Tag: perception

Butler versus Butler (on a bed of Beauvoir)

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2–3 minutes

I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Dawn and find myself restless. The book is often lauded as a classic of feminist science fiction, but I struggle with it. My problem isn’t with aliens, or even with science fiction tropes; it’s with the form itself, the Modernist project embedded in the genre, which insists on posing questions and then supplying answers, like a catechism for progress. Sci-Fi rarely leaves ambiguity alone; it instructs.

Find the companion piece on my Ridley Park blog.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this topic.

Beauvoir’s Ground

Simone de Beauvoir understood “woman” as the Other – defined in relation to men, consigned to roles of reproduction, care, and passivity. Her point was not that these roles were natural, but that they were imposed, and that liberation required stripping them away.

Octavia Butler’s Lilith

Lilith Iyapo, the protagonist of Dawn, should be radical. She is the first human awakened after Earth’s destruction, a Black woman given the impossible role of mediating between humans and aliens. Yet she is not allowed to resist her role so much as to embody it. She becomes the dutiful mother, the reluctant carer, the compliant negotiator. Butler’s narration frequently tells us what Lilith thinks and feels, as though to pre-empt the reader’s interpretation. She is less a character than an archetype: the “reasonable woman,” performing the script of liberal Western femininity circa the 1980s.

Judith Butler’s Lens

Judith Butler would have a field day with this. For her, gender is performative: not an essence but a repetition of norms. Agency, in her view, is never sovereign; it emerges, if at all, in the slippages of those repetitions. Read through this lens, Octavia Butler’s Lilith is not destabilising gender; she is repeating it almost too faithfully. The novel makes her into an allegory, a vessel for explaining and reassuring. She performs the role assigned and is praised for her compliance – which is precisely how power inscribes itself.

Why Sci-Fi Leaves Me Cold

This helps me understand why science fiction so often fails to resonate with me. The problem isn’t the speculative element; I like the idea of estrangement, of encountering the alien. The problem is the Modernist scaffolding that underwrites so much of the genre: the drive to solve problems, to instruct the reader, to present archetypes as universal stand-ins. I don’t identify with that project. I prefer literature that unsettles rather than reassures, that leaves questions open rather than connecting the dots.

So, Butler versus Butler on the bedrock of Beauvoir: one Butler scripting a woman into an archetype, another Butler reminding us that archetypes are scripts. And me, somewhere between them, realising that my discomfort with Dawn is not just with the book but with a genre that still carries the DNA of the very Modernism it sometimes claims to resist.

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The Lie That Invented Whiteness

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“What is up with us white people?” asks John Biewen in his TEDx talk The Lie That Invented Racism. It’s the sort of line that makes a roomful of middle-class liberals laugh nervously, because it’s the kind of question we’d rather leave to other people – preferably the ones already burdened with the consequences of our civilisational mess. But Biewen’s point, following Ibram X. Kendi, is that race is not some primordial fact, a tragic misunderstanding of melanin levels. It was invented, quite literally, by a Portuguese royal propagandist in the fifteenth century, and it has been paying dividends to “us” ever since.

Video: TEDx Talk with John Biewen

Yes, invented. Not discovered like a continent, not unearthed like a fossil, not deduced like a law of motion. Fabricated. Gomes de Zurara, a court chronicler under King Afonso V, was tasked with writing a stirring tale to justify Portugal’s shiny new business model: kidnapping Africans and selling them like cattle. Zurara obligingly lumped every tribe and tongue south of the Sahara into a single category – “the Blacks,” beastly and conveniently inferior – and thus performed the intellectual sleight of hand that would metastasise into centuries of racial taxonomy. It wasn’t science. It wasn’t reason. It was marketing.

And here lies the exquisite irony: this happened at the dawn of Modernity, that self-anointed Age of Reason. The Enlightenment’s sales pitch was universality – “all men are created equal,” etc. – but tucked in the fine print was the little caveat that “man” actually meant white, European, propertied man. Everyone else? Barbaric, uncivilised, or in need of civilising at the end of a whip. Modernity congratulated itself on escaping medieval superstition while simultaneously cooking up the most profitable superstition of all: that human worth can be ranked by pigmentation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discusses this topic.

This is why racism has proved so stubborn. If it were merely a misunderstanding, like thinking the Earth is flat, we’d have grown out of it. But racism was never about confusion; it was about utility. A well-tuned lie, weaponised to justify land theft, slavery, and empire, then codified into law, census, and property rights. As Kendi and others point out, race became the scaffolding for a political economy that had to square Christian salvation with chains and sugar plantations. Voilà: whiteness – not as an identity, but as a racket.

And yet, “good white people” (Dow’s term, delivered with that Minnesota-nice grimace) still act as though racism is a tragic but external drama: Black people versus hood-wearing villains, while we clap politely from the sidelines. But there are no sidelines. Whiteness was built to privilege us; neutrality is just complicity in better shoes. As historian Nell Irvin Painter reminds us, the Greeks thought they were superior, yes – but on cultural, not chromatic grounds. Race, as a concept, is a modern fix, not a timeless truth.

So what’s the moral? Stop romanticising the Enlightenment as though it were some grand emancipation. It was also a bureaucracy for inequality, a rationalisation engine that could make even human trafficking sound like a noble project. To dismantle racism is not to cleanse an ancient superstition but to tear out one of Modernity’s central operating systems.

The uncomfortable fact – the one Dow leaves hanging like smoke after the torch march – is this: if whiteness was invented for profit, then dismantling it is not philanthropy. It is debt repayment. And debt, as any bank will tell you, compounds with interest.

On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, quote, science, sexuality, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve been working through the opening chapters of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. At one point, the alien Jdahya tells Lilith, “We watched you commit mass suicide.”*

The line unsettles not because of the apocalypse itself, but because of what it presumes: that “humanity” acted as one, as if billions of disparate lives could be collapsed into a single decision. A few pulled triggers, a few applauded, some resisted despite the odds, and most simply endured. From the alien vantage, nuance vanishes. A species is judged by its outcome, not by the uneven distribution of responsibility that produced it.

This is hardly foreign to us. Nationalism thrives on the same flattening. We won the war. We lost the match. A handful act; the many claim the glory or swallow the shame by association. Sartre takes it further with his “no excuses” dictum, even to do nothing is to choose. Howard Zinn’s “You can’t remain neutral on a moving train” makes the same move, cloaked in the borrowed authority of physics. Yet relativity undermines it: on the train, you are still; on the ground, you are moving. Whether neutrality is possible depends entirely on your frame of reference.

What all these formulations share is a kind of metaphysical inflation. “Agency” is treated as a universal essence, something evenly spread across the human condition. But in practice, it is anything but. Most people are not shaping history; they are being dragged along by it.

One might sketch the orientations toward the collective “apple cart” like this:

  • Tippers with a vision: the revolutionaries, ideologues, or would-be prophets who claim to know how the cart should be overturned.
  • Sycophants: clinging to the side, riding the momentum of others’ power, hoping for crumbs.
  • Egoists: indifferent to the cart’s fate, focused on personal comfort, advantage, or escape.
  • Stabilisers: most people, clinging to the cart as it wobbles, preferring continuity to upheaval.
  • Survivors: those who endure, waiting out storms, not out of “agency” but necessity.

The Stabilisers and Survivors blur into the same crowd, the former still half-convinced their vote between arsenic and cyanide matters, the latter no longer believing the story at all. They resemble Seligman’s shocked dogs, conditioned to sit through pain because movement feels futile.

And so “humanity” never truly acts as one. Agency is uneven, fragile, and often absent. Yet whether in Sartre’s philosophy, Zinn’s slogans, or Jdahya’s extraterrestrial indictment, the temptation is always to collapse plurality into a single will; you chose this, all of you. It is neat, rhetorically satisfying, and yet wrong.

Perhaps Butler’s aliens, clinical in their judgment, are simply holding up a mirror to the fictions we already tell about ourselves.

As an aside, this version of the book cover is risible. Not to devolve into identity politics, but Lilith is a dark-skinned woman, not a pale ginger. I can only assume that some target science fiction readers have a propensity to prefer white, sapphic adjacent characters.

I won’t even comment further on the faux 3D title treatment, relic of 1980s marketing.

* Spoiler Alert: As this statement about mass suicide is a Chapter 2 event, I am not inclined to consider it a spoiler. False alarm.

Sustenance Novella free on Kindle

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On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my Ridley Park novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)

👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9PTK9N2

So what is Sustenance?

It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.

What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?

