Over the past few decades, moral psychology has staged a quiet coup against one of our most cherished fantasies: that human beings are, at bottom, rational moral agents. This is not a fringe claim. It is not a Twitter take. It is the mainstream finding of an entire research programme spanning psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience.
We do not reason our way to moral conclusions. We feel our way there. Instantly. Automatically. And only afterwards do we construct reasons that make the judgment sound respectable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This is not controversial anymore. It is replicated, taught, and celebrated. And yet, if you read the most influential books in this literature, something strange happens. The diagnosis is devastating. The prescription is reassuring.
I’ve just published a long-form video walking through five canonical books in moral psychology that all uncover the same structural problem, and then quietly refuse to live with the implications.
Each of these books is sharp, serious, and worth reading. This is not a hit piece.
But each follows the same arc:
Identify a non-rational, affective, automatic mechanism at the heart of moral judgement
Show why moral disagreement is persistent and resistant to argument
Propose solutions that rely on reflection, dialogue, reframing, calibration, or rational override
In short: they discover that reason is weak, and then assign it a leadership role anyway.
Haidt dismantles moral rationalism and then asks us to talk it out. Lakoff shows that framing is constitutive, then offers better framing. Gray models outrage as a perceptual feedback loop, then suggests we check our perceptions. Greene diagnoses tribal morality, then bets on utilitarian reasoning to save us.
None of this is incoherent. But it is uncomfortable. Because the findings themselves suggest that these prescriptions are, at best, limited.
Diagnosis without prognosis
The uncomfortable possibility raised by this literature is not that we are ignorant or misinformed.
It is that moral disagreement may be structural rather than solvable.
That political conflict may not be cured by better arguments. That persuasion may resemble contagion more than deliberation. That reason often functions as a press secretary, not a judge.
The books sense this. And then step back from it. Which is human. But it matters.
Why this matters now
We are living in systems that have internalised these findings far more ruthlessly than public discourse has.
Social media platforms optimise for outrage, not understanding. Political messaging is frame-first, not fact-first. AI systems are increasingly capable of activating moral intuitions at scale, without fatigue or conscience.
Meanwhile, our institutions still behave as if one more conversation, one more fact-check, one more appeal to reason will close the gap. The research says otherwise.
And that gap between what we know and what we pretend may be the most important moral problem of the moment.
No solution offered
The video does not end with a fix. That’s deliberate.
Offering a neat solution here would simply repeat the same move I’m criticising: diagnosis followed by false comfort. Sometimes orientation matters more than optimism. The elephant is real. The elephant is moving.And most of us are passengers arguing about the map while it walks.
Evelina Fedorenko has been committing a quiet but persistent act of vandalism against one of modernity’s favourite assumptions: that thought and language are basically the same thing, or at least inseparable housemates who share a fridge and argue about milk. They’re not.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Her fMRI work shows something both banal and scandalous. Linguistic processing and high-level reasoning live in different neural neighbourhoods. When you switch language on, the ‘language network’ lights up. When you do hard thinking without words, it doesn’t. The brain, it turns out, is not secretly narrating your life in subtitles.
This matters because an entire philosophical industry has been built on the idea that language is thought. Or worse: that thought depends on language for its very existence. That if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. A comforting story, especially for people whose entire self-worth is tied up in saying things.
Now watch two chess players in deep play. No talking. No inner monologue helpfully whispering, ‘Ah yes, now I shall execute a queenside fork’. Just pattern recognition, spatial anticipation, constraint satisfaction, and forward simulation. If language turns up at all, it does so later, like a press officer arriving after the battle to explain what really happened.
Video: Dina Belenkaya plays chess.
Language here is not the engine. It’s the after-action report. The temptation is always to reverse the order. We notice that people can describe their reasoning, and we infer that the description must have caused the reasoning. This is the same mistake we make everywhere else: confusing narration with mechanism, explanation with origin, story with structure.
Fedorenko’s findings don’t tell us that language is useless. They tell us something more irritating: language is a post hoc technology. A powerful one, yes. Essential for coordination, teaching, justification, and institutional life. But not the thing doing the actual work when the work is being done. Thought happens. Language tidies up afterwards.
Which leaves us with an awkward conclusion modern philosophy has spent centuries trying to avoid. The mind is not a well-ordered library of propositions. It’s a workshop. Messy, embodied, improvisational. Language is the clipboard, not the hands. And the clipboard, however beautifully formatted, never lifted a chess piece in its life.
As for me, I’ve long noticed that when I play a game like Sudoku, I notice the number missing from the pattern before any counting or naming occurs. The ‘it must be a 3’ only happens after I make the move.
