Yesterday, I complained about the psychoanalytic approach Fanon employed in Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 4, The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonised. Today, I share my feelings about Chapter 5, The Lived Experience of the Black Man. But first, let’s reorient the reader to my own perspective.
I am decidedly anti-colonial and even anti-post-colonial, or at least I see this trajectory as tragic. All of this is consonant with the views expressed in my Anti-Enlightenment Project.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
On one hand, I want to complain about the circuitous approach he took in Chapter 5. It was meant to be metaphorical and poetic. Whilst I feel it’s a bold move to present an areasonable approach – one that refuses the terms of Enlightenment rationality without simply inverting them – it seems that he cherry-picks his tools from the arsenal of Enlightenment thought. This applies to much of the post-colonial project broadly, though my objection there is less to any particular theoretical allegiance and more to the foundational commitments: I oppose colonialism, empire, and hegemony on grounds that precede the debate about which critical vocabulary best serves their dismantling.
Fanon’s anti-Enlightenment critique is weakened where he imports psychoanalysis too trustingly. Psychology and psychoanalysis are themselves Enlightenment byproducts: systems for rendering the human subject legible, classifiable, interpretable, and administrable. To use them against colonial Reason without first subjecting them to the same suspicion risks reproducing the very machinery under critique. The result isn’t fatal to Fanon’s charge, but it is methodologically untidy. I don’t necessarily object to using Enlightenment-derived tools after critique; I object to retaining them as though their own conceptual machinery were innocent. Psychoanalysis may be useful as metaphor, rhetoric, or historically situated vocabulary, but if it’s treated as a valid evidentiary lens without scrutiny, it smuggles Enlightenment legibility back into an anti-Enlightenment critique. That’s where Fanon’s chapter loses force for me.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Fanon is at his strongest when he shows that colonial ‘reason‘ produces the colonised subject as irrational, bodily, affective, and deficient. He rightly treats unreason not as a natural property of the colonised but as a category imposed by colonial order. My difficulty is that he then routes this insight through psychoanalysis, a method I regard as metaphorically suggestive but evidentially weak. The critique of colonial rationality survives; the psychoanalytic apparatus remains suspect.
In the end, we may both at least tacitly agree that colonialism, and the Enlightenment more generally, was not the best path. Where we part is on what should have been taken instead. Cue Robert Frost.
But the more searching question isn’t which fork we should have taken – it’s what we do with the road we’re already on. When the system itself is the problem, the question of what within it is worth retaining rarely gets answered on its merits. More often, it gets answered by inertia: by what is convenient, familiar, or already institutionally embedded. Fanon isn’t exempt from this, and neither, if we’re honest, is any thinker who inherits a tradition whilst attempting to dismantle it. The tools available are always already compromised. The most we can ask – and what distinguishes the sharper critiques from the merely passionate ones – is whether the thinker knows this, and accounts for it. Fanon sometimes does. In Chapter 5, at the moments that matter most, he doesn’t quite.
NB: I used ChatGPT for the cover image. I think it did a good job.
I recently read a piece arguing, with considerable sophistication, that LLMs represent an unprecedented psychological threat – that conversational systems operating at a planetary scale change the geometry of human susceptibility in ways that demand serious governance responses. The author wasn’t wrong about the effects. This isn’t the debate, but she was wrong about the story. The effects are real, and the narrative erected around them is the oldest displacement manoeuvre in the repertoire
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.
This is awkward. I’d been preparing some posts on the age of consent, and I decided to write a formal essay on ageism. Since the age of consent is a moral hot-button topic for some, I decided to frame the situation in a political framework instead. The setup isn’t much different, but it keeps people’s heads out of the gutter and removes the trigger that many people seem to pull. It’s awkward because none of these posts has yet been posted. Spoiler alert, I guess. I could delay this announcement, but I won’t. Here it is.
Democracy is often defended in lofty terms. We are told that citizens are rational agents, capable of judgment, autonomy, and reasoned participation in collective decision-making. Voting, on this story, is not just a procedure. It is the expression of agency by competent participants. That all sounds reassuring.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay and concept.
What’s curious is that no democratic system actually checks whether any of this is true.
There are no assessments of political understanding. No evaluation of judgment. No test of civic competence. You become a fully empowered political agent overnight, not because you demonstrate anything, but because the calendar flips. Turn eighteen. You’re in. This isn’t a minor oversight. It’s the central puzzle my recent preprint explores.
