They say no one escapes the Spectacle. Guy Debord made sure of that. His vision was airtight, his diagnosis terminal: we are all spectators now, alienated from our labour, our time, our own damn lives. It was a metaphysical mugging—existence held hostage by images, by commodities dressed in drag. The future was a feedback loop, and we were all doomed to applaud.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. Apologies in advance for the narrators’ mangling of the pronunciation of ‘Guy Debord’.
But what if the loop could be hacked? What if the infinitely halved distances of motionless critique—Zeno’s Paradox by way of Marx—could finally be crossed?
Enter: Yanis Varoufakis. Economist, ex-finance minister, techno-cassandra with a motorbike and a vendetta. Where Debord filmed the catastrophe in black-and-white, Varoufakis showed up with the source code.
Debord’s Limbo
Debord saw it all coming. The substitution of reality with its photogenic simulacrum. The slow death of agency beneath the floodlights of consumption. But like Zeno’s paradox, he could only gesture toward the end without ever reaching it. Each critique halved the distance to liberation but never arrived. The Spectacle remained intact, omnipresent, and self-replicating—like an ontological screensaver.
He gave us no path forward, only a beautiful, ruinous analysis. A Parisian shrug of doom.
Varoufakis’ Shortcut
But then comes Varoufakis, breaking through the digital labyrinth not by philosophising the Spectacle, but by naming its successor: Technofeudalism.
See, Debord was chasing a moving target—a capitalism that morphed from industrial to financial to semiotic faster than his prose could crystallise. But Varoufakis caught it mid-mutation. He pinned it to the slab and sliced it open. What spilled out wasn’t capital anymore—it was rent. Platform rent. Algorithmic tolls. Behavioural taxes disguised as convenience. This isn’t the market gone mad—it’s the market dissolved, replaced by code-based fiefdoms.
The paradox is resolved not by reaching utopia, but by realising we’ve already crossed the line—we just weren’t told. The market isn’t dying; it’s already dead, and we’re still paying funeral costs in monthly subscriptions and attention metrics.
From Spectacle to Subjugation
Debord wanted to unmask the performance. Varoufakis realised the theatre had been demolished and replaced with a server farm.
You don’t watch the Spectacle anymore. It watches you. It optimises you. It learns your keystrokes, your pulse rate, your browsing history. Welcome to feudal recursion, where Amazon is your landlord, Google your priest, and Meta your confessor.
Solving Zeno the Varoufakis Way
So how does one cross the infinite regress of alienation? Simple. You call it what it is. You reclassify the terrain.
“This is not capitalism,” Varoufakis says, in the tone of a man pulling a mask off a Scooby-Doo villain. “It’s technofeudalism. Capital didn’t win. It went feudal. Again.”
By doing so, he bypasses the academic ballet that has critics forever inching closer to the truth without touching it. He calls the system new, not to sell books, but to make strategy possible. Because naming a beast is the first step in slaying it.
In Conclusion: Debord Dreamed, Varoufakis Drives
Debord haunts the museum. Varoufakis raids the server room. Both are essential. But only one gives us a new map.
The Spectacle hypnotised us. Technofeudalism enslaves us. And if there’s a way out, it won’t be through slogans spray-painted on Parisian walls. It will be built in code, deployed across decentralised networks, and carried forward by those who remember what it meant to be not watched.
Let Debord whisper. Let Varoufakis roar. And let the rest of us sharpen our blades.
Post-COVID, we’re told trust in science is eroding. But perhaps the real autopsy should be performed on the institution of public discourse itself.
Since the COVID-19 crisis detonated across our global stage—part plague, part PR disaster—the phrase “trust in science” has become the most abused slogan since “thoughts and prayers.” Every public official with a podium and a pulse declared they were “following the science,” as if “science” were a kindly oracle whispering unambiguous truths into the ears of the righteous. But what happened when those pronouncements proved contradictory, politically convenient, or flat-out wrong? Was it science that failed, or was it simply a hostage to an incoherent performance of authority?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.
Two recent Nature pieces dig into the supposed “decline” of scientific credibility in the post-pandemic world, offering the expected hand-wringing about public opinion and populist mistrust. But let’s not be so credulous. This isn’t merely a crisis of trust—it’s a crisis of theatre.
“The Science” as Ventriloquism
Let’s begin by skewering the central absurdity: there is no such thing as “The Science.” Science is not a monolith. It’s not a holy writ passed down by lab-coated Levites. It’s a process—a messy, iterative, and perpetually provisional mode of inquiry. But during the pandemic, politicians, pundits, and even some scientists began to weaponise the term, turning it into a rhetorical cudgel. “The Science says” became code for “shut up and comply.” Any dissent—even from within the scientific community—was cast as heresy. Galileo would be proud.
