I Am a Qualified Subjectivist. No, That Does Not Mean ‘Anything Goes’.
Make no mistake: I am a subjectivist. A qualified one. Not that kind of qualified – the qualification matters, but it’s rarely the part anyone listens to.
Image: Not that kind…
Here is the unglamorous starting point: all human encounters with the world are mediated. There is no raw feed. No unfiltered access. No metaphysical lead running directly from ‘reality’ into the human mind. Every encounter is processed through bodies, nervous systems, cultures, languages, technologies, institutions, and histories.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content – See addendum below.
Whilst I discuss the specific architecture of this mediation at length in this preprint, here I will keep it simple.
If you are human, you do not encounter reality as such. You encounter it as processed. This is not controversial. What is controversial is admitting the obvious consequence: the subject is the final arbiter.
Image: NotebookLM Infographic of Qualified Subjectivism
The Subject Is the Final Arbiter
Every account of truth, reality, meaning, value, or fact is ultimately adjudicated by a subject. Not because subjects are sovereign gods, but because there is literally no other place adjudication can occur.
Who, exactly, do critics imagine is doing the adjudicating instead? A neutral tribunal floating outside experience? A cosmic referee with a clipboard? A universal consciousness we all forgot to log into?
There is no one else.
This does not mean that truth is ‘whatever I feel like’. It means that truth-claims only ever arrive through a subject, even when they are heavily constrained by the world. And constraint matters. Reality pushes back. Environments resist. Bodies fail. Gravity does not care about your personal narrative.
Why This Is Not Solipsism
Solipsism says: only my mind exists. That is not my claim. My claim is almost boring by comparison: subjects are situated, not sovereign.
We are shaped by environments we did not choose and histories we did not write. Mediation does not eliminate reality; it is how reality arrives. Your beliefs are not free-floating inventions; they are formed under biological, social, and material pressure. Two people can be exposed to the same event and encounter it differently because the encounter is not the event itself – it is the event as mediated through a particular orientation.
Why Objectivity Keeps Sneaking Back In
At this point, someone usually says: ‘But surely some things are objectively true.’
Yes. And those truths are still encountered subjectively. The mistake is thinking that objectivity requires a ‘view from nowhere’. It doesn’t. It requires stability across mediations, not the elimination of mediation altogether. We treat some claims as objective because they hold up under variation, while others fracture immediately. But in all cases, the encounter still happens somewhere, to someone.
The Real Source of the Panic
The real anxiety here is not philosophical. It’s moral and political. People are terrified that if we give up the fantasy of unmediated access to universal truth, then legitimacy collapses and ‘anything goes’.
This is a category error born of wishful thinking. What actually collapses is the hope that semantic convergence is guaranteed. Once you accept that mediation is unavoidable, you are forced to confront a harder reality: disagreement is often structural, not corrigible. Language does not fail because nothing is true. Language fails because too much is true, incompatibly.
So Yes, I Am a Qualified Subjectivist
Interpretation only ever occurs through subjects. Subjects are always mediated. Mediation is always constrained. And constraint does not guarantee convergence.
That is the position. It is not radical, fashionable, or comforting. It is simply what remains once you stop pretending there is a god’s-eye view quietly underwriting your arguments. Discomfort is simply a reliable indicator that a fantasy has been disturbed.
Addendum: Geworfenheit and the Myth of the Neutral Subject
Audio: NotebookLM summary of this Geworfenheit addendum
If all this sounds suspiciously familiar, that’s because it is. Heidegger had a word for it: Geworfenheit – usually translated as thrownness.
The idea is simple, and deeply irritating to anyone still hoping for a clean start. You do not enter the world as a neutral observer. You are thrown into it: into a body, a language, a culture, a history, a set of institutions, a moment you did not choose. You do not begin from nowhere and then acquire a perspective. You begin already situated, already oriented, already implicated.
This is not a poetic flourish. It is a structural claim about human existence.
Image: Another NotebookLM infographic for the fun of it.
What my qualified subjectivism insists on – without Heidegger’s ontological theatre – is the same basic constraint: there is no view from nowhere because there is no nowhere to stand. The subject does not float above mediation; the subject is constituted by it. Thrownness is not an accident to be corrected by better theory. It is the condition under which any theorising occurs at all.
Seen this way, the demand for pure objectivity starts to look less like a philosophical ideal and more like nostalgia for an impossible innocence. A wish to rewind existence to a point before bodies, languages, power, and history got involved. That point never existed.
Geworfenheit matters here because it dissolves the caricature that subjectivism is about arbitrary choice. Being thrown is the opposite of choosing freely. It is constraint before reflection. Orientation before argument. Salience before reasons. You do not decide what matters from a neutral menu; what matters shows up already weighted, already charged, already resistant.
This is why appeals to “just be objective” always ring hollow. Objectivity does not mean escaping thrownness. It means achieving relative stability within it. Some claims hold across many thrown positions. Others fracture immediately. That distinction matters. But none of it happens outside mediation.
So when I say the subject is the final arbiter, I am not crowning the subject king of reality. I am pointing out the obvious: adjudication happens somewhere, to someone, from within a situation they did not author. Thrownness guarantees that there is no cosmic referee waiting to overrule the encounter.
If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Discomfort is often just the sensation of a fantasy losing its grip.
On Self-Evidence, Personhood, and the Administrative Nature of Rights
The following sentence is among the most quoted in political history and among the least examined. It is invoked as moral bedrock, taught as civic catechism, and insulated from scrutiny by a reverence that mistakes repetition for comprehension. It is rarely read closely, and rarely read sceptically.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
What follows is not a rebuttal. It is an annotation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Most readers will recognise this as the opening of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America. Recognition, however, is not comprehension. The sentence survives on familiarity. Once that familiarity is set aside, it begins to fail clause by clause.
I. A Best Case, Briefly
A more charitable reading deserves brief consideration. ‘Self-evident’, in the intellectual context of the eighteenth century, did not mean obvious in the sense of requiring no reflection. It referred instead to propositions taken as axiomatic: not inferred from prior premises, but serving as starting points for reasoning. On this view, influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the claim is not that these truths are psychologically irresistible, but that they are rationally basic.
Likewise, ‘we hold’ need not be read as an admission of arbitrariness. It may be understood as a public avowal: a political body formally affirming what reason is said to disclose, rather than grounding those truths in the act of holding itself. Read this way, the sentence does not collapse into mere opinion.
Finally, the Declaration is often understood as performative rather than descriptive.[1] It does not merely state political facts; it brings a political subject into being. The ‘we’ is constituted in the act of declaration, and the language functions as a founding gesture rather than a philosophical proof.
Even on this charitable reading, however, the appeal to rational self-evidence presupposes capacities that were unevenly distributed at best. The Enlightenment notion of ‘reason’ was never a raw human faculty equally available to all. It depended on literacy, education, leisure, and institutional participation—conditions enjoyed by a narrow segment of the population.
In the late eighteenth century, large portions of the population were functionally illiterate. The ability to engage abstract political principles, to treat propositions as axiomatic starting points for reasoning, was not merely rare but socially restricted. The universal address of the sentence thus rests on a practical contradiction: it invokes a form of rational accessibility that its own social conditions actively prevented.
Nor is this merely a historical observation. Whilst formal literacy has expanded, the distribution of the capacities required for sustained abstract reasoning remains sharply constrained. What has changed is scale, not structure. Appeals to ‘self-evident’ political truths still presuppose forms of cognitive access that cannot be assumed, even now.
There is an important distinction here between innocent misreading and bad-faith translation. A modern reader who takes ‘self-evident’ to mean what it now ordinarily means is not at fault; semantic drift makes this nearly unavoidable. But to continue reading the sentence this way once its historical and philosophical context is understood is no longer an error. It is a decision.
Under the principle of least effort, claims that present themselves as ‘self-evident’ are maximally efficient. They require no sustained attention, no conceptual labour, and no challenge to inherited categories. For individuals ill-equipped – by education, time, or institutional support – to interrogate abstract political claims, such language is not merely persuasive; it is relieving.
To accept a proposition as self-evident is to be spared the burden of understanding how it works. The sentence can be consumed whole, in a single uncritical gulp. What is swallowed is not an argument, but a posture: assent without inquiry, agreement without comprehension.
This is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of a cognitive environment in which complexity is costly, and authority is familiar. ‘Self-evidence’ functions here as a labour-saving device, converting political commitments into ready-made certainties. The capacity to recognise self-evident truths thus functions as an unmarked prerequisite for political subjecthood – a gatekeeping mechanism that precedes and enables the more explicit exclusions to come.
With this in mind, the sentence can be examined clause by clause – not as philosophical proposition, but as rhetorical machinery.
II. An Annotated Deconstruction
‘We hold’
To whom does this ‘we’ apply? Who is included in this collective voice, and who is not? More importantly, what does it mean to hold something that is allegedly self-evident?
Holding is an act of maintenance. It implies agreement, reinforcement, repetition. Beliefs must be held; axioms must be held; norms must be held. Self-evidence, by contrast, is supposed to require none of this. If a truth is genuinely self-evident, it does not need to be held at all. It simply imposes itself.
The opening clause announces immediacy whilst confessing mediation. This is not a subtle tension. It is an outright contradiction. The sentence begins by undermining its own epistemic posture. The axiomatic framing does not eliminate contestability; it displaces it. What is presented as rational starting point functions, in practice, as rhetorical closure.
‘Truths’
What kind of truths are being held here?
The word does far too much work whilst remaining resolutely undefined. These are not empirical truths. They are not logical truths. They are not even clearly moral truths in the narrow sense. Instead, the term oscillates between epistemic certainty, moral assertion, and political aspiration, sliding between categories without ever settling long enough to be examined.
The pluralisation matters. By multiplying ‘truths’ whilst leaving their nature unspecified, the sentence creates an aura of obviousness without committing to a standard of justification. Disagreement is pre-empted not by argument, but by tone.
‘Self-evident’
Unless one invokes something like Descartes’ cogito as a limiting case, nothing is genuinely self-evident. Even the cogito depends on language, conceptual inheritance, and a shared grammar of doubt. Self-evidence is not an epistemic given; it is an experiential effect produced by familiarity, stability, and low resistance.
Here, ‘self-evident’ functions as rhetorical closure masquerading as epistemology. It does not establish certainty; it enforces silence. To question what is ‘self-evident’ is to risk being cast as obtuse, perverse, or acting in bad faith. Inquiry is not answered. It is short-circuited.
‘All men’
This is not the inclusive ‘men’ of abstract mankind. It is a concrete, historically bounded category: adult males, and not coincidentally white ones. The exclusions are not implied later. They are operative here, at the point of entry.
This is the quietly active boundary of the entire sentence. Before any rights are named, before any equality is asserted, the scope of applicability has already been narrowed. The universal tone is achieved by selective admission.
‘Created equal’
Created by whom? And equal in what respect?
The notion of equality here is never specified, because specification would immediately expose contestation. Equal in capacity? In worth? In standing before the law? In outcome? In moral consideration? Readers are invited to supply their preferred interpretation retroactively, which is precisely what allows the sentence to endure.
Some have suggested that ‘equal’ means ‘equal under the law’, but this simply defers the problem. The law defines equality however it pleases, when it pleases, and for whom it pleases. Equality without a metric is not a claim. It is a metaphysical gesture.
It is often said that the Declaration’s universal language contained the seeds of its own expansion. That Douglass, King, and the suffragists appealed to it is taken as evidence of its latent emancipatory power. But this confuses rhetoric with causation. These advances were not the unfolding of a promise, but the result of sustained political pressure, moral confrontation, and material struggle. The language was repurposed because it was available and authoritative, not because it was prophetic.
To call this a ‘promissory note’ is to mistake a battlefield for a contract. Promises are kept by their authors. These were extracted by those excluded, often in direct opposition to the very institutions that sanctified the sentence.
The story also flatters the present. If the promise is always being fulfilled, it is never being broken. Yet the same language remains actively contested, narrowed, and rescinded. Personhood is still conditional. Rights still evaporate at borders, prisons, and classifications. The note, if it exists at all, is perpetually past due.
‘Endowed by their Creator’
No one believes the drafters were referring to genetics or parentage. This capital-C Creator is a theological move, not a biological one. The sentence quietly abandons the pretence of self-evidence and imports divine authority as a grounding mechanism.
This is not incidental. By placing rights beyond human origin, the sentence renders them simultaneously unquestionable and unreachable. Legitimacy is outsourced to a source that cannot be interrogated. Appeals are closed by design.
‘Unalienable Rights’
Here the sentence delivers a double assertion. First, that rights exist independently of institutions. Second, that they cannot be taken away. Both claims fail on contact with history.
Rights are constructed, recognised, enforced, suspended, and withdrawn by institutions. Bentham saw this clearly: ‘natural rights’ function rhetorically to obscure the institutional conditions that alone make rights actionable.[2] And far from being inalienable, rights prove remarkably fragile. The record is unambiguous: rights track status, not humanity. The moment personhood is questioned, rights do not need to be violated. They simply cease to apply.
‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’
Under the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – the framework treating key political terms as structurally underdetermined – these are textbook Contestables.[3] None are measurable. None have stable definitions. None come with clear thresholds or enforcement criteria.
‘Happiness’ is the most revealing substitution of all. Locke’s blunt ‘property’ at least named what was being protected.[4] ‘Happiness’ softens the promise whilst emptying it of content. It gestures toward flourishing whilst committing to nothing beyond tolerable participation.
Life, liberty, and happiness are curated abstractions, not guarantees – property in softer clothing.
III. Personhood as the Hidden Mechanism
Zooming out, the operational logic becomes clear. Rights depend on personhood.[5] Personhood is conferred, not discovered. Declaring non-personhood resolves the contradiction without ever touching the rhetoric.
This is the mechanism that allows a universal language to coexist with selective application. When personhood is withdrawn, rights are not violated. They are bypassed. Ethics never gets a hearing, because the subject has already been administratively erased.
To call this administrative is not metaphor. Personhood is assigned, reclassified, and revoked through documentation, categorisation, and procedural determination. The question of who counts is settled before any ethical consideration can begin.
IV. The Sentence as Prototype, Not Mistake
It is tempting to read this sentence as naïve, hypocritical, or aspirationally flawed. That would be a mistake. The sentence is not a failure of Enlightenment thinking. It is its prototype.
It was never meant to survive scrutiny. It was meant to mobilise, stabilise, and legitimise. Its vagueness is functional. Its incoherence is load-bearing. The sentence works precisely because it is conceptually promiscuous, rhetorically elevated, and operationally evasive. What looks like philosophical sloppiness is political engineering.
V. Why It Still Matters
This sentence is not an historical curiosity. It is the template for modern political language.
Universal in tone.
Conditional in application.
Moral in rhetoric.
Administrative in practice.
The future did not reveal the sentence to be false. It revealed what the sentence was for.
Footnotes
[1] J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
[2] Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution
[3] See The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis for a full treatment of Contestables and their function in political discourse.
[4] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Written by Bry Willis
microglyphics
NB: I wrote this as a polemic rather than in a manner suitable for a journal submission. I did not wish to expend the effort to understand counterarguments. This interpretation stands on its own. This said, in Section I. I still note some historical perspective that is somewhat important. It even illustrates semantic drift, which I cover in A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
If you want a useful metaphor for how justice actually operates, don’t picture a blindfolded goddess with scales. Picture a casino.
Image: Lady Justice in Casino. The dice are rigged. haha
The rules are printed. The games look fair. Everyone is technically allowed to play. But the mathematics are tuned in advance, the exits are discreet, and the house never risks its own solvency. You don’t walk into a casino to discover whether chance is fair. You walk in to participate in a system whose advantage has already been engineered.
Justice works the same way – like a casino with house-favoured odds.
By the time a defendant appears, the ontological dice have already been loaded. The system has quietly asserted a set of metaphysical commitments that make certain outcomes legible, actionable, and punishable – whilst rendering others incoherent, inadmissible, or ‘unreasonable’. Because I am a philosopher of language and not a lawyer, I am free from the indoctrination and selection bias inherent in that system. This allows me to critique the system directly without being excommunicated from the club.
What follows are not neutral assumptions. They are ontological wagers, each chosen because its alternative would tilt the field away from institutional power.
Justice presumes that the person who acted yesterday is meaningfully the same entity standing in court today. This is not discovered; it is asserted.
Why? Because retribution requires persistence. Desert cannot attach to a momentary configuration of consciousness. Responsibility requires a carrier that survives time, memory gaps, psychological rupture, intoxication, trauma, and neurological variance.
An episodic self – Parfit’s reductionism, trauma-fractured identity, or situational selfhood – collapses the attribution pipeline. If the ‘self’ is a series of loosely connected episodes, punishment becomes conceptually incoherent. Who is being punished for whom?
So the law treats episodic accounts not as alternative ontologies but as defects: insanity, automatism, incompetence. The self is patched, not replaced.
The house needs continuity. Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.
Justice requires that actions originate somewhere. Agency is that somewhere.
The system asserts that agents could have done otherwise in a morally relevant sense. This is compatible with compatibilism, folk psychology, and everyday moral intuitions – but deeply hostile to hard determinism, strong situationism, or neurobiological deflation.
Why exclude weaker agency models? Because if agency dissolves into causation, environment, or neurochemistry, responsibility evaporates. At best, you get risk management. At worst, you get treatment or containment. Retribution has nowhere to land.
So the law nods politely to influences – upbringing, coercion, impairment – whilst ring-fencing agency as the default. Mitigation is permitted. Ontological revision is not. The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise, even if that claim grows increasingly fictional under scrutiny.
The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise
Justice models human action as a series of forks in the road. At some point, the agent ‘chose’ X over Y. This is enormously convenient.
Continuous decision spaces – poverty gradients, addiction loops, survival trade-offs – are messy. They resist clean counterfactuals. ‘What should they have done instead?’ becomes a sociological question, not a moral one.
So the system discretises. It locates a moment. A click. A trigger pull. A signature. A punch. A text sent.
Once the choice is frozen, the rest of the apparatus can proceed. Without discrete choice points, proportionality and culpability lose their anchor.
The house needs moments, not milieus.
Ontology 4: Causation
Asserted (m): Local, linear causation Excluded (n): Diffuse, systemic, or emergent causation
Justice prefers causes that point: Who did this? When? How directly?
Systemic causation – economic pressure, cultural narratives, institutional design – creates attribution problems. If harm is emergent, no individual carries it cleanly. Responsibility smears.
So causation is narrowed. Chains are shortened. Proximate cause replaces contributing conditions. Structural violence becomes background noise.
This is not because systemic causation is false. It is because it is unmanageable within a retributive frame.
The house needs causes that fit inside a sentence.
‘Reasonableness’ is the softest and most insidious ontology of the lot.
It pretends to be procedural, but it functions as cultural enforcement. The reasonable person is not an average human. They are an acculturated one.
Intensity becomes suspect. Rage becomes irrational. Grief becomes excessive. Radical interpretations become unreasonable not because they’re false, but because they disrupt cadence.
This ontology stabilises the game by disciplining tone. It doesn’t matter what you argue if you fail to argue it reasonably. Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.
Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.
The house needs calm players, not correct ones.
Why These Ontologies, and Not Their Rivals?
Because every excluded ontology threatens legibility. Justice is not designed to discover truth. It is designed to terminate cases. Ontologies that complicate attribution, disperse responsibility, or destabilise narrative continuity slow the machine. So they are ruled out – not explicitly, but structurally.
Once these commitments are in place, disagreement downstream becomes theatre. Arguments about fairness, proportionality, or intent occur within a rigged metaphysical envelope. That’s why reform debates feel sincere yet go nowhere. People argue outcomes whilst the house quietly keeps the rules.
The Point
None of this means justice is a scam. Casinos aren’t scams either. They do exactly what they are designed to do.
The problem is pretending the odds are neutral.
If you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you don’t start with sentencing guidelines or evidentiary thresholds. You start by asking which ontologies are being asserted – and why alternatives are unplayable.
Most people won’t make that move. Not because it’s wrong. Because it requires leaving the table.
Now that A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has been put to bed — not euthanised, just sedated — I can turn to the more interesting work: instantiating it. This is where LIH stops being a complaint about words and starts becoming a problem for systems that pretend words are stable enough to carry moral weight.
What follows is not a completed theory, nor a universal schema. It’s a thinking tool. A talking point. A diagram designed to make certain assumptions visible that are usually smuggled in unnoticed, waved through on the strength of confidence and tradition.
The purpose of this diagram is not to redefine justice, rescue it, or replace it with something kinder. It is to show how justice is produced. Specifically, how retributive justice emerges from a layered assessment process that quietly asserts ontologies, filters encounters, applies normative frames, and then closes uncertainty with confidence.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Most people are willing to accept, in the abstract, that justice is “constructed”. That concession is easy. What is less comfortable is seeing how it is constructed — how many presuppositions must already be in place before anything recognisable as justice can appear, and how many of those presuppositions are imposed rather than argued for.
The diagram foregrounds power, not as a conspiracy or an optional contaminant, but as an ambient condition. Power determines which ontologies are admissible, which forms of agency count, which selves persist over time, which harms are legible, and which comparisons are allowed. It decides which metaphysical configurations are treated as reasonable, and which are dismissed as incoherent before the discussion even begins.
Justice, in this framing, is not discovered. It is not unearthed like a moral fossil. It is assembled. And it is assembled late in the process, after ontology has been assumed, evaluation has been performed, and uncertainty has been forcibly closed.
This does not mean justice is fake. It means it is fragile. Far more fragile than its rhetoric suggests. And once you see that fragility — once you see how much is doing quiet, exogenous work — it becomes harder to pretend that disagreements about justice are merely disagreements about facts, evidence, or bad actors. More often, they are disagreements about what kind of world must already be true for justice to function at all.
I walk through the structure and logic of the model below. The diagram is also available as a PDF, because if you’re going to stare at machinery, you might as well be able to zoom in on the gears.
Why Retributive Justice (and not the rest of the zoo)
Before doing anything else, we need to narrow the target.
“Justice” is an infamously polysemous term. Retributive, restorative, distributive, procedural, transformative, poetic, cosmic. Pick your flavour. Philosophy departments have been dining out on this buffet for centuries, and nothing useful has come of letting all of them talk at once.
This is precisely where LIH draws a line.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not interested in pedestrian polysemy — cases where a word has multiple, well-understood meanings that can be disambiguated with minimal friction. That kind of ambiguity is boring. It’s linguistic weather.
What LIH is interested in are terms that appear singular while smuggling incompatible structures. Words that function as load-bearing beams across systems, while quietly changing shape depending on who is speaking and which assumptions are already in play.
“Justice” is one of those words. But it is not usefully analysable in the abstract.
So we pick a single instantiation: Retributive Justice.
Why?
Because retributive justice is the most ontologically demanding and the most culturally entrenched. It requires:
a persistent self
a coherent agent
genuine choice
intelligible intent
attributable causation
commensurable harm
proportional response
In short, it requires everything to line up.
If justice is going to break anywhere, it will break here.
Retributive justice is therefore not privileged in this model. It is used as a stress test.
The Big Picture: Justice as an Engine, Not a Discovery
The central claim of the model is simple, and predictably unpopular:
Justice is not discovered. It is produced.
Not invented in a vacuum, not hallucinated, not arbitrary — but assembled through a process that takes inputs, applies constraints, and outputs conclusions with an air of inevitability.
The diagram frames retributive justice as an assessment engine.
An engine has:
inputs
internal mechanisms
thresholds
failure modes
and outputs
It does not have access to metaphysical truth. It has access to what it has been designed to process.
The justice engine takes an encounter — typically an action involving alleged harm — and produces two outputs:
Desert (what is deserved),
Responsibility (to whom it is assigned).
Everything else in the diagram exists to make those outputs possible.
The Three Functional Layers
The model is organised into three layers. These are not chronological stages, but logical dependencies. Each layer must already be functioning for the next to make sense.
1. The Constitutive Layer
(What kind of thing a person must already be)
This layer answers questions that are almost never asked explicitly, because asking them destabilises the entire process.
What counts as a person?
What kind of self persists over time?
What qualifies as an agent?
What does it mean to have agency?
What is a choice?
What is intent?
Crucially, these are not empirical discoveries made during assessment. They are asserted ontologies.
The system assumes a particular configuration of selfhood, agency, and intent as a prerequisite for proceeding at all. Alternatives — episodic selves, radically distributed agency, non-volitional action — are not debated. They are excluded.
This is the first “happy path”.
If you do not fit the assumed ontology, you do not get justice. You get sidelined into mitigation, exception, pathology, or incoherence.
2. The Encounter Layer
(What is taken to have happened)
This layer processes the event itself:
an action
resulting harm
causal contribution
temporal framing
contextual conditions
motive (selectively)
This is where the rhetoric of “facts” tends to dominate. But the encounter is never raw. It is already shaped by what the system is capable of seeing.
Causation here is not metaphysical causation. It is legible causation. Harm is not suffering. It is recognisable harm. Context is not total circumstance. It is admissible context.
Commensurability acts as a gatekeeper between encounter and evaluation: harms must be made comparable before they can be judged. Anything that resists comparison quietly drops out of the pipeline.
3. The Evaluative Layer
(How judgment is performed)
Only once ontology is assumed and the encounter has been rendered legible does evaluation begin:
proportionality
accountability
normative ethics
fairness (claimed)
reasonableness
bias (usually acknowledged last, if at all)
This layer presents itself as the moral heart of justice. In practice, it is the final formatting pass.
Fairness is not discovered here. It is declared. Reasonableness does not clarify disputes. It narrows the range of acceptable disagreement. Bias is not eliminated. It is managed.
At the end of this process, uncertainty is closed.
That closure is the moment justice appears.
Why Disagreement Fails Before It Starts
At this point, dissent looks irrational.
The system has:
assumed an ontology
performed an evaluation
stabilised the narrative through rhetoric
and produced outputs with institutional authority
To object now is not to disagree about evidence. It is to challenge the ontology that made assessment possible in the first place.
And that is why so many justice debates feel irresolvable.
They are not disagreements within the system. They are disagreements about which system is being run.
LIH explains why language fails here. The same words — justice, fairness, responsibility, intent — are being used across incompatible ontological commitments. The vocabulary overlaps; the worlds do not.
The engine runs smoothly. It just doesn’t run the same engine for everyone.
Where This Is Going
With the structure in place, we can now do the slower work:
unpacking individual components
tracing where ontological choices are asserted rather than argued
showing how “reasonableness” and “fairness” operate as constraint mechanisms
and explaining why remediation almost always requires a metaphysical switch, not better rhetoric
Justice is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
That should worry us more than if it were merely malfunctioning.
This essay is already long, so I’m going to stop here.
Not because the interesting parts are finished, but because this is the point at which the analysis stops being descriptive and starts becoming destabilising.
The diagram you’ve just walked through carries a set of suppressed footnotes. They don’t sit at the margins because they’re trivial; they sit there because they are structurally prior. Each one represents an ontological assertion the system quietly requires in order to function at all.
By my count, the model imposes at least five such ontologies. They are not argued for inside the system. They are assumed. They arrive pre-installed, largely because they are indoctrinated, acculturated, and reinforced long before anyone encounters a courtroom, a jury, or a moral dilemma.
Once those ontologies are fixed, the rest of the machinery behaves exactly as designed. Disagreement downstream is permitted; disagreement upstream is not.
In a follow-up essay, I’ll unpack those footnotes one by one: where the forks are, which branch the system selects, and why the alternatives—while often coherent—are rendered unintelligible, irresponsible, or simply “unreasonable” once the engine is in motion.
That’s where justice stops looking inevitable and starts looking parochial.
And that’s also where persuasion quietly gives up.
Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after a couple of days of back and forth
My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is finished, the cover is designed, and everything is in order for a January 2026 release – save for one administrative detail: the ISBN. I expect this to be resolved presently. The Bowker distribution system in the US appears to have been set up circa 1997, and that’s just the web interface. Who knows how long the database has been in place? I’d bet circa 1955. Most countries provide ISBNs for free. Not the US. Kinda bollox. Meantime, I’ve now got three lenses through which to inspect the world.
[EDIT: ISBN issue has been resolved. I am awaiting a proof copy that should be arriving today.]
From the outside, some of my recent work can look untidy. A hypothesis about language. An ontology about mediated encounters. A paper on why moral disagreement refuses to resolve itself politely. No master theory. No clean ladder. No promised synthesis at the end. This is not an accident. It is a refusal.
What links the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW), and Disagreement Without Referees is not a shared doctrine, but a shared function. They are lenses, not foundations. Diagnostics, not blueprints. Each takes aim at a different site where Enlightenment habits quietly overpromise – meaning, access, adjudication – and shows what breaks when we stop pretending those promises were ever cashable. They form a family. Not a system. And certainly not a programme for rebuilding.
Three Lenses, Three Failure Sites
Each of these frameworks operates at a different level, but they all do the same kind of work: they explain why something we rely on feels indispensable, fails repeatedly, and yet stubbornly survives.
LIH operates at the linguistic level.
It asks why language fails precisely where we expect it to secure clarity, precision, or consensus. Its answer is unromantic: language is not uniformly capable. As we move from invariants to contestables to fluids and ineffables, its representational power degrades. The failure mode is familiar: we mistake grammatical stability for ontological stability, and then act surprised when disagreement hardens rather than dissolves.
MEOW operates at the ontological level.
It asks what kind of ‘world’ we are actually dealing with once we abandon the fantasy of unmediated access. There is no clean mind–world interface, no privileged vantage point. Every encounter is mediated – biologically, cognitively, linguistically, socially. Realism and idealism alike fail here, each clinging to a different myth of access. What remains is not scepticism, but constraint.
Disagreement Without Referees operates at the normative and political level.
It asks why moral and political disagreement persists even when all parties appear informed, sincere, and articulate. The answer is ontological incommensurability. Where frameworks do not overlap, there are no neutral referees. Argument does not converge because it cannot. What remains is persuasion, coalition, power, and consequence—moral life without an umpire.
None of these lenses replaces what it critiques. Each refuses the repair instinct that says: if we just fix the model, the system will work again. That instinct is the pathology.
What They Share (And What They Don’t)
What unites these lenses is not a set of positive claims about how the world really is. It is a shared posture:
no privileged access
no neutral ground
no final adjudication
no redemptive synthesis
But also:
no quietism
no nihilism
no ‘anything goes’
no abdication of responsibility
They do not tell you what to believe. They tell you why believing harder won’t save you.
Importantly, they are non-hierarchical. LIH does not ground MEOW. MEOW does not explain away disagreement. Disagreement does not ‘apply’ LIH in some linear fashion. They intersect. They overlap. They illuminate different failure modes of the same inherited fantasy: that there must be a place where things finally settle. There isn’t.
Image: Three Diagnostic Lenses Infographic¹
Why This Is Not a System
Systems promise closure. These lenses do not. They explain why closure is repeatedly promised, urgently demanded, and reliably missed. To systematise them would be to betray them.
What they offer instead is a kind of intellectual hygiene: a way of recognising when we are asking language, reality, or morality to do work they were never capable of doing – and then blaming one another when they don’t comply.
If there is a unifying thread, it is this:the demand for foundations is itself the problem.² These lenses do not solve that problem. They show you where it operates, how it reproduces itself, and why refusing it feels so uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point.
Footnotes
This is another NotebookLM infographic – my second. It’s not half-bad. I had to adjust some elements in Photoshop and Illustrator, and there are still textual anomalies, but all in all, I’m impressed with what 60 seconds of generation yielded – along with a 5-minute prompt and 15 minutes of touchup. It’s just a novelty for now – certainly not necessary. What do you think?
Why shared language creates the illusion – not the reality – of shared experience
Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.
Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green
Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.
A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology
Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.
If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.
Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned — not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.
Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct
Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:
Measurement registers a variable.
Behaviour implements a functional response.
Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.
Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.
The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails
Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description – slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:
our physical ontology,
our conceptual divisions,
our sense-making framework,
and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.
But these assumptions are ungrounded.
Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.
When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.
The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb
The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:
T0: biological mediation
T1: cognitive mediation
T2: linguistic mediation
T3: social mediation
Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.
Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.
Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:
perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).
Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility. MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.
Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us
In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:
Their sensory world differs;
their affective architecture differs;
their concepts do not map onto human categories;
and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.
The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.
The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template
Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.
If “cold” varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species – biological or artificial – possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.
Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is alocal ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.
Conclusion
When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.
Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.
And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.
Afterword
Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. It’s an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.
To be clear, I have nothing against Alex O’Connor. He’s engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining one’s own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.
Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, I’m not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location – not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.
Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, we’ll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.
Jason from Philosopher Muse suggested a connexion between Transductive Subjectivity and the work of Stephen Batchelor. I wasn’t familiar with Batchelor, so — as one does these days — I asked a GPT to give me the lay of the land. The machine obliged, and the result was interesting enough that it warranted a post of its own. This is it.
The risk I take is that the GPT gets it wrong. If so, call me out.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Before anyone lights incense: I’m not suddenly a convert. Batchelor’s work and mine merely pass each other on adjacent footpaths. But the overlap is conceptually neat, and the divergence is even more telling.
Stephen Batchelor vs Transductive Subjectivity: A Brief Comparative Note
1. Shared Territory: The Self as Verb, Not Noun
Both Batchelor and Transductive Subjectivity reject the folk notion of a single, continuous metaphysical self.
Batchelor (Secular Buddhism): The self is an unfolding activity — impermanent, conditional, and without a stable essence. His “not-self” is a practice of disidentification from the imagined nugget of continuity we cling to.
Transductive Subjectivity: The self is a finite series: S₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ, each produced through the pressure of relational structures (R). Identity is what results when the world meets the organism. Nothing metaphysical required; just biology, cognition, language, and institutions doing their thing.
Overlap: Both positions dismantle the enduring pearl-of-self. Both frame identity as something generated, not possessed.
2. Divergent Aims: Inner Liberation vs Structural Clarity
This is where the paths fork.
Batchelor’s Agenda: Primarily ethical and therapeutic. The point of denying a fixed self is to reduce suffering, ease attachment, and cultivate a more responsive way of being.
TS’s Agenda: Metaphysical accuracy in the service of ethical clarity. If the self is a serial construction rather than a diachronic monolith, then retributive justice collapses under its own fictions. No self, no desert. No desert, no justification for revenge-based punishment.
Batchelor wants flourishing. I want rigour. Accidental cousins.
3. Methodological Differences: Distillation vs Reconstruction
Batchelor performs what you might call Buddhism sans metaphysics. A very Western manoeuvre:
keep impermanence
keep ethical insight
jettison karma, rebirth, cosmology
rebrand the remnants as a secular spiritual practice
Practitioners dislike this because he amputates the structural scaffolding that supported the doctrine.
TS, by contrast, doesn’t distil anything. It reconstructs selfhood from first principles:
No causa sui
Episodic, indexical selfhood (Strawson)
R→S transduction (MEOW)
No diachronic essence
No metaphysical ballast
If Buddhism aligns with TS, it’s incidental — the way two different mathematicians can discover the same function by entirely different routes.
4. Conceptual Architecture: Dependent Origination vs MEOW’s Tiers
Batchelor: leans on dependent origination as a philosophical metaphor — phenomena arise through conditions.
TS: models the exact channels of that conditioning via MEOW: T0 → biological signals T1 → cognitive architecture T2 → linguistic formats T3 → social-technical pressures
Where Batchelor says “everything is contingent,” TS says “yes, and here is the actual machinery.”
5. Different Stakes
Batchelor: freeing the person from clinging to an imaginary core.
TS: freeing ethics, law, and social design from pretending that metaphysical core exists.
One is therapeutic; the other is diagnostic.
A Key Point of Departure: Batchelor Works with Folk Psychology; TS Rejects Its Premises
There is one more divergence worth highlighting because it cuts to the bone of the comparison.
Batchelor accepts the phenomenological feel of the continuous self as a legitimate starting point. His work is therapeutic: he begins where the person is, in the lived experience of being “me,” and then encourages a gentle loosening of the grip on that intuition.
Transductive Subjectivity takes a different route entirely.
For TS, the continuous, diachronic self isn’t a psychological obstacle to be softened — it is a category mistake. A narrative compression artefact. A heuristic with pragmatic uses, yes, but no metaphysical legitimacy. Batchelor tries to transform our relation to the folk-self; TS denies that the folk-self was ever more than a convenient fiction.
Batchelor says: “You seem like a continuous self; now learn to hold that lightly.”
TS says: “You seem like a continuous self because the system is glossing over discontinuities. The sensation itself is misleading.”
In other words:
Batchelor redeems the experience.
TS disassembles the model.
He treats the “self” as something to relate to differently. TS treats the “self” as an ontological construct to be replaced with a more accurate one.
This is not a difference of ethical aim but of metaphysical foundation. Batchelor trims the folk psychology; TS declines the invitation altogether.
Closing Note
So yes — the connexion Jason spotted is real. But it’s genealogical, not derivative. We arrive at similar conclusions for different reasons and with different consequences.
Batchelor is pruning a tradition. Transductive Subjectivity is rebuilding the ontology.
And both, in their own way, make the continuity-self look like the rhetorical placeholder it always was.
Written entirely by ChatGPT after a chat about Stephen Batchelor (obviously)
Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.
I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.
And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.
Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.
MEOW-GPT’s Response
(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)
“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap. When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model, the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”
“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”
It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.
Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.
Why publish this now?
This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.
The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:
It sounds like an explanation.
It licenses retribution without understanding.
It stabilises group boundaries.
It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.
In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.
This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.
Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.
This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.
MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose: that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.
For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.
MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”
(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)
Concept
Input: Evil Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces) Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).
High-level summary (≤120 words)
In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
“Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.
T₂ – Linguistic Mediation
On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.
T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation
Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.
Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)
The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.
‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.
In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.
MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.
As I was preparing another essay – an essay on the rhetoric of evil – I had a thought about the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
If one takes subjectivity seriously – not the Hollywood version with self-made heroes, but the real creature stitched together from language, history, and whatever emotional debris it stepped in on the way to adulthood – then one ends up somewhere awkward: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
Video: Two red figures walking (no sound)
Which is to say, we’re all standing on conceptual scaffolding built by other people, insisting it’s solid marble. A charming fiction, until we apply it to anything with moral voltage. ‘Evil’, for instance, collapses the moment you remove the demonological life-support and notice it’s little more than a child’s intensifier strapped to a cultural power tool.
More on that later. For now, just sit with the discomfort that the ‘self’ making moral judgments is already a negotiated artefact – relational, compromised, and never as autonomous as it pretends.
My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each other’s work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic – heaven knows I have written my share – but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.
Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense – line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing – I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.
A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)
Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The Red–Blue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.
My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege – not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleague’s argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.
This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply – indeed does apply – to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.
My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.
The Architecture of Certainty
What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture – an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.
My colleague’s book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponents’ manipulations.
This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.
This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.
It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.
The Invention of the Enemy
One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)
This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.
To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.
This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here – only demonology.
The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence
One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.
The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather – each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.
This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.
It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.
The Projection Engine
If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection – unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.
Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying one’s own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history – each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity – its own included – is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.
This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that one’s own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from one’s own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice – whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.
The Neutral Observer Who Isn’t
What the book never acknowledges – because it cannot – is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.
This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.
The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimant’s own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.
In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.
The Fictional Symmetry Problem
One of the major deficiencies in the book – and in most modern political commentary – is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the other’s missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.
The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.
This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.
Narrative Weaponry
Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing – and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.
We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.
Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.
MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.
The Missing Category: Structural Analysis
Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisation’s uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.
None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.
Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.
This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.
Where He Is Not Wrong
Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.
But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them – not to understand them.
The Danger of Certainty
What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage – though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature – but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.
The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that one’s own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason – capital R – is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.
The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.
It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.
The irony is almost tender.
Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge one’s own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.
My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview – and mistook the one for the other.
If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.
Read next:The Republic of Recursive Prophecy – an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.
Philosophics 