The Proxy Nobody Questions
Modern democracies assign political standing using proxies: simple categorical markers that stand in for more complex qualities. Age is the most obvious. It is treated as a substitute for maturity, judgment, autonomy, and responsibility. But here’s the key point: age doesn’t approximate competence. It replaces it.
If age were a rough indicator, we might expect flexibility at the margins. Exceptions. Supplementary criteria. Some attempt to track the thing it supposedly represents. Instead, we get a hard boundary. Below it, total exclusion. Above it, permanent inclusion. Capacity doesn’t matter on either side. The proxy isn’t helping institutions identify competence. It is doing something else entirely.
Competence Talk Without Competence
Despite this, democratic theory remains saturated with competence language. We are told that participation is grounded in rational agency. That citizens possess the capacities needed for self-government. That legitimacy flows from meaningful participation by autonomous agents. None of this is operationalised.
Competence is never specified, measured, or verified. It functions purely as justificatory rhetoric. A moral vocabulary that explains why inclusion is legitimate, without ever guiding how inclusion actually happens. This isn’t confusion; it’s design.
Why the Gap Doesn’t Collapse
At this point, a reasonable person might expect trouble. After all, if the justification doesn’t match the mechanism, shouldn’t the system wobble? It doesn’t. And the reason matters.
Political participation generates very weak feedback. Outcomes are mediated through institutions. Causal responsibility is diffuse. Success criteria are contested. When things go badly, it’s rarely clear why, or what a better alternative would have been.
Under these conditions, dissatisfaction becomes affective rather than analytic. People sense that things aren’t working, but lack the tools to diagnose how or where the system failed. Crucially, they also lack any way to recalibrate the link between competence and political standing, because that link was never operational in the first place. The system doesn’t aim for optimisation. It aims for stability.
Boundary Drawing Without Saying So
This structure becomes clearest when we look at boundary cases. Why eighteen rather than sixteen? Or twelve? Or twenty-one? There is no competence-based answer. Developmental research consistently shows wide overlap between adolescents and adults, and massive variation within age groups. If competence were taken seriously, age thresholds would be indefensible.
Historically, when competence was operationalised such as through literacy tests, the result was transparent hierarchy and eventual delegitimation. Modern democracies avoid that by keeping competence abstract and proxies neutral-looking. The boundary remains. The justification changes.
What This Does and Does Not Argue
This analysis does not propose reforms. It does not advocate competence testing. It does not suggest lowering or raising the voting age. It does not claim voters are stupid, irrational, or defective. It describes a structural feature of democratic legitimacy:
Democracy works by saying one thing and doing another, and that gap is not accidental. Competence language stabilises legitimacy precisely because it is never put to work. You may think that’s fine. You may think it’s unavoidable. You may think it’s a problem. The paper doesn’t tell you which to choose. It simply insists that if we’re going to talk seriously about democratic legitimacy, we should notice what role competence actually plays. And what it doesn’t.
I was having an inappropriate chat with ChatGPT and, per Feyerabend, I once again discovered that some of the best inspirations are unplanned. The conversation circled around to the conflicting narratives of Erasmus and Wells. Enter, Plato, McGilchrist, and the Enlightenment – all living rent-free in my head – and I end up with this.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I. The Proverb and Its Presumption
Erasmus sits at his writing desk in 1500-something, cheerful as a man who has never once questioned the premises of his own eyesight, and pens what will become one of the West’s most durable little myths: ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’. It arrives packaged as folk wisdom, the sort of thing you’re meant to nod at sagely over a pint. And for centuries, we did. The proverb became shorthand for a comfortable fantasy: that advantage is advantage everywhere, that perception grants sovereignty, that a man with superior faculties will naturally ascend to his rightful place atop whatever heap he finds himself on.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
– Erasmus
It’s an Enlightenment dream avant la lettre, really – this breezy confidence that reason, sight, knowledge, insight will simply work wherever they’re deployed. The one-eyed man doesn’t need to negotiate with the blind. He doesn’t need their endorsement, their customs, their consent. He arrives, he sees, he rules. The proverb presumes a kind of metaphysical meritocracy, where truth and capability are self-authenticating, where the world politely arranges itself around whoever happens to possess the sharper tools.
Image: Midjourney didn’t coöperate with my prompt for a one-eyed king. Trust that this king has only one.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of showing up in a foreign country with a briefcase full of sterling and expecting everyone to genuflect. And like most folk wisdom, it survives because it flatters us. It tells us that our advantages – our rationality, our education, our painstakingly cultivated discernment – are universally bankable. That we, the seeing, need only arrive for the blind to recognise our superiority.
