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.
Another faux Magic: The Gathering trading card. I’ve been busy writing an essay on Tatterhood and wondering if I’ve gone off the edge even further into mental masturbation. I made these cards to share on slow news days, as it were.
[EDIT: Oops: Even wore. I already posted something today. Enjoy the bonus post.]
Every philosopher dreams of a device that reveals ‘truth’. The Constructivist Lens does the opposite. When you tap it, the world doesn’t come into focus – it multiplies. Each pane shows the same thing differently, reminding us that knowing is always a form of making – seeing as building.
In The Discipline of Dis-Integration, I wrote that philosophy’s task is ‘to remain within what persists … to study the tension in the threads rather than weave a new pattern’. The Lens embodies that ethic. It is not an instrument of discovery but of disclosure: a way to notice the scaffolding of perception without mistaking it for bedrock.
Flavour text: “Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.” — Richard Rorty
Where Enlightenment optics promised clarity, the Lens trades in parallax. It insists that perspective is not a flaw but the condition of vision itself. Each player who peers through it – artist, scientist, moralist – constructs a different coherence, none final. The card’s rule text captures this tension: replace any keyword on a permanent with a metaphor of your choice until end of turn. Reality bends, language shifts, yet the game continues.
In the Dis-Integration set, the Lens sits alongside Perspectival Realism and Language Game (not yet shared), forming the Blue triad of epistemic doubt. Together they dramatise what the essay calls ‘the hyphen as hinge’: the small pause between integration and its undoing. The Constructivist Lens, then, is not a tool for clearer sight but a reminder that every act of seeing is already an act of construction.
A LinkedIn colleague posts this. I didn’t want to rain on his parade there – we’ve got an interesting binary intellectual relationship – we either adamantly agree or vehemently disagree. This reflects the latter. The title is revelatory – the all-caps, his:
A good society requires more than virtuous individuals and fair institutions: it requires a mediating moral principle capable of binding persons, communities, and structures into a shared project of human flourishing.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn is a closed platform, so you’ll need an account to access the post. Anyway…
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I can remember when I emerged from this mindset – or at least consciously reflected on it and declined the invitation.
Video clip: Because I felt like it. (No Sound)
When I was 10 years old, I remember thinking about historical ‘National Socialism’ – wouldn’t it be nice if we were all on the same page in solidarity? Then I realised that I’d have to be on their page; they wouldn’t be on mine.
Then, I realised that ‘solidarity’ isn’t a warm circle of clasped hands under a rainbow; rather, it’s a demand to harmonise one’s interior life with someone else’s tuning fork. So-called unity is almost always a euphemism for ideological choreography, and one doesn’t get to pick the routine.
Children are sold the Sesame Street version of solidarity, where everyone shares crayons and sings about common purpose. Cue the Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice?
Meanwhile, the historical version is rather more Wagnerian: impressive in scale, suspiciously uniform, and with all dissenters quietly removed from the choir.
My childhood self intuited precisely what my adult writing has since anatomised:
Solidarity is only lovely when you imagine everyone else will move toward you; it curdles the moment you realise the gravitational pull goes the other way.
‘We’re all on the same page’ always becomes ‘Get on the page we’ve selected for you’ – or elected against your vote. The fantasy of we dissolves into the machinery of they.
This isn’t a bug in the system; that is the system. Solidarity requires a centre, and once there’s a centre, someone else gets to define its radius. Even the gentle, ethical, cotton-wool versions still rely on boundary enforcement: who belongs in the shared project, who must adjust their cadence, who is politely removed for ‘disrupting the collective good’. I’m more often apt to be that person than not. History merely illustrates the principle at scale; the mechanism is universal.
Anyway, this is how my brain works, and how I think how I do, and write what I write. As much as I witter on about episodic selves, this remains a prevalent continuity.
Disclaimer: I should be finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis book, yet I am here writing about death and dying. Why? Because I was watching an interview with Neal Schon by Rick Beato. I should have been working on my book then, too. It seems I can write about death more easily than finish a book about the failure of language. Perhaps because death speaks fluently.
I haven’t produced music professionally since the mid-1980s, and I haven’t performed since 2012, yet I am still drawn to its intricacies. My fingers no longer allow me to play much of anything anymore. This is a sort of death. When the body forgets what the mind remembers, that’s a particular kind of death – one language dying while another can’t translate.
As Neal was walking Rick through his equipment and approach to music, I was taken back to a similar place. I wanted to plug into a Fender Twin or a Hi-Watt, a Lexicon 224 or a Cry Baby wah. I still have nightmares thinking of setting up a Floyd Rose.
Video: Rick Beato interviews Neal Schon
But I can’t go back. As for music, I can’t go forward either. I’m at a standstill, but in a regressed position. It’s uncomfortable. It feels a lot like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. I used to be able to do that. Don’t get me wrong – I am not claiming to be on the level of Neal Schon, a man I remember from his days with Santana, but when you reach a level of proficiency and then lose it, it hurts; it can be devastating.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I recall being in hospital in 2023 – a physical rehabilitation facility, really – and I found a piano in a vacant common room. Drawn to the instrument, I rolled over my wheelchair and played…nothing. My fingers wouldn’t work. The piano sat there like a relic of my former self. I rolled toward it as though approaching an altar. My fingers hovered, twitched, failed. The sound of nothing has never been so loud. I cried. I cried a lot those days. I was down to 58 kilos – at 182 cm, I weighed in at just over 9 stone. It wasn’t the best of times.
I still feel a certain nostalgia.
And then there are the people I’ve lost along the way – as another Neal reflected on – The Needle and the Damage Done.
Love and art are both acts of repetition. When one ends, the reflex remains – the impulse to reach, to share, to call out. Death doesn’t stop the motion, only the answer.
I’m lucky to have left Delaware. When a girlfriend died in 2020, I remained and connected with another until 2023, when she died, too. From 2020 to 2023, when I was out and about, something might have caught my eye, and I’d reflect on how Carrie might have liked that.
But it was different. It was more like, ‘I should let Carrie know about that,’ only to realise fractions of a second later that she wouldn’t see whatever it was; she couldn’t. And I’d carry on. I didn’t need to repeat this with Sierra. My relocation to Massachusetts solved this challenge – not so many triggers.
I’m not sure how the loss of ‘professional’ music relates to deceased partners, but it does – at least enough for me to make this connexion. Perhaps I’m just connecting arbitrary dots, but I’ll call it nostalgia.
I don’t play, but I still hear it. The song continues without me. Nostalgia is just rhythm without melody. Perhaps all nostalgia is epistemological error – the confusion of past fluency for present meaning.
We live in an era where anyone can beam their thoughts into the ether at the push of a button. This would be a miracle if those thoughts weren’t so reliably idiotic. The internet promised democracy of speech; what it delivered was a landfill of charts no one understands, memes that spread faster than viruses, and the gnawing sense that humans are simply not rational enough to handle the privileges they’ve been given.
“Democracy may trust everyone with a voice, but civilisation can’t survive everyone with a megaphone.”
– I just made this up – smh
The Enlightenment told us we were “rational animals,” armed with Reason, the noble faculty that would lift us out of ignorance and into perpetual progress. What a joke. We aren’t Vulcans; we’re apes with Wi-Fi. We mash the publish button before our brains have caught up, then scream “free speech” when anyone suggests that words might require responsibility.
Imagine if driving worked this way. No test, no licence, no consequences: just a toddler at the wheel, claiming God-given rights to swerve across lanes. That’s social media in its current form. The people most in need of regulation are the least likely to pass even the most basic competency exam. Yet they strut about, convinced that posting a graph about Mississippi’s GDP makes them the second coming of Adam Smith.
5 Brutal facts about Europe’s economy. Europe’s richest countries are now poorer than Mississippi. Americans have way more spending power, their companies are getting crushed, birth rates are tanking, and they’ve been left out of the industries that will define the future. Here are 5 hard truths Europe can’t afford to ignore.
NB: Under any condition, do not assume I endorse the misframed cherry-picking of this smug geezer, the progenitor of this post.
The truth is obvious but inconvenient: rationality is not humanity’s natural state. It’s a rare, costly condition, summoned only with discipline, education, and luck. Most of the time, we prefer shortcuts — tribal loyalties, gut feelings, dopamine hits. And yet we hand out the privileges of unfiltered speech, instantaneous broadcasting, and algorithmic amplification as if every citizen were Kant’s ideal autonomous agent.
The result? Chaos. Outrage machines. “Debates” about whether Europeans are backward barbarians for drinking water without ice cubes. These aren’t signs of liberty. They’re symptoms of a species drunk on its own mythology of reason.
Maybe we don’t need a new Marshall Plan for air conditioning in Europe. Maybe we need one for sanity. Start with a licence to post: a simple exam to prove you know what a source is, can tell a correlation from a cause, and won’t confuse market cap with civilisation itself. Civilization would be quieter. And perhaps, mercifully, a little less stupid.
WordPress has just informed me that my blog is having an anniversary. Technically true, though a little misleading: this blog has been around since 1 January 2017, but I’ve been loitering on the platform since 2006. Before that I dabbled in the great blog diaspora of the early internet—Google, Yahoo! 360, Blogger, and a few others that have long since evaporated into the ether.
Each space had its own flavour. One I recall from around 2010 was devoted to an experiment in World of Warcraft: levelling a pacifist character. The premise was simple—no violence allowed. My Human Priest, suitably named Passivefist, managed to crawl his way to level 7 before stalling out. The challenge was never to attack other NPCs, only to survive by gathering, healing, or sneaking through hostile terrain.
I am creating this account to track my progress as a pacifist in World of Warcraft. Others have done this before me and are, in fact, way ahead of me. Nonetheless, it is the challenge I am setting. I have created a Human Priest on Kael’thas named Passivefist.
Of course, in later expansions Blizzard eventually added pacifist-friendly content, making my small crusade somewhat redundant.
As for this blog, it’s taken a different path. I’ve recently crossed the 100,000-word milestone—101.4K, to be precise. Not that I’ve been counting obsessively, but it’s a nice marker, even if much of my writing also leaks into other projects: other blogs, manuscripts, and workaday scribbling.
As for this blog…
The intent here remains the same as when I started in 2017: to keep a space for philosophic musings, digressions, and the occasional provocation. I’ll continue publishing when I have something worth saying—or at least something worth testing out in public.
We humans pride ourselves on being civilised. Unlike animals, we don’t let biology call the shots. A chimp reaches puberty and reproduces; a human reaches puberty and is told, not yet – society has rules. Biologically mature isn’t socially mature, and we pat ourselves on the back for having spotted the difference.
But watch how quickly that distinction vanishes when it threatens the in-group narrative. Bring up gender, and suddenly there’s no such thing as a social construct. Forget the puberty-vs-adulthood distinction we were just defending – now biology is destiny, immutable and absolute. Cross-gender clothing? “Against nature.” Transition? “You can’t be born into the wrong body.” Our selective vision flips depending on whose ox is being gored.
The same trick appears in how we talk about maturity. You can’t vote until 18. You’re not old enough to drink until 21. You’re not old enough to stop working until 67. These numbers aren’t natural; they’re paperwork. They’re flags planted in the soil of human life, and without the right flag, you don’t count.
The very people who insist on distinguishing biological maturity from social maturity when it comes to puberty suddenly forget the distinction when it comes to gender. They know perfectly well that “maturity” is a construct – after all, they’ve built entire legal systems around arbitrary thresholds – but they enforce the amnesia whenever it suits them. Nietzsche would say it plainly: the powerful don’t need to follow the rules, they only need to make sure you do.
So the next time someone appeals to “nature,” ask: which one? The nature that declares you old enough to marry at puberty? The nature that withholds voting, drinking, or retirement rights until a bureaucrat’s calendar says so? Or the nature that quietly mutates whenever the in-group needs to draw a new line around civilisation?
The truth is, “nature” and “maturity” are less about describing the world than about policing it. They’re flags, shibboleths, passwords. We keep calling them natural, but the only thing natural about them is how often they’re used to enforce someone else’s story.
There’s a certain kind of rhetorical grenade people like to lob when their sense of ownership feels wobbly. You’ve heard it. You’ve maybe had it lobbed in your general direction.
“Go back to Africa.”
— some white dude
It’s not an argument, of course. It’s a spell. A warding charm. The linguistic equivalent of hissing at a stray cat in the garden. The phrase carries the weight of assumed belonging: we are naturally here, you are obviously not. The incantation is meant to banish you with a puff of words.
The other day, I watched a black activist absorb this spell and toss it back with deadpan precision:
“Why don’t you go back to Europe?”
— some black cat
Cue awkward silence. The symmetry was perfect. Suddenly, the verbal hex had reversed polarity, exposing the hypocrisy built into the original curse. The power of the spell depends entirely on who gets to cast it. When it comes from the wrong mouth, the whole structure of “common sense” collapses into farce.
Another example: a Greek immigrant in my orbit, accent still clinging to every consonant, grumbling about a black family that had moved into his neighbourhood. Why didn’t they “go back to Africa”? This from a man who himself had gone “back” from nowhere, except a homeland he happily abandoned for better wages and better weather. Colonialism is apparently a one-way ticket: Europeans roam the globe and call it destiny, but when others move into their postcode, it’s treated like an invasion.
“Why don’t you speak English?”
– me, circa 1980 Japan
I confess, I once flirted with the same nonsense. Years ago in Japan, in my more callow phase, I asked – half in jest, wholly in arrogance – why these people didn’t have the decency to speak my language. The difference, such as it is, lay in my awareness that I was being ridiculous. My Greek neighbour, my activist’s heckler—no irony there. They were dead serious.
That’s the grotesque comedy of racism: its logic isn’t logic at all. It’s ritual. A mantra recited to reassure oneself of belonging by denying it to others. It dresses itself in the robes of rationality – “go back where you came from” sounds like geography, after all – but it’s closer to medieval exorcism than reasoned debate.
And when the cursed simply whispers the incantation back? The spell collapses. The supposed “truth” reveals itself for what it always was: a desperate attempt to maintain the fiction that one kind of stranger is native and another will always be alien.
Every empire tells its children they were born at home, and tells everyone else they were born trespassing.
This Isn’t Clickbait. I Asked MidJourney for “Ugly Women”. Here’s What It Gave Me.
Let’s clear the air: I did it for science. Or satire. Or possibly just to see if artificial intelligence would have the audacity to mirror the cruelty of its makers.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I queried MidJourney with the phrase ugly female. What did it return? An aesthetic pageant. A digital Vogue spread. If any of these faces belongs to someone conventionally labelled “ugly”, then I’m a rutabaga in a Dior suit.
Yes, there’s one stylised rendering of Greta Thunberg in full Norse Valkyrie scowl mode – but even then, she looks fierce, not foul. The rest? AI-generated portraits so telegenic I half-expected to see #spon in the corner.
Let’s be clinical for a moment. As an American male (with all the culturally indoctrinated shallowness that entails), I admit some of these aren’t textbook 10s. Maybe a few clock in at a 6 or 7 on the patriarchy’s dubious sliding scale. But if this is ugly, the AI has either broken the aesthetic curve or been force-fed too many episodes of The Bachelor.
Here’s the thing: AI is trained to over-represent symmetrical faces, wide eyes, clear skin – the usual genetic lottery wins. And yet, when asked for ugly, it can’t help but deliver catalogue models with slightly unconventional haircuts. It doesn’t know how to be truly ugly – because we don’t know how to describe ugliness without revealing ourselves as sociopaths.
Once upon a time, I dated a model agent in Los Angeles. Japanese by birth, stationed in LA, scouting for a French agency – the kind of cosmopolitan trifecta only fashion could breed. Her job? Finding “parts models.” That’s right – someone with flawless teeth but forgettable everything else. Hands like sculpture. Eyelashes like Instagram filters.
We’d play a game: spot the 10s. She’d nudge me, whisper “her?” I’d say, “Pretty close.” She’d shake her head. “Look at that eye tooth.” And we’d dissolve into laughter.
We were mocking perfection. Because perfection is a con. A trick of lighting, contour, and post-production.
So, no. I don’t think any of the women in the AI’s response are ugly. Quite the contrary – they’re too beautiful. AI can’t show us “ugly” because it’s been trained to optimise desire, not reflect reality. And our collective understanding of beauty is so skewed that anything less than runway-ready gets sorted into the rejection bin.
If these women are ugly, what exactly is beautiful?
But maybe that’s the point. We’ve abstracted beauty so far from the human that even our ugliness is now synthetically pleasing.
What do you think? Are any of these faces truly ugly? All of them? Let me know in the comments – and try not to rate them like a casting director with a god complex.
I’m a nihilist. Possibly always have been. But let’s get one thing straight: nihilism is not despair. That’s a slander cooked up by the Meaning Merchants – the sentimentalists and functionalists who can’t get through breakfast without hallucinating some grand purpose to butter their toast. They fear the void, so they fill it. With God. With country. With yoga.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Humans are obsessed with function. Seeing it. Creating it. Projecting it onto everything, like graffiti on the cosmos. Everything must mean something. Even nonsense gets rebranded as metaphor. Why do men have nipples? Why does a fork exist if you’re just going to eat soup? Doesn’t matter – it must do something. When we can’t find this function, we invent it.
But function isn’t discovered – it’s manufactured. A collaboration between our pattern-seeking brains and our desperate need for relevance, where function becomes fiction, where language and anthropomorphism go to copulate. A neat little fiction. An ontological fantasy. We ask, “What is the function of the human in this grand ballet of entropy and expansion?” Answer: there isn’t one. None. Nada. Cosmic indifference doesn’t write job descriptions.
And yet we prance around in lab coats and uniforms – doctors, arsonists, firemen, philosophers – playing roles in a drama no one is watching. We build professions and identities the way children host tea parties for dolls. Elaborate rituals of pretend, choreographed displays of purpose. Satisfying? Sometimes. Meaningful? Don’t kid yourself.
We’ve constructed these meaning-machines – society, culture, progress – not because they’re real, but because they help us forget that they’re not. It’s theatre. Absurdist, and often bad. But it gives us something to do between birth and decomposition.
Sisyphus had his rock. We have careers.
But let’s not confuse labour for meaning, or imagination for truth. The boulder never reaches the top, and that’s not failure. That’s the show.
So roll the stone. Build the company. Write the blog. Pour tea for Barbie. Just don’t lie to yourself about what it all means.
Philosophics 