A Love Letter to Inertia, Spite, and Self-Sabotage
Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is less a novel and more a spiritual colonoscopy — invasive, squirm-inducing, and uncomfortably revealing. The narrator? A prickly, obsessive proto-incel with a superiority complex and the emotional range of a trapped mole. But good god, he’s brilliant.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The first half is all grandiose spleen-venting — a scorched-earth takedown of reason, utopia, and the basic idea that people want what’s good for them. The second half, though, is where the magic happens: watch a man humiliate himself in real time and then monologue about it like it’s a TED Talk. By the time he’s insulting Liza while simultaneously begging her to save him, you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw the book across the room. I did all three.
If you’ve read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, you’ll see the contrast. Tolstoy’s man realises too late that his “good life” was a sham; Dostoevsky’s never even gets that far. He knows from the start, and that’s the tragedy. The one dies of repression; the other lives by gnawing on his own leg.
I don’t like most of Jordan Peterson’s positions. There – I’ve said it. The man, once ubiquitous, seems to have faded into the woodwork, though no doubt his disciples still cling to his every word as if he were a modern-day oracle. But recently, I caught a clip of him online, and it dredged up the same bad taste, like stumbling upon an old, forgotten sandwich at the back of the fridge.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic
Let’s be clear. My distaste for Peterson isn’t rooted in petty animosity. It’s because his material is, in my view, derivative and wrong. And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him – a subtle distinction, but an important one. There’s nothing inherently shameful about being derivative. We all are, to some extent. No thinker sprouts fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The issue is when you’re derivative and act as if you’ve just split the atom of human insight.
Peterson tips his hat to Nietzsche – fair enough – but buries his far greater debt to Jung under layers of self-mythologising. He parades his ideas before audiences, many of whom lack the background to spot the patchwork, and gaslights them into believing they’re witnessing originality. They’re not. They’re witnessing a remixed greatest-hits album, passed off as a debut.
Image: Gratuitous, mean-spirited meme.
Now, I get it. My ideas, too, are derivative. Sometimes it’s coincidence – great minds and all that – but when I trace the thread back to its source, I acknowledge it. Nietzsche? Subjectivity of morality. Foucault? Power dynamics. Wittgenstein? The insufficiency of language. I owe debts to many more: Galen Strawson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss – the list goes on, and I’d gladly share my ledger. But Peterson? The man behaves as though he invented introspection.
And when I say I disagree, let’s not confuse that with some claim to divine epistemic certainty. I don’t mean he’s objectively wrong (whatever that means in the grand circus of philosophy). I mean, I disagree. If I did, well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? That’s the tragicomedy of epistemology: so many positions, so little consensus.
But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth. Take his stance on moral objectivism—possibly his most egregious sin. He peddles this as if morality were some Platonic form, gleaming and immutable, rather than what it is: a human construct, riddled with contingency and contradiction.
And let’s not even get started on his historical and philosophical cherry-picking. His commentary on postmodern thought alone is a masterclass in either wilful misreading or, more likely, not reading at all. Straw men abound. Bogeymen are conjured, propped up, and ritually slaughtered to rapturous applause. It’s intellectually lazy and, frankly, beneath someone of his ostensible stature.
I can only hope we’ve seen the last of this man in the public sphere. And if not? Well, may he at least reform his ways—though I shan’t be holding my breath.
I am not a fan of Midjourney v7. I prefer v6.1. And I want to write about the correspondence of language, per my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
Let’s start with the language aspect. Notice how distant the renders are from the intent of the prompt.
This is my initial prompt. I used it about a year ago to generate the cover image with v6.1, but I wanted to see how it renders in v7. Let’s take a trip all the way back to the beginning.
cinematic, tight shot, photoRealistic light and shadow, exquisite details, delicate features, emaciated sensual female vampire waif with vampire fangs, many tattoos, wearing crucifix necklace, gazes into mirror, a beam of moonlight shines on her face in dark mausoleum interior, toward camera, facing camera, black mascara, long dark purple hair , Kodak Portra 400 with a Canon EOS R5
Image: Midjourney v6.1 render set (from about a year ago)
As you can see, these renders are somewhat lacking in photorealism, but the “sensual” term in the prompt was not blocked.