Sustenance is for readers who:

  • Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats
  • Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness
  • Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception
  • Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement

This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.

This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India

For more details, visit the Sustenance page.

📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025

Why a Free Copy of Sustenance?

I made this Kindle version available for free to get some reviews. This promotion is all or nothing, so take advantage of the opportunity. If you want to leave a review, please do.

Snake Oil in Academic Robes: Selling Tickets They Don’t Own

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Yaron Brook, ever Ayn Rand’s ventriloquist, insists students are customers. Education, in his frame, is no different from a gym membership; you pay to be made “uncomfortable.” Professors as personal trainers, universities as masochism boutiques. It’s an absurd metaphor that fits all too well in our consumerist age: education rebranded as a service industry, discomfort sold at premium prices.

Video: What is killing universities?

Catherine Liu cuts in sharply: I am not a service worker. And she’s right. Education is not concierge service; it is meant to disturb, dislodge, and disorient. Liu distinguishes “Leftist” universal reason from “Liberal” mushy inclusivity, nostalgic for Enlightenment rationality, perhaps, but her refusal to collapse education into hospitality is a rare moment of clarity.

Eric Kaufman diagnoses the “new left” as a cult of the sacred, where identity is fetishised and offence policed. Liu nods; Brook flirts with Marxism for a minute; suddenly everyone seems to agree the university has lost its bearings.

Brook is not wrong that conservatives self-select out of higher ed. But let’s be clear: not because academia is too “left,” but because they crave catechism, not critique. They want ideological madrassas, not laboratories of doubt. In this sense, Brook’s consumer model is apt: conservatives want a product that validates their priors. That is indoctrination, not education.

Meanwhile, the universities collude in their own corruption. They market “education™” as networking, branding, and employability. At the top tier, the Ivies, Oxbridge, Grandes Écoles, you might still buy proximity to power. But below that? Snake oil. At best, you get nosebleed seats in the auditorium of influence. At worst, an obstructed view behind a pillar. For most, the ticket is counterfeit: a credential that promises access and delivers only debt.

And yet, the true thing still exists. Real education, the kind Liu gestured toward, doesn’t need oak-panelled halls or hedge-fund endowments. It can happen online, in a book, in a seminar, even here with ChatGPT. It’s the deliberate encounter with discomfort, with error, with reason itself. But snake oil sells better than hard truths, and so universities keep hawking tickets they don’t own.

The Reasonable Person: From Judge Judy to SCOTUS

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2–4 minutes

When I was a child, the United States Supreme Court was still spoken of in hushed, reverent tones, as though nine robed sages in Washington were the Platonic guardians of justice. Impartiality was the word on everyone’s lips, and we were meant to believe that “the law” floated above the grubby realm of politics, as pure and crystalline as the Ten Commandments descending from Sinai.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic (MP3).

Even then, I didn’t buy it. The whole thing reeked of theatre. And the past few decades have proved that scepticism correct: the Court has become a pantomime. In this robed reality show, nine unelected lawyers cosplaying as oracles interpret the world for us, often by a razor-thin vote that splits exactly along partisan lines. Impartial? Please. A coin toss would be less predictable.

This is why I perked up when I heard Iain McGilchrist, in his recent interview with Curt Jaimungal, wax lyrical about rationality versus reasonableness. Schizophrenia, he tells us, is like a left hemisphere gone berserk, parsing the world in a literalist frenzy without the right hemisphere’s sense of context. The schizophrenic hears a voice in an empty room and, lacking the capacity for metaphor, deduces that it must be the neighbours whispering through the electrical socket. Rational, in its way, but absurd.

Video: Iain McGilchrist and Curt Jaimungal

McGilchrist’s corrective is “reasonableness,” which he casts as the quality of a wise judge: not a slave to mechanistic logic, but able to balance intuition, context, and experience. The problem, of course, is that “reasonable” is one of those delightful weasel words I keep writing about. It claims to be neutral – a universal standard, above the fray – but in practice, it’s just a ventriloquism act. “Reasonable” always turns out to mean what I, personally, consider obvious.

Enter Judge Judy, daytime television’s answer to jurisprudence. Watch her wag a finger and declare, “Any reasonable person would have kept the receipt!” And the studio audience – hand-picked to agree with her every twitch – erupts in applause. It’s reasonableness as spectacle, the mob dressed up as jurisprudence.

Now scale that performance up to SCOTUS. The “reasonable person” test is embedded deep in the common law tradition, but the reasonable person is not you, me, or anyone who has actually missed a bus, pawned a wedding ring, or heard a neighbour’s radio through thin walls. No, the reasonable person is an imaginary, well-groomed gentleman of property whose intuitions happen to dovetail nicely with the prejudices of the bench. The Court, like Judge Judy, insists it is Reason incarnate, when in truth it is reasonableness-by-consensus, a carefully curated consensus at that.

McGilchrist is right that rationality, stripped of context, can lead to absurdity. But in elevating “reasonableness” as if it were a transcendent virtue, he mistakes projection for philosophy. A judge is “reasonable” only when her intuitions rhyme with yours. And when they don’t? Suddenly, she’s a madwoman in robes, and her “reasonableness” is exposed as nothing more than taste disguised as universal law.

The “reasonable person” – whether invoked by the Supreme Court or by Judge Judy – is a ghost that conveniently resembles the speaker. We imagine we’re appealing to some objective standard, when in fact we’re gazing into a mirror. The tragedy of schizophrenia, as McGilchrist notes, is to take metaphor literally. The tragedy of law and politics is the opposite: to dress literal bias in metaphor, to call it “reason,” and to applaud ourselves for our wisdom while the stage set burns behind us.

Boab’s God: Latent Agency in Welsh’s Kafkaesque Metamorphosis

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I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.

Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.

Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:

  • Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
  • Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Übermensch, but an Über-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
  • Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
  • Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.

The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.

So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.

Gregor rots. Boab rages. Both end the same way.

Trainspotting

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Trainspotting Movie Poster
2–3 minutes

I identify strongly with Irvine Welsh’s characters in Trainspotting – the book, not the sanitised film version. Especially with Mark Renton, whose voice strips away illusions with a brutality that borders on honesty.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Consider this passage from the chapter “Bang to Rites” (pp. 86–87), where Renton attends the funeral of his mate Billy. Billy joined the army to escape the dead-end life they all shared, only to be killed on duty in Northern Ireland. Renton’s verdict:

“He died a hero they sais. Ah remember that song: ‘Billy Don’t Be A Hero’. In fact, he died a spare prick in a uniform, walking along a country road Wi a rifle in his hand. He died an ignorant victim ay imperialism, understanding fuck all about the myriad circumstances which led tae his death. That wis the biggest crime, he understood fuck all about it. Aw he hud tae guide um through this great adventure in Ireland, which led tae his death, wis a few vaguely formed sectarian sentiments.

“The cunt died as he lived: completely fuckin scoobied.

“His death wis good fir me. He made the News at Ten. In Warholian terms, the cunt had a posthumous fifteen minutes ay fame. People offered us sympathy, n although it wis misguided, it wis nice tae accept anywey. Ye dinnae want tae disappoint folk.

“Some ruling class cunt, a junior minister or something, says in his Oxbridge voice how Billy wis a brave young man. [1] He wis exactly the kind ay cunt they’d huv branded as a cowardly thug if he wis in civvy street rather than on Her Majesty’s Service. [2] This fucking walking abortion says that his killers will be ruthlessly hunted down. So they fuckin should. Aw the wey tae the fuckin Houses ay Parliament.

“Savour small victories against this white–trash tool of the rich that’s no no no”

[1] Renton doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Not Billy, not the army, not the Oxbridge suits who polish the tragedy into something fit for the News at Ten. The uniform is a costume, a disguise: a working-class lad suddenly deemed “brave” only because he was wearing the right outfit when he died. Strip away the uniform, and he’d have been dismissed as a thug or a waster.

[2] Renton’s root-cause analysis is unsparing. Billy wasn’t killed by the man with the gun so much as by the machine that put him there – the state, the ruling classes, the ones who spin death into “sacrifice” while continuing to shuffle the poor like pawns across the board.

It’s this clarity that makes Welsh’s work more than a drug novel. Trainspotting isn’t just about needles and nods; it’s about seeing through the charade. Renton despises both establishment and rebellion because both are performance, both hollow. His cynicism is the closest thing to honesty in a world that would rather dress up corpses in borrowed dignity.

And maybe that’s why I feel the affinity: because subversion matters more than allegiance, and sometimes the only truthful voice is the one that refuses to be polite at the funeral.