Erasmus offers this with no apparent irony. He hands us a proverb that whispers: your clarity is your crown.
II. Wells Wanders In
Four centuries later, H.G. Wells picks up the proverb, turns it over in his hands like a curious stone, and proceeds to detonate it.
The Country of the Blind (1904) is many things – a fable, a thought experiment, a sly dismantling of Enlightenment presumption – but above all it is an act of literary vandalism against Erasmus and everything his proverb smuggles into our collective assumptions. Wells sends his protagonist, Nuñez, tumbling into an isolated Andean valley where a disease has rendered the entire population blind for generations. They’ve adapted. They’ve built a culture, a cosmology, a complete lifeworld organised around their particular sensorium. Sight isn’t absent from their world; it’s irrelevant. Worse: it’s nonsense. The seeing man’s reports of ‘light’ and ‘sky’ and ‘mountains’ sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
Nuñez arrives expecting Erasmus’s kingdom. He gets a psychiatric evaluation instead.
The brilliance of Wells’s story isn’t simply that the one-eyed man fails to become king – it’s how he fails. Nuñez doesn’t lack effort or eloquence. He tries reason, demonstration, patient explanation. He attempts to prove the utility of sight by predicting sunrise, by describing distant objects, by leveraging his supposed advantage. None of it matters. The blind don’t need his reports. They navigate their world perfectly well without them. His sight isn’t superior; it’s alien. And in a culture that has no use for it, no linguistic scaffolding to accommodate it, no social structure that values it, his one eye might as well be a vestigial tail.
The valley’s elders eventually diagnose Nuñez’s problem: his eyes are diseased organs that fill his brain with hallucinations. The cure? Surgical removal.
Wells lets this hang in the air, brutal and comic. The one-eyed man isn’t king. He’s a patient. And if he wants to stay, if he wants to belong, if he wants to marry the girl he’s fallen for and build a life in this place, he’ll need to surrender the very faculty he imagined made him superior. He’ll need to let them fix him.
The story ends ambiguously – Nuñez flees at the last moment, stumbling back toward the world of the sighted, though whether he survives is left unclear. But the damage is done. Erasmus’s proverb lies in ruins. Wells has exposed its central presumption: that advantage is advantage everywhere. That perception grants authority. That reason, clarity, and superior faculties are self-evidently sovereign.
They’re not. They’re only sovereign where the culture already endorses them.
III. Plato’s Ghost in the Valley
If Wells dismantles Erasmus, Plato hovers over the whole scene like a weary ghost, half scolding, half despairing, muttering that he told us this would happen.
The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the original version of this story. The philosopher escapes the cave, sees the sun, comprehends the Forms, and returns to liberate his fellow prisoners with reports of a luminous reality beyond the shadows. They don’t thank him. They don’t listen. They think he’s mad, or dangerous, or both. And if he persists – if he tries to drag them toward the exit, toward the light they can’t yet see – they’ll kill him for it.
Video: Plato’s Cave
Plato’s parable is usually read as a tragedy of ignorance: the prisoners are too stupid, too comfortable, too corrupted by their chains to recognise truth when it’s offered. But read it alongside Wells and the emphasis shifts. The cave-dwellers aren’t wrong, exactly. They’re coherent. They’ve built an entire epistemology around shadows. They have experts in shadow interpretation, a whole language for describing shadow behaviour, social hierarchies based on shadow-predicting prowess. The philosopher returns with reports of a three-dimensional world and they hear gibberish. Not because they’re defective, but because his truth has no purchase in their lifeworld.
Plato despairs over this. He wants the prisoners to want liberation. He wants truth to be self-authenticating, wants knowledge to compel assent simply by virtue of being knowledge. But the cave doesn’t work that way. The prisoners don’t want truth; they want comfort shaped like reality. They want coherence within the system they already inhabit. The philosopher’s sun is as alien to them as Nuñez’s sight is to the blind valley.
And here’s the kicker: Plato knows this. That’s why the allegory is tragic rather than triumphant. The philosopher does see the sun. He does apprehend the Forms. But his knowledge is useless in the cave. Worse than useless – it makes him a pariah, a madman, a threat. His enlightenment doesn’t grant him sovereignty; it exile him from the only community he has.
The one-eyed man isn’t king. He’s the lunatic they’ll string up if he doesn’t learn to shut up about the sky.
IV. The Enlightenment’s Magnificent Blunder
Once you’ve got Erasmus, Wells, and Plato in the same room, the Enlightenment’s central fantasy collapses like wet cardboard.
