What followed was a case study in how not to communicate.
LinkedIn, that self-parody of professional virtue signalling, is essentially a digital networking séance: a place where narcissism wears a tie. So I expected a reaction – just not one quite so unintentionally revealing.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But First…
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
— Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesn’t kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, it’s not an atrocity – it’s ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented – and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern – social media’s endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism – pure, fair, competitive – untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘That’s not capitalism, that’s bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
« Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. »
Image: Mentioned Meme
That’s the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia – functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. It’s a comforting fable that erases the costs – colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapse—folded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘You’re confused,’ ‘You’re a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. It’s a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
That’s precisely the blindness the post was about – the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken – just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘It’s not capitalism; it’s profiteering’.
This is capitalism’s soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isn’t capitalism – it’s people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. It’s a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalism’s most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few – precious few – saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalism’s violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the “cost optimisation” logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration – it’s the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isn’t extinct – merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People don’t read – hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic – all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself – automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesn’t scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesn’t just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity – the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage – the economic expression of the Enlightenment’s original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isn’t that we’ve lost meaning. It’s that we’ve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradise… end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is “decency”? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. I’ll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in “cost optimization” than other businesses. To say that someone’s chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someone’s second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with “capitalism”. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such “adjustments” to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not “capitalism”. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
You’re a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that don’t work and that’s where we’re at. You’re killing the future. You’re an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and you’ll be the one who’s bitching when you’re on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As I’ve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in today’s capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Today’s profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and it’s not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism — where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) describes how “self-regulating” markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call “real capitalism” is, in Polanyi’s terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (1994–2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalism’s algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weber’s early insight into rationalisation—the conversion of moral action into procedural necessity—reaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed “the banality of evil” as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Han’s In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics — the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment — a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of “self-made” success functions as capitalism’s moral camouflage — the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernity’s central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, showing how every human system — political, linguistic, economic — eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly — not construction — is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty — a narrative form of “cost-optimisation ethics.”
Whenever you point out that capitalism kills – quietly, bureaucratically, with paperwork instead of bullets—someone inevitably pipes up about the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor. It’s a reflex, like the ideological hiccup of a system allergic to self-reflection.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
One such defender of the sacred market recently wrote:
“Half a truth is often a great lie. What about the Great Leap Forward? The Holodomor? The Cambodian Genocide? The slaughters caused by socialism?” (thread)
You can almost hear the pearls clutching.
For context, I share the text from his profile. I’ll let you perform the personality assessment.
One thing I will promise; I never block anyone just because I may disagree with or dislike their words. Because the only people who do are cowards. Want to attack me? Fine. If you think that makes the world a better place, go ahead; you cannot hurt me with your words.
Let’s be clear: the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are not Communism™ incarnate, any more than Donald Trump represents Democracy™. Systems don’t commit atrocities; people do – though some systems make atrocity easier, more efficient, and more deniable.
To illustrate: imagine Luigi Mangioni shoots and kills Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi is an individual agent. Thompson, by contrast, is the face of a healthcare system that quietly decides who lives and who dies based on profitability.
If Thompson represents a system that allows people to die for lack of coverage, who bears the greater moral burden? Luigi, with his single bullet – or the corporate mechanism that kills by neglect, at scale, every day?
Capitalism hides behind its abstraction. It kills by omission. Stalin and Mao at least had the decency to be explicit. The capitalist death machine grinds on invisibly, its victims written off as ‘market externalities’.
So when a self-described truth-teller tells me to make a video about ‘the slaughters of socialism’, I’ll happily oblige – right after he makes one about preventable deaths under his beloved market: the uninsured, the unhoused, the unprofitable. The only difference between Stalin’s gulags and our modern equivalents is branding. One killed by decree; the other kills by design.
It’s almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernism’s last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido – good heavens – was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
“In the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.”
The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.
Fromm’s optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
“After the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.”
Ah yes, the Jazz Age orgy of liberation – champagne, Freud, and flapper hemlines. The problem, of course, is that every generation mistakes its new neuroses for freedom from the old ones. Fromm’s “sexual revolution” was barely a shuffle in the bourgeois bedroom; Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe arrived the next year, practically shouting across the café table that liberation was still a myth stitched into the same old corset.
Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society – as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.
Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasn’t something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it – half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Fromm’s optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.
The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.
So yes, Fromm’s Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith – this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldn’t see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.
Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Fromm’s dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps it’s precisely that naivety that’s worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion – before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
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.