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Democracy: The Worst Form of Government, and Other Bedtime Stories

Posted in agency, anarchism, economics, equality, fiction, free will, identity, intelligence, language, maths, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, quote, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–5 minutes

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Intolerance has become a kind of intellectual talisman, clutched like a rosary whenever fascists start goose-stepping into the town square. Its message is simple enough: to preserve tolerance, one must be intolerant of intolerance. Shine enough sunlight on bad ideas, and – so the pious hope – they’ll shrivel into dust like a vampire caught out at dawn.

If only.

The trouble with this Enlightenment fairy tale is that it presumes bad ideas melt under the warm lamp of Reason, as if ignorance were merely a patch of mildew waiting for the bleach of debate. But bad ideas are not bacteria; they are weeds, hydra-headed and delighting in the sun. Put them on television, and they metastasise. Confront them with logic, and they metastasise faster, now with a martyr’s halo.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

And here’s the part no liberal dinner-party theorist likes to face: the people most wedded to these “bad ideas” often don’t play the game of reason at all. Their critical faculties have been packed up, bubble-wrapped, and left in the loft decades ago. They don’t want dialogue. They want to chant. They don’t want evidence. They want affirmation. The Socratic method bounces off them like a ping-pong ball fired at a tank.

But let’s be generous. Suppose, just for a moment, we had Plato’s dream: a citizenry of Philosopher Kings™, all enlightened, all rational. Would democracy then work? Cue Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, that mathematical killjoy which proves that even under perfect conditions – omniscient voters, saintly preferences, universal literacy – you still cannot aggregate those preferences into a system that is both fair and internally consistent. Democracy can’t even get out of its own way on paper.

Now throw in actual humans. Not the Platonic paragons, but Brexit-uncle at the pub, Facebook aunt with her memes, the American cousin in a red cap insisting a convicted felon is the second coming. Suddenly, democracy looks less like a forum of reasoned debate and more like a lottery machine coughing up numbers while we all pretend they mean “the will of the people.”

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

And this is where the Churchill quip waddles in, cigar smoke curling round its bowler hat: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Ah yes, Winston, do please save us with a quip so well-worn it’s practically elevator music. But the problem is deeper than taste in quotations. If democracy is logically impossible (Arrow) and practically dysfunctional (Trump, Brexit, fill in your own national catastrophe), then congratulating ourselves that it’s “better than the alternatives” is simply an admission that we’ve run out of imagination.

Because there are alternatives. A disinterested AI, for instance, could distribute resources with mathematical fairness, free from lobbyists and grievance-mongers. Nursery schools versus nursing homes? Feed in the data, spit out the optimal allocation. No shouting matches, no demagoguery, no ballots stuffed with slogans. But here the defenders of democracy suddenly become Derrida in disguise: “Ah, but what does fair really mean?” And just like that, we are back in the funhouse of rhetorical mirrors where “fair” is a word everyone loves until it costs them something.

So perhaps democracy doesn’t require an “educated populace” at all; that was always just sugar-paper wrapping. It requires, instead, a population sufficiently docile, sufficiently narcotised by the spectacle, to accept the carnival of elections as a substitute for politics. Which is why calling the devotees of a Trump, or any other demagogue, a gaggle of lemmings is both accurate and impolitic: they know they’re not reasoning; they’re revelling. Your contempt merely confirms the script they’ve already written for you.

Video: Short callout to Karl Popper and Hilary Lawson.

The philosopher, meanwhile, is left polishing his lantern, muttering about reason to an audience who would rather scroll memes about pedophile pizza parlours. Popper warned us that tolerance cannot survive if it tolerates its own annihilation. Arrow proved that even if everyone were perfectly reasonable, the maths would still collapse. And Churchill, bless him, left us a one-liner to make it all seem inevitable.

Perhaps democracy isn’t the worst form of government except for all the others. Perhaps it’s simply the most palatable form of chaos, ballots instead of barricades, polling booths instead of pitchforks. And maybe the real scandal isn’t that people are too stupid for democracy, but that democracy was never designed to be about intelligence in the first place. It was always about managing losers while telling them they’d “had their say.”

The Enlightenment promised us reason; what it delivered was a carnival where the loudest barker gets the booth. The rest of us can either keep muttering about paradoxes in the corner or admit that the show is a farce and start imagining something else.

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