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 falseโฆ 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]โฆ 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: Foreignsentiment
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 faรงade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.
People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of โpower,โ as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzscheโs 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 Montesquieuโs 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.
Carneyโs 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 faรงade. 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. Nietzscheโs 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.
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: youโre assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up โ 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 doesnโt 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:
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. Thatโs a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in womenโs sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
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 โ female), this regionโs 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 donโt 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 โregisteredโ that organ in the same way.
He doesnโt overclaim. He doesnโt 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 itโs 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 Sapolskyโs language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isnโt a metaphor. Itโs 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 โ 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.
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 ลฝiลพek and Hegel โ or perhaps I’m just not good at maths. You decide.
Nietzsche (โ18)
Nietzsche is likely the uranium core. Haters and detractors like to diminish his contribution โ and he didn’t play by the old rules โ 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 thereโs a thinker who detonated the Enlightenmentโs pretensions more elegantly, Iโve 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 Nietzscheโs uranium core, the next concentric ring becomes murkier.
Foucault (โ20%)
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 (โ10%)
Derrida gives me language as mischief. Meaning wobbles, slides, cracks; binaries betray themselves; every conceptual edifice contains its own trapdoor. Derrida isnโt a system; heโs an escape artist. And frankly, you canโt write anything about the insufficiency of language without genuflecting in his general direction.
Late Wittgenstein (โ15%)
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 doesnโt shout; he shrugs โ and everything collapses neatly.
Rorty (โ5%)
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. Heโs the friendly voice whispering, ‘You donโt 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 (โ4%)
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 soufflรฉ.
Heidegger (โ6%)
Selective extraction only. Being-in-the-world, thrownness, worldhood โ 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 (โ6%)
They provide the atmospheric weather: choice, finitude, absurdity, revolt, the sheer mess of human freedom. They donโt define the system; they give it blood pressure. Besides, I met them before I switched to Team Nietzsche-Foucault.
ลฝiลพek, Latour, Baudrillard (โ2% combined)
These three are my licensed provocateurs.
ลฝiลพek 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.
Theyโre trickster figures, not architects.
Hume, Putnam, Dennett, and the Ancillaries (โ1% 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 (โ5%)
The unallocated mass: writers, anthropologists, theorists, stray thinkers you absorb without noticing. The ‘residuals’ category for the philosophical inventory โ 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 โ 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 didnโt 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 โ 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 โ 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 itโs too late to scroll back and adjust the ledger. Consider them rounding errors โ casualties of the margins, lost to the tyranny of percentages.
If anyone mentions another one โ Spinoza comes to mind โ I’ll try to figure out where they fit in my pantheon. Were I to render this tomorrow, the results may vary.
I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed โ perhaps too lightly โ against my debt to feminist philosophy. Itโs 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.]
I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but letโs name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects โ your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults โ I owe much to the feminist philosophers โ Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again โ and, while weโre 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 โuniversalโ is merely someoneโs local story told loud enough to drown out the others.
This isnโt a matter of sex or gender, though thatโs 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 donโt buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isnโt people; itโs the linguistic furniture we inherited.
Iโm 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 doesnโt make one a caretaker; having a penis doesnโt preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.
When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, itโs not because theyโre women. Itโs because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the playerโs gender doesnโt change the rules.
Maintenance as Political Praxis
My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether โ the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance Iโve 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 isnโt new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they werenโt shouting in Latin or running empires. Iโm 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 โintellectual propertyโ over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. Iโll 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 โ and I say this reluctantly โ itโs 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.
Iโm just trying to keep the engine running without pretending itโs divine.
I’ve just added a new entry to my Anti-Enlightenment corpus, bringing the total to seven โ 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 โ The Anti-Enlightenment Project โ Published Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay(s)
Epistemic
What counts as โtruthโ?
Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
Political
What holds power together?
Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail; Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Psychological
Why do subjects crave rule?
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self; The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Anthropological
What makes a โnormalโ human?
The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Ethical
How to live after disillusionment?
The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Summary Schema โ The Anti-Enlightenment Project โ Unpublished Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative 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?
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 โ a consensus mechanism mistaken for truth. This essay maps how โobjectivityโ 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.
2. Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail
Published October 2025 The Enlightenment built democracy for rational ghosts โ imagined citizens who never existed. This essay dissects six contradictions at the foundation of โrationalโ governance and shows why democracyโs collapse was prewritten in its metaphysics. From mathematical impossibility to sociological blindness, it charts the crisis of coherence that modern politics still calls freedom. โ Read on Zenodo
3. Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Published October 2025 Modern democracies worship the now. This essay examines presentism โ the systemic bias toward immediacy โ as a structural flaw of Enlightenment thinking. By enthroning rational individuals in perpetual โdecision time,โ modernity erased the unborn from politics. What remains is a political theology of the short term, collapsing both memory and imagination. โ Read on Zenodo
4. Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self
Published October 2025 โAgencyโ is not a metaphysical faculty โ itโs 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. โ Read on Zenodo
5. The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Published October 2025
This essay formalises Dis-Integrationism โ a philosophical method that refuses synthesis, closure, and the compulsive need to โmake whole.โ It traces how Enlightenment reason, deconstruction, and therapy culture all share a faith in reintegration: the promise that whatโs fractured can be restored. Against this, Dis-Integrationism proposes care without cure, attention without resolution โ 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.
6. The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Published October 2025
Modernityโs most persistent myth is the โnormalโ human. This essay excavates how legibility โ the drive to measure, categorise, and care โ became a form of control. From Queteletโs statistical man to Foucaultโs biopower and todayโs quantified emotion, Homo Normalis reveals the moral machinery behind normalisation. It ends with an ethics of variance: lucidity without repair, refusal without despair.
7. The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Published October 2025
This essay examines how the Enlightenmentโs ideal of autonomy contains the seed of its undoing. The rational, self-governing subject โ celebrated as the triumph of modernity โ 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 โ an ethic of maintenance rather than mastery โ can thought remain responsive as the light fades.
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 theologyโs structure without its grace. It might read Spinoza, Kantโs moral law, and modern technocracy as secularised metaphysics โ 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 Enlightenmentโs Unconfessed Religion.
9. The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Axis: Aesthetic / Affective Core Question: How did beauty become moral instruction?
Concept: From Kantโs 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 Arendtโs notion of the world between us or to indigenous and feminist relational models. Goal: To imagine a non-totalitarian togetherness โ 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.
Modern liberal democracies still chant the Enlightenmentโs refrain: the rational, self-governing individual acting freely within a moral order of their own design. Itโs an elegant myth โ 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 โ from the Enlightenmentโs causa sui complex to the ecstatic submission that defines modern authoritarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it explores how freedomโs 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 โ 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.
Iโve 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.
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 Enlightenmentโs glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself โ after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernityโs 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 โ 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 โ 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.
Not the darkness after the light, but the shadow the light forgot it cast
The Enlightenment promised light. What it delivered was fluorescence โ bright, sterile, and buzzing with the sound of its own reason.
The Anti-Enlightenment Project gathers a set of essays, fragments, and quotations tracing how that light dimmed โ or perhaps was never as luminous as advertised. Itโs less a manifesto than a map of disintegration: how agency became alibi, how reason became ritual, and how modernity mistook motion for progress.
Preprints and essays (Against Agency, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, and others to follow)
Related reflections from Philosophics posts going back to 2019
A living index of quotations from Nietzsche to Wynter, tracing philosophyโs slow discovery that its foundation may have been sand all along
This isnโt a war on knowledge, science, or reason โ only on their misappropriation as universal truths. The Anti-Enlightenment simply asks what happens when we stop pretending that the Enlightenmentโs โlightโ was neutral, natural, or necessary.
Itโs not reactionary. Itโs diagnostic.
The Enlightenment built the modern world; the Anti-Enlightenment merely asks whether we mistook the glare for daylight.
I’ve just published Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning, an essay that began as this blog post. I’m sharing the ‘official’ link and this first draft. As the essay matured, I added additional support, but I focused primarily on refuting the anticipated opposing arguments. Rather than regurgitate the final version here, I felt showing the genesis would be more instructive. Of course, the essay didnโt spring fully formed; Iโve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, Iโm told Iโm too slippery with words, that I treat truth as if it were just another game of persuasion, that I reduce morality to chalk lines on a playing field. The objection usually comes with force: ‘But surely you believe some things are objectively true?‘
I donโt. Or more precisely, I donโt see how ‘objectivity’ in the metaphysical sense can be defended without lapsing into stagecraft. Granite foundations have always turned out to be scaffolding with the paint touched up. Priests once told us their gods guaranteed truth; scientists later promised the lab would serve as granite; politicians assure us democracy is the stone pillar. But in each case the creaks remain.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This essay is written with an academic readership in mind. It assumes familiarity with figures like Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Ayer, and with the long quarrel over subjectivity, relativity, and objectivity. My aim is not to retell those arguments from the ground up, but to position my own framework within that ongoing dispute.
Scope
Before proceeding, some guardrails. When I say โobjectivity is illusion,โ I mean in the social and moral domain. Iโm not denying quarks or mathematics. My claim is narrower: in human discourse, no truth escapes subjectivity or contingency.
This dovetails with my broader Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that even our words are leaky vessels, prone to misfire and misunderstanding. If language itself is unstable ground, then objectivity built upon it can hardly be granite. My claim here is not that nothing exists outside us, but that in the social world we inhabit together, every ‘truth’ rests on creaking boards.