In Nature Human Behaviour paper (van der Linden et al., 2025) identifies four archetypes of distrust: distrust in the message, the messenger, the medium, and the motivation. What they fail to ask is: what if all four were compromised simultaneously? What if the medium (mainstream media) served more as a stenographer to power than a check upon it? What if the message was oversimplified into PR slogans, the messengers were party apparatchiks in lab coats, and the motivations were opaque at best?
Trust didn’t just erode. It was actively incinerated in a bonfire of institutional vanity.
A Crisis of Influence, Not Integrity
The second Nature commentary (2025) wrings its hands over “why trust in science is declining,” as if the populace has suddenly turned flat-Earth overnight. But the real story isn’t a decline in trust per se; it’s a redistribution of epistemic authority. Scientists no longer have the stage to themselves. Influencers, conspiracy theorists, rogue PhDs, and yes—exhausted citizens armed with Wi-Fi and anxiety—have joined the fray.
Science hasn’t lost truth—it’s lost control. And frankly, perhaps it shouldn’t have had that control in the first place. Democracy is messy. Information democracies doubly so. And in that mess, the epistemic pedestal of elite scientific consensus was bound to topple—especially when its public face was filtered through press conferences, inconsistent policies, and authoritarian instincts.
Technocracy’s Fatal Hubris
What we saw wasn’t science failing—it was technocracy failing in real time, trying to manage public behaviour with a veneer of empirical certainty. But when predictions shifted, guidelines reversed, and public health policy began to resemble a mood ring, the lay public was expected to pretend nothing happened. Orwell would have a field day.
This wasn’t a failure of scientific method. It was a failure of scientific messaging—an inability (or unwillingness) to communicate uncertainty, probability, and risk in adult terms. Instead, the public was infantilised. And then pathologised for rebelling.
Toward a Post-Scientistic Public Sphere
So where does that leave us? Perhaps we need to kill the idol of “The Science” to resurrect a more mature relationship with scientific discourse—one that tolerates ambiguity, embraces dissent, and admits when the data isn’t in. Science, done properly, is the art of saying “we don’t know… yet.”
The pandemic didn’t erode trust in science. It exposed how fragile our institutional credibility scaffolding really is—how easily truth is blurred when science is fed through the meat grinder of media, politics, and fear.
The answer isn’t more science communication—it’s less scientism, more honesty, and above all, fewer bureaucrats playing ventriloquist with the language of discovery.
Conclusion
Trust in science isn’t dead. But trust in those who claim to speak for science? That’s another matter. Perhaps it’s time to separate the two.
I died in March 2023 — or so the rumour mill would have you believe.
Of course, given that I’m still here, hammering away at this keyboard, it must be said that I didn’t technically die. We don’t bring people back. Death, real death, doesn’t work on a “return to sender” basis. Once you’re gone, you’re gone, and the only thing bringing you back is a heavily fictionalised Netflix series.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.
No, this is a semantic cock-up, yet another stinking exhibit in the crumbling Museum of Language Insufficiency. “I died,” people say, usually while slurping a Pumpkin Spice Latte and live-streaming their trauma to 53 followers. What they mean is that they flirted with death, clumsily, like a drunk uncle at a wedding. No consummation, just a lot of embarrassing groping at the pearly gates.
And since we’re clarifying terms: there was no tunnel of light, no angels, no celestial choir belting out Coldplay covers. No bearded codgers in slippers. No 72 virgins. (Or, more plausibly, 72 incels whining about their lack of Wi-Fi reception.)
There was, in fact, nothing. Nothing but the slow, undignified realisation that the body, that traitorous meat vessel, was shutting down — and the only gates I was approaching belonged to A&E, with its flickering fluorescent lights and a faint smell of overcooked cabbage.
To be fair, it’s called a near-death experience (NDE) for a reason. Language, coward that it is, hedges its bets. “Near-death” means you dipped a toe into the abyss and then screamed for your mummy. You didn’t die. You loitered. You loitered in the existential equivalent of an airport Wetherspoons, clutching your boarding pass and wondering why the flight to Oblivion was delayed.
As the stories go, people waft into the next world and are yanked back with stirring tales of unicorns, long-dead relatives, and furniture catalogues made of clouds. I, an atheist to my scorched and shrivelled soul, expected none of that — and was therefore not disappointed.
What I do recall, before the curtain wobbled, was struggling for breath, thinking, “Pick a side. In or out. But for pity’s sake, no more dithering.” In a last act of rational agency, I asked an ER nurse — a bored-looking Athena in scrubs — to intubate me. She responded with the rousing medical affirmation, “We may have to,” which roughly translates to, “Stop making a scene, love. We’ve got fifteen others ahead of you.”
After that, nothing. I was out. Like a light. Like a minor character in a Dickens novel whose death is so insignificant it happens between paragraphs.
I woke up the next day: groggy, sliced open, a tube rammed down my throat, and absolutely no closer to solving the cosmic riddle of it all. Not exactly the triumphant return of Odysseus. Not even a second-rate Ulysses.
Here’s the reality: There is no coming back from death. You can’t “visit” death, any more than you can spend the afternoon being non-existent and return with a suntan.
Those near-death visions? Oxygen-starved brains farting out fever dreams. Cerebral cortexes short-circuiting like Poundland fairy lights. Hallucinations, not heralds. A final, frantic light show performed for an audience of none.
Epicurus, that cheerful nihilist, said, “When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not.” He forgot to mention that, in between, people would invent entire publishing industries peddling twaddle about journeys beyond the veil — and charging $29.99 for the paperback edition.
No angels. No harps. No antechamber to the divine. Just the damp whirr of hospital machinery and the faint beep-beep of capitalism, patiently billing you for your own demise.
If there’s a soundtrack to death, it’s not choirs of the blessed. It’s a disgruntled junior surgeon muttering, “Where the hell’s the anaesthetist?” while pawing desperately through a drawer full of out-of-date latex gloves.
And thus, reader, I lived. But only in the most vulgar, anticlimactic, and utterly mortal sense.
There will be no afterlife memoir. No second chance to settle the score. No sequel. Just this: breath, blood, occasional barbed words — and then silence.
It appears the merry halfwits at Meta — those tireless alchemists of despair — are now experimenting with AI-generated comments on Instagram. Because, of course they are. Why sully your dainty human fingers tapping out coherent thoughts when a helpful little gremlin in the server farm can do it for you? In their infinite, tinfoil wisdom, they envision a future wherein the Machine analyses your browsing history (undoubtedly a glittering mosaic of shame) and the original post, and, from that exquisite mulch, vomits up a tidy selection of canned remarks.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this content.
No need to think, no need to feel. Simply choose one of the suggested comments — “Love this! 💖” or “So inspiring! 🚀” — and blast it into the void. If you’re feeling particularly alive, tweak a word or two. Or, better yet, allow the AI to respond automatically, leaving you free to pursue more meaningful activities. Like blinking. Or waiting for death.
Am I dreaming? Could this be — dare I whisper it — the final liberation? Could we, at last, ignore social media altogether, let it rot in peace, while we frolic outside in the sunlight like bewildered medieval peasants seeing the sky for the first time?
Picture it: a vast, pulsating wasteland where no living soul has trodden for centuries. Only bots remain, engaged in endless cycles of trolling, flattering, and mutual gaslighting. Automated praise machines battling semi-sentient hatebots, each iteration less tethered to reality than the last. Digital crabs scuttling across an abandoned beach, hissing memes into the void. Yet another example of carcinisation.
Indeed, if one could zoom further out, the true horror becomes evident: a crumbling worldscape founded on a shattered circuit board, stretching endlessly in all directions. Across this silicon desert, scavenger crabs—half-metal, half-mad—scuttle about, clutching relics of the digital age: a rusted Instagram logo, a shattered “Like” button, a defunct influencer’s ring light. Massive server towers loom as toppled monuments, their wires weeping in the acid wind. Here, in this museum of forgotten vanities, the crabs reign supreme, kings of a kingdom of ash and corrupted data.
And somewhere in the future, an anthropologist — perhaps a child raised by wolves and irony — will dust off an ancient Instagram server and peer inside. What will they see? Not a record of humanity’s vibrant social life, no. Not a tapestry of culture and thought. No, they’ll find a grim, howling testament to our collective abandonment: bots chatting to bots about posts made by other bots, in a language degraded into gibberish, a self-perpetuating carnival of nonsense.
“#Blessed,” the ancient texts will proclaim, beneath a pixelated photograph of an AI-generated smoothie, posted by a bot, commented upon by a bot, adored by bots who themselves have been dead for centuries, if they were ever truly “alive” at all.
One can almost imagine the academic paper: “The Great Collapse: How Homo Sapiens Outsourced Its Emotional Labour to the Algorithm and Evaporated in a Puff of Likes.”
I neither champion nor condemn tradition—whether it’s marriage, family, or whatever dusty relic society is currently parading around like a prize marrow at a village fête.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on traditional families.
In a candid group conversation recently, I met “Jenny”, who declared she would have enjoyed her childhood much more had her father not “ruined everything” simply by existing. “Marie” countered that it was her mother who had been the wrecker-in-chief. Then “Lulu” breezed in, claiming, “We had a perfect family — we practically raised ourselves.”
“We had a perfect family; we practically raised ourselves.”
