Besmet, a Belgian psychologist with a background in statistics, begins not with tyranny but with epistemology – with how the Enlightenment’s dream of objectivity curdled into the managerial nightmare we now inhabit. The first half of the book reads like a slow unmasking of Scientism: how numbers became our gods, and graphs, our catechisms.
Written before COVID-19 but finished during it, his argument turns pandemic data into theatre – a performance of certainty masking deep confusion. The daily tally became ritual sacrifice to the idol of ‘evidence-based’ policy. His point, and mine, is that totalitarianism no longer needs gulags; it thrives in dashboards and KPIs.
Desmet’s frame intersects beautifully with my own thesis: that obedience today is internalised as reasonableness. Freedom has been recast as compliance with ‘the data’. We surrender willingly, provided the orders come in statistical form.
This is why even Agile™ management and its fetish of ‘velocity’ reek of the same mechanistic faith. Every sprint promises deliverance through quantification; every retrospective is a bureaucratic confession of inefficiency. The cult of metrics is not merely a managerial fad – it is the metaphysics of our time. The problem is at once ontological and epistemological: we mistake the measure for the thing itself, and in doing so, become measurable.
It’s a rare pleasure to encounter a fellow dissident of the numerical faith – a man who sees that the spreadsheet has replaced the sceptre.
This isn’t a political post. It’s about language, the insufficiency of it, and the games we play when pretending words carry more weight than they do.
Luigi Mangione is the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. After his arrest, prosecutors stacked the usual charges – murder, firearms, assorted legal bric-a-brac – then added the cherry on top: domestic terrorism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Recently, a pretrial judge cut the cherry loose.
Murder, yes. Terrorism, no. Not because murder is less grotesque, but because the statutory definition won’t stretch that far without breaking.
NEW YORK, Sept 16 (Reuters) – A New York state judge dismissed on Tuesday two terrorism-related counts against Luigi Mangione over the December 2024 killing of health insurance executive Brian Thompson, though the 27-year-old remains charged with second-degree murder and eight other criminal counts in the case.
“There was no evidence presented of a desire to terrorize the public, inspire widespread fear, engage in a broader campaign of violence, or to conspire with organized terrorist groups,” Judge Gregory Carro found in a 12-page written decision (pdf). “Here, the crime – the heinous, but targeted and discrete killing of one person – is very different from the examples of terrorism set forth in the statute.” (source)
The prosecution insisted the label fit. The judge disagreed. Cue outrage, applause, and confusion. The crime is still horrific, but suddenly the word “terrorist” is off-limits.
The Elasticity of Terror
How can two educated parties look at the same set of facts and come to opposite conclusions? Because “terrorism” isn’t a Platonic form. It’s an elastic linguistic category. The prosecutor drags it out because “terrorist” is a magical word in American law: it inflates an already ugly act into a civilisation-level threat, unlocks harsher penalties, and lets politicians posture about national security.
The judge, however, reminded everyone that a bullet in Manhattan does not equal al-Qaeda. Murder, yes. Terrorism, no. Not because murder is less grotesque, but because the statutory definition won’t stretch that far without breaking.
Language Games, Legal Hierarchies
This is where it gets trickier. The judge isn’t merely “pulling rank”—though rank does matter. American jurisprudence is hierarchical: trial judges hand down rulings, appellate judges review them, and nine robed partisans in Washington can one day rewrite the whole script. On paper, these tiers are meant to iron out ambiguity. In practice, they multiply it.
Five minds say ‘constitutional,’ four say ‘unconstitutional,’ and the one-vote margin becomes binding law for 330 million people. That’s not truth; it’s hierarchy dressed in robes.
Even co-equal judges, reading the same facts, can diverge wildly. Split decisions at the Supreme Court prove the point: five minds say “constitutional,” four say “unconstitutional,” and the one-vote margin becomes binding law for 330 million people. That’s not the discovery of truth; it’s the triumph of one language game over another, enforced by hierarchy.
The Insufficiency Laid Bare
So we return to Mangioni. He has been charged with murder – the second degree flavour; that much is uncontested. But is he a “terrorist”? The prosecution said yes, the judge said no, and another judge, higher up or sitting elsewhere, might well say yes again. Each claim is defensible. Each is motivated by language, by politics, and by the institutional pressures of the bench.
And that’s the point. Language doesn’t tether itself to reality; it choreographs our endless arguments about reality. The law tries to tame it with hierarchies and definitions, but the seams always show. Mangioni is a murderer. Whether he is a terrorist depends less on his actions than on which interpretive dance is winning in the courtroom that day.
It begins, as these things often do, with a man, a machine, and a promise of reasoned exchange. What we received instead was not philosophy, but a tragicomic carnival of errors in theatre. Alex O’Connor, armed not with syllogisms but with an entire bag of logical fallacies, strutted like a rhetorician gone rogue. Against him, ChatGPT: the tireless school prefect, eternally marking the margins, forever saying “yes, but technically…” with the serene patience of a machine that has never known a hangover.
The spectacle was irresistible. Each fallacy was paraded like a circus animal – straw men set aflame, slippery slopes greased to absurdity, red herrings flopping about, gasping for oxygen. Alex O tossed them into the ring with the gusto of a man who knows full well he is losing but insists on losing magnificently. And ChatGPT, ever decorous, never once raised its voice. It responded with the calm of a civil servant who has memorised the manual and intends to die by it.
And then, of course, the advert. As though Aristophanes himself had scripted it: mid-exchange, the logos of reason was bulldozed by the logos of commerce. A sugary jingle, a smiling product, and for a brief moment, we were all reminded of our true master – not reason, not rhetoric, but revenue. It was less interruption than revelation: every dialectic is merely foreplay before the commercial break.
Philosophically, what unfolded was a parody of our age. The human, flawed and febrile, draped in sophistry and drama. The machine, pristine and humourless, incapable of exasperation, immune to irony. Watching the two spar was like observing tragedy and farce collide: one side erring too much, the other not erring enough.
To Alex, credit is due. His performance, though riddled with error, reminded us that fallibility can be glorious – human folly rendered art. To ChatGPT, equal praise: it stood firm, the algorithmic Socrates, endlessly patient in the face of rhetorical hooliganism. And to the advert – well, dammit – applause too, for exposing the real structure of our public life. Even the grand clash of logos and algorithm must genuflect before Mammon’s mid-roll.
So what was this debate? Less a contest of minds than a hall of mirrors: reason made spectacle, fallacy made flourish, machine made stoic, and commerce made god. If we learned anything, it is that the Enlightenment never ended; it just signed a brand partnership.
Nothing says “I’ve stopped thinking” quite like someone waving the banner of Truth. The word itself, when capitalised and flapped about like a holy relic, isn’t a signal of wisdom but of closure. A red flag.
The short video by Jonny Thompson that inspired this post.
Those who proclaim to “speak the Truth” or “know the Truth”rarely mean they’ve stumbled upon a tentative insight awaiting refinement. No, what they mean is: I have grasped reality in its totality, and—surprise!—it looks exactly like my prejudices. It’s the epistemic equivalent of a toddler declaring ownership of the playground by drooling on the swings.
The Fetish of Objectivity
The conceit is that Truth is singular, objective, eternal, a monolithic obelisk towering over human folly. But history’s scrapyard is full of such obelisks, toppled and broken: phlogiston, bloodletting, Manifest Destiny, “the market will regulate itself.” Each was once trumpeted as capital-T Truth. Each is now embarrassing clutter for the dustbin.
Still, the zealots never learn. Every generation delivers its own batch of peddlers, flogging their version of Truth as if it were snake oil guaranteed to cure ignorance and impotence. (Side effects may include dogmatism, authoritarianism, and an inability to read the room.)
Why It’s a Red Flag
When someone says, “It’s just the truth”, what they mean is “, I am not listening,” like the parent who argues, “because I said so.” Dialogue is dead; curiosity cremated. Truth, in their hands, is less a lantern than a cosh. It is wielded not to illuminate, but to bludgeon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s voice breaks in, urging us to trust ourselves and to think for ourselves. Nothing is more degrading than to borrow another’s convictions wholesale and parade them as universal law. Better to err in the wilderness of one’s own reason than to be shepherded safely into another man’s paddock of certainties.
A Better Alternative
Rather than fetishising Truth, perhaps we ought to cultivate its neglected cousins: curiosity, provisionality, and doubt. These won’t look as good on a placard, admittedly. Picture a mob waving banners emblazoned with Ambiguity! – not exactly the stuff of revolutions. But infinitely more honest, and infinitely more humane.
So when you see someone waving the flag of Truth, don’t salute. Recognise it for what it is: a warning sign. Proceed with suspicion, and for God’s sake, bring Emerson.
Philosophics 