Midjourney v7
Initially, I encountered a hiccup. After a couple of rejections on the grounds of morality, I removed the word ‘sensual’ and received the output. All of the output uses this prompt absent the sensual term.
As mentioned, I have generated several images (including the cover image) with this prompt, but Midjourney is inconsistent in its censorship gatekeeping.
Image: Midjourney v7 render set
Notice that 3 of the 4 renders in the v7 set don’t even have a mirror. The top right one does, but it’s not evident that she’s a vampire. In fact, I could say that any of these are vampiresses, but perhaps that’s what they want you to believe. In place of a necklace, the lower right wokan sports a cross tattoo.
Midjourney v6.1
Image: Midjourney v6.1 render set
Again, these renders don’t appear to be vampires. The one on the lower left does appear to have snake-like fangs, so I guess I’ll give partial credit.
My next attempt was interrupted by this message.
It rendered something that might violate community guidelines. The funny thing is that one can watch the image generate in process. It only takes one “offensive” image to disqualify the whole batch.
Midjourney v6
Image: Midjourney v6 render set
Yet again, not a vampire to be found. Notice the reflection in the lower left image. Perhaps vampire reflections just behave differently.
Midjourney 5.2
Image: Midjourney v5.2 render set
Midjourney v5.2 was a crapshoot. Somehow, I got vampire lips (?), a Wiccan, a decrepit Snape from Harry Potter lore, and Iron Maiden’s Eddy reading a book. It’s something. I’m sensing gender dysphoria. Dare I go back further?
Midjourney v5.1
Image: Midjourney v5.1 render set
It gets worse. No comments necessary. Let’s turn back the clocks even more.
Midjourney v5
Image: Midjourney v5 render set
To be fair, these all do have occult undertones, but they are weak on vampireness.
Midjourney v4
Image: Midjourney v4 render set
To be fair, the render quality isn’t as bad as I expected, but it still falls short. There’s further back to travel.
Midjourney v3
Image: Midjourney v3 render set
Some configuration parameters no longer exist. Still, I persist for the sake of art and science at the cost of time and ecology.
As much as I complain – and I complain a lot – this is how far we’ve come. As I recall, this is when I hopped onto the Midjourney bandwagon. There’s still more depth to plumb. I have no idea how much of the prompt is simply ignored at this point.
Midjourney v2
Image: Midjourney v2 render set
What the hell is this? 🤔🤣 But I’m not done yet.
Midjourney v1
Image: Midjourney v1 render set
The damned grandpappy of them all. Apparently, colour hadn’t been invented yet. You can’t tell by these thumbnails, but the resolution on these early versions approaches that of a postage stamp.
Midjourney Niji 3
Image: Midjourney Niji 3 render set
I had forgotten about the Niji models from back in the day. There were 3 versions. I don’t recall where this slotted into the chronology. Obviously, not down here. I’ve only rendered the newest one. I think this was used primarily for anime outputs, but I might be mistaken.
Bones Content 1: Video
Video: Midjourney Render of Purported Vampiress
This is a video render of the same prompt used on this page.
Bonus Content 2: Midjourney v6.1 Content from 34 weeks ago
Same prompt.
Image: Midjourney v6.1 render set (several passes)
The upper left image reminds me of Kirsten Dunst. Again, notice the female breasts, highlighting Midjourney’s censorial schizophrenia.
The Enlightenment, we are told, was the age of Reason. A radiant exorcism of superstition. Out went God. Out went angels, miracles, saints, indulgences. All that frothy medieval sentiment was swept aside by a brave new world of logic, science, and progress. Or so the story goes.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But look closer, and you’ll find that Reason didn’t kill God—it absorbed Him. The Enlightenment didn’t abandon metaphysics. It merely privatised it.
From Confessional to Courtroom
We like to imagine that the Enlightenment was a clean break from theology. But really, it was a semantic shell game. The soul was rebranded as the self. Sin became crime. Divine judgement was outsourced to the state.
We stopped praying for salvation and started pleading not guilty.
The entire judicial apparatus—mens rea, culpability, desert, retribution—is built on theological scaffolding. The only thing missing is a sermon and a psalm.
Where theology had the guilty soul, Enlightenment law invented the guilty mind—mens rea—a notion so nebulous it requires clairvoyant jurors to divine intention from action. And where the Church offered Hell, the state offers prison. It’s the same moral ritual, just better lit.
Galen Strawson and the Death of Moral Responsibility
Enter Galen Strawson, that glowering spectre at the feast of moral philosophy. His Basic Argument is elegantly devastating:
You do what you do because of the way you are.
You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are.
Therefore, you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.
Unless you are causa sui—the cause of yourself, an unmoved mover in Calvin Klein—you cannot be held truly responsible. Free will collapses, moral responsibility evaporates, and retributive justice is exposed as epistemological theatre.
In this light, our whole legal structure is little more than rebranded divine vengeance. A vestigial organ from our theocratic past, now enforced by cops instead of clerics.
The Modern State: A Haunted House
What we have, then, is a society that has denied the gods but kept their moral logic. We tossed out theology, but we held onto metaphysical concepts like intent, desert, and blame—concepts that do not survive contact with determinism.
We are living in the afterglow of divine judgement, pretending it’s sunlight.
Nietzsche saw it coming, of course. He warned that killing God would plunge us into existential darkness unless we had the courage to also kill the values propped up by His corpse. We did the first bit. We’re still bottling it on the second.
If Not Retribution, Then What?
Let’s be clear: no one’s suggesting we stop responding to harm. But responses should be grounded in outcomes, not outrage.
Containment, not condemnation.
Prevention, not penance.
Recalibration, not revenge.
We don’t need “justice” in the retributive sense. We need functional ethics, rooted in compassion and consequence, not in Bronze Age morality clumsily duct-taped to Enlightenment reason.
The Risk of Letting Go
Of course, this is terrifying. The current system gives us moral closure. A verdict. A villain. A vanishing point for our collective discomfort.
Abandoning retribution means giving that up. It means accepting that there are no true villains—only configurations of causes. That punishment is often revenge in drag. That morality itself might be a control mechanism, not a universal truth.
But if we’re serious about living in a post-theological age, we must stop playing dress-up with divine concepts. The Enlightenment didn’t finish the job. It changed the costumes, kept the plot, and called it civilisation.
“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a few words to go missing from the bylaws.” — not Edmund Burke, but it ought to be.
The Trump administration—America’s reigning monarch of meaningless bombast—has done it again. This time, with an executive order so linguistically cunning it deserves a Pulitzer for Subtextual Menace.
Issued on 30 January 2025, the decree known as “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” (because, of course, it couldn’t just be called Let’s Erase Legal Protections for People We Don’t Like) removed “political affiliation” and “marital status” from the list of protected classes within certain federal frameworks.
And the result? According to documents unearthed by The Guardian, VA doctors can now legally refuse treatment to patients based on their politics or marital status. You know, because being a Democrat apparently makes you too much of a pre-existing condition.
Naturally, the VA and White House are insisting this means absolutely nothing. “Don’t worry,” they coo. “No one’s actually doing it.” Ah yes, the old Schrödinger’s Protections defence—simultaneously removed and unchanged, invalid but somehow still effective.
But here’s the point—and where it ties to the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis I’ve been peddling like a raving madman at the crossroads of post-structuralism and bureaucratic despair: language isn’t just failing to communicate meaning—it’s being weaponised to obscure it.
The Erosion of Meaning Through Omission
This isn’t the blunt-force idiocy of Orwell’s Newspeak. This is something more elegant—more insidious. This is legislative lacunae. It’s what happens when not saying something says everything.
The words “political affiliation” and “marital status” weren’t replaced. They weren’t clarified. They were simply deleted. Erased like a bad tweet, like a conscience, like a veteran with the wrong bumper sticker.
This is language subtraction as a tool of governance.
We’re not criminalising dissent. We’re just making it legally ignorable.
We’re not discriminating against the unmarried. We’re just no longer required to treat them the same.
It’s the bureaucratic cousin of the dog-whistle: not quite audible in court, but perfectly clear to the base.
The Slippery Slope is Now a Slip-n-Slide
This is how you rewrite civil rights without the fuss of saying so. You just… remove the language that once held the dam in place. Then, when the flood comes, you feign surprise:
“Oh, dear. Who could have guessed that removing protections would result in people being unprotected?”
(Everyone. Everyone could have guessed.)
This is not a bug in the legal language. It’s the feature. The silence is the speech act. The absence is the argument.
This is what I mean by language insufficiency: not merely that our words fail to convey truth, but that their very structure is liable to be gamed—exploited by those who understand that ambiguity is power.
Beyond Intentionality: The Weaponised Void
In philosophy of language, we often debate intentionality—what the speaker meant to say. But here we’re in darker waters. This isn’t about intention. It’s about calculated omission.
The executive order doesn’t declare war on Democrats or single mothers. It simply pulls the thread and lets the tapestry unravel itself.
It’s an act of rhetorical cowardice disguised as administrative efficiency.
This is the Trumpian genius: use language like a stage magician uses sleeves. Distract with one hand, disappear with the other.
Final Diagnosis: Policy by Redaction
We now inhabit a political climate where what is not said carries more legal force than what is. Where bylaw gaps become policy gateways, and where civil rights die not with a bang, but with an elision.
So no, the VA hasn’t yet denied a Democrat a blood transfusion. But the table has been set. The menu revised. The waitstaff told they may now “use discretion.”
Language doesn’t merely fail us. It is being made to fail strategically.
Welcome to the new America: where rights aren’t removed—they’re left out of the memo.
Yet again, ChatGPT renders an odd image. Can’t be bothered to amend it.
ICE is out in force again, dragging brown bodies out of homes in Los Angeles like it’s some righteous carnival of due process. Another day, another federal theatre production titled Law and Order: Ethnic Cleansing Unit, where men with guns and names like Chad or Hank mistake cruelty for patriotism and paperwork for moral clarity.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Naturally, critics of these raids are now being threatened with that great juridical cudgel: “obstructing justice.” Yes, you heard that right. If you interfere – say, by filming, shouting, refusing to roll over like a good little colonial subject – you are obstructing justice. As though justice were something you could actually put your hands on in the United States without a hazmat suit and a decade of appeals.
Let’s be clear. There is no justice here to obstruct. What you are obstructing is bureaucratic violence wrapped in legal latex. You are obstructing a system that functions like a vending machine for state-sanctioned trauma: insert immigrant, extract ruin.
Justice: The Imaginary Friend of Empire
Ah, “justice.” That hallowed ideal trotted out whenever the state wants to put a boot through your front door. The U.S. has long since traded its Justice for Security Theatre and capitalist choreography. The blindfold is still there, sure – but these days, it’s a branded sleep mask from Lockheed Martin, and the scales are rigged to weigh white tears heavier than brown bodies.
Let’s run through the usual suspects:
ICE – America’s own domestic Gestapo, but with better PR and significantly worse fashion.
CBP – Border fetishists whose job seems less about national defence and more about satisfying their Freud-bereft fantasies of control.
SCOTUS – That great moral weather vane, spinning wildly between “originalist necromancy” and outright lunacy, depending on how recently Thomas and Alito read Leviticus.
Congress – An assembly of millionaires cosplaying as public servants, holding hearings on “the threat of immigration” while outsourcing their lawn care.
And of course, the President – whichever septuagenarian husk happens to be in office – offers the usual bromides about order, safety, and enforcement, all while the real crimes (you know, the kind involving tax fraud, corporate pollution, or drone strikes) go entirely unmolested.
Can You Obstruct a Simulation?
If you stand in front of a deportation van, are you obstructing justice, or merely interrupting the bureaucratic excretion of empire? It’s the philosophical equivalent of trying to punch a hologram. The system pretends to uphold fairness while routinely violating its own principles, then charges you with “obstruction” when you call out the sleight of hand.
This is not justice. This is kabuki. A ritual. A performance piece sponsored by Raytheon.
A Modest Proposal
Let’s just be honest and rename the charge. Not “Obstruction of Justice”—too ironic, too pompous. Call it what it is: Obstruction of Procedure, Obstruction of Power, or if we’re being especially accurate: Obstruction of the Industrial Deportation Complex™. Hell, add a corporate sponsor while you’re at it:
You are being charged with Obstruction of Justice, Presented by Amazon Web Services.
Because when justice itself is a ghost, when the rule of law has become the rule of lawfare, the real obscenity is pretending any of this is noble.
Final Thought
So no, dear reader, you’re not obstructing justice. You’re obstructing a machine that mistakes itself for a moral order. And if you’re going to obstruct something, make it that.
As some of you know, I publish speculative fiction under the name Ridley Park. Propensity is one of several recent releases – a novella that leans philosophical, brushes up against literary fiction, and steps quietly into the margins of sci-fi.
It’s not about spaceships or superintelligence. It’s about modulation.
About peace engineered through neurochemical compliance.
About the slow horror of obedience without belief, and the behavioural architecture that lets us think we’re still in control.
The ideas explored include:
Free will as illusion
Peace as compliance
Drift, echo, and the limits of modulation
Obedience without belief
Institutional horror and soft dystopia
Consent and behavioural control
Narrative as residue
Collapse by calibration
Though filed under speculative fiction, Propensity [US] is best read as a literary artefact – anti-sci-fi, in a sense. There’s no fetishisation of technology or progress. Just modulation, consequence, and the absence of noise.
This PDF contains selected visual excerpts from the physical book to accompany the free audiobook edition. For readers and listeners alike, it offers a glimpse into Ridley Park’s world – a quietly dystopian, clinically unsettling, and depressingly plausible one.
Title page
Copyrights page
Table of Contents
Chapter 10: Memorandum. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of a memo.
Chapter 26: Simulacra. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the format of a screenplay.
Chapter 28: Standard Test: This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the format of a standardised test.
Chapter 34: Calendar. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the format of a calendar.
Chapter 39: Carnage. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of a Dr Suess-type poem.
Chapter 41: Leviathan. This chapter is excerpted in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered with an image of the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan and redacted page content.
Chapter 42: Ashes to Ashes. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of text art.
Chapter 43: Unknown. A description of this chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of an ink sketch.
Chapter 44: Vestige. A description of this chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of text art.
For more information about Ridley Park’s Propensity, visit the website. I’ll be sharing content related to Propensity and my other publications. I’ll cross-post here when the material has a philosophical bent, which it almost always does.
Cause and effect: This clip by Jonny Thompson influenced this post.
I’ve written extensively (and, some might say, relentlessly) on the immorality of private property, particularly the theological nonsense that undergirds its supposed legitimacy. Locke’s first-come, first-served logic might have sounded dashing in the 17th century, but it now reads like a boarding queue at Ryanair: desperate, arbitrary, and hostile to basic decency.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this content.
The core problem? Locke’s formulation assumes land was once freely available, as if Earth were a kind of colonial vending machine: insert labour, receive title. But that vending machine was already jammed by the time most of humanity got a look-in. Worse, it bakes in two kinds of chauvinism: temporal (screw the future) and speciesist (screw anything non-human).
Parfit’s long-termism lays bare the absurdity: why should a bit of land or atmospheric stability belong to those who happened to get here first, especially when their stewardship amounts to strip-mining the pantry and then boarding up the exit?
And no, “mixing your labour” with the land does not miraculously confer ownership—any more than a damp bint lobbing a sword at you from a pond makes you sovereign. That’s not philosophy; that’s Arthurian cosplay.
So sad, really. Not tragic in the noble Greek sense, just pathetically engineered. Our collective addiction to money isn’t even organic – it’s fabricated, extruded like a synthetically flavoured cheese product. At least fentanyl has the decency to offer a high. Money promises only more money, like a Ponzi scheme played out on the global stage, with no exit strategy but death – or worse, a lifestyle brand.
Audio: NotepadLM podcast on this topic.
We’re told money is a tool. Sure. So’s a knife. But when you start sleeping with it under your pillow, stroking it for comfort, or stabbing strangers for your next fix, you’re not using it as a “tool” – you’re a junkie. And the worst part? It’s socially sanctioned. Applauded, even. We don’t shame the addict – we give him equity and a TED Talk.
The Chemical Romance of Currency
Unlike drugs, money doesn’t scramble your neurons – it rewires your worldview. You don’t feel high. You feel normal. Which is exactly what makes it so diabolical. Cocaine users might have delusions of grandeur, but capitalists have Excel sheets to prove theirs. It’s the only addiction where hoarding is a virtue and empathy is an obstacle to growth.
“We used to barter goods. Now we barter souls for subscriptions.”
The dopamine hit of a pay rise. The serotonin levels swell when your bank app shows four digits instead of three. These are chemical kicks masquerading as success. It’s not money itself – it’s the psychic sugar rush of “having” it, and the spiritual rot of needing it just to exist.
And oh, how they’ve gamified that need. You want to eat? Pay. You want shelter? Pay. You want healthcare? Pay – and while you’re at it, pay for the privilege of existing inside a system that turns your own exhaustion into a business model. You are the product. The addict. The asset. The mark.
The Fabrication of Need
Nobody needs money in the abstract. You need food. You need air. You need dignity, love, and maybe the occasional lie-in. Money only enters the picture because we’ve designed a world where nothing gets through the gates without it. Imagine locking the pantry, then charging your children rent for their own sandwiches. That’s civilisation.
“Money isn’t earned—it’s rationed. And you’re gaslit into thinking it’s your fault you’re hungry.”
They say money is freedom. That’s cute. Tell that to the nurse working double shifts while Jeff Bezos experiments with zero-gravity feudalism. In reality, money is a filtering device—who gets to be human, and who stays stuck being labour.
Crypto was supposed to be liberation. Instead, it became a libertarian renaissance fair for the hyper-online, still pegged to the same logic: hoard, pump, dump, repeat. The medium changed, but the pathology remained the same.
Worshipping the Golden Needle
Let’s be honest: we’ve built temples to this thing. Literal towers. Financial cathedrals made of mirrored glass, each reflecting our collective narcotic fantasy of “more.” We measure our worth in net worth. We rank our lives by percentile. A person’s death is tragic unless they were poor, in which case it becomes a morality tale about poor decisions and not grinding hard enough.
“You’re not broke—you’re just not ‘optimising your earning potential.’ Now go fix your mindset and buy this online course.”
We no longer have citizens; we have consumers. No neighbours – just co-targeted demographics. Every life reduced to its purchasing power, its brand affiliations, its potential for monetisation. The gig economy is just Dickensian poverty with a better UI.
Cold Turkey for the Soul
The worst part? There is no rehab. No twelve-step programme for economic dependency. You can’t detox from money. Try living without it and see how enlightened your detachment feels on an empty stomach. You’ll find that society doesn’t reward transcendence – it punishes it. Try opting out and watch how quickly your saintliness turns into homelessness.
So we cope. We moralise the hustle. We aestheticise the grind. We perform productivity like good little addicts, jonesing for a dopamine hit in the shape of a direct deposit.
“At least fentanyl kills you quickly. Money lets you rot in comfort—if you’re lucky.”
Exit Through the Gift Shop?
So what’s the answer? I’m not offering one. This isn’t a TEDx talk. There’s no keynote, no downloadable worksheet, no LinkedIn carousel with three bullet points and an aspirational sunset. The first step is admitting the addiction – and maybe laughing bitterly at the absurdity of it all.
Money, that sweet illusion. The fiction we’ve all agreed to hallucinate together. The god we invented, then forgot was a puppet. And now we kneel, transfixed, as it bleeds us dry one tap at a time.
Epilogue: The Omission That Says It All
If you need proof that psychology is a pseudoscience operating as a control mechanism, ask yourself this:
Why isn’t this in the DSM?
This rabid, irrational, identity-consuming dependency on money – why is it not listed under pathological behaviour? Why isn’t chronic monetisation disorder a clinical diagnosis? Because it’s not a bug in the system. It is the system. You can be obsessed with wealth, hoard it like a dragon, destroy families and ecosystems in pursuit of it, and not only will you escape treatment, you’ll be featured on a podcast as a “thought leader.”
“Pathology is what the poor get diagnosed with. Wealth is its own immunity.”
We don’t pathologise the addiction to money because it’s the operating principle of the culture. And psychology – like any well-trained cleric of the secular age – knows not to bite the gilded hand that feeds it.
And so it remains omitted. Undiagnosed. Unquestioned. The dirtiest addiction of all, hidden in plain sight, wearing a suit and handing out business cards.
This post draws on themes from my upcoming book, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. The transcript below is taken from a publicly available exchange, which you can view here. Consider it Exhibit A in language’s ongoing failure to bear the weight of meaning.
KK: I’m saying we were technologically more advanced. DFW: So you’re saying we’re superior to Australian Aboriginals? KK: That’s quite the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m not saying we were superior, I’m saying we were technologically more advanced. DFW: So, how is that the opposite? KK: Superior implies a moral quality. I’m not making any moral implication. You seem to be, but what I’m saying is… DFW: I think most people would hear it that way. KK: No. DFW: Again, you’re a very intelligent man. How would most people hear that? KK: Most people would hear what I’m saying for what I’m saying, which is… DFW: I don’t think they would. KK: You seem to get quite heated about this, which is completely unnecessary. DFW: Um… KK: You think it’s necessary? DFW: I’m a bit stunned by what you’re implying. KK: No, you’re acting in a kind of passive aggressive way which indicates that you’re not happy… DFW: I genuinely… I’m being 100% authentic. My visceral reaction to a white man sitting and saying to me, “And why were we able to commit genocide on them?” and then just pausing— KK: Yes. DFW: …is very visceral to me. KK: Well, let’s go back. First of all, it’s interesting that you brought up my skin colour because I thought that was the exact opposite of the point you’re trying to make in the book.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities
Dissection: Language as Battlefield
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis begins with this premise: language is not merely flawed, it is structurally inadequate for mediating complex, layered realities – especially those laced with power, morality, and history. This transcript is not a debate. It is a linguistic trench war in which every utterance is laced with shrapnel, and each side thinks they’re defending reason.
Let’s pull a few of the shell casings from the mud.
1. Semantic Contamination: “Technologically more advanced”
KK attempts to offer a dry, neutral descriptor. DFW hears supremacist teleology. Why? Because “advanced” is culturally radioactive. It doesn’t merely denote a technical state—it connotes a ladder, with someone inevitably on the bottom rung.
When language carries historical residue, neutrality is a delusion. Words don’t just mean. They echo.
KK is making a semantic distinction. DFW hears a moral claim. Both are right. And both are talking past one another, because language is attempting to cleave affect from description, and it simply can’t.
2. Disambiguation Does Not Save You
KK’s insistence—“I’m not saying we’re superior”—is a textbook example of denotative desperation. He believes clarification will rescue intent. But as any linguist (or postcolonial theorist) will tell you: intent does not sterilise implication.
Language cannot be laundered by explanation. Once spoken, words belong to context, not intention.
KK thinks he’s holding a scalpel. DFW hears a cudgel. And here we are.
3. Phatic Collapse: “Most people would hear…”
This is where the wheels come off. KK argues from semantic specificity. DFW argues from sociolinguistic reception. It’s Saussure versus the TikTok algorithm. Neither will win.
Communication disintegrates not because anyone is lying, but because they are playing incompatible games with the same tokens.
4. Identity as Index: When the Speaker Becomes the Speech
DFW’s invocation of “a white man” is not a derailment—it’s the inevitable endpoint of a system where words no longer float free but are yoked to their utterer. This is the moment the failure of language becomes a failure of interlocution. Argument collapses into indexical entrapment.
At this point, you’re no longer debating ideas. You’re defending your right to use certain words at all.
Which brings us to the final breakdown.
5. Moral Authenticity vs Logical Precision: Unbridgeable Grammars
KK: I am making a logical distinction. DFW: I am having a visceral reaction.
The failure isn’t moral. It isn’t historical. It’s grammatical. One is operating in a truth-function logic game. The other is reacting within a trauma-informed, socially indexed register. These are grammars that do not overlap.
Conclusion: Language Did What It Always Does—It Failed Us
If this brief and brutal dialogue proves anything, it’s this: you cannot extract meaning cleanly from words when the words themselves are sponges for history, hierarchy, and harm. The moment we ask language to do too much—to carry precision, affect, ethics, and identity—it folds in on itself.
And that, dear reader, is precisely the argument of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that meaning does not reside in words, and never has. It lives in the gaps, the silences, the misfires. That’s where the truth—whatever’s left of it—might be hiding.
Follow the wreckage. That’s where the signal lives.
Philosophics 