The modern search for the truth of consciousness has the unmistakable smell of a desert expedition gone wrong.
Everyone agrees the elephant is real. Everyone insists it’s important. No one agrees what it is, where it’s going, or whether it’s moving in circles. Still, the caravan marches on, convinced that the next dune will finally reveal solid ground.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This confidence rests on a familiar Modern assumption: motion equals progress. We may not know where the shoreline of Truth lies, but surely we’re heading toward it. Each new theory, each new scan, each new formalism feels like a step forward. Bayesian updates hum reassuringly in the background. The numbers go up. Understanding must be improving.
But deserts are littered with travellers who swore the same thing.
The problem with consciousness is not that it is mysterious. It’s that it is structurally unplaceable. It is not an object in the world alongside neurons, fields, or functions. It is the mediated condition under which anything appears at all. Treating it as something to be discovered “out there” is like looking for the lens inside the image.
MEOW puts its finger exactly here. Consciousness is not a hidden substance waiting to be uncovered by better instruments. It is a constrained encounter, shaped by biology, cognition, language, culture, technology. Those constraints are real, binding, and non-negotiable. But they do not add up to an archetypal Truth of consciousness, any more than refining a map yields the territory itself.
Modern theories of consciousness oscillate because they are stabilising different aspects of the same mediated situation. IIT formalises integration. Global workspace models privilege broadcast. Predictive processing foregrounds inference. Illusionism denies the furniture altogether. Each feels solid while inhabited. Each generates the same phenomenology of arrival: now we finally see what consciousness really is.
Until the next dune.
Cognitively, we cannot live inside a framework we believe to be false. So every new settlement feels like home. Retrospectively, it becomes an error. Progress is narrated backwards. Direction is inferred after the fact. Motion is moralised.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. — Søren Kierkegaard
The elephant keeps walking.
None of this means inquiry is futile. It means the myth of convergence is doing far more work than anyone admits. Consciousness research improves descriptions, sharpens constraints, expands applicability. What it does not do is move us measurably closer to an observer-independent Truth of consciousness, because no such bearing exists.
The elephant is not failing to reach the truth.
The desert is not arranged that way.
Image: NotebookLM infographic on this concept.
Once you stop mistaking wandering for navigation, the panic subsides. The task is no longer to arrive, but to understand where circles form, where mirages recur, and which paths collapse under their own metaphysical optimism.
Consciousness isn’t an elephant waiting to be found.
It’s the condition under which we keep mistaking dunes for destinations.
You wake up in the middle of a collapsing building. Someone hands you a map and says, find your way home. You look down. The map is for a different building entirely. One that was never built. Or worse, one that was demolished decades ago. The exits don’t exist. The staircases lead nowhere.
This is consciousness.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t choose it. And the tools we inherited to navigate it—language, philosophy, our most cherished questions—were drawn for a world that does not exist.
Looking back at my recent work, I realise I’m assembling a corpus of pessimism. Not the adolescent kind. Not nihilism as mood board. Something colder and more practical: a willingness to describe the structures we actually inhabit rather than the ones we wish were there.
It starts with admitting that language is a compromised instrument. A tool evolved for coordination and survival, not for metaphysical clarity. And nowhere is this compromise more concealed than in our most sanctified word of inquiry.
1. The Weasel Word
We treat “why” as the pinnacle of human inquiry. The question that separates us from animals. Philosophy seminars orbit it. Religions are scaffolded around it. Children deploy it until adults retreat in defeat.
But “why” is a weasel word. A special case of how wearing an unnecessary coat of metaphysics.
The disguise is thinner in other languages. French pourquoi, Spanish por qué, Italian perché all literally mean for what. Japanese dōshite means by what way. Mandarin wèishénme is again for what. The instrumental skeleton is right there on the surface. Speakers encounter it every time they ask the question.
In the Indo-European lineage, “why” descends from the same root as “what”. It began as an interrogative of means and manner, not cosmic purpose. To ask “why” was originally to ask by what mechanism or for what end. Straightforward, workmanlike questions.
Over time, English inflated this grammatical shortcut into something grander. A demand for ultimate justification. For the Reason behind reasons.
The drift was slow enough that it went unnoticed. The word now sounds like a deeper category of inquiry. As if it were pointing beyond mechanism toward metaphysical bedrock.
The profundity is a trick of phonetic history. And a surprising amount of Anglo-American metaphysics may be downstream of a language that buried the receipt.
2. What “Why” Smuggles In
To see the problem clearly, follow the logic that “why” quietly encourages.
When we ask “Why is there suffering?” we often believe we are asking for causes. But the grammar primes us for something else entirely. It whispers that there must be a justification. A reason-giver. An intention behind the arrangement of things.
The slide looks like this:
“Why X?” → invites justification rather than description → suggests intention or purpose → presumes a mind capable of intending → requires reasons for those intentions → demands grounding for those reasons
At that point the inquiry has only two exits: infinite regress or a metaphysical backstop. God. Logos. The Good. A brute foundation exempt from the very logic that summoned it.
This is not a failure to answer the question. It is the question functioning exactly as designed.
Now contrast this with how.
“How did X come about?” → asks for mechanism → traces observable causal chains → bottoms out in description
“How” eventually terminates in it is so. “Why”, as commonly used, never does. It either spirals forever or leaps into transcendence.
This is not because we lack information. It is because the grammatical form demands more than the world can supply.
3. The Substitution Test
Here is the simplest diagnostic.
Any genuine informational “why” question can be reformulated as a “how” question without losing explanatory power. What disappears is not content but metaphysical residue.
“Why were you late?” → “How is it that you are late?”
“Why did the dinosaurs go extinct?” → “How did the dinosaurs go extinct?”
Asteroid impact. Climate disruption. No intention required.
Even the grand prize:
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” → “How is it that there is something?”
At which point the question either becomes empirical or dissolves entirely into it is. No preamble.
Notice the residual discomfort when “my car broke down” answers “why were you late”. Something feels unpaid. The grammar had primed the listener for justification, not description. For reasons, not causes.
The car has no intentions. It broke. That is the whole truth. “How” accepts this cleanly. “Why” accepts it while still gesturing toward something that was never there.
4. The Black Box of Intention
At this point the problem tightens.
If “why” quietly demands intentions, and intentions are not directly accessible even to the agents who supposedly have them, then the entire practice is built on narrative repair.
We do not observe our intentions. We infer them after the fact. The conscious mind receives a press release about decisions already made elsewhere and calls it a reason. Neuroscience has been showing this for decades.
So:
Asking others why they acted requests a plausible story about opaque processes
Asking oneself why one acted requests confabulation mistaken for introspection
Asking the universe why anything exists requests a fiction about a mind that is not there
“How” avoids this entirely. It asks for sequences, mechanisms, conditions. It does not require anyone to perform the ritual of intention-attribution. It does not demand that accidents confess to purposes.
5. Thrownness Without a Vantage Point
I stop short of calling existence a mistake. A mistake implies a standard that was failed. A plan that went wrong. I prefer something colder: the accident.
Human beings find themselves already underway, without having chosen the entry point or the terms. Heidegger called this thrownness. But the structure is not uniquely human.
The universe itself admits no vantage point from which it could justify itself. There is no external tribunal. No staging ground. No meta-position from which existence could be chosen or refused.
This is not a claim about cosmic experience. It is a structural observation about the absence of justification-space. The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” presumes a standpoint that does not exist. It is a grammatical hallucination.
Thrownness goes all the way down. Consciousness is thrown into a universe that is itself without preamble. We are not pockets of purposelessness in an otherwise purposeful cosmos. We are continuous with it.
The accident runs through everything.
6. Suchness
This is not a new insight. Zen Buddhism reached it by a different route.
Where Western metaphysics treats “why” as an unanswered question, Zen treats it as malformed. The koan does not await a solution. It dissolves the demand for one. When asked whether a dog has Buddha-nature, the answer Mu does not negate or affirm. It refuses the frame.
Tathātā—suchness—names reality prior to justification. Things as they are, before the demand that they make sense to us.
This is not mysticism. It is grammatical hygiene.
Nietzsche smashed idols with a hammer. Zen removes the altar entirely. Different techniques, same target: the metaphysical loading we mistake for depth.
7. Scavenging for Meaning
If there is no True Why, no ultimate justification waiting beneath the floorboards of existence, what remains?
For some, this sounds like collapse. For me, it is relief.
Without a cosmic script, meaning becomes something we assemble rather than discover. Local. Contingent. Provisional. Real precisely because it is not guaranteed.
I find enough purpose in the warmth of a partner’s hand, in the internal logic of a sonata, in the seasonal labour of maintaining a garden. These things organise my days. They matter intensely. And they do so without claiming eternity.
I hold them lightly because I know the building is slated for demolition. Personally. Biologically. Cosmologically. That knowledge does not drain them of colour. It sharpens them.
This is what scavenging means. You build with what you find. You use what works. You do not pretend the materials were placed there for you.
Conclusion: The Sober Nihilist
To be a nihilist in this sense is not to despair. It is to stop lying about the grammar of the universe.