One more note: just because social administration requires appeals to objectivity doesnโt mean objectivity exists. Courts, laboratories, and parliaments invoke it to secure trust, and it works well enough as theater. But necessity is not proof. And it is not my responsibility to conjure a granite replacement. What follows is an operating model, not a new altar.
Thesis
Objectivity is an illusion. Truth is rhetorical. Morality is prescriptive, not propositional. Our ethic is not granite but care: tending the planks we walk on, knowing they creak.
Operating Model: Five Premises
This framework is not a foundation. It is an operating model โ contingent, provisional, subject to revision as circumstances change. Like any model, it can (and should) be updated to fit the culture and times.
Premise 1: Subjectivity is the baseline. Every claim originates in a perspective. No statement is free of the lens through which it is made. Even to deny subjectivity is to speak from a subject.
Premise 2: Relativity is emergent. What we call ‘relative truth’ is not a separate category but the convergence of individual subjectivities into provisional consensus. Consensus is never neutral: it is formed rhetorically โ through persuasion, cultural resonance, and power [1]. MacIntyre made a similar point in After Virtue. The moral consensus of the Ancients was not grounded in objectivity but in a shared tradition โ a thick account of human flourishing that gave coherence to their claims. When that scaffolding collapsed, consensus fractured, leaving modern moral discourse in fragments. Critics accused MacIntyre of relativism, since different traditions yield different ‘truths’, but his point reinforces mine: what looks like objectivity is in fact the temporary overlap of subjectivities sustained by tradition [2].
Premise 3: Objectivity is illusion. Claims presented as objective are relative norms hardened by repetition and forgotten as contingent scaffolding. ‘Objectivity’ is consensus disguised as granite. Its invocation in courts or parliaments may be useful, but usefulness is not existence. The burden of proof belongs to anyone insisting on an independent, metaphysical anchor for moral or social truths (Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’ [3], Kuhnโs paradigms [4], Latour’s laboratories [5]).
Even if one concedes, with Weber (as MacIntyre reminds us), that objective moral truths might exist in principle, they remain inaccessible in practice. What cannot be accessed cannot guide us; reconciliation of values and virtues must therefore take place within traditions and rhetoric, not in appeal to unreachable granite [13].
Premise 4: Rhetoric establishes truth. What counts as ‘true’ in the social and moral domain is established rhetorically โ through coherence, resonance, utility, or force. This does not mean truth is ‘mere spin’. It means truth is never metaphysical; it is enacted and enforced through persuasion. If a metaphysical claim convinces, it does so rhetorically. If a scientific claim holds, it does so because it persuades peers, fits the evidence, and survives testing. In short: rhetoric is the medium through which truths endure [6].
Premise 5: Non-Cognitivism, Stated Plainly. I take moral utterances to be prescriptions, not propositions. When someone says ‘X is wrong’, they are not reporting an objective fact but prescribing a stance, a rule, a line in chalk. This is my operating position: non-cognitivism (Ayer [7], Stevenson [8]).
That said, I know the term feels alien. Many prefer the dialect of subjectivism โ ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ โ or the quasi-realist stance that moral language behaves like truth-talk without cosmic backing (Blackburn [9]). I have no quarrel with these translations. They name the same scaffolding in different accents. I am not defending any school as such; I am simply stating my plank: morality prescribes rather than describes.
Ethic: Care. Since scaffolding is all we have, the obligation is not to pretend it is stone but to keep it usable. By ‘care’, I do not mean politeness or quietism. I mean maintenance โ deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt โ so long as they acknowledge the scaffolding we share. Care is not optional: stomp hard enough and the floor collapses beneath us all.
Examples clarify: peer review in science is care in action, patching leaky vessels rather than proving granite. Civil rights movements practiced care by repairing rotten planks of law, sometimes with revolt. Communities rebuilding after disaster embody care by reconstructing scaffolding, not pretending it was indestructible. Care is maintenance, reciprocity, and survival.
Bridge: These five premises do not add up to a system or a foundation. They form an operating model: subjectivity as baseline, relativity as emergent, objectivity as illusion, rhetoric as truth, morality as prescription. Together they outline a practice: walk the planks with care, admit the creaks, patch where needed, and stop pretending we live in marble halls.
Rationale
Why prefer scaffolding to granite? Because granite has always been a mirage. The history of philosophy and politics is a history of crumbling temples and collapsing empires. The promises of permanence never survive the weather.
Think of Nietzsche, who called truths ‘a mobile army of metaphors’ [3]. Think of Foucault, who showed that what counts as ‘truth’ is always bound up with power [1]. Think of Rorty, who reduced truth to what our peers let us get away with saying [6]. These are not nihilists but diagnosticians: they exposed the creaks in the floorboards and the wizard behind the curtain.
Metaphors drive the point home:
Scaffolding and granite: What holds is temporary, not eternal. Granite is an illusion painted on timber.
Chalk lines: Rules of play โ binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire โ each built like beachfront villas with a fine view and bad footing. Storms came, sand eroded, and down they went.
Bias as framing: Kahneman himself admitted ‘bias’ is not a thing in the world [10], only a deviation from a chosen model. Gigerenzer [11] and Jared Peterson [12] remind us heuristics are adaptive. To call them ‘biases’ is not neutral โ itโs allegiance to a standard of rationality.
The point is simple: what holds today is scaffolding, and pretending otherwise is self-deception.
Counterarguments and Refutations
Objection: Moral Paralysis. Without objective morality, why abolish slavery or defend rights?
Refutation: Chalk lines still bind. Speed limits arenโt cosmic, but they regulate conduct. Abolition endured not because it tapped a cosmic truth but because it persuaded, resonated, and took root. Slavery was once ‘in bounds’. Now it is ‘offsides’. That shift was rhetorical, emotional, political โ but no less binding.
Objection: Problem of Dissent. If all is subjective, the lone dissenter is ‘just another voice’.
Refutation: Dissent gains traction through coherence, predictive success, or resonance. Galileo, abolitionists, suffragists โ none relied on metaphysical granite. They persuaded, they resonated, they moved chalk lines. Truth was made through rhetoric, not uncovered in stone.
Objection: Performative Dependency. Even to say ‘subjective’ assumes the subject/object split. Arenโt you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But Iโm the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, Iโm in the house. But I refuse to pretend itโs marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal โ itโs porous, dynamic, and leaky, just like language itself.
Objection: Infinite Regress. Why stop at subjectivity? Why not de-integrate further?
Refutation: Subjectivity is not granite, but it is the last plank before void. Peel it back and you erase the possibility of claims altogether. If tomorrow we discover that the ‘subject’ is a swarm of quarks or circuits, fine โ but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesnโt disprove.
Conclusion: The Ethic of Care
This is not reintegration. It is dis-integration: naming the creaks, stripping polyvinyl from rotten boards, refusing granite illusions.
If you wish to build here, build. But know the ground shifts, the storms come, the shoreline erodes. The ethic is not certainty but care: to tend the scaffolding we share, to patch without pretending it is stone, and to let dissent itself become part of the maintenance.
After revisiting MacIntyre on Nietzsche โ with Descartes lurking in the background โ I think itโs time for another round on dis-integrationism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Philosophy has a bad renovation habit. Descartes tears the house down to its studs, then nails God back in as a load-bearing beam. Nietzsche dynamites the lot, then sketches a heroic รbermensch strutting through the rubble. MacIntyre sighs, bolts Aristotleโs virtue table to the frame, and calls it load-bearing furniture. The pattern repeats: demolition, followed by reconstruction, always with the insistence that this time the structure is sound.
Video: Jonny Thompson’s take on Nietzsche also inspired this post.
But the error isnโt in tearing down. The error is in rushing to rebuild. Thatโs where the hyphen in dis-integrationism matters โ it insists on the pause, the refusal to immediately re-integrate. We donโt have to pretend the fragments are secretly a whole. We can live with the splinters.
Yes, someone will protest: โWe need something.โ True enough. But the something is always a construction โ provisional, contingent, human. The problem isnโt building; the problem is forgetting that youโve built, then baptising the scaffolding as eternal bedrock.
Modernityโข is a museum of such floorboards: rationalism, utilitarianism, rights-talk, virtue ethics, each nailed down with solemn confidence, each creaking under the weight of its contradictions. The sane position is not to deny the need for floors, but to remember they are planks, not granite.
For the religious, the reply is ready-made: God is the foundation, the rock, the alpha and omega. But that is already a construction, no matter how venerable. Belief may provide the feeling of solidity, but it still arrives mediated by language, institutions, rituals, and interpretation. The Decalogue is a case in point: per the lore, God conveyed information directly to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and onward in an unbroken chain. The claim is not only that the foundation exists, but that certain communities possess unique and privileged access to it โ through scripture, tradition, and โreasonsโ that somehow stop short of being just more scaffolding.
Yet history betrays the trick. The chain is full of edits, schisms, rival prophets, councils, translations, and contradictions โ each presented not as construction but as โclarification.โ The gapless transmission is a myth; the supposed granite is a patchwork of stone and mortar. A dis-integrationist view doesnโt deny the weight these systems carry in peopleโs lives, but it refuses to mistake architecture for geology. Whatever floor you stand on was built, not found.
Dis-integrationism is simply the refusal to be gaslit by metaphysics.
Philosophics 