At some point in history – some smoke-filled Enlightenment salon, some powdered wig convention – someone floated the idea that when opinions differ, the “fairest” way forward is to count hands and let the larger number win. On the surface, it feels intuitive. If ten want tea and nine want coffee, surely the tea-drinkers deserve their kettle.
But the trick lies in the numbers. By this logic, 49% of the people get exactly what they did not want, and their consolation prize is the promise of “next time”. What passes as fairness is simply coercion with polite manners.
The problem is structural:
Majority ≠ Mandate. A slim majority is just a statistical accident elevated into divine authority.
Minorities Lose by Default. If you belong to a permanent minority – ethnic, cultural, ideological –you may never taste victory, yet you’re still bound to abide by everyone else’s “consensus.”
Abstainers Become Scapegoats. When two candidates split a third of the population each and the rest sit out, the “winner” is crowned with less than half the electorate behind them. The abstainers are then blamed for “not preventing” the outcome, as though voting for a candidate they disliked would have saved them.
Why did this formula gain traction? Because it looked neat. It gave the appearance of fairness, a clean heuristic: count, declare, move on. Like democracy itself, it was born of Enlightenment rationalism’s obsession with rules, numbers, and abstraction. The premise was that humans are rational agents, and rational agents could submit to a rational procedure. The reality: humans are messy, tribal, irrational.
Majority rule became a ritual of laundering domination into legitimacy. “The people have spoken” is the priestly incantation, even if two-thirds of the people didn’t.
If we strip the veneer, what remains is not fairness but a convenient shortcut – one that was accepted, then sanctified, because it seemed better than monarchy and cheaper than perpetual stalemate. And so we’ve been living under the ghost of that decision ever since, confusing arithmetic with justice.
In celestial mechanics, the three-body problem is notorious. Give Newton two bodies – a planet and a sun – and the equations sing. Add a third, and the song collapses into noise. No general solution exists. Even the smallest nudge in one orbit cascades unpredictably through the system.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Now swap out planets for people. Not three, but millions. Each voter tugging with their own gravity – preferences, fears, biases, identities, the entire mess of human subjectivity. Democracy insists that by tallying these forces, we’ll arrive at something stable: the will of the people. But what we actually get is the millions-body problem: unstable coalitions, contradictory mandates, endlessly shifting orbits.
almost any outcome can be engineered by manipulating the order of votes
Condorcet’s Dilemma
The French mathematician Marquis de Condorcet spotted this flaw in the 18th century. His paradox showed that even if every individual voter ranks choices rationally, the group as a whole may not. Collective preferences can loop in circles: A beats B, B beats C, C beats A. It’s not dysfunction; it’s baked into the math.
Later, political scientists proved the paradox was only the beginning. McKelvey’s “chaos theorem” demonstrated that in a system with three or more options, almost any outcome can be engineered by manipulating the order of votes. In other words, democratic choice is not stable; it’s sensitive to framing, sequence, and agenda control.
Condorcet was brilliant enough to see the cracks, but like his Enlightenment peers, he decided that the fiction of order was preferable to the reality of chaos. Better to promise tidy majorities than to admit that majority rule is structurally incoherent.
majority rule a ritual of laundered coercion
The Tidy Lie
Why did majority rule catch on? Because it looked fair, even if speciously so. It gave the appearance of impartiality: count, declare, move on. It was simple enough to administer, and more palatable than monarchy or deadlock.
But neatness is not truth. If 51% of people vote for one candidate, 49% are compelled to live under a government they explicitly rejected. If a third of the population abstains altogether, the “winner” might rule with the backing of barely one-third of the country – yet claim a mandate.
This is what makes majority rule a ritual of laundered coercion. The losers are told, “next time you might win,” even though whole minorities may never win. Abstainers are scapegoated for outcomes they opposed. And everyone is asked to keep pretending that arithmetic equals legitimacy.
Like the three-body problem, democracy has no general solution.
The Millions-Body Orbit
Elections give us final numbers – 34% here, 33% there – and we mistake them for laws of motion, as if the cosmos has spoken. But what we’re really seeing is a freeze-frame of chaos. The actual trajectories – coalitions, grievances, shifting identities – continue to wobble beneath the surface.
Like the three-body problem, democracy has no general solution. It isn’t clockwork; it’s turbulence. The miracle is not that it works, but that we pretend it does. Every “mandate” is a temporary illusion, a centre of gravity that exists only until the next disturbance knocks it off course.
And yet, the illusion persists. Because without it, the truth is unbearable: that there is no singular “will of the people,” only the millions-body problem, endlessly unstable, masked by the ritual of counting hands.
We are governed by phantoms. Not the fun kind that rattle chains in castles, but Enlightenment rational ghosts – imaginary citizens who were supposed to be dispassionate, consistent, and perfectly informed. They never lived, but they still haunt our constitutions and television pundits. Every time some talking head declares “the people have spoken”, what they really mean is that the ghosts are back on stage.
The conceit was simple: build politics as if it were an engineering problem. Set the rules right, and stability follows. The trouble is that the material – actual people – wasn’t blueprint-friendly. Madison admitted faction was “sown in the nature of man”, Rousseau agonised over the “general will”, and Condorcet managed to trip over his own math. They saw the cracks even while laying the foundation. Then they shrugged and built anyway.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The rational ghosts were tidy. Real humans are not. Our brains run on shortcuts: motivated reasoning, availability cascades, confirmation bias, Dunning–Kruger. We don’t deliberate; we improvise excuses. Education doesn’t fix it – it just arms us with better rationalisations. Media doesn’t fix it either – it corrals our biases into profitable outrage. The Enlightenment drafted for angels; what it got was apes with smartphones.
Even if the ghosts had shown up, the math betrayed them. Arrow proved that no voting system can translate preferences without distortion. McKelvey showed that whoever controls the sequence of votes controls the outcome. The “will of the people” is less an oracle than a Ouija board, and you can always see whose hand is pushing the planchette.
Scale finishes the job. Dunbar gave us 150 people as the human limit of meaningful community. Beyond that, trust decays into myth. Benedict Anderson called nations “imagined communities”, but social media has shattered the illusion. The national conversation is now a million algorithmic Dunbars, each convinced they alone are the real people.
Audio: This is a longer (40-minute) NotebookLM podcast on the essay itself.
Why did democracy limp along for two centuries if it was this haunted? Because it was on life-support. Growth, war, and civic myth covered the cracks. External enemies, national rituals, and propaganda made dysfunction look like consensus. It wasn’t design; it was borrowed capital. That capital has run out.
Cue the panic. The defences roll in: Churchill said democracy was the “least bad” system (he didn’t, but whatever). Voters self-correct. Education will fix it. It’s only an American problem. And if you don’t like it, what – authoritarianism? These are less arguments than incantations, muttered to keep the ghosts from noticing the creaks in the floorboards.
The real task isn’t to chant louder. It’s to stop pretending ghosts exist. Try subsidiarity: smaller-scale politics humans can actually grasp. Try deliberation: citizens’ assemblies show ordinary people can think, when not reduced to a soundbite. Try sortition: if elections are distorted by design, maybe roll the dice instead. Try polycentric governance: let overlapping authorities handle mismatch instead of hammering “one will”. None of these are perfect. They’re just less haunted.
Enlightenment democracy was built to fail because it was built for rational ghosts. The ghosts never lived. The floorboards are creaking. The task is ours: build institutions for the living, before the house collapses under its own myths.
The Argument in Skeleton Form
Beneath the prose, the critique of Enlightenment democracy can be expressed as a syllogism: a foundation that assumed rational citizens collides with psychological bias, mathematical impossibility, and sociological limits. The outcome is a double failure – corrupted inputs and incoherent outputs – masked only by temporary props.
Figure: Logical skeleton of “Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail.” For the complete essay, with sources and elaboration, see the open-access preprint on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17250225
The fashionable complaint is that large language models ‘hallucinate’. They spit out confident nonsense: the tech pundits are scandalised. A chatbot invents a book, attributes it to Plato, and spins a dialogue about Quidditch. ‘Hallucination!’ they cry. Machines, it seems, are liars.
Spare me. Humans are the original hallucination engines. We fabricate categories, baptise them in blood, and call the result ‘truth’. At least the machine doesn’t pretend its fictions are eternal.
Take race and selfhood, our twin masterpieces of make-believe.
They carve boundaries out of fog. Race slices humanity into ‘Black’ and ‘White’. Selfhood cordons ‘I’ off from ‘you’. Arbitrary partitions, paraded as natural law.
They’re locked in by violence and paperwork. Race was stabilised by censuses, laws, and medical forms – the same bureaucratic gears that powered slavery, eugenics, and apartheid. Selfhood was stabilised by diaries, court records, and psychiatric charts. Write it down often enough, and suddenly the fiction looks inevitable.
They make bodies manageable. Race sorts populations into hierarchies and facilitates exploitation. Selfhood sorts individuals for property, accountability, and punishment. Together, they’re operating systems for social control.
They are fictions with teeth. Like money, they don’t need metaphysical foundations. They are real because people are willing to kill for them.
These hallucinations aren’t timeless. They were midwifed in the Enlightenment: anthropology provided us with racial typologies, the novel refined the autonomous self, and colonial administration ran the pilot projects. They’re not ancient truths – they’re modern software, installed at scale.
So when ethicists wring their hands over AI ‘hallucinations’, the joke writes itself. Machines hallucinate openly. Humans hallucinate and call it scripture, law, and identity. The only difference is centuries of institutional muscle behind our delusions.
And here’s the sting: what terrifies us isn’t that AI produces falsehoods. It’s that, given time, its inventions might start to look as solid as ours. Fifty years from now, people could be killing for an algorithm’s hallucination the same way they’ve been killing for gods, races, and selves.
Radical Futures Studio’s “7 Signals” deck has been circulating widely. It’s a striking example of Storytelling 101: identify a villain, chart the signs of its decline, and point toward an eventual resolution. In this case, the villain is white supremacy. The signs are its institutional and cultural fray. The resolution is its collapse.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As far as stories go, it’s effective. It provides a framework, some memorable imagery, and the reassurance that the ugliness on display today is a death rattle, not a resurgence. No wonder it resonates. People want to believe the noise means the monster is dying.
Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask
But as analysis, the frame is too tight. Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask. White supremacy is real enough in its effects, but its persistence and decline are contingent. The deeper system – the scaffolding of late-stage capitalism, the Enlightenment’s brittle universalism, the institutions now staggering under their own contradictions – remains the host. When whiteness peels away, the system does not vanish. It simply rebrands.
To point to the peeling paint and say ‘the house is collapsing’ is to mistake surface for structure. Yes, the paint matters; it shapes how people experience the walls. But the real rot lies deeper, in the beams. The Enlightenment project promised seamless cloth: rationality, universality, permanence. Capitalism promised endless expansion and renewal. Both promises are faltering, and the cracks are visible everywhere – climate, finance, governance, identity. Racism, whiteness, supremacy: these are one set of cracks, not the foundation itself.
The risk of the ‘signals’ narrative is that it offers too neat a moral arc. It comforts the audience that the villain is cornered, that justice is baked into the future. But history is rarely so tidy. Supremacy does not die; it changes costumes. One mask slips, another is stitched on. If we mistake the collapse of whiteness for the collapse of the system, we blind ourselves to how easily the scaffolding survives in new guises.
Racism is a systemic lie
None of this is to reject the cause. Racism is a systemic lie, and its decline is worth cheering. But it is not enough to track the noise of its death rattle. To understand the larger story, we need to step back and see the woods for the trees. The true collapse underway is broader: the exhaustion of capitalism’s last stage, the unravelling of Enlightenment’s promises, the loss of legitimacy in institutions that no longer hold. That is the forest in which the tree of whiteness withers.
If we focus only on the tree, we risk missing the landscape. And if we mistake peeling paint for the beams, we risk celebrating cosmetic decline while the house quietly reassembles itself under a different banner.
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 didn’t spring fully formed; I’ve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, I’m told I’m 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 don’t. Or more precisely, I don’t 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 ‘objectivity is illusion,’ I mean in the social and moral domain. I’m 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 doesn’t 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 – 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 – 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 – 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], Kuhn’s 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 – 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 – ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ – 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 – deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt – 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 – binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire – 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 – it’s 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 aren’t 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 – 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 – 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. Aren’t you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But I’m the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, I’m in the house. But I refuse to pretend it’s marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal – it’s 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 – but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesn’t 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.
Reason is not an oracle of truth but a spectrum-bound tool, and when it is worshipped as absolute, it curdles into pathology. True rationality knows when to temper itself, when to equivocate, and when a kind lie is wiser than a cold fact.
Reason and rationality are the household gods of modernity. We light incense to them daily: follow the science, be reasonable, act rationally. But before we genuflect, it’s worth asking what exactly we mean. By reason, I mean the faculty of inference – spotting contradictions, tracing causes. By rationality, I mean the practice of applying that faculty toward some end. That’s all. Nothing mystical.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The trouble starts when these concepts are treated as absolutes. They aren’t. They vary in intensity and application. A person’s reasoning operates on a spectrum with something like frequency and amplitude. Some minds hum at low frequency – broad strokes, contradictions smoothed over by intuition. Others burn hot at high frequency and amplitude – rapid logical leaps, obsessive consistency, the inability to let a premise go. And while some reason flows like a continuous wave – steady, consistent, predictable – other forms fire more like particles: synaptic sparks that don’t always connect, logic arriving in bursts or stutters rather than as a smooth line.
“But a normal ego of this sort is, like normality in general, an ideal fiction. The abnormal ego, which is unserviceable for our purposes, is unfortunately no fiction. 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; and the degree of its remoteness from one end of the series and of its proximity to the other will furnish us with a provisional measure of what we have so indefinitely termed an ‘alteration of the ego’.”
― Sigmund Freud
Push too far and what we sanctify as ‘reason’ bleeds into what psychiatry pathologises as autism or schizophrenia. Meanwhile, ‘normal’ cognition always includes an emotional ballast. Strip it out and the result looks alien, even monstrous. Freud’s quip about psychopathy – that the psychopath differs from the rest of us in degree, not kind – applies just as well to reason. Rationality is simply the socially acceptable blend of logic and affect. Deviate, and you’re declared broken.
Camus gave us a parable in The Stranger. Meursault observes his world with ruthless clarity, but no emotional resonance. He doesn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, and society condemns him less for murder than for failing to perform grief. His ‘pure’ reason reads as inhuman.
Here’s the paradox: if rationality means adapting effectively to one’s environment, then pure rationality demands knowing when to suspend itself. A person who insists on logic at every turn is not rational but maladapted. The rational actor lies, flatters, nods at the boss’s bad joke, comforts the friend who doesn’t want statistics but solace. Rationality that cannot bend collapses into pathology.
This is why the infamous ‘Do these jeans make me look fat?’ question is such a perfect test. The ‘true’ answer, if you are reasoning narrowly, may be ‘yes’. But true rationality recognises the context, the stakes, the human need beneath the words. The rational response is not the cold fact but the kind equivocation. Rationality that cannot lie is no rationality at all.
Here’s the paradox: if rationality means adapting effectively to one’s environment, then pure rationality demands knowing when to suspend itself. A person who insists on logic at every turn is not rational but maladapted. The rational actor lies, flatters, nods at the boss’s bad joke, comforts the friend who doesn’t want statistics but solace. Rationality that cannot bend collapses into pathology.
Consider the social rituals we all know. A partner says, ‘I like that house’, and the rationally over-tuned response is to evaluate the house. The actual cue is in the like, not the house. The answer isn’t that you dislike the house, but rather what you can appreciate about it. Miss that, and you miss the point. Or take the dinner table: when my son was seven, a well-meaning host – very Martha Stewart – asked him how he enjoyed his meal. He replied, with perfect candour, ‘I’ve had better’. From a logical standpoint, faultless. From a rational standpoint – if rationality includes social adaptation – disastrous. The question was never about the food. It was a cue for appreciation, for harmony. He gave fact when what was asked for was affiliation.
So yes, I attack reason and rationality – not because they don’t exist, but because they are misapplied, reified, and worshipped as neutral arbiters of truth. They are not. They are tools with a range, and outside that range, they fail catastrophically. To speak of ‘reason’ as if it were an unqualified good is like praising fire without mentioning its talent for arson.
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After I wrote this, I realised I forgot to mention Kant.
Even Kant, patron saint of rational duty, insisted you must never lie, not even a white lie, not even to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding. For him, truth-telling was categorical, binding, immune to circumstance. But this is reason gone rigid, unable to flex with human reality. It shows how worship of Reason leads not to morality but to monstrosity. A rationality that cannot bend is no rationality at all.
Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) has had the half-life of uranium. His thesis is simple and disturbing: rational individuals become irrational when they merge into a crowd. The crowd hypnotises, contagion spreads, and reason dissolves in the swell of collective emotion.
It’s neat. It’s elegant. It’s also far too flattering.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Le Bon assumes that the default state of the human being is rational, some Enlightenment holdover where citizens, left to their own devices, behave like tidy mini-Kants. Then, and only then, do they lose their reason in the mob. The trouble is that a century of behavioural science has made it painfully clear that “rational man” is a fairy tale.
Daniel Kahneman mapped our cognitive machinery in Thinking, Fast and Slow: System 1 (fast, intuitive, emotional) is running the show while System 2 (slow, deliberate, logical) is mostly hired as the PR manager after the fact. Dan Ariely built a career documenting just how predictably irrational we are – anchoring, framing, sunk-cost fallacies, you name it. Add in Tversky, Thaler, Gigerenzer, and the usual suspects, and the picture is clear: we don’t need a crowd to become irrational. We start irrational, and then the crowd amplifies it.
In that sense, Le Bon wasn’t wrong about crowds being dangerous, but he may have missed the darker point. A crowd doesn’t corrupt a rational base – it accelerates the irrational baseline. It’s not Jekyll turning into Hyde; it’s Hyde on a megaphone.
This matters because if you take Le Bon literally, the problem is situational: avoid crowds and you’ll preserve reason. But if you take Kahneman seriously, the problem is structural: crowds only reveal what was already there. The positive feedback loop of group psychology doesn’t replace rationality; it feeds on the biases, illusions, and shortcuts already baked into the individual mind.
Le Bon handed us the stage directions for mass manipulation. Modern behavioural economics shows us that the script was already written in our heads before we ever left the house. Put the two together and you have the perfect recipe for political spectacle, advertising, and algorithmic nudges.
Which makes Le Bon’s century-old observations correct – but not nearly bleak enough.
Are you rational, or merely rehearsing your tribe’s catechism? Bayes’ theorem insists we should all update our beliefs the same way when presented with the same evidence. Yet in today’s political divide, identical events harden opposing convictions. The problem isn’t the math—it’s the priors. When your starting assumptions are inherited, acculturated, or indoctrinated, no amount of “evidence” will move you into enemy territory.
A Bayesian Sketch of the Divide
Let be a contested claim (pick your poison: “the election was fair,” “immigration helps,” whatever).
People in Camp R and Camp B begin with different priors and . That’s acculturation if you’re being polite, indoctrination if you’ve run out of patience.
They observe evidence (news, a court ruling, a video clip, a statistic).
They update:
posterior odds = prior odds ×
Except they don’t, not cleanly, because trust in sources warps the likelihoods.
Video: Jonny Thompson on Bayes’ Theorem. I love Jonny’s content, which is why I reference it so often. He and I have such different philosophical worldviews. Vive la différence (or différance).
Why this locks in polarisation
1. Wildly different priors. If Camp R starts at and Camp B at , then even moderately pro- evidence (say likelihood ratio ) yields:
R: prior odds
B: prior odds
Same evidence, one camp “settled,” the other still unconvinced. Repeat ad infinitum, preferably on primetime.
2. Identity-weighted likelihoods. People don’t evaluate ; they evaluate . Disconfirming evidence is down-weighted by a factor . This is called “being rational” on your own planet and “motivated reasoning” on everyone else’s.
3. Different hypothesis sets. Camps don’t just disagree on ; they entertain different s. If one side’s model includes “coordinated elite malfeasance” and the other’s does not, then identical data streams update into different universes.
4. Selective exposure = selection bias. Evidence isn’t i.i.d.; it’s curated by feeds, friends, and fury. You are sampling from your own posterior predictive distribution and calling it “reality.”
5. Asymmetric loss functions. Even if beliefs converged, choices won’t. If the social cost of dissent is high, the decision threshold moves. People report a “belief” that minimises ostracism rather than error.
6. No common knowledge, no convergence. Aumann told us honest Bayesians with common priors and shared posteriors must agree. Remove either—common priors or the “we both know we both saw the same thing” bit—and you get the modern news cycle.
“Acculturation” vs “Indoctrination”
Same mechanism, different moral valence. Priors are installed by families, schools, churches, unions, algorithms. Call it culture if you approve of the installers; call it indoctrination if you don’t. The probability calculus doesn’t care. Your tribal totems do.
Two quick toy moves you can use in prose
Likelihood hacking: “When evidence arrives, the tribe doesn’t deny the datum; it edits the likelihoods. ‘If my side did it, it’s an outlier; if your side did it, it’s a pattern.’ This is not hypocrisy; it’s a parameter update where the parameter is loyalty.”
Posterior divergence despite ‘facts’: “Give two citizens the same court ruling. One updates towards legitimacy because courts are reliable; the other away from legitimacy because courts are captured. The ruling is constant; the trust vector is not.”
If one wanted to reduce the split (perish the thought)
Forecast, don’t opine. Run cross-camp prediction markets or calibration tournaments. Bayes behaves when you pay people for accuracy rather than performance art.
Adversarial collaboration. Force both sides to pre-register what evidence would move them and how much. If someone’s for disconfirming evidence is effectively zero, you’ve identified faith, not inference.
Reference classes, not anecdotes. Pull arguments out of the single-case trap and into base-rate land. Yes, it’s boring. So is surgery, but people still do it.
The punchline
Polarisation isn’t the failure of reason; it’s what happens when reason is strapped to identity. Priors are social. Likelihoods are political. Posteriors are performative. You can call it acculturation if you want to feel civilised, indoctrination if you want to throw a brick, but either way you’re watching Bayes’ theorem run inside a culture war. The maths is sober; the humans are not.
After revisiting MacIntyre on Nietzsche – with Descartes lurking in the background – I think it’s 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 Übermensch strutting through the rubble. MacIntyre sighs, bolts Aristotle’s 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 isn’t in tearing down. The error is in rushing to rebuild. That’s where the hyphen in dis-integrationism matters – it insists on the pause, the refusal to immediately re-integrate. We don’t have to pretend the fragments are secretly a whole. We can live with the splinters.
Yes, someone will protest: “We need something.” True enough. But the something is always a construction – provisional, contingent, human. The problem isn’t building; the problem is forgetting that you’ve built, then baptising the scaffolding as eternal bedrock.
Modernity™ 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 — through scripture, tradition, and “reasons” 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 – each presented not as construction but as “clarification.” The gapless transmission is a myth; the supposed granite is a patchwork of stone and mortar. A dis-integrationist view doesn’t deny the weight these systems carry in people’s 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.
be a contested claim (pick your poison: “the election was fair,” “immigration helps,” whatever).
and 
. That’s acculturation if you’re being polite, indoctrination if you’ve run out of patience.
(news, a court ruling, a video clip, a statistic).
and Camp B at 
, then even moderately pro-
) yields:
; they evaluate 
. Disconfirming evidence is down-weighted by a factor 
. This is called “being rational” on your own planet and “motivated reasoning” on everyone else’s.
; they entertain different 
for disconfirming evidence is effectively zero, you’ve identified faith, not inference.
Philosophics 