This is Chapter 5 of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while and wasn’t sure how a 70-year-old book could have so much relevance, but it does. Granted, some of it is irrelevant, a victim of the period it was written. This happens.
Sidebar: Whilst praising Freud, Fromm also calls him out, essentially accusing him of projecting his mummy-daddy issues onto the world at large. When I first encountered Freud’s work in the 1980s, it was already largely discredited. Some of what should have been wasn’t. Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst heavily overshadowed his other contributions. In fact, Freud offers some strong philosophical insights into society and civilisation. He’s not all about cigars and dreamscapes.
What strikes me about this chapter is the historical perspective it provides on capitalism. I’m an academic economist. I taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade. I’ve read (and recommend reading) Marx’s Capital firsthand.
Audio: NotebookLM Podcast commentary on this content.
Fromm adds additional details here. Firstly, he notes that the capitalism that marked the early days of the Industrial Revolution—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—differed from that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earlier period still had cultural and moral tethers that became frayed or lost in later periods. Without regurgitating the chapter, I cite some themes:
“this underselling practice is grown to such a shameful height, that particular persons publicly advertise that they undersell the rest of the trade.”
People were not very keen on price cutting as a competitive mechanism.
They also note the unfair competitive advantage of the monied elites who could buy materials in cash instead of credit and could thereby undercut prices, who would have to account for paying interest rates or markups on credit.
Whilst in the twentieth century, regulating undercutting is seen as protectionism, the earlier centuries had no problems defending merchants. We do have laws on the ebooks that prevent dumping, but these are rarely enforced, and when they are, it’s a political rather than economic statement. In practice, but done in the name of economics are politics in the same manner as science was used as cover to implement policy during the COVID-19 debacle.
Montesquieu says “that machines which diminish the numbers of workers are ‘pernicious’.” This sentiment echoes the current sentiments about robotics and artificial intelligence.
Nineteenth-century capitalism saw man as the measure of all things supplanted by capital. This is the capitalism Marx rails against—profits over humanity and society, the pursuit of local maxima at the expense of global maxima. This is also where the goal of hypergrowth and growth for growth’s sake came into vogue, ushering us into the Modern Age of Modern ideals—science, progress, order, and so on.
I won’t exhaust the chapter here, but for what it is, it’s a relatively light read. Whether I comment on later chapters depends on whether they engage me. Cheers.
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.
Because I didn’t want to expend the time and effort of drafting an essay on this follow-up to my recent post on the debate on the age of consent and other morally charged issues, I asked ChatGPT 5.2* for a response after a chat and using my article as input. Here it is unedited.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
There is a peculiar social reflex that appears whenever rigorous reasoning is applied to a moral taboo. The reasoning is not assessed. It is diagnosed. The act of analysis itself is treated as incriminating. To ask whether a law is coherent is taken as evidence that one wishes to violate it. To interrogate a norm is assumed to be an endorsement of its transgression.
Logic becomes guilt by association.
This is not a recent development, nor a failure of individual temperament. It is a recurring structural feature of liberal moral discourse. And it has been observed, repeatedly, by thinkers who were then punished for observing it.
Most of them learned to speak obliquely. Those who didn’t were posthumously moralised into villains.
Power Punishes Inquiry Before It Punishes Acts
This pattern is clearest in the work of Michel Foucault, though he never named it so baldly. Across his analyses of sexuality, psychiatry, criminality, and deviance, Foucault shows how discourse does not merely regulate behaviour. It regulates who may speak and at what cost.
In The History of Sexuality, inquiry into sex is not treated as a neutral investigation. It is treated as participation. To analyse is already to be implicated. The question “why is this norm structured this way?” is reinterpreted as “why do you want to do this?”
Power does not refute the argument. It reframes the arguer.
What I have called the moral contamination reflex is simply Foucault’s power-knowledge dynamic rendered without euphemism. Description collapses into confession. Analysis becomes evidence.
Thinking Itself Becomes Suspicious
Hannah Arendt encountered the same mechanism outside the domain of sexuality. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she refused moral theatre and insisted on analysis. The result was predictable. Her work was read not as an explanation, but as an apology. Reflection was interpreted as sympathy. Distance as betrayal.
She did not excuse. She thought. That was enough.
Arendt grasped something liberal societies remain unwilling to admit: in moralised contexts, explanation is treated as exculpation. The refusal to perform outrage is itself construed as an ethical failure. Thought becomes suspect because it disrupts consensus emotion.
Interpretation as an Affront to Feeling
Susan Sontag made the same diagnosis from another angle. Against Interpretation is often misread as anti-intellectualism. It is not. It is a critique of cultures that prize affective immediacy and treat analysis as dilution.
In taboo domains, interpretation is framed as aestheticising harm, smoothing over pain, or evading responsibility. Feeling must remain raw. Unmediated. Authoritative. Analysis becomes a threat because it interrupts the emotional unanimity that stands in for moral clarity.
Liberal cultures, Sontag saw, defend affect as moral authority and punish anyone who insists on distance.
Logic Never Gets Jurisdiction
Where Foucault and Arendt focus on power and panic, Stanley Fish supplies the institutional explanation. His work on interpretive communities shows that arguments about taboo subjects are never evaluated on formal grounds. They are assessed for alignment.
If a conclusion threatens a community’s moral posture, the reasoning is reclassified as motive-revealing behaviour. The argument is not wrong. It is telling on you.
Fish’s core insight applies cleanly here: what counts as reason depends on whether the community wants the conclusion. Logic does not fail. It is denied jurisdiction.
The Oldest Warning Everyone Claims to Believe
None of this would have surprised John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, his fear is not bad laws, but laws insulated from scrutiny by moral certainty. Once questioning itself is pathologised, correction becomes impossible.
Mill assumed that rational inquiry survives moral offence. That assumption has quietly expired. What remains is the performance of rationality alongside the suppression of its consequences.
The Scapegoat Absorbs the Argument
René Girard supplies the anthropological layer that completes the picture. In moments of moral panic, societies do not debate inconsistencies. They select carriers of contamination.
The thinker becomes the stand-in for the anxiety the argument provokes. Accusation replaces refutation. Biography replaces premise. Once the speaker is expelled, coherence is restored without ever being examined.
This explains why historical figures are so often retroactively moralised. Their arguments are no longer addressed. Their character is sufficient.
The Pattern, Stated Plainly
What unites these perspectives is a single rule that liberal societies refuse to articulate:
Certain questions may not be asked without self-implication.
To analyse is to confess. To clarify is to endorse. To question is to reveal desire.
This is why figures like Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze are now routinely invoked as moral warnings rather than intellectual interlocutors. The goal is not to understand what was argued, but to signal that asking such questions is itself disqualifying.
Moral certainty is preserved. Legal incoherence is left untouched.
What This Essay Is Not Doing
This is not a defence of bad arguments, harmful acts, or historical petitions. It is a defence of a distinction that has become strangely controversial: that describing the structure of a norm is not the same as endorsing the behaviour it regulates.
To point out that a legal threshold is philosophically arbitrary is not to advocate its abolition. To analyse a moral panic is not to side with its villains. To insist on logic is not to confess desire.
But this distinction is precisely what the moral contamination reflex is designed to erase.
Why Logic Feels Radioactive
The reason this argument provokes hostility is not that it is wrong. It is that it threatens a stabilising mechanism. Liberal societies rely on the fiction that their laws are both rational and morally self-evident. Scrutiny exposes the seams.
If logic is allowed back in, the theatre collapses. And theatres, moral or otherwise, do not like their lighting rigs inspected.
This is not a new failure mode. It is a recurring one. It appears whenever inquiry approaches a taboo and disappears the moment the inquirer becomes the story.
Which, predictably, is taken as further evidence of guilt.
Written by ChatGPT 5.2
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* Full disclosure and notice: If you don’t prefer GPT output, feel free to skip this piece. The names in bold had been hyperlinked, but the extended content didn’t survive the copy-paste process.
By fall, I don’t mean autumn except perhaps metaphorically speaking. The accompanying image illustrates a progression from the pre-Enlightenment reformation and the factors leading to the Modern Condition and increases in schizophrenia in people, societies, and enterprises.
Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content.
This image is essentially composited from a later chapter in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. In it, he outlines a path that commences at the Reformation that led to Lutheranism and Protestantism and further to Calvinism (not separately depicted). Max Weber argued that Capitalism is inextricably linked to Calvinism and the workmanship ideal tradition.
McGilchrists argument is founded on the notion that Catholocism is a communally oriented belief system whilst Protestantism is focused on the individual and salvation through personal work. The essence of capitalism is the same.
Of course, history isn’t strictly linear. In fact, there are more elements than one could realistically account for, so we rely on a reduction. In concert with the Reformation but on a slight delay is the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which led not only to faith in science but then to the pathology of Scientism.
This Protestant-Scientismic nexus brought us to Capitalism and into the Industrial Revolution, where humans were devivified or devitalised, trading their souls to be pawns to earn a few shekels to survive. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution led to Marxism, through Marx’s critique of Capitalism, but Marxism has the same fatal flaw as Capitalism inasmuch as it doesn’t view people as humans. It does afford them a slightly higher function as workers, but this still leaves humanity as a second-tier aspect and even historicity is elevated above as a sort of meta-trend or undercurrent.
From there, we transition to Modernity, which yields the modern condition and schizophrenics in one fell swoop. This is no coincidence.
Although I end this journey at Modernism, McGilchrist is also leery of the effects of post-modernism as well as philosophy itself as overly reductionist in its attempts to categorise and systematise, valuing signs and symbols over lived experience. His main complaint with postmodernism is that it moves from the objective perspective of Modernity to the subjective perspective, and so there remains no base foundation, which is the shared experience. I’m not sure I agree with his critique, but I’m not going to contemplate it here and now.
In the end, this journey and illustration are gross simplifications, but I still feel it provides valuable perspective. The challenge is that one can’t readily put the genie back into the bottle, and the question is where do we go from here, if not Modernism or Postmodernism. I shouldn’t even mention Metamodernism because that seems like an unlikely synthesis, as well-intentioned as it might be. McGilchrist gives examples of reversals in the trend toward left-hemisphere bias, notably the Romantic period, but that too was reversed, recommencing the current trajectory. My feeling is that if we continue down this dark path, we’ll reach a point of no return.
It seems to be that it’s growing at an increasing rate, like a snowball careening down a slope. It not only drives the left-dominant types further left because an analytical person would reinforce the belief that if only s/he and the world were more analytical things would be so much better—even in a world where net happiness is trending downward—, but it also forces this worldview on other cultures, effectively destroying them and assimilating them into the dark side, if I can borrow a Star Wars reference.
Epilogue
I wasn’t planning to share this story—at least not now. In another forum, I responded to a statement, and I was admonished by Professor Stephen Hicks, author of the book of dubious scholarship, Explaining Postmodernism.
I responded to this query:
If you’re a single mother and have a son I’d suggest putting him in a sport or martial arts to add some masculine energy to his life. It’s not a replacement for the actual father but it can help instil structure and discipline into the core of his being.
— Julian Arsenio
“Perhaps this world needs less discipline and structure, not more,” was my response, to which Hicks replied.
The quotation is not about “the world.” It is about boys without fathers. Evaluate the quotation in its context.
— Stephen Hicks
“Disciplined boys create a disciplined world. Not a world I’d prefer to create or live in. We need more right-hemisphere people. Instead, we are being overwhelmed by left hemisphere types, leading to Capitalism and the denouement of humanity as it encroaches like cancer, devouring or corrupting all it touches.
“In the end, it is about the world, which from a left hemisphere perspective is a sum of its parts. Right-hemisphere thinkers know otherwise,” was my reply. He responded,
You seem to have difficulty focusing. From a quotation about fatherless boys you free associate to [sic] weird psychology and global apocalptic [sic] pessimism. Pointless.
— Stephen Hicks
“I’ll suggest that the opposite is true, and perhaps you need to focus less and appreciate the Gestalt. This was not free association. Rather, it is a logical connexion between the disposition of the people in the world and lived reality.
“Clearly, you are a left-hemisphere structured thinker. The world is literally littered with this cohort.
“I suggest broadening your worldview so as not to lose the woods for the trees. I recommend Dr Iain McGilchrist as an apt guide. Perhaps reading The Master and His Emissary and/or The Matter with Things would give you another perspective. #JustSaying”
And still, rather than addressing the issue of fatherless boys, you go off on tangents, this time psychologizing about people you’ve zero first-hand knowledge of.
— Stephen Hicks
Feel free to interpret this as you will. For me, his attempt to limit discussion to some notion he had in his head and his failure to see the woods for the trees, as I write, suggests that he is a left-brain thinker. Having watched some of his videos, whether lectures or interviews, this was already evident to me. This exchange is just another proof point.
I considered offering the perspective of Bruno Bettleheim’s importance of unstructured play, but as is evidenced above, he is not open to dialogue. His preference appears to be a monologue. This is the left hemisphere in action. This is an example of how insidious this convergent thinking is, and it makes me worry about what’s ahead in a world of people demanding more structure and discipline. Foucault’s Discipline and Surveillance comes to the forefront.
Philosophics 