Tag: normality

Missing Pieces of the Anti-Enlightenment Project

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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Summary Schema – The Anti-Enlightenment Project – Unpublished Essays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.

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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.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Myth of Homo Normalis

Posted in identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Archaeology of the Legible Human

Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)

Modernity’s most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Quetelet’s statistical conjuring trick – l’homme moyen, the “average man” –and ending in our age of wearable psychometrics and algorithmic empathy, it traces how normality became both the instrument and the idol of Western governance.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this essay.

Along the way it dissects:

  • The arithmetic imagination that turned virtue into a mean value.
  • Psychology™ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
  • Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
  • Critical theory’s recursion, where resistance becomes a management style.
  • The palliative society, in which every emotion is tracked, graphed, and monetised.
Audio: ElevenLabs reading of the whole essay (minus citations, references, and metacontent).
NB: The audio is split into chapters on Spotify to facilitate reading in sections.

What begins as a genealogy of statistics ends as an autopsy of care. The normal is revealed not as a condition, but as an administrative fantasy – the state’s dream of perfect legibility. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal of wholeness, a discipline of remaining unsynthesised.

Lucidity, not liberation, may be the only virtue left to us – knowing the apparatus intimately enough to refuse its metaphysics while continuing to breathe within it.

The Myth of Homo Normalis is the sixth instalment in the Anti-Enlightenment Project, joining Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together they map the slow disassembly of reason’s empire – from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.

Read or cite:
🔗 Zenodo DOI
🔗 PhilArchive page – forthcoming link

Within One Sigma of Civilisation

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Freud once quipped that people are “normal” only on average. To the degree that they deviate from the mean, they are neurotic, psychotic, or otherwise abnormal. Whatever else one thinks of Freud, the metaphor holds for Modernity.

Image: Picture and quote by Sigmund Freud: Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent. —Analysis Terminable And Interminable (1937), Chapter V

We are “Modern” only on average, and only for the first standard deviation. Within one sigma, you can wave a flag and declare: rational, secular, Enlightened. But step further into the tails and the façade dissolves. The “normal” modern turns out to attend megachurches, consult horoscopes, share conspiracy memes, or cling to metaphysical relics that Enlightenment reason was supposed to have torched centuries ago.

„ Jeder Normale ist eben nur durchschnittlich normal, sein Ich nähert sich dem des Psychotikers in dem oder jenem Stück, in größerem oder geringerem Ausmaß. “

— Sigmund Freud, Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse

The problem isn’t that these people aren’t Modern. The problem is that nobody is Modern, not in the sense the story requires. The mean is an over-fitted abstraction. “Modernity” works like Freud’s “normal”: a statistical average that erases the deviations, then insists that the erased bits are pathology rather than reality.

But the tails are where most of human life actually happens. The “average Modern” is as mythical as the “reasonable person.” What we call Modernity is just a bell curve costume draped over the same mix of superstition, desire, and contingency that has always driven human behaviour.

Ambiguous Normalcy

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I’ve never really liked the concept of normal being applied to behaviour, whether individually or societally. At a micro level, it might be fine, and one can assess a deviation from a norm, but at a macro level, we have averages of averages, so how many dimensions need to be out of calibration and for how long to be considered abnormal.

Moreover, statistically speaking, where we have a normal (Gaussian) distribution, we might consider a mean and a certain variance or standard deviation from that mean to be normal, but the reaction to deviance is asymmetrical.

An example that comes to mind is that of cheating. It is well documented that humans are predictably cheaters (and liars). Nonetheless, there are two measures of normalcy. There is a fundamental attribution bias in play.

We view ourselves as basically honest and justify occasions when we act the same way. Regarding the chart below, we like to believe that cheating is uncommon. In fact, we chastise or otherwise punish cheaters.

Descriptive versus Prescriptive Normalcy

Full disclosure this is not to scale nor representative of actual data. It’s merely an illustrative tool for conversation.

Prescriptive Normalcy

The bottom range in green represents the accepted and prescribed normal range of cheating. In this example, it might be anticipated that an average person might cheat on things like their taxes, their diets, not returning extra change at a vendor, and so on, about a third of the time, give or take. Anything more would be considered abnormal and unacceptable. Anything less and the person might be considered to be uptight or a goody-two-shoes, perhaps like Ned Flanders of the Simpsons franchise.

Ned Flanders – Hokily Dokily

Descriptive Normalcy

In practice, people operate well outside of this range. As illustrated by the top red range, people tend to cheat closer to two-thirds of the time. If a person is caught cheating, they are treated as being well outside of the prescribed range, society will look upon them harshly despite this actually being normal behaviour for those judging, those who know that they are guilty of the same activity.

One reason for the overreaction may be to signal that they are among the righteous. Here, it’s good to remember Jung’s quip: The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow

Carl Jung

Intelligence Quotient

If I use IQ* for a reference, normal is the mean plus or minus a standard deviation (or sigma [σ]) of 16 points, so between 84 and 116. In the early to mid-20th century, clinical psychology nomenclature grouped IQs by bands:

ClassificationIQ Range
Idiot0 – 24
Imbecile25 – 49
Moron50 – 69
Dull or Borderline70 – 79
Below Average90 – 89
Average90 – 109
Above Average100 – 119
Superior120 – 129
Very Superior130 – 139
Genius140+
Willam Stern Intelligence Quotient Nomenclature

Later moron was replaced by moderate mental retardation or moderate mental subnormality with an IQ of between 35 and 49. As with many things, and in the case of IQ, an observation above the norm is associated as better with an observation below the norm being considered as worse.

* IQ has many problems. At first, an IQ of 100 is supposed to represent the average (mean) of a population, yet the average IQ of the world population is just over 82, a number outside and below the 1σ threshold. In the United States, the average IQ is an unremarkable 97% (ranking 26 among 199 countries). Japan and Taiwan top the list at over 106. In fact, Asian countries comprise the top 6 slots. Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom are almost an even 100, falling ever so short. at 99 and change. Guatemala, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nepal fall at the bottom of the ranking, each with average IQs under 50.