“Why” feels like a meaningful inquiry, but it does not connect to anything real in the way we imagine. It demands intention from a cosmos that has none and justification from accidents that cannot supply it.
“How” is enough. It traces causes. It observes mechanisms. It accepts that things sometimes bottom out in is.
Once you stop asking the universe to justify itself, you are free to deal with what is actually here. The thrown, contingent, occasionally beautiful business of being alive.
I am a nihilist not because I am lost, but because I have put down a broken map. I am looking at what is actually in front of me.
And that, it turns out, is enough.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this topic
Full Disclosure: This article was output by ChatGPT after an extended conversation with it, Claude, and me. Rather than trying to recast it in my voice, I share it as is. I had started this as a separate post on nihilism, and we ended up here. Claude came up with the broken map story at the start and Suchness near the end. I contributed the weasel words, the ‘how’ angle, the substitution test, the metaphysics of motivation and intention, thrownness (Geworfenheit), Zen, and nihilism. ChatGPT merely rendered this final output after polishing my conversation with Claude.
We had been discussing Cioran, Zapffe, Benatar, and Ligotti, but they got left on the cutting room floor along the way.
Claude Opus 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2 with input from Bry Willis
There is a peculiar anachronism at work in how we think about reality. In physics, we still talk as if atoms were tiny marbles. In everyday life, we talk as if selves were little pilots steering our bodies through time. In both cases, we know better. And in both cases, we can’t seem to stop.
Audio: NotebookLM summary of this podcast
Consider the atom. Every chemistry textbook shows them as colorful spheres, electrons orbiting like planets. We teach children to build molecules with ball-and-stick models. Yet modern physics dismantled this picture a century ago. What we call ‘particles’ are really excitations in quantum fields—mathematical patterns, not things. They’re events masquerading as objects, processes dressed up as nouns.
The language persists because the maths doesn’t care what we call things, and humans need something to picture. ‘Electron’ is easier to say than ‘localised excitation in the electromagnetic field’.
The self enjoys a similar afterlife.
We speak of ‘finding yourself’ or ‘being true to yourself’ as if there were some stable entity to find or betray. We say ‘I’m not the same person I was ten years ago’ while simultaneously assuming enough continuity to take credit – or blame – for what that ‘previous person’ did.
But look closer. Strip away the story we tell about ourselves and what remains? Neural firing patterns. Memory fragments. Social roles shifting with context. The ‘you’ at work is not quite the ‘you’ at home, and neither is the ‘you’ from this morning’s dream. The self isn’t discovered so much as assembled, moment by moment, from available materials.
Like atoms, selves are inferred, not found.
This isn’t just philosophical hand-waving. It has practical teeth. When someone with dementia loses their memories, we wrestle with whether they’re ‘still themselves’. When we punish criminals, we assume the person in prison is meaningfully continuous with the person who committed the crime. Our entire legal and moral framework depends on selves being solid enough to bear responsibility.
And here’s the thing: it works. Mostly.
Just as chemistry functions perfectly well with its cartoon atoms, society functions with its fictional selves. The abstractions do real work. Atoms let us predict reactions without drowning in field equations. Selves let us navigate relationships, assign accountability, and plan futures without collapsing into existential vertigo.
The mistake isn’t using these abstractions. The mistake is forgetting that’s what they are.
Physics didn’t collapse when atoms dissolved into probability clouds. Chemistry students still balance equations; medicines still get synthesised. The practical utility survived the ontological revolution. Similarly, ethics won’t collapse if we admit selves are processes rather than things. We can still make promises, form relationships, and hold each other accountable.
What changes is the confusion.
Once you see both atoms and selves as useful fictions – pragmatic compressions of unmanageable complexity – certain puzzles dissolve. The ship of Theseus stops being paradoxical. Personal identity becomes a matter of degree rather than an all-or-nothing proposition. The hard problem of consciousness softens when you stop looking for the ghost in the machine.
We’re pattern-seeking creatures in a universe of flux. We freeze processes into things because things are easier to think about. We turn verbs into nouns because nouns fit better in our mental hands. This isn’t a bug in human cognition – it’s a feature. The problem comes when we forget we’re doing it.
So we end up in the peculiar position of defending little billiard balls in a field universe, and little inner captains in a processual mind, long after the evidence has moved on. We know atoms aren’t solid. We know selves aren’t fixed. Yet we persist in talking as if they were.
Perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps all language is a kind of useful betrayal of reality – solid enough to stand on, but not so solid we can’t revise it when needed.
The half-life of knowledge keeps ticking. Today’s insights become tomorrow’s anachronisms. But some fictions are too useful to abandon entirely. We just need to remember what they are: tools, not truths. Maps, not territories.
And every once in a while, it helps to check whether we’re still navigating by stars that went out long ago.
I’ve been reading Bernard Williams lately, and I’ve written about his work on Truth and Truthfulness. I’m in the process of writing more on the challenges of ontological moral positionsand moral luck. I don’t necessarily want to make contemporary news my focal point, but this is a perfect case study for it. I’ll be releasing a neutral philosophy paper on the underlying causes, but I want to comment on this whilst it’s still in the news cycle.
The form of xenophobia is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, though the ontological split is applicable more generally. For those unfamiliar with US news, I’ll set this up. The United States is currently deploying federal enforcement power in ways that deliberately bypass local consent, blur policing and military roles, and rely on fear as a stabilising mechanism. Historical analogies are unavoidable, but not required for the argument that follows. These forces have been deployed in cities that did not and do not support the Trump administration, so they are exacting revenge and trying to foment fear and unrest. This case is an inevitable conclusion to these policy measures.
tl;dr: The Law™ presents itself as fact-driven, but only by treating metaphysical imputations about inner life as if they were empirical findings. This is not a flaw in this case; it is how the system functions at all.
NB: Some of this requires having read Williams or having a familiarity with certain concepts. Apologies in advance, but use Google or a GPT to fill in the details.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Why the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Exposes the Limits of Bernard Williams
The Minneapolis ICE shooting is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is painfully ordinary. A person is dead. An officer fired shots. A vehicle was involved. Video exists. Statements were issued. Protests followed. No one seriously disputes these elements. They sit in the shared centre of the Venn diagram, inert and unhelpful. Where everything fractures is precisely where the law insists clarity must be found: intent and motive. And this is where things stop being factual and start being metaphysical.
The Comfortable Fiction of Legal Facts
The legal system likes to tell a comforting story about itself. It claims to be empirical, sober, and evidence-driven. Facts in, verdicts out. This is nonsense.
What the law actually does is this:
It gathers uncontested physical facts.
It then demands a psychological supplement.
It treats that supplement as if it were itself a fact.
Intent and motive are not observed. They are inferred. Worse, they are imposed. They are not discovered in the world but assigned to agents to make outcomes legible.
In Minneapolis, the uncontested facts are thin but stable:
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026.
The incident involved Good’s vehicle, which was present and moving at the time shots were fired.
Ross fired his weapon multiple times, and Good died from those gunshot wounds.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the agent acted in self-defence.
Video footage exists that shows at least part of the encounter.
The case ignited protests, widespread condemnation from local officials, and political pushback.
This creates a shared intersection: vehicle, Ross, shots, and that ‘something happened’ that neither side is denying.
The Law smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.
None of these facts contain intent. None of them specify motive. They do not tell us whether the movement of the vehicle was aggression, panic, confusion, or escape. They do not tell us whether the shooting was fear, anger, habit, or protocol execution. Yet the law cannot proceed without choosing. So it does what it always does. It smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.
Intent and Motive as Institutional Impositions
Intent is treated as a condition of responsibility. Motive is treated as its explanation. Neither is a fact in anything like the ordinary sense. Even self-report does not rescue them. Admission is strategically irrational. Silence is rewarded. Reframing is incentivised. And even sincerity would not help, because human beings do not have transparent access to their own causal architecture. They have narratives, rehearsed and revised after the fact. So the law imputes. It tells the story the agent cannot safely tell, and then punishes or absolves them on the basis of that story. This is not a bug. It is the operating system.
Where Bernard Williams Comes In
This is where Bernard Williams becomes relevant, and where his account quietly fails. In Truth and Truthfulness, Williams famously rejects the Enlightenment fantasy of capital-T Truth as a clean, context-free moral anchor. He replaces it with virtues like sincerity and accuracy, grounded in lived practices rather than metaphysical absolutes. So far, so good.
Williams is right that moral life does not float above history, psychology, or culture. He is right to attack moral systems that pretend agents consult universal rules before acting. He is right to emphasise thick concepts, situated reasons, and practical identities. But he leaves something standing that cannot survive the Minneapolis test.
The Residue Williams Keeps
Williams still needs agency to be intelligible. He still needs actions to be recognisably owned. He still assumes that reasons, however messy, are at least retrospectively available to anchor responsibility. This is where the residue collapses.
In cases like Minneapolis:
Intent is legally required but epistemically unavailable.
Motive is legally explanatory but metaphysically speculative.
Admission is disincentivised.
Narrative is imposed under institutional pressure.
At that point, sincerity and accuracy are no longer virtues an agent can meaningfully exercise. They are properties of the story selected by the system. Williams rejects metaphysical Truth while retaining a metaphysical agent robust enough to carry responsibility. The problem is that law does not merely appeal to intelligibility; it manufactures it under constraint.
Moral Luck Isn’t Enough
Williams’ concept of moral luck gestures toward contingency, but it still presumes a stable agent who could, in principle, have acted otherwise and whose reasons are meaningfully theirs. But once intent and motive are understood as institutional fabrications rather than inner facts, ‘could have done otherwise’ becomes a ceremonial phrase. Responsibility is no longer uncovered; it is allocated. The tragedy is not that we fail to know the truth. The tragedy is that the system requires a truth that cannot exist.
Facts Versus Stories
The law does not discover which story is true. It selects which story is actionable.
The Minneapolis case shows the fault line clearly:
Facts: bodies, movements, weapons, recordings.
Stories: fear versus anger, defence versus aggression.
The first is uncontested. The second does all the work.
And those stories are not epistemic conclusions. They are metaphysical commitments enforced by law. Williams wanted to rescue ethics from abstraction. What he could not accept is that, once abstraction is removed, responsibility does not become more human. It becomes procedural.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
The law does not operate on truth. It operates on enforceable interpretations of behaviour. Intent and motive are not facts. They are tools. Williams saw that capital-T Truth had to go. What he did not see, or perhaps did not want to see, is that the smaller, more humane residue he preserved cannot bear the weight the legal system places on it.
Once you see this, the obsession with ‘what really happened’ looks almost childish. The facts are already known. What is being fought over is which metaphysical fiction the system will enforce.
That decision is not epistemic. It is political. And it is violent.
I’ve read about 85 per cent of James by Percival Everett. I recommend it. On the surface, it is simply a very good story set in the narrative universe of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I will avoid spoilers as best I can.
The novel is set in the antebellum American South. James and the others move through Missouri, a state that openly supported slavery, and at one point into Illinois, a state that officially opposed it but quietly failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Illinois, it turns out, is no safe haven. Ideology and practice, as ever, are on speaking terms only when it suits them.
Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
This is not a book review. I may write one later for my Ridley Park site once I’ve finished the book. What interests me here are two philosophical tensions Everett stages with remarkable economy.
There are two characters who are Black but able to pass as white. One of them feels profound guilt about this. He was raised as a slave, escaped, and knows exactly what it means to be treated as Black because he has lived it. Passing feels like theft. Survival, perhaps, but theft all the same.
The other is more unsettled. He was raised as a white man and only later discovers that he is not, as the language goes, “pure-bred”. This revelation leaves him suspended between identities. Should he now accept a Black identity he has never inhabited, or continue to pass quietly, benefitting from a system that would destroy him if it knew?
James offers him advice that is as brutal as it is lucid:
“Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.”
This is the philosophical nerve of the book.
Truth, Everett suggests, is indifferent to belief. Belief does not mediate justice. It does not reorganise power. It does not rewire how the world responds to your body. What matters is not what is true, nor even what is believed to be true, but how one is seen.
The world does not respond to essences. It responds to appearances.
Identity here is not an inner fact waiting to be acknowledged; it is a surface phenomenon enforced by institutions, habits, and violence. The truth can be known, spoken, even proven, and still change nothing. The social machine runs on perception, not ontology.
In James, Everett is not offering moral comfort. He is stripping away a modernist fantasy: that truth, once revealed, obliges the world to behave differently. It doesn’t. The world only cares what you look like while moving through it.
Truth, it turns out, is perfectly compatible with injustice.
Lewis Goodall, a talk show host, calls the cross-border seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro a ‘kidnapping’. His guest and Trump apologist, Angie Wong, rejects the word. She first says ‘arrest’, then ‘extradition’, then finally the improvised ‘special extradition’. Around that single lexical choice, a 12-minute standoff unfolds.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
As a language philosopher, I am evaluating the language and am less concerned with the underlying facts of the matter. Language serves to obscure these facts from the start and then rhetorically controls the narrative and framing.
Video: Source segment being analysed
There is a familiar mistake made whenever public discourse turns heated: the assumption that the real disagreement lies in the facts. This is comforting, because facts can, at least in principle, be checked. What follows examines a different failure mode altogether. The facts are largely beside the point.
Consider a broadcast exchange in which a political commentator and an interviewer argue over how to describe the forcible removal of a head of state from one country to another. The interviewer repeatedly uses the word kidnapping. The guest repeatedly resists this term, preferring arrest, extradition, and eventually the improvisational compromise ‘special extradition’.
What matters here is not which term is correct. What matters is what the interaction reveals about how meaning is negotiated under pressure.
The illusion of disagreement
Superficially, the exchange appears to be a dispute about legality. Was there a treaty? Was due process followed? Which court has jurisdiction? These questions generate heat, but they are not doing the work.
The real disagreement is prior to all of that: which lexical frame is allowed to stabilise the event.
Once a label is accepted, downstream reasoning becomes trivial. If it was an extradition, it belongs to one legal universe. If it was a kidnapping, it belongs to another. The participants are not arguing within a shared framework; they are competing to install the framework itself.
Equivocation as method, not error
The guest’s shifting vocabulary is often described as evasive or incoherent. This misreads what is happening. The movement from extradition to special extradition is not confusion. It is a deliberate widening of semantic tolerance.
‘Special extradition’ is not meant to clarify. It is meant to survive. It carries just enough institutional residue to sound procedural, while remaining sufficiently vague to avoid binding criteria. It functions less as a description than as a holding pattern.
This is equivocation, but not the amateur kind taught in logic textbooks. It is equivocation under constraint, where the aim is not precision but narrative continuity.
Why exposure fails
The interviewer repeatedly points out that extradition has a specific meaning, and that the situation described does not meet it. This is accurate, and also ineffective.
Why? Because the exchange is no longer governed by definitional hygiene. The audience is not being asked to adjudicate a dictionary entry. They are being asked to decide which voice has the authority to name the act.
Once that shift occurs, exposing misuse does not correct the discourse. It merely clarifies the power asymmetry. The guest can concede irregularity, precedent-breaking, even illegality, without relinquishing control of the label. The language continues to function.
Truth as a downstream effect
At no point does the exchange hinge on discovering what ‘really happened’. The physical sequence of events is relatively uncontested. What is contested is what those events are allowed to count as.
In this sense, truth is not absent from the discussion; it is subordinate. It emerges only after a rhetorical frame has been successfully installed. Once the frame holds, truth follows obediently within it.
This is not relativism. It is an observation about sequence. Rhetoric does not decorate truth here; it prepares the ground on which truth is later claimed.
Language doing institutional work
The most revealing moment comes when the guest effectively shrugs at the legal ambiguity and asks who, exactly, is going to challenge it. This is not cynicism. It is diagnostic.
Words like arrest and extradition are not merely descriptive. They are operational tokens. They open doors, justify procedures, and allow institutions to proceed without stalling. Their value lies less in semantic purity than in administrative usability.
‘Kidnapping’ is linguistically precise in one register, but administratively useless in another. It stops processes rather than enabling them. That is why it is resisted.
What the case study shows
This exchange is not about geopolitics. It is about how language behaves when it is tasked with carrying power. Meaning drifts not because speakers are careless, but because precision is costly. Labels are selected for durability, not accuracy. Truth does not arbitrate rhetoric; rhetoric allocates truth. Seen this way, the debate over terminology is not a failure of communication. It is communication functioning exactly as designed under modern conditions. Which is why insisting on ‘the correct word’ increasingly feels like shouting into a ventilation system. The air still moves. It just isn’t moving for you.
2025 has been a good year for this blog. I’ve crossed the 1,000-post mark, and this year it has had over 30,000 page views – best year ever. This month was the best month ever, and 1st December was the most popular day ever. That’s a lot of ‘evers’.
I shared the remainder of this post on my Ridley Park fiction blog – same reader, same books, same opinion. Any new content added below is in red.
I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.
Fiction
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.
This was very philosophical and psychological. Nothing appeared to happen until chapter 7, as I recall. I felt like I was just eavesdropping on some school chums, which I was. Then came the big reveal.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.
Again, philosophical, psychological. I liked it.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.
This, I read because I was attracted to the premise of memory as it might affect language. It touched on this a tad, but it was mostly about memory, anti-memory, and constructed selves. How can one experience a contiguous, diachronic self with memory gaps? It never quite got that deep, that on occasion it did, as far as I recall.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.
This is an age-old cult classic – much better than the already excellent films. Fills in what the film cut for its medium. I read several other Welsh books. Filth was an honourable mention, which I also made connexions to Antimemetics, above.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.
This flagged a tad at the end, but it was prescient and released in 1922, decades before 1984 and Brave New World. Worth the read.
Nonfiction
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so it fell off the list.
Moral Politics by George Lakoff
Evidently, I forgot to explain myself in my prior post. I refer to this book and its trade counterpart, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is more of a political polemic, but still worth the read. It’s also shorter. This is about Moral politics – duh! – but it’s about moral language. It was a precursor to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion or Kurt Gray’s Outraged! I found Haidt’s work interesting but reductive; I found Gray’s work merely reductive.
This said, Lakoff and Haidt were the vector through which I came upon my language ontology theory that further confounds language insufficiency. To be sure, Haidt was an unnecessary point, but it did emphasise it. Haidt’s frameworks also give me something to riff on.
Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.
Nothing much to add here. Technofeudalism is economic fare, albeit with philosophical implications. I enjoyed it. Yanis is also an interesting speaker.
NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then Beauvoir poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.
Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads. Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.
Bottom of the Barrel
Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.
Nah. I felt he was trying to hard for shock value. It didn’t shock, but it put me off. At least High-rise represented an absurd cultural microcosm. I just wanted the story to be over. Luckily, I read both of these sequentially whilst on holiday, so I wasn’t looking to ingest anything serious.
Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.
Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.
Outraged! by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt.
See comments above. ☝️
Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.
Honourable Mention
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.
I did like this, and it was much better than the Natalie Portman film adaptation. This is the first book in a trilogy. I absolutely hated the second instalment. The third was not as good as the first, but it tried to get back on track from the derailment of the second. As I wrote in public reviews, the second book could have been a prologue chapter to the third book with all of the relevant information I cared about. You could skip the second story with almost no material effect on the story or character arcs.
Looking through some of the drafts clogging the blog, I decided to whittle away at the queue. I started this months ago. It’s here now, not particularly in sync with the season or recent topics, but I like Sapolsky.
‘Biology is destiny’, say the Christian Right, the bland bureaucrats of morality, the loud whisperers at Sunday school. They want gender to be a tomb carved in marble: you’re assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up – what do you mean by biology? Which biology? Which markers count?’
Video: Neuro-biology of Transsexuality, Prof. Robert Sapolsky
In the clip above, Sapolsky unpacks neurological evidence that upends the essentialist cheat codes. He doesn’t pretend we now have the final answer to gender. He does something scarier to fundamentalists: he shows just how messy biology is.
The Bed Nucleus, the Finger Ratio, and the ‘Wrong Body’ Hypothesis
Sapolsky discusses three pieces of neurobiological evidence:
Digit ratio (2nd vs 4th finger length): In lesbians, on average, the ratio is closer to what you see in straight men than straight women. That’s a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in women’s sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc): Here we reach heavy artillery. There is a neuron population in this region that, on average, is about twice as large in males as in females. In postmortem analyses of trans women (male → female), this region’s size corresponds to their identified gender, not their natal sex. Crucially, that alignment is seen even in trans individuals who never underwent full hormone therapy or surgical changes.
Sapolsky recounts astute controls: men treated (for, say, testicular cancer) with feminising hormones don’t show the same shift.
Also, using the phantom-limb analogy: men who lose their penis to cancer often report phantom sensations; trans women rarely do. That suggests the body map in the brain never fully “registered” that organ in the same way.
He doesn’t overclaim. He doesn’t say, ‘Case closed, biology proves everything’. He says: These data complicate your neat categories. They force you to ask: which biological measure do you privilege? Hypertrophied neurons? Chromosomes? Receptor density? Hormones? All of them simultaneously? None of them?
Essentialism as a Trap
Fundamentalists and anti-trans ideologues deploy essentialism because it’s convenient. They demand an ironclad ‘essence’ so they can exclude anyone who fails their test. But what Sapolsky shows is that essence is simply a scaffold; we get to pick which biological scaffolds we accept. They may choose genes and genitals; the neurobiologist gives them neuron counts and brain-maps. When your ideology elevates one scaffold and ignores the others, it betrays its own contingency.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that identity, experience, insistence (in Sapolsky’s language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mismatch between internal brain architecture and external form. The stubborn fragments of biology that fundamentalists accept are torn by the dissonance that science increasingly reveals.
What This Means for Trans Rights, Discourse & Strategy
Science is never ‘conclusive’. Sapolsky offers compelling support, not gospel. Anyone claiming this settles everything has never looked at a scatter plot.
Lived experience still matters. Even if we never had brain slices, self-reports, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, narratives remain valid. Brain studies supplement, not supplant, testimony.
Essentialist opponents have boxed themselves in. When they demand biology decides everything, they hand the baton to neuroscientists – and neuroscientists keep running with it. The entire ‘biology’ equals only what I like’ regime is exposed.
Ambiguity is a strength, not a liability. If we insist identity is linear and tidy, we re-enact their demand for purity. Recognising complexity, mess, and variance is radical resistance.