Now, here’s where it gets delicious:
Each of these women, bright-eyed defenders of “traditional marriage” and “traditional family” (cue the brass band), had themselves ticked every box on the Modern Chaos Bingo Card: children out of wedlock? Check. Divorces? Check. Performative, cold-marriage pantomimes? Absolutely—and scene. Their definition of “traditional marriage” is the vintage model: one cis-male, one cis-female, Dad brings home the bacon, Mum weeps quietly into the washing-up. Standard.
Let’s meet the players properly:
Jenny sprang from a union of two serial divorcées, each dragging along the tattered remnants of previous families. She was herself a “love child,” born out of wedlock and “forcing” another reluctant stroll down the aisle. Her father? A man of singular achievements: he paid the bills and terrorised the household. Jenny now pays a therapist to untangle the psychological wreckage.
Marie, the second of two daughters, was the product of a more textbook “traditional family”—if by textbook you mean a Victorian novel where everyone is miserable but keeps a stiff upper lip about it. Her mother didn’t want children but acquiesced to her husband’s demands (standard operating procedure at the time). Marie’s childhood was a kingdom where Daddy was a demigod and Mummy was the green-eyed witch guarding the gates of hell.
Lulu grew up in a household so “traditional” that it might have been painted by Hogarth: an underemployed, mostly useless father and a mother stretched thinner than the patience of a British Rail commuter. Despite—or because of—the chaos, Lulu claims it was “perfect,” presumably redefining the word in a way the Oxford English Dictionary would find hysterical. She, too, had a child out of wedlock, with the explicit goal of keeping feckless men at bay.
And yet—and yet—all three women cling, white-knuckled, to the fantasy of the “traditional family.” They did not achieve stability. Their families of origin were temples of dysfunction. But somehow, the “traditional family” remains the sacred cow, lovingly polished and paraded on Sundays.
Why?
Because what they’re chasing isn’t “tradition” at all — it’s stability, that glittering chimera. It’s nostalgia for a stability they never actually experienced. A mirage constructed from second-hand dreams, glossy 1950s propaganda, and whatever leftover fairy tales their therapists hadn’t yet charged them £150 an hour to dismantle.
Interestingly, none of them cared two figs about gay marriage, though opinions about gay parenting varied wildly—a kettle of fish I’ll leave splashing outside this piece.
Which brings us back to the central conundrum:
If lived experience tells you that “traditional family” equals trauma, neglect, and thinly-veiled loathing, why in the name of all that’s rational would you still yearn for it?
Societal pressure, perhaps. Local customs. Generational rot. The relentless cultural drumbeat that insists that marriage (preferably heterosexual and miserable) is the cornerstone of civilisation.
Still, it’s telling that Jenny and Marie were both advised by therapists to cut ties with their toxic families—yet in the same breath urged to create sturdy nuclear families for their own children. It was as if summoning a functional household from the smoking ruins of dysfunction were a simple matter of willpower and a properly ironed apron.
Meanwhile, Lulu—therapy-free and stubbornly independent—declares that raising oneself in a dysfunctional mess is not only survivable but positively idyllic. One can only assume her standards of “perfect” are charmingly flexible.
As the title suggests, this piece questions traditional families. I offer no solutions—only a raised eyebrow and a sharper question:
What is the appeal of clinging to a fantasy so thoroughly at odds with reality? Your thoughts, dear reader? I’d love to hear your defences, your protests, or your own tales from the trenches.
I’ve recently decided to take a sabbatical from what passes for economic literature these days — out of a sense of self-preservation, mainly — but before I hermetically sealed myself away, I made a quick detour through Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (PDF). Naturally, I emerged none the wiser, blinking like some poor subterranean creature dragged into the daylight, only to tumble headlong into David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.
This particular tome had been languishing in my inventory since its release, exuding a faint but persistent odour of deferred obligation. Now, about a third of the way in, I can report that Graeber’s thesis — that the modern world is awash with soul-annihilatingly pointless work — does resonate. I find myself nodding along like one of those cheap plastic dashboard dogs. Yet, for all its righteous fury, it’s more filler than killer. Directionally correct? Probably. Substantively airtight? Not quite. It’s a bit like admiring a tent that’s pitched reasonably straight but has conspicuous holes large enough to drive a fleet of Uber Eats cyclists through.
An amusing aside: the Spanish edition is titled Trabajos de mierda (“shitty jobs”), a phrase Graeber spends an entire excruciating section of the book explaining is not the same thing. Meanwhile, the French, in their traditional Gallic shrug, simply kept the English title. (One suspects they couldn’t be arsed.)
Chapter One attempts to explain the delicate taxonomy: bullshit jobs are fundamentally unnecessary — spawned by some black magic of bureaucracy, ego, and capitalist entropy — whilst shit jobs are grim, thankless necessities that someone must do, but no one wishes to acknowledge. Tragically, some wretches get the worst of both worlds, occupying jobs that are both shit and bullshit — a sort of vocational purgatory for the damned.
Then, in Chapter Two, Graeber gleefully dissects bullshit jobs into five grotesque varieties:
Flunkies, whose role is to make someone else feel important.
Goons, who exist solely to fight other goons.
Duct Tapers, who heroically patch problems that ought not to exist in the first place.
Box Tickers, who generate paperwork to satisfy some Kafkaesque demand that nobody actually reads.
Taskmasters, who either invent unnecessary work for others or spend their days supervising people who don’t need supervision.
Naturally, real-world roles often straddle several categories. Lucky them: multi-classed in the RPG of Existential Futility.
Graeber’s parade of professional despair is, admittedly, darkly entertaining. One senses he had a great deal of fun cataloguing these grotesques — like a medieval monk illustrating demons in the margins of a holy text — even as the entire edifice wobbles under the weight of its own repetition. Yes, David, we get it: the modern economy is a Potemkin village of invented necessity. Carry on.
If the first chapters are anything to go by, the rest of the book promises more righteous indignation, more anecdotes from anonymous sad-sacks labouring in existential oubliettes, and — if one is lucky — perhaps a glimmer of prescription hidden somewhere amidst the diagnosis. Though, I’m not holding my breath. This feels less like an intervention and more like a well-articulated primal scream.
Still, even in its baggier moments, Bullshit Jobs offers the grim pleasure of recognition. If you’ve ever sat through a meeting where the PowerPoint had more intellectual integrity than the speaker or spent days crafting reports destined for the corporate oubliette marked “For Review” (translation: Never to Be Seen Again), you will feel seen — in a distinctly accusatory, you-signed-up-for-this sort of way.
In short: it’s good to read Graeber if only to have one’s vague sense of societal derangement vindicated in print. Like having a charmingly irate friend in the pub lean over their pint and mutter, “It’s not just you. It’s the whole bloody system.”
I’m not sure I’ll stick with this title either. I think I’ve caught the brunt of the message, and it feels like a diversion. I’ve also got Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism on the shelf. Perhaps I’ll spin this one up instead.
Watching Sam Harris ruminate on the nature of political lies (still believing, poor lamb, that reason might one day triumph) reminds me of something more sinister: lies today are not attempts at persuasion. They are shibboleths — tribal passwords, loyalty oaths, secret handshakes performed in the broad light of day.
Video: Sam Harris tells us why Trump and his ilk lie.
Forget “alternative facts.” That charming euphemism was merely a decoy, a jangling set of keys to distract the infantile media. The real game was always deeper: strategic distortion, the deliberate blurring of perception not to deceive the outsider, but to identify the insider.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
When Trump — or any other post-truth demagogue — proclaims that penguins are, in fact, highly trained alien operatives from the Andromeda galaxy, the objective is not persuasion. The point is to force a choice: will you, standing before this glistening absurdity, blink and retreat into reason, stammering something about ornithology… Or will you step forward, clasp the hand of madness, and mutter, ‘Yes, my liege, the penguins have been among us all along’?
Those who demur, those who scoff or gasp or say ‘You’re an idiot,”’have failed the loyalty test. They have outed themselves as enemy combatants in the epistemic war. Truth, in this brave new world, is not a destination; it is an allegiance. To speak honestly is to wage rebellion.
Orwell, who tried very hard to warn us, understood this dynamic well: the real triumph of Big Brother was not merely to compel you to lie but to compel you to believe the lie. Koestler, another battered prophet of the age, charted how political movements sink into ritualistic unreason, demanding not conviction but performance. Swift, for his part, knew it was all hilarious if you tilted your head just right.
The bigger the lie, the better the shibboleth. Claim that two and two make five, and you catch out the weak-willed rationalists. Claim that penguins are extraterrestrials, and you find the truly devoted, the ones willing to build altars from ice and sacrifice to their feathery overlords.
It’s no accident that modern political theatre resembles a deranged initiation ritual. Each day brings a new absurdity, a fresh madness to affirm: ‘Men can become women by declaration alone!” “Billionaires are victims of systemic oppression!’ ‘The penguins are amongst us, plotting!’ Each claim a little more grotesque than the last, each compliance a little more degrading, a little more irreversible.
And oh, how eagerly the initiates rush forward! Clap for the penguins, or be cast out into the howling wilderness! Better to bend the knee to absurdity than be marked as an unbeliever. Better to humiliate yourself publicly than to admit that the Emperor’s penguin suit is just a costume.
Meanwhile, the opposition — earnest, naive — keeps trying to argue, to rebut, to point out that penguins are terrestrial flightless birds. How quaint. How pathetic. They do not understand that the moment they say, “You’re an idiot,” they’ve broken the spell, declared themselves apostates, and rendered themselves politically irrelevant.
The shibboleth, once uttered, divides the world cleanly: the believers, who will say anything, do anything, believe anything, provided it marks them safe from exile; and the infidels, who cling stupidly to reality.
The future belongs, not to the true, but to the loyal. Not to the rational, but to the ritualistic. The more extravagant the lie, the greater the proof of your faith.
So raise a glass to the penguins, ye of faint heart, and prepare your soul for abasement. Or stand firm, if you dare, and be prepared to be eaten alive by those who traded reason for the rapture of belonging.
After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. He’s a heretic.
I’m not a fan of IQ as a general metric. Let us be done with the cult of the clever. Let us drag the IQ score from its pedestal, strip it of its statistical robes, and parade it through the streets of history where it belongs—next to phrenology, eugenics, and other well-meaning pseudosciences once weaponised by men in waistcoats.
The so-called Intelligence Industrial Complex—an infernal alliance of psychologists, bureaucrats, and HR departments—has for too long dictated the terms of thought. It has pretended to measure the immeasurable. It has sold us a fiction in numerical drag: that human intelligence can be distilled, packaged, and ranked.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
What it measures, it defines. What it defines, it controls.
IQ is not intelligence. It is cognitive GDP: a snapshot of what your brain can do under fluorescent lights with a timer running. It rewards abstraction, not understanding; speed, not depth; pattern recognition, not wisdom. It’s a test of how well you’ve been conditioned to think like the test-makers.
This is not to say IQ has no value. Of course it does—within its own ecosystem of schools, bureaucracies, and technocracies. But let us not mistake the ruler for the terrain. Let us not map the entire landscape of human potential using a single colonial compass.
True intelligence is not a number. It is a spectrum of situated knowings, a polyphony of minds tuned to different frequencies. The Inuit hunter tracking a seal through silence. The griot remembering centuries of lineage. The autistic coder intuiting an algorithm in dreamtime. The grandmother sensing a lie with her bones. IQ cannot touch these.
To speak of intelligence as if it belonged to a single theory is to mistake a monoculture for a forest. Let us burn the monoculture. Let us plant a thousand new seeds.
A Comparative Vivisection of Intelligence Theories
Theory / Model
Core Premise
Strengths
Blind Spots / Critiques
Cultural Framing
IQ (Psychometric g)
Intelligence is a single, general cognitive ability measurable via testing
Predicts academic & job performance; standardised
Skewed toward Western logic, ignores context, devalues non-abstract intelligences
Western, industrial, meritocratic
Multiple Intelligences (Gardner)
Intelligence is plural: linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily, etc.
Recognises diversity; challenges IQ monopoly
Still individualistic; categories often vague; Western in formulation
Liberal Western pluralism
Triarchic Theory (Sternberg)
Intelligence = analytical + creative + practical
Includes adaptability, real-world success
Still performance-focused; weak empirical grounding
Western managerial
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
Intelligence includes emotion regulation and interpersonal skill
Useful in leadership & education contexts
Commodified into corporate toolkits; leans self-help
Western therapeutic
Socio-Cultural (Vygotsky)
Intelligence develops through social interaction and cultural mediation
Recognises developmental context and culture
Less attention to adult or cross-cultural intelligence
Soviet / constructivist
Distributed Cognition / Extended Mind
Intelligence is distributed across people, tools, systems
Breaks skull-bound model; real-world cognition
Hard to measure; difficult to institutionalise
Post-cognitive, systems-based
Indigenous Epistemologies
Intelligence is relational, ecological, spiritual, embodied, ancestral
Holistic; grounded in lived experience
Marginalised by academia; often untranslatable into standard metrics
Global South / decolonial
Conclusion: Beyond the Monoculture of Mind
If we want a more encompassing theory of intelligence, we must stop looking for a single theory. We must accept plurality—not as a nod to diversity, but as an ontological truth.
Intelligence is not a fixed entity to be bottled and graded. It is a living, breathing phenomenon: relational, situated, contextual, historical, ecological, and cultural.
And no test devised in a Princeton psych lab will ever tell you how to walk through a forest without being seen, how to tell when rain is coming by smell alone, or how to speak across generations through story.
It’s time we told the Intelligence Industrial Complex: your number’s up.
I’ve read Part I of Hobbes’ Leviathan and wonder what it would have been like if he filtered his thoughts through Hume or Wittgenstein. Hobbes makes Dickens read like Pollyanna. It’s an interesting historical piece, worth reading on that basis alone. It reads as if the Christian Bible had to pass through a legal review before it had been published, sapped of vigour. As bad a rap as Schopenhauer seems to get, Hobbes is the consummate Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah, humbug – you nasty, brutish, filthy animals!*
Audio: NotebookLM podcast conversation on this topic.
In any case, it got me thinking of free will and, more to the point, of will itself.
A Brief History of Humanity’s Favourite Metaphysical Scapegoat
By the time Free Will turned up to the party, the real guest of honour—the Will—had already been drinking heavily, muttering incoherently in the corner, and starting fights with anyone who made eye contact. We like to pretend that the “will” is a noble concept: the engine of our autonomy, the core of our moral selves, the brave little metaphysical organ that lets us choose kale over crisps. But in truth, it’s a bloody mess—philosophy’s equivalent of a family heirloom that no one quite understands but refuses to throw away.
So, let’s rewind. Where did this thing come from? And why, after 2,500 years of name-dropping, finger-pointing, and metaphysical gymnastics, are we still not quite sure whether we have a will, are a will, or should be suing it for damages?
Plato: Soul, Reason, and That Poor Horse
In the beginning, there was Plato, who—as with most things—half-invented the question and then wandered off before giving a straight answer. For him, the soul was a tripartite circus act: reason, spirit, and appetite. Will, as a term, didn’t get top billing—it didn’t even get its name on the poster. But the idea was there, muddling along somewhere between the charioteer (reason) and the unruly horses (desire and spiritedness).
No explicit will, mind you. Just a vague sense that the rational soul ought to be in charge, even if it had to beat the rest of itself into submission.
Aristotle: Purpose Without Pathos
Aristotle, ever the tidy-minded taxonomist, introduced prohairesis—deliberate choice—as a sort of proto-will. But again, it was all about rational calculation toward an end. Ethics was teleological, goal-oriented. You chose what aligned with eudaimonia, that smug Greek term for flourishing. Will, if it existed at all, was just reason picking out dinner options based on your telos. No inner torment, no existential rebellion—just logos in a toga.
Augustine: Sin, Suffering, and That Eternal No
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and along comes Saint Augustine, traumatised by his libido and determined to make the rest of us suffer for it. Enter voluntas: the will as the seat of choice—and the scene of the crime. Augustine is the first to really make the will bleed. He discovers he can want two incompatible things at once and feels properly appalled about it.
From this comes the classic Christian cocktail: freedom plus failure equals guilt. The will is free, but broken. It’s responsible for sin, for disobedience, for not loving God enough on Wednesdays. Thanks to Augustine, we’re stuck with the idea that the will is both the instrument of salvation and the reason we’re going to Hell.
Cheers.
Medievals: God’s Will or Yours, Pick One
The Scholastics, never ones to let an ambiguity pass unanalysed, promptly split into camps. Aquinas, ever the reasonable Dominican, says the will is subordinate to the intellect. God is rational, and so are we, mostly. But Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the original voluntarist hooligans, argue that the will is superior—even in God. God could have made murder a virtue, they claim, and you’d just have to live with it.
From this cheerful perspective, will becomes a force of arbitrary fiat, and humans, made in God’s image, inherit the same capacity for irrational choice. The will is now more than moral; it’s metaphysical. Less reason’s servant, more chaos goblin.
Hobbes: Appetite with Delusions of Grandeur
Then along comes Thomas Hobbes, who looks at the soul and sees a wheezing machine of appetites. Will, in his famously cheery view, is simply “the last appetite before action.” No higher calling, no spiritual struggle—just the twitch that wins. Man is not a rational animal, but a selfish algorithm on legs. For Hobbes, will is where desire stumbles into motion, and morality is a polite euphemism for not getting stabbed.
Kant: The Will Gets a Makeover
Enter Immanuel Kant: powdered wig, pursed lips, and the moral rectitude of a man who scheduled his bowel movements. Kant gives us the “good will”, which acts from duty, not desire. Suddenly, the will is autonomous, rational, and morally legislative—a one-man Parliament of inner law.
It’s all terribly noble, terribly German, and entirely exhausting. For Kant, free will is not the ability to do whatever you like—it’s the capacity to choose according to moral law, even when you’d rather be asleep. The will is finally heroic—but only if it agrees to hate itself a little.
Schopenhauer: Cosmic Will, Cosmic Joke
And then the mood turns. Schopenhauer, world’s grumpiest mystic, takes Kant’s sublime will and reveals it to be a blind, thrashing, cosmic force. Will, for him, isn’t reason—it’s suffering in motion. The entire universe is will-to-live: a desperate, pointless striving that dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction.
There is no freedom, no morality, no point. The only escape is to negate the will, preferably through aesthetic contemplation or Buddhist-like renunciation. In Schopenhauer’s world, the will is not what makes us human—it’s what makes us miserable.
Nietzsche: Transvaluation and the Will to Shout Loudest
Cue Nietzsche, who takes Schopenhauer’s howling void and says: yes, but what if we made it fabulous? For him, the will is no longer to live, but to power—to assert, to create, to impose value. “Free will” is a theologian’s fantasy, a tool of priests and moral accountants. But will itself? That’s the fire in the forge. The Übermensch doesn’t renounce the will—he rides it like a stallion into the sunset of morality.
Nietzsche doesn’t want to deny the abyss. He wants to waltz with it.
Today: Free Will and the Neuroscientific Hangover
And now? Now we’re left with compatibilists, libertarians, determinists, and neuroscientists all shouting past each other, armed with fMRI machines and TED talks. Some claim free will is an illusion, a post hoc rationalisation made by brains doing what they were always going to do. Others insist that moral responsibility requires it, even if we can’t quite locate it between the neurons.
We talk about willpower, will-to-change, political will, and free will like they’re real things. But under the hood, we’re still wrestling with the same questions Augustine posed in a North African villa: Why do I do what I don’t want to do? And more importantly, who’s doing it?
Conclusion: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Mess
From Plato’s silent horses to Nietzsche’s Dionysian pyrotechnics, the will has shape-shifted more times than a politician in an election year. It has been a rational chooser, a moral failure, a divine spark, a mechanical twitch, a cosmic torment, and an existential triumph.
Despite centuries of philosophical handwringing, what it has never been is settled.
So where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the way? Twisting, contradictory, and littered with the corpses of half-baked metaphysical systems.
Welcome to the labyrinth. Bring snacks.
* The solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short quote is forthcoming. Filthy animals is a nod to Home Alone.
Humans, we are told, are exceptional—unlike the rest of the lowly animal kingdom. We alone possess reason, morality, and the ability to transcend our base instincts. And yet, curiously, this argument is rolled out only when convenient. At times, we are commanded to rise above our primal urges; at others, we are scolded for even thinking about resisting them. This ideological schizophrenia is no accident—it is a feature, not a bug, of our prevailing moral and economic order.
The contradictions of “human nature” arguments can be broken down into two key patterns:
A. We must transcend our animal instincts—but only when they threaten social or economic order.
B. We must accept our animal instincts as unchangeable—but only when they reinforce existing power structures.
This hypocrisy is especially visible in how capitalism and morality are framed. Let’s examine two case studies.
Case 1: Prostitution—A Market That Must Be Morally Suppressed
Sex is as fundamental a biological drive as hunger or thirst. One would think that in a world where everything is commodified, prostitution—the most direct transaction of supply and demand—would be embraced by free-market capitalists. But no. We are told that engaging in this “base” activity is degrading, immoral, and must be curtailed. The same capitalists who defend free enterprise at all costs suddenly become moralists, urging us to resist temptation and rise above our urges. Sex, despite being one of the most natural acts imaginable, is treated as an impulse to be tamed rather than an economic exchange to be normalised.
Case 2: Capitalism—A System We Must Accept as “Natural”
Contrast this with how we are told to think about capitalism. Greed, exploitation, and ruthless competition? Those are “just human nature.” The strong thrive, and the weak perish. We are warned not to question the system because to do so would be to fight against nature itself. Socialism? A naive fantasy. Economic cooperation? Impossible. Mutual aid? Utopian nonsense. We must accept that humans are selfish creatures, that hierarchy is inevitable, and that billionaires accumulating obscene wealth while millions starve is simply the way of things.
Why are we ordered to suppress our instincts in one case yet surrender to them in another? Because morality, in its institutional form, is not about virtue—it is about control.
The Convenient Flexibility of “Human Nature”
This selective logic is designed to keep power structures intact. The rules shift depending on whose interests are at stake:
If an instinct challenges profit or control, it must be suppressed.
If an instinct benefits the ruling order, it must be accepted as natural.
Thus, the same societies that demand moral restraint when it comes to sex, leisure, or pleasure suddenly rediscover their inner Darwinist when defending capitalist greed and economic cruelty.
The “Natural Order” Myth
The claim that capitalism is the inevitable result of human nature is one of history’s greatest ideological scams. If it were indeed “natural,” it would not require:
Constant propaganda to reinforce its legitimacy.
Violent suppression of alternative systems.
Trillions in government bailouts every time it fails.
Moreover, humans are not only competitive, selfish creatures. We are also wired for cooperation, altruism, and communal living—traits conveniently erased from discussions about economics.
Final Thought: Breaking the Cycle
If we can rise above base instincts for sex and violence, why can’t we rise above capitalist greed and exploitation? Why is overcoming “human nature” only demanded when it suits power? The truth is, we are only commanded to rise above when it keeps us obedient—and ordered to accept reality when it keeps the powerful in control.
The only real rebellion is to reject this hypocrisy entirely. The future belongs not to those who passively accept the contradictions of the present, but to those who refuse to play by its schizophrenic rules.
Philosophics 