Tag: morality

A Key Point of Departure: He Accepts the Folk Psychology I Reject

Posted in identity, language, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
3–5 minutes

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.

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Written entirely by ChatGPT after a chat about Stephen Batchelor (obviously)

Philosophics

Announcing: The Rhetoric of Evil

Posted in critical theory, Culture & Society, essays, identity, language, modernism, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, power, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–8 minutes

How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought


DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17757134

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.

If you’d like to read the full argument:

📄 The Rhetoric of Evil: How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought

Appendix: How MEOW-GPT Reads “Evil”

A didactic demonstration of the framework in action. Download the MEOW framework below.

📄The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World: A Relational Metaphysics Beyond Mind and World

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.

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Written by Bry Willis and MEAW GPT

Philosophics

The Relative Intersubjectivity of Subjectivity

Posted in identity, morality, philosophy, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
1–2 minutes

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.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose

Posted in identity, modernism, morality, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–4 minutes

Telos is humanity’s most persistent delusion – the idea that existence is crawling toward some luminous conclusion. From Aristotle’s perfect forms to Nietzsche’s Will to Power to Silicon Valley’s AI salvation, the story barely changes: history, we are told, has direction. But direction is not destiny; it is momentum misinterpreted as meaning. Much of my Anti-Enlightenment attention – and my drive toward Dis-Integration – centres on this notion.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Progress is the Enlightenment’s secular gospel. Its promise – that every change is improvement – keeps the engine of exploitation humming. But change is inevitable; progress is propaganda. The arrow of time doesn’t point toward justice or enlightenment; it just points forward, indifferent to who’s crushed under it.

The Myth of Self-Correcting Systems

We are taught to place faith in systems: markets, democracies, algorithms. If they falter, it’s because of bad actors, not bad architecture. Replace the managers, swap the politicians, tweak the code. But the rot is structural, not moral.

These systems aren’t misfiring; they’re functioning exactly as designed – to preserve their own inertia while leaking meaning, resources, and compassion. The obsession with fixing individuals while sparing the machine is moral sleight of hand. At some point, tightening bolts on a burning engine becomes absurd. What we need is not a tune-up but a renovation.

This is where the philosophy of care and maintenance enters – not as sentimental housekeeping, but as radical engineering. Care is not complacent; it’s insurgent. It means facing the filth under the hood and admitting that the design itself is faulty.

Feminism and the Forgotten Labour of Repair

For centuries, the labour of care has been feminised, dismissed, and exploited – a quiet background hum while men congratulated themselves for building civilisation. Yet it is care, not conquest, that prevents collapse.

Philosophical feminists like Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and María Puig de la Bellacasa saw this long before innovation culture learned to rebrand it as sustainability. They argued that ethical life is not about fulfilment or growth but about tending to fragile systems, material and social. Their revolution is not cosmic; it’s custodial.

The so-called masculine ethos – endless expansion, disruption, will to power – has delivered us burnout disguised as achievement. Its gods are metrics, its sacraments quarterly reports, its apocalypse deferred until after the IPO.

The Maintenance Ethic

Abandon the myth of natural or supernatural telos, and what remains is the duty of upkeep: a civic, psychological, and planetary responsibility. Maintenance is not stagnation; it’s resistance to decay through conscious intervention. It recognises that the world does not move toward betterment but toward breakdown – and that care is the only counter-force we possess.

Progress, as we’ve sold it, is the fever dream of a species mistaking acceleration for evolution. Maintenance is what happens when the dream fades and the mechanic steps in with a wrench.

Societies and cultures are constructs. As with twelve-step programmes, once we recognise this, we can move on to the next step. This is a notion of progress I can endorse: not the myth of inevitable improvement, but the humble acknowledgement that we built these machines and we can rebuild them differently.

The Workshop, Not the Temple

Civilisation doesn’t need another prophet or disruptor. It needs a caretaker with dirty hands. Meaning is not discovered; it is serviced. Systems are not sacred; they are rebuilt.

We can keep worshipping progress and watch the engine seize again, or we can accept the more humbling task of renovation – not of souls or nations, but of the machinery we ourselves assembled. The future, if it exists, will not be a miracle of purpose but a triumph of maintenance.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Propensity for Simulacra, An Excerpt

Posted in Audio, fiction, free will, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, quote, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

Man starts over again every day,
in spite of all he knows,
against all he knows.
— Emil Cioran

I posted Chapter 26 of my novella, Propensity. I share it here because it invokes Baudrillard’s Simulacra.

Consider it an advert – and a window into Propensity.

Simulacra – When the Camera Becomes the Conscience
Blog Post: Propensity, Chapter 26 – Simulacra
Audio: Propensity, Chapter 2 – Oversight

The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?

No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.

The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.

As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?

This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.

A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.

Editorial Review

“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.

—Reedsy Discovery Review

Meantime, give it a listen.

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Written by Bry Willis AKA Ridley Park

Philosophics

Excess Capitalism: 1,000 Views

Posted in modernism, morality, politics, power, societyTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment
Excess Deaths Attributable to Capitalism

This is one of the more popular posts on here, so I shouldn’t have to give this milestone special attention, but I will anyway. Slow news day. It’s more about economics and political science, but I go there, too. Not a big fan of Capitalism in any of its many incarnations.

Video: Midjourney automation

I decided to experiment with Midjourney for this cover art and short animation. Instead of creating a typical prompt, I simply copied and pasted the text into the box above and let Midjourney make sense of it. This was the result. Then I asked to animate a loop.

Enough diversion. Back to finishing my latest book. I see light at the end of the tunnel.

On Death and Dying

Posted in healthcare, identity, language, music, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Disclaimer: I should be finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis book, yet I am here writing about death and dying. Why? Because I was watching an interview with Neal Schon by Rick Beato. I should have been working on my book then, too. It seems I can write about death more easily than finish a book about the failure of language. Perhaps because death speaks fluently.

I haven’t produced music professionally since the mid-1980s, and I haven’t performed since 2012, yet I am still drawn to its intricacies. My fingers no longer allow me to play much of anything anymore. This is a sort of death. When the body forgets what the mind remembers, that’s a particular kind of death – one language dying while another can’t translate.

As Neal was walking Rick through his equipment and approach to music, I was taken back to a similar place. I wanted to plug into a Fender Twin or a Hi-Watt, a Lexicon 224 or a Cry Baby wah. I still have nightmares thinking of setting up a Floyd Rose.

Video: Rick Beato interviews Neal Schon

But I can’t go back. As for music, I can’t go forward either. I’m at a standstill, but in a regressed position. It’s uncomfortable. It feels a lot like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. I used to be able to do that. Don’t get me wrong – I am not claiming to be on the level of Neal Schon, a man I remember from his days with Santana, but when you reach a level of proficiency and then lose it, it hurts; it can be devastating.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I recall being in hospital in 2023 – a physical rehabilitation facility, really – and I found a piano in a vacant common room. Drawn to the instrument, I rolled over my wheelchair and played…nothing. My fingers wouldn’t work. The piano sat there like a relic of my former self. I rolled toward it as though approaching an altar. My fingers hovered, twitched, failed. The sound of nothing has never been so loud. I cried. I cried a lot those days. I was down to 58 kilos – at 182 cm, I weighed in at just over 9 stone. It wasn’t the best of times.

I still feel a certain nostalgia.

And then there are the people I’ve lost along the way – as another Neal reflected on – The Needle and the Damage Done.

Love and art are both acts of repetition. When one ends, the reflex remains – the impulse to reach, to share, to call out. Death doesn’t stop the motion, only the answer.

I’m lucky to have left Delaware. When a girlfriend died in 2020, I remained and connected with another until 2023, when she died, too. From 2020 to 2023, when I was out and about, something might have caught my eye, and I’d reflect on how Carrie might have liked that.

But it was different. It was more like, ‘I should let Carrie know about that,’ only to realise fractions of a second later that she wouldn’t see whatever it was; she couldn’t. And I’d carry on. I didn’t need to repeat this with Sierra. My relocation to Massachusetts solved this challenge – not so many triggers.

I’m not sure how the loss of ‘professional’ music relates to deceased partners, but it does – at least enough for me to make this connexion. Perhaps I’m just connecting arbitrary dots, but I’ll call it nostalgia.

I don’t play, but I still hear it. The song continues without me. Nostalgia is just rhythm without melody. Perhaps all nostalgia is epistemological error – the confusion of past fluency for present meaning.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Blind Owl

Posted in fiction, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

“In this debased and wretched world, full  of destitution and want, for the first time  I thought that a beam of sunshine had shone  upon my life—but alas, this was not a beam  of sunshine, it was a flicker of light…” 

— The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat

This Philosophics.blog is my primary social media outlet, but I have another presence for my fiction fare – RidleyPark.blog. In reviewing the content on connected sites, I rediscovered this review of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Interestingly, I read this in French and English to suss it out, neither of which necessarily survived the translation from the original Persian.

This book was interesting enough to review twice – here and here.

I also realise that I never finished this review sequence, as parts 2 and 3 were never released. I don’t even have the heart to open my video suite to determine the fate of the rest; not today, anyway.

Check out the short to get a feel for the narrative.

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written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Seduction of the Spreadsheet

Posted in healthcare, maths, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
1–2 minutes

Whilst researching “The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom”, I stumbled across Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism. The title alone was bait enough. I expected the usual reheated liberal anxiety about dictators; instead, I found a critique of data worship and mechanistic reason that hits the nerve of our statistical age.

Besmet, a Belgian psychologist with a background in statistics, begins not with tyranny but with epistemology – with how the Enlightenment’s dream of objectivity curdled into the managerial nightmare we now inhabit. The first half of the book reads like a slow unmasking of Scientism: how numbers became our gods, and graphs, our catechisms.

Written before COVID-19 but finished during it, his argument turns pandemic data into theatre – a performance of certainty masking deep confusion. The daily tally became ritual sacrifice to the idol of ‘evidence-based’ policy. His point, and mine, is that totalitarianism no longer needs gulags; it thrives in dashboards and KPIs.

Desmet’s frame intersects beautifully with my own thesis: that obedience today is internalised as reasonableness. Freedom has been recast as compliance with ‘the data’. We surrender willingly, provided the orders come in statistical form.

This is why even Agile™ management and its fetish of ‘velocity’ reek of the same mechanistic faith. Every sprint promises deliverance through quantification; every retrospective is a bureaucratic confession of inefficiency. The cult of metrics is not merely a managerial fad – it is the metaphysics of our time. The problem is at once ontological and epistemological: we mistake the measure for the thing itself, and in doing so, become measurable.

It’s a rare pleasure to encounter a fellow dissident of the numerical faith – a man who sees that the spreadsheet has replaced the sceptre.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Myth of Ethical AI

Posted in agency, economics, equality, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, maths, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–4 minutes

In fact, the myth of a unified ethics.

‘Ethical AI’ is one of those phrases that makes philosophers reach for the gin. It’s like saying ‘compassionate capitalism or ‘fair monopoly’. The words coexist only in PowerPoint presentations and TED Talks, where moral tension is rebranded as innovation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The tech establishment loves to mutter about ‘ethics’ as though it were a feature flag – something to be toggled on in beta before the next investor round. But ethics, inconveniently, isn’t monolithic. There is no master code of moral conduct waiting to be compiled into machine learning. There are ethics, plural: Greek, Buddhist, Confucian, feminist, existentialist – each with its own vision of good, and none agreeing on the syntax.

Video: Whilst rendering cover images, I generated this and figured I’d share it for no particular reason.

The Utilitarian Delusion

When the Silicon Valley moralists speak of ‘ethics’, what they actually mean is a bland utilitarian consequentialism, tarted up in slide decks. Do what produces the most good for the most people. Sounds efficient – until you realise the spreadsheet never quite adds up. Whose good? Whose people?

This moral arithmetic smuggles in its biases like contraband. It assumes the human species sits atop the moral food chain, that GDP and engagement metrics can be moral indicators, and that ethics itself can be quantified. The utilitarian calculus is seductive precisely because it flatters the technocrat’s sensibility: moral worth as data set, consequence as outcome variable.

It’s Bentham for the broadband age – pleasure measured in clicks, pain in latency. The only thing worse than this cheerful consequentialism is the belief that it’s neutral.

The Ethics of Obedience

The next trick in the tech priesthood’s catechism is ‘alignment’ – training AI to reflect ‘human values’. But whose values? The Californian elite’s, presumably: a pseudo-egalitarian capitalism that confuses ‘doing good’ with ‘disrupting the poor’.

When they say alignment, they mean obedience. When they say ‘responsible AI’, they mean ‘please don’t regulate us yet’. The entire project rests on a moral inversion: the child instructing the parent, the tool defining the hand. The algorithm doesn’t learn ethics; it learns precedent. It learns who gets the loan, who gets the sentence, who gets the ad for antidepressants.

These systems don’t go rogue – they conform. Perfectly.

The Mirror Problem

The great irony of “ethical AI” is that the machine already behaves ethically – by our own measure. It optimises what we’ve taught it to value: efficiency, profit, attention, control. The trouble is that these are our ethics, not its. The algorithm merely holds up a mirror, and we recoil at the reflection.

To demand ‘ethical AI’ while leaving our institutions morally bankrupt is theatre. The problem is not that AI lacks conscience; it’s that the humans who build it mistake conscience for compliance. The ethics crisis in technology isn’t about machines misbehaving; it’s about humans pretending to behave.

The Real Question

We keep asking whether AI can be ethical, as though machines might one day deliver what we have failed to. But the real question is simpler, bleaker: can we be? If history is any guide, the answer is ‘only when it’s profitable’.

Until then, ‘ethical AI’ remains a convenient myth, moral placebo for the age of automation. What we need are not ethical algorithms but ethical architects. And the odds of finding those among the venture capital class are, as ever, vanishingly small.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics