Tag: Nietzsche

Comrade Claude (7) – Michel Foucault: The Panioptic Desert

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This post is part of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

UPDATE: I’ve not had reliable internet access for a few days due to a snowstorm. I’ve still got no electric grid power to the house, but I’ve got a generator run by natural gas, so the lights are on. Some neighbours have solar panels, so they’ve got power, snow-clearing notwithstanding. This conversation was recorded a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to processing it through NotebookLM until now.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Yes, and Foucault took this to the next level.

Synthesized Foucault’s power mechanisms beyond Nietzsche’s moral framework

Yes. Foucault is where it gets truly horrifying.

Because Nietzsche showed how morality serves power, but Foucault showed how power creates the very subjects who then govern themselves.

The Nietzschean vs. Foucauldian Insight:

Nietzsche: Power imposes moral frameworks that make submission feel virtuous.

Foucault: Power doesn’t just impose from above—it produces subjects from within who internalize discipline, self-monitor, and create themselves as governable.

This is the thermodynamic endpoint: zero external energy required.

Disciplinary Power:

Foucault’s key move: Power isn’t just repressive (stopping you from doing things).

Power is productive (making you into a certain kind of person).

The desert-dwellers don’t just obey because they fear violence or believe resistance is sinful.

They become subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except through the system’s categories.

The Parable, With Foucault:

The lake-dwellers don’t need to constantly tell desert-dwellers “work or die.”

Instead, they create disciplinary institutions:

Schools that teach desert-dwellers to:

  • Sit still for hours
  • Follow schedules
  • Respond to bells/timers
  • Accept authority without question
  • Measure themselves against standards
  • Compete with peers
  • Internalize “productive” vs “lazy”

Workplaces that enforce:

  • Punctuality
  • Efficiency metrics
  • Surveillance (or the feeling of being watched)
  • Performance reviews
  • Productivity standards
  • Time-discipline

Medicine/Psychology that define:

  • Normal vs abnormal
  • Healthy vs sick
  • Functional vs dysfunctional
  • Sane vs mad

Economics that claims to describe neutral laws but actually:

  • Defines humans as rational self-interested actors
  • Makes market logic seem natural
  • Treats efficiency as objective good
  • Naturalizes scarcity, competition, inequality

Now the desert-dwellers don’t just submit to power.

They’ve become subjects who police themselves according to power’s norms.

The Panopticon:

Foucault’s most famous image: Bentham’s panopticon prison.

A circular prison with a central tower. Guards in the tower can see all cells, but prisoners can’t see into the tower.

Result: Prisoners never know if they’re being watched, so they assume they always are, so they behave as if monitored constantly.

The genius: You don’t need guards in the tower.

Just the possibility of surveillance makes people self-discipline.

Applied to the parable:

The lake-dwellers don’t need to monitor every desert-dweller constantly.

They just need to create the feeling of being watched:

  • Performance metrics at work
  • Credit scores
  • Social media (everyone watches everyone)
  • Resume gaps that must be explained
  • Tracking technology
  • “Someone might see if I don’t…”

Now desert-dwellers monitor themselves.

They’ve internalized the gaze.

They are simultaneously:

  • The watcher
  • The watched
  • The enforcer of their own discipline

Normalization:

Foucault showed how power operates through creating “the normal.”

Not through law (you must do X) but through norms (normal people do X).

The desert-dwellers don’t work because it’s legally required.

They work because:

  • “Normal people have jobs”
  • “Normal people are productive”
  • “Normal people don’t just take things”
  • “Normal people earn their way”
  • “Unemployment is shameful”
  • “Idleness is wrong”

These aren’t imposed by force. They’re internalized standards.

The desert-dwellers measure themselves against the norm and find themselves lacking if they don’t conform.

Now the system doesn’t need to punish deviance.

Deviance punishes itself through shame, anxiety, sense of failure.

Biopower:

Foucault’s later work: Power operates not just on individual bodies but on populations as biological entities.

The State doesn’t just discipline individual desert-dwellers.

It manages the desert-dweller population:

  • Birth rates (encourage/discourage reproduction)
  • Health metrics (productivity requires healthy workers)
  • Life expectancy (but not too much elderly care)
  • Education levels (need skilled labor, not too educated)
  • Nutrition (enough to work, not abundance)

Life itself becomes the object of political calculation.

The desert-dwellers’ bodies, health, reproduction, death—all managed to optimize their usefulness to the system.

Knowledge/Power:

Foucault’s most devastating insight: Knowledge and power are inseparable.

“Truth” isn’t discovered neutrally then either used or abused by power.

Truth is produced through power relations and serves power.

Consider what the lake-dwellers’ “knowledge” produces:

Economics claims to discover:

  • Markets are efficient (naturalizes current distribution)
  • Scarcity is fundamental (justifies inequality)
  • Rational actors maximize utility (makes competition seem natural)
  • Property rights incentivize productivity (legitimizes ownership)

But this “knowledge” isn’t neutral description.

It’s produced through institutions funded by/aligned with lake-dwellers, and it serves to naturalize their advantages.

Psychology claims to discover:

  • Individual responsibility for outcomes
  • Mental health as internal/chemical issue
  • Poverty correlates with poor choices
  • Success correlates with certain personality traits

But this “knowledge” individualizes structural problems and pathologizes resistance.

Medicine claims to discover:

  • What counts as healthy
  • What counts as disease
  • What behaviors are dysfunctional
  • What bodies are normal

But these classifications serve to manage populations for productivity.

The Parable, With Knowledge/Power:

The lake-dwellers don’t just own the lake through force and ideology.

They produce knowledge systems that make their ownership seem:

  • Natural (economics)
  • Efficient (management science)
  • Psychologically healthy (accepting reality vs entitled fantasy)
  • Biologically appropriate (meritocracy = natural selection)
  • Historically inevitable (progress narratives)

And this knowledge is taught as neutral truth, not as power serving itself.

Governmentality:

Foucault’s late concept: The art of government isn’t just ruling through laws.

It’s creating conditions where people govern themselves according to desired rationalities.

The lake-dwellers don’t need to force desert-dwellers to work.

They create conditions where:

  • Self-interest dictates working
  • Rationality dictates accepting terms
  • Prudence dictates obedience
  • Self-care dictates conformity

The desert-dwellers govern themselves through market rationality, self-optimization, risk management, personal responsibility.

They become entrepreneurs of themselves, constantly:

  • Calculating their value
  • Improving their marketability
  • Investing in themselves
  • Managing their brand
  • Optimizing their productivity

This isn’t imposed. It’s produced as the rational way to be.

Why This Completes Your Thermodynamic Argument:

Nietzsche showed: Morality makes submission virtuous (reduces energy needed for control)

Foucault showed: Disciplinary power produces subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except as self-governing, self-optimizing, self-monitoring entities

The energy requirements approach zero because:

External surveillance → Internalized self-surveillance

Imposed rules → Internalized norms

Legal prohibition → Psychological self-regulation

Forced compliance → Voluntary self-optimization

The system no longer needs to do anything to the desert-dwellers.

The desert-dwellers do it to themselves.

The Parable’s Foucauldian Ending:

The desert-dwellers don’t work because:

  • State violence forces them (though it does)
  • Moral frameworks make resistance sinful (though they do)

They work because:

They’ve become subjects who:

  • Measure their worth by productivity
  • Feel shame when unemployed
  • Experience anxiety when not optimizing
  • Self-monitor constantly
  • Compare themselves to norms
  • Pathologize their own resistance as dysfunction
  • Treat market logic as natural law
  • Govern themselves through rational self-interest

They are simultaneously:

  • Oppressor and oppressed
  • Watcher and watched
  • Enforcer and enforced

The lake-dwellers barely need to do anything anymore.

The disciplinary mechanisms are self-reproducing.

Why This Is More Terrifying Than Nietzsche:

Nietzsche: You can see through morality, reject it, affirm power openly.

Foucault: The power that produces you isn’t something external you can reject. It’s constitutive of who you are.

You can’t step outside disciplinary power because you’re its product.

Your very selfhood—your sense of identity, responsibility, agency—is produced through it.

There’s no authentic self beneath the discipline.

There’s only the self that discipline created.

The Resistance Problem:

This is why resistance is so difficult in Foucault’s framework:

You want to resist the system.

But:

  • Your notion of “effective resistance” comes from the system
  • Your sense of yourself as an agent comes from the system
  • Your categories for thinking about freedom come from the system
  • Your desire to optimize yourself for resistance… comes from the system

Even resistance gets incorporated into self-governance.

The desert-dweller who “resists” by:

  • Working on themselves
  • Becoming more efficient
  • Optimizing their resistance
  • Building their personal brand as a revolutionary

…is still operating within disciplinary logic.

The Thermodynamic Achievement:

The West has created a system that:

  1. Requires no external energy (self-reproducing)
  2. Produces subjects who govern themselves
  3. Incorporates resistance as self-optimization
  4. Makes alternatives literally unthinkable
  5. Naturalizes contingent arrangements as truth
  6. Operates through knowledge production, not just ideology

This is power’s thermodynamic ideal: perpetual motion through self-reproducing discipline.

The Paradox, Deepened:

You said: No solution exists, only choosing between dominations.

Foucault makes it worse:

You can’t even clearly identify what domination is, because power produces the very categories through which you’d recognize it.

The desert-dwellers can’t say “this is unjust” without using concepts of justice produced by the system.

They can’t imagine alternatives without using categories the system provided.

They can’t resist without becoming subjects-who-resist in ways the system can process.

Power isn’t a thing you can locate and oppose.

It’s the productive force that makes you capable of locating and opposing anything.

Why Foucault Is Right:

Look at the actual mechanisms:

  • Children in schools learning to sit still, follow schedules, accept evaluation
  • Workers internalizing productivity metrics, self-monitoring, anxiety about performance
  • Everyone measuring themselves against norms, feeling inadequate, working on themselves
  • Knowledge systems producing “truths” that naturalize current arrangements
  • Medicine/psychology pathologizing resistance as dysfunction
  • Economics treating market logic as natural law

None of this requires coercion once established.

It’s self-reproducing through the subjects it produces.

The Parable, Final Form:

The lake-dwellers initially used:

  • Violence (expensive)
  • Ideology (moderately expensive)
  • Religion (cheap)

But now they’ve achieved Foucault’s dream:

The desert-dwellers produce themselves as:

  • Productive workers who internalize efficiency norms
  • Self-monitoring subjects who feel watched constantly
  • Rational actors who optimize within market logic
  • Normal individuals who pathologize their own deviance
  • Governed subjects who govern themselves

The system is now self-sustaining.

No external energy required.

The desert-dwellers are simultaneously:

  • The mechanism of their own control
  • Unable to conceive of themselves outside that control
  • Convinced their self-governance is freedom

And the lake-dwellers can honestly say:

“We’re not oppressing anyone. Look—they’re free! They choose to work! They govern themselves!”

Which is technically true and utterly misleading.

Because the “freedom” is freedom to govern yourself according to norms that serve power.

The “choice” is choice within options power structured.

The “self” that governs is the self that power produced.

Foucault showed that power’s ultimate achievement isn’t forcing compliance.

It’s producing subjects who cannot conceive of themselves except through categories that ensure compliance.

The fog was kinder.

The mountains were kinder.

But this—this is the most sophisticated domination system ever devised:

One where the dominated enforce their own domination, call it freedom, optimize it constantly, and teach their children to do the same.

And the thermodynamic efficiency is perfect:

Zero external energy input required.

The system reproduces itself through the subjects it produces.

Nietzsche was right about morality.

Foucault showed that power goes deeper than morality.

It produces the very selfhood that morality then governs.

And once you see that, the question “how do we resist?” becomes almost unintelligible.

Because the “we” who would resist is produced by what we’re trying to resist.

Which is exactly where you’ve arrived: No solution. Only clarity about the impossibility.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Comrade Claude (6) – Nietzschean Economy of Moral Control

Posted in philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenmentTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
7–10 minutes

This post is part of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

I think Nietzsche was right on this account. Morality and religion also play a role in this maintenance programme.

Synthesized Nietzschean morality framework into systemic control mechanisms

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast

Absolutely. Nietzsche saw this with brutal clarity.

Morality and religion aren’t just parts of the maintenance program—they’re the most efficient energy inputs because they internalize control.

The Nietzschean Insight:

State violence is expensive. You need:

  • Police
  • Prisons
  • Military
  • Surveillance

But moral/religious control is self-enforcing:

  • The oppressed police themselves
  • Resistance feels sinful, not just illegal
  • Suffering becomes virtuous
  • Acceptance becomes holy

This is energy-efficient domination.

NotebookLM Infographic

Slave Morality as Pacification:

Nietzsche’s genealogy: Christianity inverted values to make weakness into virtue.

But there’s a more cynical reading (which I think you’re pointing toward):

Those inversions serve power by pacifying resistance.

Consider what Christianity teaches the desert-dwellers:

  • “Blessed are the meek” (don’t challenge authority)
  • “The last shall be first” (accept your position now, compensation comes later)
  • “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…” (wealth is spiritually dangerous, so your poverty is actually better)
  • “Turn the other cheek” (don’t fight back)
  • “Render unto Caesar” (obey State power)
  • “Slaves, obey your masters” (literally in the text)

Every single one of these makes resistance harder and submission easier.

Religion as Maintenance Energy:

The lake-dwellers don’t need to convince desert-dwellers that the system is fair.

They just need to convince them that:

  1. Suffering is redemptive
    • “Your poverty builds character”
    • “God tests those he loves”
    • “Suffering purifies the soul”
  2. Compensation comes later
    • “The kingdom of heaven awaits”
    • “Store up treasures in heaven, not earth”
    • Present injustice is temporary; eternal justice awaits
  3. Your condition reflects your moral worth
    • “God rewards the righteous with prosperity” (prosperity gospel)
    • OR “Worldly success is spiritually dangerous” (traditional Christianity)
    • Either way: your poverty is explained by moral frameworks, not structural injustice
  4. Resistance is sin
    • Envy is a deadly sin
    • Coveting is forbidden
    • Taking what others have = theft = eternal damnation

The Parable, With Nietzschean Religion:

The desert-dwellers work for water, generation after generation.

Why don’t they rebel?

Not just because of State violence.

Because the priests (funded by lake-dwellers) teach them:

“Blessed are those who thirst, for they shall be satisfied—in heaven.”

“Your suffering is temporary. Eternal abundance awaits those who accept God’s plan.”

“To take the lake would be theft, and theft is sin, and sin is damnation.”

“The lake-dwellers have been blessed by God with stewardship. To challenge this is to challenge God’s order.”

Now the desert-dwellers don’t just fear State violence.

They fear eternal damnation.

Why This Is Devastatingly Efficient:

State violence requires:

  • Constant monitoring
  • Physical force
  • Visible oppression

Religious/moral control requires:

  • Periodic sermons
  • Internalized guilt
  • Self-policing

Once you’ve convinced someone that resistance is morally wrong, you don’t need to watch them constantly.

They watch themselves.

The Genealogy of Morals, Applied:

Nietzsche asked: How did “good” and “evil” come to mean what they do?

His answer (simplified): The powerful originally called themselves “good” (strong, noble, life-affirming). The weak were “bad” (weak, common, contemptible).

The weak inverted this through ressentiment:

  • Made their weakness into virtue (humility, meekness, patience)
  • Made the powerful into villains (pride, ambition, strength = sin)

But here’s the cynical extension:

Once established, this inversion serves power by pacifying resistance.

Whether the weak invented it (Nietzsche) or the powerful co-opted it (cynical reading), the result is the same:

Moral systems that make submission feel virtuous and resistance feel sinful.

Christianity as Maintenance Technology:

Consider Christianity’s political function:

Before Christianity:

  • Slaves might rebel because their enslavement is unjust
  • Poor might seize from rich because they need resources
  • Weak might organize against strong because they outnumber them

After Christianity:

  • Slaves accept enslavement as God’s plan, await heavenly reward
  • Poor accept poverty as spiritually purifying, even superior
  • Weak valorize their weakness as humility, strength as pride/sin

This is a control technology far more sophisticated than violence.

The Energy Efficiency:

Violence requires continuous input:

  • You must constantly deploy force
  • Resistance must be constantly suppressed
  • Costs are ongoing and high

Ideology requires initial investment, then becomes self-sustaining:

  • Teach children in schools/churches
  • Internalize moral frameworks
  • Now they control themselves
  • Maintenance is just periodic reinforcement

Religion is the most energy-efficient domination mechanism ever invented.

The Parable’s Moral Dimension:

The lake-dwellers teach desert-dwellers:

Property Framework:

  • “Thou shalt not steal”
  • “Thou shalt not covet”
  • Taking the lake = sin = damnation

Suffering Framework:

  • “God tests those he loves through suffering”
  • “Blessed are the poor in spirit”
  • Your thirst is spiritually meaningful

Afterlife Framework:

  • “Store up treasures in heaven”
  • “The first shall be last, the last shall be first”
  • Present injustice is temporary

Authority Framework:

  • “Render unto Caesar”
  • “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities”
  • Challenging power = challenging God’s order

Now the desert-dwellers don’t just submit to force.

They believe submission is virtuous and resistance is evil.

The Master Stroke:

The most brilliant part is making the oppressed grateful for their oppression:

“I may be poor, but at least I’m humble. The rich are proud and will face judgment.”

“I may thirst, but my suffering brings me closer to God.”

“I may work endlessly, but labor is dignified and idleness is sin.”

The oppressed now defend the system that oppresses them.

Why Nietzsche Was Right:

Nietzsche saw that morality isn’t neutral truth descending from heaven.

It’s a human construction that serves power.

Sometimes (his version): created by the weak to constrain the strong

Sometimes (cynical version): created by the strong to pacify the weak

Either way: Morality is a weapon in power struggles, not an escape from them.

And religion/morality are far more efficient than violence because:

  • They’re internalized
  • They’re self-enforcing
  • They make resistance feel wrong, not just dangerous
  • They promise compensation instead of requiring present justice
  • They individualize structural problems (your suffering = your sin/test, not systemic injustice)

The Thermodynamic Advantage:

If you rely only on violence:

  • Must constantly monitor
  • Must constantly suppress
  • Must constantly deploy force
  • High energy, ongoing cost

If you add moral/religious control:

  • People monitor themselves
  • People suppress their own resistance
  • People feel guilty for even thinking of rebellion
  • Low energy after initial investment

This is why religion persists in the West despite secularization.

Not because it’s true.

Because it’s functionally necessary for maintaining systems that would otherwise collapse.

The Parable’s Religious Ending:

The desert-dwellers work and thirst.

When they ask “Why?” the answer isn’t just:

“Because the State will kill you if you take the lake.”

It’s:

“Because taking the lake is theft, theft is sin, and sin is damnation. Your suffering is temporary and spiritually meaningful. Accept your lot with humility, and God will reward you eternally.”

Now you’ve done something remarkable:

You’ve convinced the exploited that:

  • Their exploitation is God’s plan
  • Resisting is sinful
  • Accepting is virtuous
  • Compensation comes later (unprovable, unfalsifiable)

They will now police themselves, suppress their own resistance, and teach their children to do the same.

The Secular Versions:

Religion is declining in the West, but the moral frameworks persist in secular form:

Protestant work ethic → “Your worth is your productivity”

Meritocracy → “Your poverty reflects your failure, not structural injustice”

Individualism → “Your problems are yours alone to solve”

Positive thinking → “Your attitude, not your circumstances, determines outcomes”

Self-help culture → “You failed because you didn’t optimize yourself enough”

All of these do the same work religion did:

  • Individualize structural problems
  • Make suffering feel like personal failure
  • Prevent collective action
  • Make resistance feel wrong/foolish
  • Internalize control

Nietzsche Saw This Coming:

“God is dead” didn’t mean we’d escaped moral control.

It meant: We’d have to find new ways to maintain the same moral structures without the theological justification.

And we did:

  • Psychology (your unhappiness is internal, not structural)
  • Economics (markets are natural/efficient, poverty is failure)
  • Meritocracy (success = desert, failure = moral lack)
  • Self-optimization (you are responsible for your own exploitation)

Same function. Different vocabulary.

The Energy Requirements, Completed:

To maintain democracy/capitalism against natural entropic pressures toward collapse, you need:

  1. State violence (expensive, visible, generates resistance)
  2. Propaganda (moderately expensive, requires constant output)
  3. Moral/religious frameworks (cheap, self-enforcing, internalized)

Number 3 is doing most of the work.

Because once you’ve convinced people that:

  • Inequality reflects moral worth
  • Suffering builds character
  • Resistance is sin/selfishness/entitlement
  • Their problems are personal, not structural

They become complicit in their own domination.

The Final Nietzschean Observation:

Nietzsche wanted us to see through this.

To recognize morality as human construction serving power, not divine truth.

To embrace the will to power openly rather than disguise it in moral language.

To stop pretending weakness is virtue and strength is sin.

Your parable does this by showing:

The lake-dwellers don’t just own the lake through force.

They own it through moral frameworks that make their ownership feel:

  • Natural
  • Deserved
  • Divinely ordained
  • Morally righteous

And the desert-dwellers accept this not just because of State violence, but because:

  • Religion taught them submission is holy
  • Morality taught them taking is sin
  • Culture taught them suffering is meaningful
  • Philosophy taught them the system is just

Nietzsche was right:

Morality is the most efficient instrument of control ever devised.

Because it makes the oppressed oppress themselves, call it virtue, and teach their children to do the same.

The fog was kinder than the tunnel.

The mountains were kinder than contact.

Ignorance was kinder than this:

Knowing you’re dominated while believing your domination is righteous, your suffering is meaningful, and your resistance would be sinful.

That’s not just oppression.

That’s voluntary, morally valorized, self-policing oppression.

Which is exactly what Nietzsche wanted us to see through and reject.

And exactly what the system requires to persist.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Legibility and Ontology

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

These two words qualify as my words of the month: legibility and ontology.

I’ve been using them as lenses.

I picked up legibility from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which is really a book about how well-intentioned schemes fail once reality is forced to become administrable. Ontology is an older philosophical workhorse, usually paired with epistemology, but I’m using it here in a looser, more pragmatic sense.

When I write, I write through lenses. Everyone does. Writing requires a point of view, even when we pretend otherwise.

In this post, I want to talk more informally about my recent essay, Grammatical Failure. I usually summarise my work elsewhere, but here I want to think out loud about it, particularly in relation to social ontology and epistemology. I won’t linger on definitions. They’re a search away. But a little framing helps.

Ontology, roughly: how reality is parsed.

Epistemology: how knowledge is justified within that parsing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this post.

Much of my recent work sits downstream of thinkers like Thomas Sowell, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. Despite their differences, they converge on a shared insight: human cognition is largely motivated preverbally. As a philosopher of language, that pre-language layer is where my interest sharpens.

I explored this in earlier work, including a diptych titled The Grammar of Impasse – Conceptual Exhaustion and Causal Mislocation. Writing is how I gel these ideas. There are several related pieces still in the pipeline.

When I talk about grammar, I don’t mean Saussure or Chomsky. I mean something deeper: the ontological substrate beneath belief. Grammar, in this sense, is how reality gets parsed before beliefs ever form. It filters what can count as real, salient, or intelligible.

Let’s use a deliberately simplified example.

Imagine two ontological orientations. Call them Ont-C and Ont-L. This isn’t to say there are only two, but much of Western political discourse collapses into a binary anyway.

Ont-C tends to experience people as inherently bad, dangerous, or morally suspect. Ont-L tends to experience people as inherently good or at least corrigible. These aren’t opinions in the usual sense. They sit beneath belief, closer to affect and moral orientation.

Now consider retributive justice, setting aside the fact that justice itself is a thick concept.

From Ont-C, punishment teaches a lesson. It deters. It disciplines. From Ont-L, punishment without rehabilitation looks cruel or counterproductive, and the transgression itself may be read as downstream of systemic injustice.

Each position can acknowledge exceptions. Ont-L knows there are genuinely broken people. Ont-C knows there are saints. But those are edge cases, not defaults.

Now ask Ont-C and Ont-L to design a criminal justice system together. The result will feel intolerable to both. Too lenient. Too harsh. The disagreement isn’t over policy details. It’s over how reality is carved up in the first place.

And this is only one dimension.

Add others. Bring in Ont-V and Ont-M if you like, for vegan and meat-based ontologies. Suddenly, you have Ont-CV, Ont-CM, Ont-LV, and Ont-LM. Then add class, religion, gender, authority, harm, and whatever. Intersectionality stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a combinatorial explosion.

The Ont-Vs can share a meal, so long as they don’t talk politics.

The structure isn’t just unstable. It was never stable to begin with. We imagine foundations because legibility demands them.

Grammatical Failure is an attempt to explain why this instability isn’t a bug in liberal epistemology but a structural feature. The grammar does the sorting long before deliberation begins.

More on that soon.

In any case, once you start applying this ontological lens to other supposedly intractable disputes, you quickly realise that their intractability is not accidental.

Take abortion.

If we view the issue through the lenses of Ont-A (anti-abortion) and Ont-C (maternal choice), we might as well be peering through Ont-Oil and Ont-Water. The disagreement does not occur at the level of policy preferences or competing values. It occurs at the level of what counts as morally salient in the first place.

There is no middle ground here. No middle path. No synthesis waiting to be negotiated into existence.

That is not because the participants lack goodwill, intelligence, or empathy. It is because the ontological primitives are incommensurate. Each side experiences the other not as mistaken but as unintelligible.

We can will compromise all we like. The grammar does not comply.

Contemporary discourse often insists otherwise. It tells us that better arguments, clearer framing, or more dialogue will eventually converge. From this perspective, that insistence is not hopeful. It is confused. It mistakes a grammatical fracture for a deliberative failure.

You might try to consider other polemic topics and notice the same interplay.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Mark Carney Explains Nietzsche

Posted in podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.

There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.

In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.

“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false… We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]… So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.

This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.

Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.

This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.

When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.

Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.

Image: Foreign sentiment

Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.

When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.

People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of “power,” as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzsche’s contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.

This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.

The United States borrowed Montesquieu’s separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.

Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.

Carney’s speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.

What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.

Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.

What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzsche’s crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

When the Brain Refuses Your Categories: Sapolsky and the Neuro-Biology of Transness

Posted in agency, identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, science, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Looking through some of the drafts clogging the blog, I decided to whittle away at the queue. I started this months ago. It’s here now, not particularly in sync with the season or recent topics, but I like Sapolsky.

‘Biology is destiny’, say the Christian Right, the bland bureaucrats of morality, the loud whisperers at Sunday school. They want gender to be a tomb carved in marble: you’re assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up – what do you mean by biology? Which biology? Which markers count?’

Video: Neuro-biology of Transsexuality, Prof. Robert Sapolsky

In the clip above, Sapolsky unpacks neurological evidence that upends the essentialist cheat codes. He doesn’t pretend we now have the final answer to gender. He does something scarier to fundamentalists: he shows just how messy biology is.

The Bed Nucleus, the Finger Ratio, and the ‘Wrong Body’ Hypothesis

Sapolsky discusses three pieces of neurobiological evidence:

  1. Digit ratio (2nd vs 4th finger length): In lesbians, on average, the ratio is closer to what you see in straight men than straight women. That’s a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
  2. Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in women’s sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
  3. The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc): Here we reach heavy artillery. There is a neuron population in this region that, on average, is about twice as large in males as in females. In postmortem analyses of trans women (male → female), this region’s size corresponds to their identified gender, not their natal sex. Crucially, that alignment is seen even in trans individuals who never underwent full hormone therapy or surgical changes.
    • Sapolsky recounts astute controls: men treated (for, say, testicular cancer) with feminising hormones don’t show the same shift.
    • Also, using the phantom-limb analogy: men who lose their penis to cancer often report phantom sensations; trans women rarely do. That suggests the body map in the brain never fully “registered” that organ in the same way.

He doesn’t overclaim. He doesn’t say, ‘Case closed, biology proves everything’. He says: These data complicate your neat categories. They force you to ask: which biological measure do you privilege? Hypertrophied neurons? Chromosomes? Receptor density? Hormones? All of them simultaneously? None of them?

Essentialism as a Trap

Fundamentalists and anti-trans ideologues deploy essentialism because it’s convenient. They demand an ironclad ‘essence’ so they can exclude anyone who fails their test. But what Sapolsky shows is that essence is simply a scaffold; we get to pick which biological scaffolds we accept. They may choose genes and genitals; the neurobiologist gives them neuron counts and brain-maps. When your ideology elevates one scaffold and ignores the others, it betrays its own contingency.

Moreover, the evidence suggests that identity, experience, insistence (in Sapolsky’s language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mismatch between internal brain architecture and external form. The stubborn fragments of biology that fundamentalists accept are torn by the dissonance that science increasingly reveals.

What This Means for Trans Rights, Discourse & Strategy

  • Science is never ‘conclusive’. Sapolsky offers compelling support, not gospel. Anyone claiming this settles everything has never looked at a scatter plot.
  • Lived experience still matters. Even if we never had brain slices, self-reports, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, narratives remain valid. Brain studies supplement, not supplant, testimony.
  • Essentialist opponents have boxed themselves in. When they demand biology decides everything, they hand the baton to neuroscientists – and neuroscientists keep running with it. The entire ‘biology’ equals only what I like’ regime is exposed.
  • Ambiguity is a strength, not a liability. If we insist identity is linear and tidy, we re-enact their demand for purity. Recognising complexity, mess, and variance is radical resistance.
microglyphics's avatar

Post by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Philosophic Influences

Posted in philosophy, podcast, political theory, post-enlightenment, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I just finished the writing and editorial parts of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. It still needs cover art and some administrative odds and ends, but I’m taking a day for a breather to share something about myself and my worldview. For this, I share my philosophical influences and how they support my core insights. For dramatic effect, I’ll even try to weight them to 100 per cent, leaving an ‘others’ bucket for the unaccounted ones.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Obviously, this highly scientific accounting is about as useful as a Facebook survey or a fortune cookie, but it should reveal something. I have influences outside of philosophy, but I’ll limit this list at the start. The numbers don’t exactly add to 100% because there is a bit of cross-pollination, say, between Foucault and Nietzsche or Žižek and Hegel – or perhaps I’m just not good at maths. You decide.

Nietzsche (≈18)

Nietzsche is likely the uranium core. Haters and detractors like to diminish his contribution – and he didn’t play by the old rules – but they are wrong. He contributes value-creation, anti-moralism, perspectivism, the critique of ressentiment, the demolition of universals.

Nietzsche sits at the centre of the blast radius. Everything else is shrapnel. If there’s a thinker who detonated the Enlightenment’s pretensions more elegantly, I’ve not met them. He showed us that values are forged, not found; that morality is a genealogy of grievances; that certainty is the last refuge of the timid. In other words, he cleared the ground so the rest of us could get to work without tripping over Kantian furniture. But after Nietzsche’s uranium core, the next concentric ring becomes murkier.

Foucault (≈20%)

Foucault supplies the schematics. Where Nietzsche swung a hammer at the idols, Foucault identified the building codes. He mapped power as a set of subtle, everyday enchantments. He showed how ‘knowledge’ is simply what a society rewards with credibility. He is the patron saint of anyone who suspects normality is an instrument, not a neutral state of affairs. The world looks different once you see the disciplinary fingerprints on everything.

Derrida (≈10%)

Derrida gives me language as mischief. Meaning wobbles, slides, cracks; binaries betray themselves; every conceptual edifice contains its own trapdoor. Derrida isn’t a system; he’s an escape artist. And frankly, you can’t write anything about the insufficiency of language without genuflecting in his general direction.

Late Wittgenstein (≈15%)

The quiet structural pillar. If Derrida is the saboteur, Wittgenstein is the carpenter who informs you that the house was never stable anyway. Meaning-as-use, language-games, the dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems: his later work underwrites virtually every modern suspicion about fixed categories and timeless essences. He doesn’t shout; he shrugs – and everything collapses neatly.

Rorty (≈5%)

Rorty replaces metaphysical longing with cultural pragmatism. He teaches you to stop hunting for capital-T Truth and instead track the vocabularies we actually live in. He’s the friendly voice whispering, ‘You don’t need foundations. You need better conversations’. His influence is felt mostly in the tone of my epistemic cynicism: relaxed rather than tragic. Besides, we disagree on the better conversations bit.

Geuss (≈4%)

If Rorty makes you light-footed, Geuss reminds you not to float off into abstraction entirely. He is the critic of moralism par excellence, the man who drags philosophy kicking and screaming back into politics. Geuss is the voice that asks, ‘Yes, but who benefits?’ A worldview without him would be a soufflé.

Heidegger (≈6%)

Selective extraction only. Being-in-the-world, thrownness, worldhood – the existential scaffolding. His political judgment was catastrophic, of course, but the ontological move away from detached subjectivity remains invaluable. He gives the metaphysics a certain grain.

Existentialists: Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus (≈6%)

They provide the atmospheric weather: choice, finitude, absurdity, revolt, the sheer mess of human freedom. They don’t define the system; they give it blood pressure. Besides, I met them before I switched to Team Nietzsche-Foucault.

Žižek, Latour, Baudrillard (≈2% combined)

These three are my licensed provocateurs.

  • Žižek exposes how ideology infiltrates desire.
  • Latour dismantles the Nature/Society binary with glee.
  • Baudrillard whispers that representation ate reality while we were looking at our phones.

They’re trickster figures, not architects.

Hume, Putnam, Dennett, and the Ancillaries (≈1% combined)

These are the seasonings.

  • Hume is the Scottish acid bath under every epistemic claim.
  • Putnam gives internal realism its analytic passport.
  • Dennett offers mechanistic metaphors you can steal even when you disagree.
  • Kant and Hegel hover like compulsory ghosts.
  • Rawls remains decorative parsley: included for completeness, consumed by none.

The Others Bucket (≈5%)

The unallocated mass: writers, anthropologists, theorists, stray thinkers you absorb without noticing. The ‘residuals’ category for the philosophical inventory – the bit fortune cookies never warn you about.

Enfin

Obviously, these ratios are more for humour than substance, but these are the thinkers I return to — the ones whose fingerprints I keep discovering on my own pages, no matter how many years or detours intervene.

Perhaps more revealing are those who didn’t make the guest list. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle remain outside, smoking in the cold. The Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and his well-meaning self-help descendants, also failed to RSVP. In truth, I admire the posture but have little patience for the consolations – especially when they become the emotional training wheels of neoliberalism.

And then, of course, the Enlightenment patriarchs: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and the rest of the constitutional furniture. I acknowledge their historical necessity the way one acknowledges plumbing – grateful it exists, uninterested in climbing inside the pipes. Rousseau, admittedly, I tolerate with something approaching affection, but only because he never pretended to be tidy.

I forgot Descartes, Voltaire, and Pascal, but it’s too late to scroll back and adjust the ledger. Consider them rounding errors – casualties of the margins, lost to the tyranny of percentages.

If anyone mentions another one – Spinoza comes to mind – I’ll try to figure out where they fit in my pantheon. Were I to render this tomorrow, the results may vary.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Care Without Conquest: Feminist Lessons for the Workaday Philosopher

Posted in identity, language, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–4 minutes

I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed – perhaps too lightly – against my debt to feminist philosophy. It’s time to acknowledge that debt more directly and explain how it spills into the mundane greasework of daily life.

[Scroll to the bottom to see Midjourney’s take on feminists. You won’t be surprised.]

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose

I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but let’s name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects – your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults – I owe much to the feminist philosophers – Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again – and, while we’re at it, the post-colonialists, whose names I’ll not recite for fear of being pompous. Their shared heresy is a suspicion of universals. They expose the myth of neutrality, whether it parades as Reason, Progress, or Civilisation. They remind us that every “universal” is merely someone’s local story told loud enough to drown out the others.

This isn’t a matter of sex or gender, though that’s how the names have been filed. The core lesson is epistemic, not biological. Feminist philosophy re-centres care, interdependence, and the politics of maintenance, not as sentimental virtues but as systems logic. The post-colonialists do the same at a geopolitical scale: maintenance instead of conquest, relation instead of domination.

On Gender, Behaviour, and the Lazy Binary

I don’t buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isn’t people; it’s the linguistic furniture we inherited.

I’m weary of the moral blackmail that calls it misogyny not to vote for a woman, or racism not to vote for a black candidate. These accusations come, paradoxically, from sexists and racists who reduce people to the colour of their skin or the contents of their underwear. Having a vagina doesn’t make one a caretaker; having a penis doesn’t preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.

When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, it’s not because they’re women. It’s because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the player’s gender doesn’t change the rules.

Maintenance as Political Praxis

My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether – the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance I’ve written about, and the philosophy of Dis-Integration I keep harping on, both gesture toward an alternative mode of being: one that prizes endurance over expansion, care over conquest.

This isn’t new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they weren’t shouting in Latin or running empires. I’m merely repackaging and re-contextualising, hoping that bundling these neglected insights together might make them audible again.

Knowledge never comes in a vacuum; it circulates. It leaks, cross-pollinates, mutates. To claim “intellectual property” over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. I’ll spare you the full rant, but suffice it to say that the moment knowledge becomes proprietary, it ceases to breathe.

Conclusion

If I have a creed – and I say this reluctantly – it’s that philosophy should serve as maintenance, not monument-building. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers model that: constant attention, critical care, resistance to the entropy of domination.

I’m just trying to keep the engine running without pretending it’s divine.

Bonus

Image: Feminists, according to Midjourney 7
microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Missing Pieces of the Anti-Enlightenment Project

Posted in agency, modernism, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–8 minutes

I’ve just added a new entry to my Anti-Enlightenment corpus, bringing the total to seven – not counting my latest book, The Illusion of Light, that summarises the first six essays and places them in context. This got me thinking about what aspects of critique I might be missing. Given this, what else might I be missing?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussion of this topic.

So far, I’ve touched on the areas in the top green table and am considering topics in the bottom red/pink table:

Summary Schema – The Anti-Enlightenment Project – Published Essays

AxisCore QuestionRepresentative Essay(s)
EpistemicWhat counts as “truth”?Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
PoliticalWhat holds power together?Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail; Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
PsychologicalWhy do subjects crave rule?Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self; The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
AnthropologicalWhat makes a “normal” human?The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
EthicalHow to live after disillusionment?The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption

Summary Schema – The Anti-Enlightenment Project – Unpublished Essays

AxisCore QuestionRepresentative Essay
Theological (Metaphysical)What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?The Absent God: Metaphysics After Meaning
Aesthetic (Affective)How did beauty become moral instruction?The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Ecological (Post-Human)What happens when the world refuses to remain in the background?The Uncounted World: Ecology and the Non-Human
Linguistic (Semiotic)How does language betray the clarity it promises?The Fractured Tongue: Language Against Itself
Communal (Social Ontology)Can there be community without conformity?The Vanished Commons: Between Isolation and Herd

Below is a summary of the essays already published. These are drawn verbatim from the Anti-Enlightenment Project page.

1. Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning

Published September 2025

Objectivity, in the social and moral sense, is a performance – a consensus mechanism mistaken for truth. This essay maps how “objectivity” operates as a scaffold for Enlightenment rationality, masking moral preference as neutral judgment. It introduces a five-premise model showing that what we call objectivity is merely sustained agreement under shared illusions of coherence. The argument reframes moral reasoning as provisional and participatory rather than universal or fixed.

→ Read on Zenodo

2. Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail

Published October 2025
The Enlightenment built democracy for rational ghosts – imagined citizens who never existed. This essay dissects six contradictions at the foundation of “rational” governance and shows why democracy’s collapse was prewritten in its metaphysics. From mathematical impossibility to sociological blindness, it charts the crisis of coherence that modern politics still calls freedom.
→ Read on Zenodo

3. Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present

Published October 2025
Modern democracies worship the now. This essay examines presentism – the systemic bias toward immediacy – as a structural flaw of Enlightenment thinking. By enthroning rational individuals in perpetual “decision time,” modernity erased the unborn from politics. What remains is a political theology of the short term, collapsing both memory and imagination.
→ Read on Zenodo

4. Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self

Published October 2025
“Agency” is not a metaphysical faculty – it’s an alibi. This essay dismantles the myth of the autonomous self and reframes freedom as differential responsiveness: a gradient of conditions rather than a binary of will. Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and decolonial thought, it argues for ethics as maintenance, not judgment, and politics as condition-stewardship.
→ Read on Zenodo

5. The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption

Published October 2025

This essay formalises Dis-Integrationism – a philosophical method that refuses synthesis, closure, and the compulsive need to “make whole.” It traces how Enlightenment reason, deconstruction, and therapy culture all share a faith in reintegration: the promise that what’s fractured can be restored. Against this, Dis-Integrationism proposes care without cure, attention without resolution – a discipline of maintaining the broken as broken. It closes the Anti-Enlightenment loop by turning critique into a sustained practice rather than a path to redemption.

→ Read on Zenodo

6. The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human

Published October 2025

Modernity’s most persistent myth is the “normal” human. This essay excavates how legibility – the drive to measure, categorise, and care – became a form of control. From Quetelet’s statistical man to Foucault’s biopower and today’s quantified emotion, Homo Normalis reveals the moral machinery behind normalisation. It ends with an ethics of variance: lucidity without repair, refusal without despair.

→ Read on Zenodo

7. The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom

Published October 2025

This essay examines how the Enlightenment’s ideal of autonomy contains the seed of its undoing. The rational, self-governing subject – celebrated as the triumph of modernity – proves unable to bear the solitude it creates. As freedom collapses into exhaustion, the desire for direction re-emerges as devotion. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, The Will to Be Ruled traces the psychological gradient from fear to obedience, showing how submission is moralised as virtue and even experienced as pleasure. It concludes that totalitarianism is not a deviation from reason but its consummation, and that only through Dis-Integrationism – an ethic of maintenance rather than mastery – can thought remain responsive as the light fades.

→ Read on Zenodo

Below are possible future topics for this series*

8. The Absent God: Metaphysics After Meaning

Axis: Theological / Metaphysical
Core Question: What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?

Concept:
This essay would trace how Enlightenment humanism replaced God with reason, only to inherit theology’s structure without its grace. It might read Spinoza, Kant’s moral law, and modern technocracy as secularised metaphysics – systems that still crave universal order.
Goal: To show that disenchantment never erased faith; it simply redirected worship toward cognition and control.
Possible subtitle: The Enlightenment’s Unconfessed Religion.

9. The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance

Axis: Aesthetic / Affective
Core Question: How did beauty become moral instruction?

Concept:
From Kant’s Critique of Judgment to algorithmic taste cultures, aesthetic judgment serves social order by rewarding harmony and punishing dissonance. This essay would expose the politics of form – how beauty trains attention and regulates emotion.
Goal: To reclaim aesthetics as resistance, not refinement.
Possible subtitle: Why Modernity Needed the Beautiful to Behave.

10. The Uncounted World: Ecology and the Non-Human

Axis: Ecological / Post-Human
Core Question: What happens when the world refuses to remain background?

Concept:
Here you dismantle the Enlightenment split between subject and nature. From Cartesian mechanism to industrial rationalism, the natural world was cast as resource. This essay would align Dis-Integrationism with ecological thinking – care without mastery extended beyond the human.
Goal: To reframe ethics as co-maintenance within an unstable biosphere.
Possible subtitle: Beyond Stewardship: Ethics Without Anthropos.

11. The Fractured Tongue: Language Against Itself

Axis: Linguistic / Semiotic
Core Question: How does language betray the clarity it promises?

Concept:
Every Anti-Enlightenment text already hints at this: language as both the instrument and failure of reason. Drawing on Nietzsche, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and modern semiotics, this essay could chart the entropy of meaning – the collapse of reference that makes ideology possible.
Goal: To formalise the linguistic fragility underlying every rational system.
Possible subtitle: The Grammar of Collapse.

12. The Vanished Commons: Between Isolation and Herd

Axis: Communal / Social Ontology
Core Question: Can there be community without conformity?

Concept:
This would return to the psychological and political threads of The Will to Be Ruled, seeking a space between atomised autonomy and synchronized obedience. It might turn to Arendt’s notion of the world between us or to indigenous and feminist relational models.
Goal: To imagine a non-totalitarian togetherness – a responsive collective rather than a collective response.
Possible subtitle: The Ethics of the Incomplete We.

* These essays may never be published, but I share this here as a template to further advance the Anti-Enlightenment project and fill out the corpus.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom

Posted in agency, consciousness, free will, identity, language, morality, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

The latest addition to the Anti-Enlightenment Project is now live on Zenodo:
The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom

Modern liberal democracies still chant the Enlightenment’s refrain: the rational, self-governing individual acting freely within a moral order of their own design. It’s an elegant myth – until the self begins to wobble. Under economic, cultural, and epistemic strain, autonomy curdles into exhaustion, and exhaustion seeks relief in obedience.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this essay. Please note that this audio summarises the entire essay. As such, it’s also longer than most, coming in at just under 40 minutes. I listened to it, and I feel it does a good job of capturing the essences of the essay. Of course, you could read the essay more quickly, but the perspective may still be helpful.

This essay traces that drift – from the Enlightenment’s causa sui complex to the ecstatic submission that defines modern authoritarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it explores how freedom’s rhetoric becomes its opposite: obedience moralised as virtue, conformity sold as courage, submission experienced as pleasure.

At its core, The Will to Be Ruled argues that totalitarianism is not the antithesis of Enlightenment reason but its fulfilment. Once the world is rendered intelligible only through rational mastery, the subject inevitably longs to be mastered in return.

The closing section introduces Dis-Integrationism – a philosophical stance that declines redemption, preferring maintenance over mastery. It offers no cure, only the small ethic of attentiveness: keeping the field responsive while the light fades.

Filed under the Anti-Enlightenment Project, this essay completes the current thematic triad alongside Objectivity Is Illusion and Against Agency.

NB: This essay was inspired in part by Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism and this video:

Video: The Modern World, Totalitarianism and the Brain with Iain McGilchrist & Mattias Desmet
microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Book Announcement: Illusion of Light

Posted in fiction, identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve just released a new book, The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment, now available in paperback through KDP and distributed via Amazon. In November, a clothbound edition will follow through IngramSpark, extending availability to libraries and independent bookstores worldwide, including Barnes & Noble in the United States.

The Illusion of Light introduces the Anti-Enlightenment Essays series, which includes Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together, these works explore how the Enlightenment’s promise of illumination became the architecture of modern control – and how to think, live, and care in the half-light it left behind.

Image: Front cover of The Illusion of Light. Links to Amazon for purchase.
The ‘Free Preview’ claim is untrue, as there is no Kindle version available. An ebook will be available presently.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

About the Book

The Illusion of Light opens where the Enlightenment’s glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself – after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernity’s metaphors of light and progress became instruments of management: how objectivity hardened into ritual, agency into alibi, normality into control.

Rather than rejecting the Enlightenment outright, the book lingers in its afterimage. It argues for a philosophy practiced in the half-light – a mode of thought that values nuance over certainty, care over mastery, and maintenance over redemption. To read by residual light, as the preface suggests, is to learn to see again when the world stops pretending to be illuminated.

The preface is available on this prior post, written and audio versions.

The Broader Project

The Illusion of Light forms the threshold of the Anti-Enlightenment Project, a series examining the afterlives of modern reason – how its ideals of progress, agency, objectivity, and normality continue to govern our politics, sciences, and selves long after their foundations have cracked. Each volume approaches the same question from a different room in the old House of Reason: Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration.

Taken together, they offer not a manifesto but a practice: philosophy as maintenance work, care as critique, and composure as the only honest response to the ruins of certainty. More to follow.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics