function despite uncertainty.
The law does not ask what really happened. It asks which story is actionable.
Two Motor Vehicles
Now add a second moving object.
Another car enters the frame, and with it an entire moral universe.
Suddenly, the event is no longer merely physical. It becomes relational. Agency proliferates. Narratives metastasise.
Who was speeding? Who had the right of way? Who saw whom first? Who should have anticipated whom?
Intent and motive rush in to fill the explanatory vacuum, despite remaining just as unobservable as before.
Nothing about the ontology improved. Everything about the storytelling did.
Where the tree refused intention, the second vehicle invites it. We begin inferring states of mind from trajectories, attributing beliefs from brake lights, extracting motives from milliseconds of motion.
But none of this is observed.
What we observe are:
vehicle positions after the fact,
damage patterns,
skid marks,
witness statements already filtered through shock and expectation.
From these traces, we construct mental interiors.
The driver “intended” to turn. The other driver “failed” to anticipate. Someone was “reckless”. Someone else was merely “unlucky”.
These are not facts. They are interpretive assignments, layered atop already mediated observations, selected because they allow responsibility to be distributed in socially recognisable ways.
This is why explanation now fractures.
One cascade of whys produces a story about distraction or poor judgment. Another produces a story about road design or visibility. Another about timing, traffic flow, or urban planning.
Each narrative is plausible. Each is evidence-constrained. None is ontologically privileged.
Yet one will be chosen.
Not because it is truer, but because it is actionable.
The presence of a second vehicle does not clarify causation. It merely increases the number of places we are willing to stop asking questions.
Modernity mistakes this proliferation of narrative for epistemic progress. In reality, it is moral bookkeeping.
The crash still occurred. Metal still deformed. Momentum still stopped.
What changed was not access to truth, but the urgency to assign fault.
With one vehicle and a tree, facts already fail to arrive unmediated. With two vehicles, mediation becomes the point.
And still, we insist on calling the result the facts.
But nothing fundamental has changed. We have not escaped mediation. We have merely scaled it up and professionalised it.
Cameras do not record reality. They record:
a frame,
from a position,
at a sampling rate,
with compression,
under lighting conditions,
interpreted later by someone with a mandate.
Video feels decisive because it is vivid, not because it is ontologically transparent. It freezes perspective and mistakes that freeze for truth. Slow motion, zoom, annotation. Each step adds clarity and distance at the same time.
Experts do not access essence either. They perform disciplined abduction.
From angles, debris fields, timing estimates, and damage profiles, they infer plausible sequences. They do not recover the event. They model it. Their authority lies not in proximity to reality, but in institutional trust and methodological constraint.
More data does not collapse interpretation. It multiplies it.
With enough footage, we don’t get the story. We get competing reconstructions, each internally coherent, each technically defensible, each aligned to a different question:
Who is legally liable?
Who is financially responsible?
Who violated policy?
Who can be blamed without destabilising the system?
At some point, someone declares the evidence “clear”.
What they mean is: we have enough material to stop arguing.
This is the final Modern illusion: that accumulation converges on essence. In reality, accumulation converges on closure.
The event remains what it always was: inaccessible except through traces. The facts become thicker, more confident, more footnoted. Their metaphysical status does not improve.
Reality happened once. It left debris. We organised the debris into narratives that could survive institutions.
Cameras didn’t reveal the truth. Experts didn’t extract it. They helped us agree on which interpretation would count.
And agreement, however necessary, has never been the same thing as access to what is.
* I was once driving in a storm, and a telephone pole fell about a metre in front of my vehicle. My car drove over the pole, and although I was able to drive the remainder of the way home, my suspension and undercarriage were worse for the wear and tear.
Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after an extended chat about the image as a talking point about the inaccessibility of facts.
He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.
There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.
In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.
“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false… We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]… So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.
This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.
This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.
When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.
Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.
Image: Foreignsentiment
Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.
When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.
People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of “power,” as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzsche’s contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.
This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.
The United States borrowed Montesquieu’s separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.
Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.
Carney’s speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.
What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.
Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.
What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzsche’s crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.
As 2025 closes, I find myself in the mildly suspicious position of being asked where I stand. I’m almost pretty sure it’s a deontological duty I must fulfil.
This has become the ritual gesture of our time. Not what are you working on? or what are you unsure about? but what is your position? The question arrives already armed with a grid. Left or right. Modern or postmodern. Optimist or doomer. Builder or critic. Pick a square. Declare yourself. Be legible.
Audio: Notebook summary podcast of this topic.
I have spent enough years inside philosophy, politics, systems design, and cultural critique to recognise this for what it is. Not a genuine request for understanding, but a demand for administrative convenience. Positions are easy to catalogue. They travel well on social platforms. They allow disagreements to be staged rather than examined. I no longer occupy one.
If I had to name the shift that has taken place in my thinking, I might call it post-postmodern. More accurately, I think of it as post-position. Not because I have outgrown critique, but because I have grown weary of pretending that declaring a stance is the same thing as doing the work.
Postmodernism, to its credit, diagnosed something real. It exposed the hidden scaffolding behind our grand narratives. It showed how claims to neutrality smuggled power, how universals arrived late and acted eternal, and how reason often functioned as a polite enforcement mechanism. That diagnosis still stands. Nothing that followed has invalidated it. What failed was not the critique, but the decision to treat critique as a destination.
Somewhere along the line, postmodernism hardened into an identity. Suspicion became an aesthetic. Irony turned into a resting posture. Eventually, even scepticism acquired a set of approved moves and unacceptable conclusions. The work of dismantling was mistaken for the achievement of wisdom.
The response to this impasse has been predictable. We are now urged to rebuild. To restore foundations. To recover truth, agency, meaning, and normativity. Usually with a tone of urgency that suggests things have all gone a bit too far. They haven’t gone too far. They’ve gone exactly where the premises lead.
At this point, it is worth noting that ‘postmodernism’ has largely ceased to exist as a self-ascribed position at all. It survives almost entirely as a slur. No serious thinker today introduces themselves as a Postmodernist in the way one might once have claimed empiricism, structuralism, or even analytic philosophy.
The term is now deployed from the outside, usually as shorthand for intellectual irresponsibility: relativism, nihilism, irony, excess critique. It is a caricature assembled by its opponents, then attacked as if it were a living school with doctrines and membership cards.
People who employ the term Postmodern™* relative to philosophy are intellectually lazy and not likely worth engaging in a debate on the topic, because they have not likely engaged the content charitably, if at all, outside of a caricature.
This matters because it reveals something quietly telling. What is being rejected under the banner of ‘postmodernism’ is not a coherent programme, but the discomfort produced when inherited certainties fail to survive scrutiny. The slur functions as a containment strategy. It allows critics to dismiss the diagnosis without engaging the illness.
Any thinker with even a passing familiarity with the terrain knows this. Which is why no self-respecting, or self-denigrating, postmodern thinker would now characterise themselves as such. The label has been evacuated of descriptive value and filled with anxiety.
What is being revived in these reconstruction projects is not certainty, but legibility. A longing for systems that can be explained cleanly, defended coherently, and enforced consistently. Clear positions are attractive because they reduce friction. They allow disagreement to be formalised, managed, and ultimately neutralised. This is where I step off.
Post-position thinking is often mistaken for relativism, so it is worth being explicit. It does not claim that nothing is real, that all claims are equal, or that consequences dissolve into opinion. Reality remains stubborn. Harm remains unevenly distributed. Constraints still bite.
What it rejects is something more specific: the belief that ethical, epistemic, or political seriousness requires the occupation of a stable, declarable position.
Positions are not engines of thought. They are summaries produced after the fact. They tidy complexity into something portable, then forget the mess that made the tidying necessary. Once adopted, they begin to govern perception. You start seeing what fits and discarding what does not. The position becomes an answer generator rather than a question machine.
Post-position thinking refuses that trade.
It stays with instability where stability would be dishonest. It tolerates contradiction where resolution would be cosmetic. It treats coherence as local, provisional, and negotiated rather than universal and enforceable. This is not indecision. It is fidelity to how complex systems actually behave. One way to describe the shift is a movement away from critique toward maintenance.
Modernism wanted to build. Postmodernism wanted to dismantle. Both share a quiet assumption that there is a point at which the work is done. Maintenance has no such illusion. It accepts that some systems cannot be fixed, only kept from doing additional damage – that concepts fray; that norms age badly; that repair is continuous and never final.
Maintenance is unspectacular. It does not produce manifestos. It does not scale elegantly. It involves partial solutions, awkward compromises, and the constant risk of failure. It is also where most of the moral work actually happens.
From this vantage point, the demand to ‘take a position‘ looks increasingly misplaced. Not because commitments vanish, but because commitments are situational, asymmetric, and responsive to context. Loyalty shifts from creeds to consequences. What matters is not whether an idea is internally consistent, but what it does when it leaves the page and collides with institutions, incentives, and frightened people.
So when I refuse to declare where I stand, it is not evasiveness. It is a refusal to pretend that standing still is a virtue.
This is the posture I am carrying into 2026. Not a programme, not a system, not a rehabilitated foundation. Just a refusal to confuse clarity with truth, structure with virtue, or positions with thinking.
If that feels unsatisfying, that may be the point. Satisfaction is a modernist luxury. Maintenance rarely provides it. The work continues anyway.
* To be fair, I have referred to myself as Postmodern™, but this was a shortcut out of solidarity with Foucault, Derrida, Latour, Baudrillard, and others painted with this brush. I still admire these thinkers.
Although I didn’t want to publish a formal essay, I wanted to produce something otherwise rigorous. The references I make are of the authored piece I am critiquing – MacIntyre, Žižek, Lacan – I’ve discussed these figures and their works, sometimes at length.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast discussion of this content.
Preamble: Setting the Encounter
Over the past several weeks, Otti Vogt and I have been circling one another in public threads on leadership, solidarity, ethics, and what might loosely be called the moral architecture of social life. At moments, we converge; more often, we don’t. The exchanges have been serious, occasionally sharp, and – credit where it’s due – largely conducted in good faith.
Recently, Otti published a more explicit articulation of the ontological commitments underlying his work – The Future of Flourishing: Toward a Dialectical Spiritual Realist Social Ontology (DRS) – a framework grounded in participatory metaphysics, virtue ethics, and an objective conception of the Good, oriented toward human flourishing. In doing so, he has done something both generous and rare in contemporary discourse: he has made his meta-assumptions visible. That gesture deserves to be taken seriously. This response is written in that spirit.
For my part, I have already shared a different set of commitments, most notably what I call the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) and the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH). These are not counter-ontologies in the conventional sense, nor are they offered as replacements for the metaphysical structures Otti defends. They are diagnostic lenses. Their purpose is to foreground mediation, semantic drift, power asymmetries, and the limits of moral language – especially where that language is asked to perform stabilising or universalising work it cannot reliably sustain.
What follows, then, is not a refutation from within Otti’s framework, nor an attempt to ‘correct’ his ontology by substituting another in its place. It is an analysis conducted from a philosophy of language that explicitly rejects the need for the kind of metaphysical grounding his project presupposes.
That distinction matters. Much philosophical disagreement fails not because arguments are weak, but because interlocutors believe they are disputing conclusions when they are, in fact, operating with incompatible assumptions about what language can do, how meaning holds, and where normativity comes from.
Accordingly, I will first restate Otti’s position as charitably and accurately as possible, including the conditions under which it appears to work well. I will then apply MEOW and LIH as analytic lenses – not to score points, but to observe how this framework behaves under pressure: across time, across groups, and across material and organisational realities. Finally, I will explain why, despite its internal coherence and aspirational appeal, I regard the project as structurally unsustainable beyond tightly aligned in-groups.
This is a polemic, but not a casual one.
This is a polemic, but not a casual one. It is written in respect of the seriousness of the work, and in full awareness that the disagreement it traces is unlikely to be resolved. I do not expect to publish this as a formal preprint, but I have structured it much as I otherwise would. The latitude afforded by a blog is used here not to loosen standards, but to speak more plainly about where the fault-lines actually lie.
At its strongest, Otti Vogt’s framework is an attempt to rescue ethics, leadership, and social solidarity from what he takes to be the exhaustion of proceduralism, relativism, and technocratic management. The diagnosis is familiar but not trivial: without a shared moral horizon, collective action collapses into preference aggregation, power struggles, or managerial optimisation masquerading as value-neutral necessity. Against this, Otti proposes a participatory social ontology grounded in three interlocking commitments.
First, normativity is real.
Moral claims are not merely expressions of preference, strategic coordination devices, or retrospective rationalisations of power. They track something objective, even if imperfectly. The Good is not constructed ex nihilo by consensus, nor generated procedurally through participation; rather, participation presupposes it. Solidarity, dignity, and justice do not emerge bottom-up from agreement alone, but from orientation toward a moral reality that precedes and exceeds any given social formation.
Second, personhood is constitutively relational.
Individuals are not pre-social atoms who later enter into moral contracts, but beings-in-relation whose identities are shaped through participation in shared practices, institutions, and meanings. Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics, Christian theology, and strands of critical realism, Otti treats ethical formation not as rule-following but as the cultivation of practical wisdom within an ordered moral ecology. Virtue, here, is not compliance but excellence-in-relation.
Third, social structures are dialectical rather than merely procedural.
Change does not occur through rule revision alone, nor through technocratic optimisation, but through what might be called moral morphogenesis: the transformation of agents and structures together as they orient themselves toward better forms of collective life. Leadership, on this view, is not managerial control but ethical mediation – holding open a space in which shared participation in the Good can occur.
Importantly, this is not presented as naïve moralism. Otti is explicit that causality and ethics must be distinguished, that material conditions matter, and that social systems operate across stratified domains. His engagement with Bhaskar, Archer, and Duindam is meant to secure this distinction without collapsing ethics into natural determinism. Likewise, his invocation of Lacan and Žižek is intended to show that absence, lack, and non-identity are not defects to be eliminated, but productive tensions that drive ethical becoming rather than undermining it. On the happy path, this framework is compelling.
In small, relatively homogeneous groups – especially those already sharing a thick moral vocabulary – it offers a powerful grammar for meaning-making. It legitimises ethical judgment without reducing it to preference. It resists the flattening tendencies of procedural liberalism. It offers leaders a language richer than metrics and incentives, while avoiding crude authoritarianism. And it gives participants a sense that their actions matter not merely instrumentally, but as contributions to something genuinely worthwhile.
If one already accepts its metaphysical premises, the system is internally coherent. More than that, it is motivational, aspirational, and – within its own frame – normatively robust. That coherence is not in dispute.
What happens when this DRS framework leaves the happy path?
What is in dispute is what happens when this framework leaves the happy path: when participants do not already share the ontology, when meanings drift over time, when organisational power intervenes, and when the language of participation is asked to scale beyond aligned in-groups into contested social reality. That is where the analysis begins.
2. Where the Framework Breaks: Boundary Conditions, Not Bad Faith
The first pressure point appears the moment participation is treated as if it occurs within an open, neutral moral field.
It doesn’t.
Participation always takes place inside an already-structured semantic environment. Values, goods, virtues, and ends are never encountered as raw givens, but as pre-formatted invitations. One does not simply ‘enter’ participation; one enters a space whose grammar has been written in advance, whose concepts already carry weight, direction, and implied hierarchies of legitimacy. This is not an accidental feature of social life. It is constitutive of it.
To participate is to move within a field of meanings that already distinguishes sense from nonsense, virtue from vice, maturity from immaturity, insight from confusion. Even when those distinctions are contested, the contest itself presupposes a shared language in which disagreement can appear as intelligible disagreement rather than noise.
This matters because Otti’s framework consistently treats participation as if it were epistemically generous and normatively hospitable by default. Yet participation is never merely an invitation; it is also a constraint. It shapes what can be said without sanction, which forms of dissent register as good-faith critique, and which appear as moral immaturity, resistance, or failure to ‘grasp the horizon’.
The moment a moral centre is posited – however dialectical, however participatory – it generates a gradient of alignment. Some positions sit closer to the centre and therefore appear clearer, wiser, more attuned. Others sit further out and must explain themselves, translate themselves, or justify their deviance from what is increasingly experienced as common sense. This is not a corruption of participatory ethics. It is its inevitable consequence.
Even if the Good is not imposed but ‘participated in,’ participation itself is never symmetrical. Someone always articulates the terms. Someone always curates the language. Someone always has greater fluency in the idiom of the Good and thus greater interpretive authority over what participation currently requires.
Participation does not erase power. It reconfigures it.
In practice, this produces a familiar asymmetry: those already aligned with the metaphysical grammar experience the framework as expansive and liberating, while those outside it experience it as invisible pressure. They are not coerced in any crude sense, but they are nonetheless nudged, corrected, reoriented, or quietly marginalised. The boundary condition, then, is simple but decisive: Participation does not erase power. It reconfigures it.
The claim that solidarity arises from participation in the Good rather than from procedure does not eliminate enforcement; it relocates it upstream, into ontology. What had previously been contested politically now appears as a matter of moral attunement or ontological adequacy. This is especially significant when the framework encounters out-groups.
For those who do not already share the metaphysical commitments – who do not recognise the same Good, or who reject the idea that such a Good exists independently of social negotiation – participation becomes conditional. Entry requires translation into a language they did not choose. Dissent must be framed in terms that already concede too much.
At that point, participation ceases to be an open moral practice and becomes something closer to initiatory alignment. This does not make the framework incoherent. It makes it local.
The problem arises only when a local moral grammar presents itself as foundational, scalable, or universally binding – when its boundary conditions are treated as philosophical necessities rather than contingent achievements. That transition is where the trouble begins.
3. Virtue as a Fluid: The Instability at the Centre
The next fault line emerges around virtue itself. Within Otti’s framework, virtue is no longer merely a description of excellence-in-practice, nor even a tradition-bound cultivation of character in recognisable forms of life. It becomes something more elusive: a dynamic orientation toward the Good, realised through participatory attunement rather than rule-following or procedural compliance.
On the surface, this looks like a strength. It avoids legalism. It avoids rigid codification. It allows for context, judgment, and development over time. But this move has a cost.
Once virtue is abstracted from stable practices and anchored instead to a transcendent moral horizon, it becomes semantically fluid. Its content is no longer secured by what people reliably do well together, but by how well their dispositions appear aligned with an ideal that itself resists definitive articulation.
At this point, virtue quietly changes function. It ceases to operate primarily as a descriptive account of excellence within a practice and becomes prescriptive as a mode of conformity to an interpretive centre. The question shifts from ‘What does excellence look like here?’ to ‘How well does this agent instantiate the orientation we recognise as virtuous?’
MacIntyre already gestures toward this danger, though he does not fully escape it. His attempt to recover virtue through traditions of practice depends on the relative stability of those traditions. Once the tradition fragments or pluralises, virtue must either harden into orthodoxy or soften into abstraction. Otti’s framework opts for the latter, but abstraction does not dissolve authority; it redistributes it.
And interpretation, inevitably, has interpreters.
When virtue becomes fluid, it also becomes indexical. Its meaning is determined less by shared activity than by ongoing interpretation. And interpretation, inevitably, has interpreters.
Those most fluent in the language of the Good become de facto arbiters of what virtue currently requires. Those less fluent must demonstrate sincerity, openness, or willingness to be formed. Virtue, in other words, becomes something one is recognised as having rather than something one demonstrably does. This produces a subtle but powerful inversion.
Instead of virtue disciplining ideals through lived practice, ideals discipline agents through moral evaluation. What begins as openness hardens into expectation. What begins as formation shades into assessment. What begins as aspiration becomes normativity with softer edges but firmer reach.
The fluidity of virtue does not eliminate moral pressure. It intensifies it, precisely because it lacks clear boundaries. And this is where temporal drift compounds the problem.
If virtue is continuously rearticulated in light of a transcendent Good, then yesterday’s excellence may become today’s deficiency – not because practices failed, but because the interpretive centre shifted. The agent who was once exemplary now appears insufficiently attuned. Correction follows. Alignment is requested. Resistance is reclassified as misunderstanding. None of this requires bad faith. None of it requires domination. It emerges naturally from the structure.
A virtue ethics that cannot tolerate virtue disagreement without moralising it is no longer describing excellence. It is managing deviation. This is not an argument against virtue per se. It is an argument against virtue untethered from stable practices and reattached to metaphysical ideals whose interpretation remains necessarily contested. Once virtue becomes a fluid, it stops being a guide to excellence and starts functioning as a solvent – dissolving difference while claiming to honour it.
Interlude: Interpretation, Gravity, and the Problem of Innocent Power
At this point, it is tempting to reassure ourselves that none of the above entails domination, coercion, or even hierarchy in any crude sense. After all, the framework under discussion explicitly rejects authoritarianism, emphasises participation, and repeatedly insists that the Good is not imposed but disclosed through relational engagement. This reassurance is sincere. It is also insufficient.
The problem is not that leaders within such a framework intend to exert power. The problem is that interpretation exerts power regardless of intention.
Any system oriented toward a transcendent Good requires interpretation. Someone must articulate what participation looks like here, now, under these conditions. Someone must distinguish fidelity from distortion, growth from regression, openness from refusal. These judgments cannot be automated, proceduralised, or dissolved into pure dialogue. They must be made.
Where judgments are made, gravity forms. This is not a psychological claim about ego, nor a moral accusation about bad faith. It is a structural observation. Interpretive authority emerges wherever meaning is stabilised long enough to guide action. The more abstract and elevated the referent, the greater the interpretive leverage required to render it actionable. The paradox is this: the more a leader insists they are not exercising authority, the harder their authority becomes to contest.
When normativity is framed as participation in the Good rather than compliance with rules, disagreement does not present itself as disagreement. It presents itself as misalignment, immaturity, or insufficient formation. Resistance is redescribed not as an alternative judgment but as a failure of attunement.
At this point, critique becomes difficult without appearing morally suspect. This is what gives participatory metaphysics its peculiar force. It does not silence opposition; it spiritualises it. Dissenters are not wrong so much as ‘not yet there’. Their objections are not refuted; they are absorbed into a narrative of ongoing formation.
This is not coercion. It is more effective than coercion. Even if a leader sincerely wishes not to exert gravity, the structure ensures that gravity accumulates around them. Those closest to the interpretive centre appear most aligned with the Good. Their judgments carry more weight. Their language becomes the idiom through which virtue is recognised.
If a leader truly did not wish to exert gravity, the most consistent action would be not to lead. But leadership, by definition, involves orientation. Orientation requires reference points. Reference points generate asymmetry. Asymmetry generates power.
The framework attempts to resolve this by redescribing hierarchy as ‘participatory’ rather than directive, and authority as ‘mediating’ rather than commanding. Yet this is a semantic reconfiguration, not a structural one. The same dynamics persist under gentler names. What disappears is not power, but its visibility. And power that cannot be named cannot be resisted. It can only be internalised.
This is the point at which metaphysics becomes political, whether it intends to or not. The claim that the Good is objective does not neutralise power. It sanctifies it.
4. Temporal Semantic Drift: Why Moral Centres Do Not Hold
Even if one grants – charitably – that participatory metaphysics can function without collapsing into interpretive domination in the short term, it remains vulnerable to a more corrosive force: time.
Moral centres do not fail all at once. They drift. The framework under discussion acknowledges this in principle. It speaks of dialectical movement, of gaps between actuality and the Good, of ongoing formation rather than static completion. On paper, this appears to inoculate it against rigidity.
In practice, it does the opposite. A moral centre that must continuously reinterpret itself in light of a transcendent horizon is never neutral. Each iteration reorders what counts as fidelity, maturity, and alignment. What was virtuous yesterday may become insufficient today – not because practices degraded, but because the interpretive frame shifted.
This is not accidental. It is intrinsic. Because the Good is not fully specifiable, its articulation is always provisional. But provisional articulations still carry normative force. People organise their lives around them. Careers, identities, reputations, and exclusions follow.
Then the centre moves. Those who move with it appear wise, flexible, and developmentally advanced. Those who hesitate appear resistant. Those who remain where they are appear obstructive. Drift is redescribed as growth, and displacement as failure to keep up.
This is how moral projects shed members without ever formally excluding them. At Time-nought, alignment feels communal. At Time-one, it becomes selective. At Time-two, it becomes justificatory. By the time the pattern is visible, the language of solidarity has already done its work.
Transductive subjectivity intensifies this effect. Because subjects and structures co-constitute one another, each moment of participation subtly reshapes the field itself. The centre is never merely followed; it is reproduced through enactment. Drift compounds. What results is not pluralism, but path dependency.
Early interpretations disproportionately shape later possibilities. Foundational voices become canonical. Corrective gestures are framed as recoveries rather than revisions. The centre insists it is merely unfolding what was always implicit. At this point, appeals to the Good no longer function as orientation. They function as retrospective validation. This is where temporal semantic drift becomes decisive.
Key terms – virtue, flourishing, participation, solidarity – do not remain semantically stable across contexts or generations. They accrete meaning through use, conflict, and institutionalisation. To claim continuity is to perform continuity, not to demonstrate it.
The framework attempts to resolve this by appealing to a stable moral horizon beyond language. But this simply relocates the problem. The horizon does not speak. People do.
Every attempt to stabilise meaning across time requires custodians. Custodianship introduces authority. Authority introduces exclusion. Exclusion introduces rationalisation. None of this implies malice. It implies entropy.
What works in a tightly aligned founding cohort does not survive scale, succession, or stress. History is littered with ethical systems that were internally coherent, sincerely motivated, and initially generative – until drift revealed the cost of maintaining coherence.
The claim is not that moral projects inevitably fail. It is that they cannot guarantee their own continuity without paying a price.
Participatory metaphysics offers no mechanism for escaping this. It offers only better reasons for why the price was necessary.
Interlude II: On Borrowing Žižek to Refute Žižek
At this point, a further tension must be addressed directly, because it is not incidental. It sits at the conceptual core of the framework itself.
Otti explicitly invokes Žižek and Lacan to demonstrate that absence, lack, and non-identity are not pathological failures to be overcome, but productive features of subjectivity and social life. This move is intended to show that participatory metaphysics can accommodate negativity, incompleteness, and instability without collapsing into relativism or nihilism. The intention is understandable. The result is incoherent.
Žižek’s central claim is not merely that the Big Other is fractured, incomplete, or imperfectly realised. It is that the Big Other does not exist. There is no transcendent guarantor of meaning, no symbolic authority that secures coherence from beyond the field of human practices. To ‘traverse the fantasy’ is precisely to accept this absence, not to redescribe it in more sophisticated terms.
Lacan’s notion of constitutive lack is not a privation awaiting fulfilment. It is not a gap that participation can close. It is an ontological condition: the impossibility of any final anchoring of meaning, identity, or desire. Lack is not productive because it gestures toward plenitude; it is productive because plenitude is structurally impossible. This is where the framework under review performs a decisive sleight of hand.
To invoke Lacan in support of a transcendent Good is therefore not a creative synthesis. It is a misappropriation.
By mapping Lacanian lack onto Bhaskar’s concept of real absence, the argument treats both as ‘modes of non-being that nonetheless exercise causal force’. But this collapses a distinction that Žižek and Lacan insist upon. Bhaskar’s absences are, in principle, fillable: the missing resource, the unjust structure, the preventable harm. Lacan’s lack is not. Attempts to fill it do not resolve the problem; they generate new symptoms, new fantasies, new forms of misrecognition. To invoke Lacan in support of a transcendent Good is therefore not a creative synthesis. It is a misappropriation.
What results is the reinstallation of precisely what psychoanalysis dismantles: a symbolic guarantor that promises coherence, orientation, and resolution. The Good becomes the ultimate Big Other – disavowed, abstracted, and rendered untouchable by those who claim merely to participate in it. This is not a minor theoretical inconsistency. It reveals the deeper strategy at work.
The framework borrows the critical sophistication of post-structural thought to inoculate itself against charges of naivety, while quietly reinstalling a classical metaphysics that those same thinkers spent their careers undoing. Absence is affirmed rhetorically, only to be neutralised ontologically. Negativity is welcomed, but only insofar as it can be oriented toward a pre-existing moral horizon. In effect, the language of lack is used to smuggle in fullness.
Once this move is made, the rest follows predictably. Interpretation acquires authority. Participation acquires normativity. Dissent becomes misrecognition. And the Good, now safely beyond contestation, does exactly the work the Big Other has always done – only with better philosophical cover.
5. Transductive Subjectivity: Participation Rewrites the Good
The final pressure point is not historical but immediate. Even if one brackets time, tradition, and institutional inertia, the framework still assumes something that does not hold: that subjects can participate in the Good without becoming co-authors of it. This is where transductive subjectivity becomes decisive.
Subjects are not vessels into which ethical form is poured. They are mediating agents. Every act of participation feeds back into the system that solicited it. Meaning is not transmitted intact; it is refracted through position, interest, fear, aspiration, and interpretation. Participation does not preserve coherence. It produces variance.
This is not a flaw in human beings. It is how social systems function. Each interaction slightly reshapes the normative field, altering expectations, redefining what counts as success, recalibrating what virtue now looks like in practice. Multiply this across hundreds or thousands of agents, and the idea of a stable moral centre becomes untenable without aggressive correction.
Here, Archer’s morphogenetic insight quietly undermines the aspiration of ethical constancy. Structures condition action, action transforms structure, and the cycle repeats. There is no equilibrium point. The system is always becoming something slightly different from what it was meant to be.
Either participation rewrites the Good, or the Good rewrites participants. There is no third option.
From within the framework, this is often redescribed as growth, maturation, or deepening participation. From a systems perspective, it is drift under another name. Either participation rewrites the Good, or the Good rewrites participants. There is no third option.
What holds such systems together is not metaphysical participation, but selective reinforcement. Certain interpretations of virtue are amplified; others fade. Some agents are rewarded as exemplars; others are marked as misaligned. Over time, the system converges not on the Good, but on what is most compatible with its own survival. At this point, solidarity no longer links virtue to the common good. It links conformity to belonging.
This is why ‘participative flourishing’ is not a distinct category so much as a rhetorical intensifier. Flourishing is always participative in the tautological sense that humans act together. The adjective matters only when it is doing boundary work: distinguishing authentic participation from deviant engagement. And that distinction is never neutral.
Once transductive feedback is acknowledged, the best-case scenario becomes clear. The framework can temporarily stabilise a coherent moral culture for a relatively homogeneous group. It may feel meaningful, even liberating, from within.
But it will not scale without exclusion. It will not persist without maintenance. And it will not survive contact with materially divergent lives without becoming prescriptive. This is not cynicism. It is mechanics.
6. Leadership, Power, and the Reality of Organisational Life
All of the above tensions sharpen dramatically once we leave ‘society’ in the abstract and enter organisations. Organisations are not voluntary moral laboratories. They are asymmetric structures with built-in coercion, however politely framed. Participation is rarely free when the alternative is unemployment, precarity, or social marginalisation. Exit costs matter. Silence matters. Compliance matters. This is where appeals to solidarity, virtue, and shared flourishing acquire a different texture.
In organisational settings, leadership does not operate via participative democracy. Its function is not collective deliberation, but directional coordination. Leaders set priorities, allocate resources, and define success metrics. Even the most ‘inclusive’ leadership models ultimately require alignment, not pluralism. Consultation can be widened; directionality cannot be abolished without abolishing the role itself. This produces a structural contradiction.
On the one hand, the rhetoric insists that ethics flows from participation in a shared Good. On the other, participation itself is conditioned by hierarchy. A leader may deny being a centre of gravity, but gravity does not ask permission. The mere ability to define vision, values, or culture already exerts force.
Under these conditions, solidarity does not simply emerge. It is staged. Employees learn quickly which interpretations of virtue are rewarded, which forms of dissent are tolerated, and which are quietly penalised. Moral language becomes a signalling system long before it becomes a compass.
Ethics becomes a loyalty test. Solidarity becomes alignment. Flourishing becomes a synonym for fit.
The danger here is not cartoon authoritarianism. It is something subtler and more durable: moral capture. By this I mean the process through which ethical vocabulary is absorbed into institutional incentives, such that ‘goodness’ becomes legible primarily as compliance with the organisation’s preferred self-description. Ethics becomes a loyalty test. Solidarity becomes alignment. Flourishing becomes a synonym for fit.
This is why organisational utopias tend to function best in small, ideologically homogeneous groups and become brittle as complexity increases. Add more agents, more roles, more external pressures, and more disagreement about what ‘good work’ even is, and the system faces a choice between diversity of perspective and coherence of direction. History suggests it usually chooses the latter.
Religious movements, political vanguards, start-ups, consultancies, and ‘values-led’ enterprises all confront the same dilemma. Harmony is easy when dissenters are excluded early. It becomes harder once heterogeneity enters the system. At that point, solidarity either thins into vacuous slogans or hardens into enforcement.
Girard would recognise the pattern immediately: cohesion is often purchased by identifying the misfit, the blocker, the ‘toxic’ element – the one who must be managed out so that the group can experience itself as good.
The claim that better formation, transparency, or distributed leadership can resolve this misunderstands the problem. These tools can redistribute labour and reduce certain abuses. They do not eliminate asymmetry. Someone still defines the centre, even when it is dressed up as ‘process’, ‘culture’, or ‘shared ownership’. A moral horizon interpreted by a few will, reliably, become a moral demand placed upon the many. Which brings us to the unavoidable conclusion.
7. What This Critique Is (and Is Not)
This critique is not a defence of relativism-for-fun, nor of nihilism-as-apathy. I am a nihilist in a narrow, technical sense: I deny the existence of inherent meanings that are not invented, stabilised, and transmitted through language and practice. Meaning is not discovered intact in the world; it is negotiated, maintained, and contested. That position does not entail indifference. It entails vigilance.
If meanings are made rather than given, then they require care. They require scrutiny. They require attention to who is doing the naming, who benefits from the stabilisation, and who is being asked to align. Nihilism, in this sense, is not a shrug. It is a refusal to outsource responsibility to metaphysics.
In practical terms, this means treating ethical claims as proposals rather than discoveries, responsibilities rather than revelations, and commitments that must be defended in public rather than secured by ontological guarantee. It means accepting that moral authority is something we negotiate and sustain together, not something we uncover already intact and binding.
Nor is this an argument against local moral projects. Communities can and do organise themselves around shared goods, shared narratives, and shared aspirations. Such projects can be meaningful, motivating, and even life-sustaining. But they are also contingent, temporary, and sustained only through ongoing renegotiation.
Moral coherence achieved locally does not scale automatically, and it does not endure without friction.
What works for a particular group, at a particular moment, under particular conditions, does not thereby acquire universal authority. Moral coherence achieved locally does not scale automatically, and it does not endure without friction. That is not a failure of ethics. It is the cost of plurality and time.
The problem arises only when local moral projects mistake their internal coherence for external legitimacy. When they present themselves not as one way of organising meaning, but as a foundational ontology, a scalable ethical architecture, or a universally binding account of the Good.
At that point, disagreement ceases to register as intelligible difference and becomes moral deficiency. Dissent is redescribed as immaturity. Refusal is framed as lack of formation. And ethics quietly crosses the line from orientation into governance. This critique is aimed precisely at that crossing.
8. Conclusion: A Local Moral Project, Not a Universal Architecture
Taken on its own terms, this ontology is serious, internally coherent, and animated by a genuine concern for moral decay, procedural emptiness, and the hollowness of technocratic governance. It is not frivolous work. It is not cynical work. It is work born of dissatisfaction with thin ethics and a desire to recover meaning, orientation, and responsibility. But that does not make it universal.
What this framework offers is best understood not as a foundational solution to ethics, leadership, or societal becoming, but as a local moral project: a thick, tradition-inflected grammar capable of organising commitment among those already disposed to its metaphysical and ethical premises.
Within such in-groups, it may function well. It can generate shared language, reinforce norms, motivate sacrifice, and provide a sense of direction. It may even feel emancipatory, precisely because it relieves participants of the burden of perpetual moral indeterminacy. That relief is not incidental. It is the primary psychological reward such frameworks offer.
What it cannot do, without remainder, is scale across plural moral landscapes without reintroducing coercion under another name.
The moment the framework encounters agents who do not recognise its metaphysical centre, virtue ceases to orient and begins to adjudicate. Solidarity becomes conditional. Participation becomes aspirational compliance. Flourishing becomes legible only to those who already speak the language.
This is not a failure of goodwill. It is the inevitable consequence of grounding ethics in a substantive vision of the Good rather than in negotiated coexistence under conditions of deep disagreement.
History does not suggest a third option.
Attempts to resolve this by appeal to deeper formation, better leadership, or more refined ontological articulation misunderstand the problem. The obstacle is not insufficient sophistication. It is the impossibility of securing universal normative authority without either emptying ethics of content or enforcing it through power. History does not suggest a third option.
To acknowledge this is not to abandon ethics, nor to retreat into relativism or nihilism-as-apathy. It is to recognise that moral systems are provisional, situated, and sustained through ongoing negotiation rather than metaphysical guarantees. Meaning is made, not discovered intact. And whatever coherence we achieve is fragile, temporary, and bought at the cost of exclusion.
If this ontology were presented as one compelling way of organising moral life among those who freely choose it, there would be little to object to. The trouble begins only when it is asked to do more than it can bear: to ground, to bind, to scale, and to endure without remainder. That expectation is not just ambitious. It is precisely the illusion that has undone every such project before.
9. Closing: Admirable Aspirations, Ancient Failure Modes
The desire animating this ontology is admirable. So were many before it. Projects of moral renewal rarely fail because their intentions are corrupt. They fail because they underestimate three forces that never go away: semantic drift, human difference, and the stubborn refusal of people to remain aligned over time without someone being marginalised, disciplined, or expelled. What works at Time-nought rarely survives Time-one.
At the outset, shared language feels like shared purpose. Participation feels voluntary. Solidarity feels mutual. But as contexts shift, meanings stretch, and pressures accumulate, the system must either loosen its grip or tighten it. History suggests it almost always chooses the latter, while continuing to speak the language of the former.
This framework may function well as an in-group grammar. It may even be nourishing there.
This framework may function well as an in-group grammar. It may even be nourishing there. Within aligned communities, it can generate coherence, motivation, and a genuine sense of ethical direction. That should not be dismissed.
But once pressed beyond its boundaries, it exhibits the same failure modes we have seen for centuries: moral centres that require constant maintenance, virtues that drift and must be reinterpreted, participation that quietly becomes compliance, and solidarity that depends on exclusion to remain intact. The difference here is not structure, but style.
What we are offered is not a new solution to ethics, leadership, or social order, but a familiar answer articulated with contemporary sophistication and excellent footnotes. That does not make it unserious. It makes it recognisable.
And recognition, in this case, means seeing an old pattern dressed in new language: a moral centre that promises orientation while quietly reintroducing authority, a vision that speaks the grammar of participation while relying on alignment to survive.
The aspiration is admirable. The failure modes are ancient. And no amount of metaphysical refinement has ever abolished them.
Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.
I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.
And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.
Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.
MEOW-GPT’s Response
(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)
“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap. When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model, the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”
“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”
It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.
Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.
Why publish this now?
This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.
The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:
It sounds like an explanation.
It licenses retribution without understanding.
It stabilises group boundaries.
It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.
In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.
This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.
Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.
This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.
MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose: that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.
For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.
MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”
(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)
Concept
Input: Evil Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces) Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).
High-level summary (≤120 words)
In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
“Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.
T₂ – Linguistic Mediation
On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.
T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation
Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.
Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)
The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.
‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.
In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.
MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.
As I was preparing another essay – an essay on the rhetoric of evil – I had a thought about the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
If one takes subjectivity seriously – not the Hollywood version with self-made heroes, but the real creature stitched together from language, history, and whatever emotional debris it stepped in on the way to adulthood – then one ends up somewhere awkward: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
Video: Two red figures walking (no sound)
Which is to say, we’re all standing on conceptual scaffolding built by other people, insisting it’s solid marble. A charming fiction, until we apply it to anything with moral voltage. ‘Evil’, for instance, collapses the moment you remove the demonological life-support and notice it’s little more than a child’s intensifier strapped to a cultural power tool.
More on that later. For now, just sit with the discomfort that the ‘self’ making moral judgments is already a negotiated artefact – relational, compromised, and never as autonomous as it pretends.
A surprising number of people have been using the MEOW GPT I released into the wild. Naturally, I can’t see how anyone is actually using it, which is probably for the best. If you hand someone a relational ontology and they treat it like a BuzzFeed quiz, that’s on them. Still, I haven’t received any direct feedback, positive or catastrophic, which leaves me wondering whether users understand the results or are simply nodding like priests reciting Latin they don’t believe.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The truth is uncomfortable: if you haven’t grasped the Mediated Encounter Ontology (of the World), the outputs may feel like a philosophical brick to the face. They’re meant to; mediation has consequences. I’m even considering adding a warning label:
If you hold an unwavering commitment to a concept with any philosophical weight, perhaps don’t input it. There is a non-zero chance the illusion will shatter.
Below is a sampling of the concepts I tested while inspecting the system’s behaviour. I’m withholding the outputs, partly to avoid influencing new users and partly to preserve your dignity, such as it is.
authenticity
anattā (Buddhist)
character (in Aristotle’s virtue-ethical sense)
consciousness
dignity
freedom
hózhó (Navajo)
justice
karma
love
progress
ren ( 仁 )
table
tree
truth
I may have tried others, depending on how irritated I was with the world at the time.
(Now that I think of it, I entered my full name and witnessed it nearly have an aneurysm.)
My purpose in trying these is (obviously) to test the GPT. As part of the test, I wanted to test terms I already considered to be weasel words. I also wanted to test common terms (table) and terms outside of Western modalities. I learned something about the engine in each case.
Tables & Trees
One of the first surprises was the humble ‘table’ which, according to the engine, apparently moonlights across half of civilisation’s conceptual landscape. If you input ‘table’, you get everything from dinner tables to data tables to parliamentary procedure. The model does exactly what it should: it presents the full encounter-space and waits for you to specify which world you meant to inhabit.
The lesson: if you mean a table you eat dinner on, say so. Don’t assume the universe is built around your implied furniture.
‘Tree’ behaves similarly. Does the user mean a birch in a forest? A branching data structure? A phylogenetic diagram? MEOW GPT won’t decide that for you; nor should it. Precision is your job.
This is precisely why I tested ‘character (in Aristotle’s virtue-ethical sense)’ rather than tossing ‘character’ in like a confused undergraduate hoping for luck.
Non-Western Concepts
I also tested concepts well outside the Western philosophical sandbox. This is where the model revealed its real strength.
Enter ‘karma’: it promptly explained that the Western reduction is a cultural oversimplification and – quite rightly – flagged that different Eastern traditions use the term differently. Translation: specify your flavour.
Enter ‘anattā’: the model demonstrated that Western interpretations often reduce the concept to a caricature. Which, frankly, they do.
Enter ‘hózhó’: the Navajo term survives mostly in the anthropological imagination, and the model openly described it as nearly ineffable – especially to those raised in cultures that specialise in bulldozing subtlety. On that score, no notes.
Across the board, I was trying to see whether MEOW GPT would implode when confronted with concepts that resist neat Western categorisation. It didn’t. It was annoyingly robust.
Closing Notes
If you do try the MEOW GPT and find its results surprising, illuminating, or mildly offensive to your metaphysical sensibilities, let me know – and tell me why. It helps me understand what the engine does well and what illusions it quietly pops along the way. Your feedback may even keep me from adding further warning labels, though I wouldn’t count on it.
This whole misadventure began sometime in 2018, when I started documenting what has now metastasised into the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. If I weren’t typing this, I’d be doing the honourable thing and finishing the index, but here we are, procrastinating with purpose. I had a suspicion, even then, that language was up to something. Something slippery. Something evasive. At first, it was just a motley catalogue of weasel words that refused to sit still long enough to be given a meaning. I should have taken the hint when the list kept expanding like a Victorian railway: terminally over-budget and convinced of its own grandeur.
But, naturally, I pressed on.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast and conversation around this topic.
At the time I had that slow-burn itch about identity, selfhood, free will, agency – you know, the usual metaphysical tat we’re reared on like a Victorian child raised on laudanum. It wasn’t that these things didn’t exist; it was that the words simply couldn’t bear the conceptual load we’d been piling onto them. And so I found myself in the company of philosophers who either tried to rescue these terms (Dennett, ever the valiant firefighter with a damp match), complicate them (Searle, constructing houses of cards under wind machines), or dissolve them outright (Parfit, smiling serenely as the rest of us panic).
Meanwhile, Strawson was somewhere in the corner insisting experience is all there is, Putnam was in his perennial retraction phase, and I was merely trying to keep my own conceptual apparatus from collapsing like an undercooked soufflé.
I’ll admit I had a long-standing soft spot for Dennett’s consciousness-as-emergence hypothesis. It made a certain intuitive sense at the time: pile up enough neural machinery, sprinkle in some feedback loops, and consciousness would bubble up like steam from a kettle. It felt elegant. It felt mechanistically honest. And, crucially, it made perfect sense within the inherited Realist framework I was still tacitly lugging around. Of course, experience ’emerges’ from physical processes if you start from a worldview already partitioned into physical substrates and mental phenomena waiting to be accounted for. Dennett wasn’t wrong so much as operating within the same architectural error the rest of us had been marinating in. Once I began reframing the whole encounter through mediation rather than emergence, the elegance dissolved. What had looked like metaphysics turned out to be a conceptual afterimage generated by a language that couldn’t model its own limitations.
And then there was Chalmers.
Ah, the ‘hard problem’. I lost count of how many times it surfaced. Like mould. Or a debt collector. Chalmers’ dilemma – how physical processes give rise to experience – is purportedly the Mount Everest of metaphysics. Yet the more I thought about it, the more it reeked of a linguistic parlour trick. A conceptual magic eye puzzle: stare long enough and a unicorn appears, provided you’ve surrendered your scepticism and a good measure of oxygen.
The problem isn’t that consciousness is ‘hard’. The problem is that the linguistic scaffolding we’re using was never built for this terrain. ‘Experience’. ‘Physical’. ‘Mental’. ‘Explain’. These words pretend to be steel beams when they’re actually damp cardboard.
What remains isn’t a cosmic riddle but a linguistic artefact. A conceptual false path carved by centuries of grammatico-metaphysical enthusiasm – the unfortunate habit of mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
Which brings me to the present, having at last gelled the LIH and published the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – a relational metaphysics that has the decency not to hallucinate substances it can’t justify. MEOW clears the fog rather neatly: the so-called ‘hard problem’ is only ‘hard’ because we continue to treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ as two independent substances requiring metaphysical reconciliation. Together, LIH and MEOW provide a double exposure of the problem: LIH shows why the language fails; MEOW shows what the language was failing to describe.
So here we are. I’d like to reconsider Chalmers through the dual lenses of LIH and MEOW – not to ‘solve’ the hard problem, but to show it was never the right problem to begin with. The difficulty isn’t consciousness; it’s the language we’re forced to use, the same language that refuses to sit still, the same language that keeps trying to trick us into mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
In a coming post, I intend to pry open that illusion with a crowbar. Delicately, of course. One must be civilised about these things.
Because if language is insufficient – and it is – then perhaps what Chalmers discovered was not the abyss of consciousness, but the limit of the dictionary.
Philosophics 