Humanity’s great Enlightenment wheeze – that baroque fantasy of Reason marching triumphantly through history like a powdered dragoon – has always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of selling snake oil in a crystal decanter. We were promised lucidity, emancipation, and the taming of ignorance; what we got was a fetish for procedural cleverness, a bureaucratisation of truth, and the ghastly belief that if you shine a bright enough torch into the void, the void will politely disclose its contents.
The Enlightenment presumed universality. It imagined that rationality, properly deployed, would work everywhere – that its methods were culture-neutral, that its conclusions were binding on all reasonable minds, that the shadows in Plato’s cave and the blindness in Wells’s valley could be cured by the application of sufficient light and logic. It treated reason as a kind of metaphysical bulldozer, capable of flattening any terrain it encountered and paving the way for Progress, Truth, and Universal Human Flourishing.
This was, to put it mildly, optimistic.
What the Enlightenment missed – what Erasmus’s proverb cheerfully ignores and what Wells’s story ruthlessly exposes – is that rationality is parochial. It’s not a universal solvent. It’s a local dialect, a set of practices that evolved within particular cultures, buttressed by particular institutions, serving particular ends. The Enlightenment’s rationality is Western rationality, Enlightenment rationality, rationality as understood by a specific cadre of 18th-century European men who happened to have the printing press, the political clout, and the colonial apparatus to export their epistemology at gunpoint.
They mistook their own seeing for sight itself. They mistook their own lifeworld for the world. And they built an entire civilisational project on the presumption that everyone else was just a less-developed version of them – prisoners in a cave, blind villagers, savages waiting to be enlightened.
The one-eyed man imagined himself king. He was actually the emissary who forgot to bow.
V. McGilchrist’s Neuroscientific Millinery
Iain McGilchrist sits in the same intellectual gravity well as Plato and Wells, only he dresses his thesis up in neuroscientific millinery so contemporary readers don’t bolt for the door. The Master and His Emissary is essentially a 500-page retelling of the same ancient drama: the emissary – our little Enlightenment mascot – becomes so enamoured of his own procedures, abstractions, and tidy schemas that he forgets the Master’s deeper, embodied, culturally embedded sense-making.
McGilchrist’s parable is neurological rather than allegorical, but the structure is identical. The left hemisphere (the emissary) excels at narrow focus, manipulation, abstraction – the sort of thing you need to count coins or parse grammar or build bureaucracies. The right hemisphere (the Master) handles context, pattern recognition, relational understanding – the sort of thing you need to navigate an actual lifeworld where meaning is messy, embodied, and irreducible to procedures.
The emissary is supposed to serve the Master. Left-brain proceduralism is supposed to be a tool deployed within the broader, contextual sense-making of the right brain. But somewhere along the way – roughly around the Enlightenment, McGilchrist suggests – the emissary convinced itself it could run the show. Left-brain rationality declared independence from right-brain contextuality, built an empire of abstraction, and wondered why the world suddenly felt thin, schizophrenic, oddly two-dimensional.
It’s Erasmus all over again: the presumption that the emissary with one eye should be king. The same tragic misunderstanding of how worlds cohere.
McGilchrist’s diagnosis is clinical, but his conclusion is damning. Western modernity, he argues, has become pathologically left-hemisphere dominant. We’ve let analytic thought pretend it’s sovereign. We’ve mistaken our schemas for reality, our maps for territory, our procedures for wisdom. We’ve built cultures that privilege manipulation over meaning, extraction over relationship, clarity over truth. And we’re baffled when these cultures feel alienating, when they produce populations that are anxious, depressed, disenchanted, starved for something they can’t quite name.
The emissary has forgotten the Master entirely. And the Master, McGilchrist suggests, is too polite – or too injured – to stage a coup.
In McGilchrist’s frame, culture is the Master. Strategy, reason, Enlightenment rationality – these are the emissary’s tools. Useful, necessary even, but never meant to govern. The Enlightenment’s mistake was letting the emissary believe his tools were all there was. It’s the same delusion Nuñez carries into Wells’s valley: the belief that sight, reason, superior faculties are enough. That the world will rearrange itself around whoever shows up with the sharper implements.
It won’t. The valley doesn’t need your eyes. The cave doesn’t want your sun. And the Master doesn’t answer to the emissary’s paperwork.
VI. The Triumph of Context Over Cleverness
So here’s what these three – Erasmus, Wells, Plato – triangulate, and what McGilchrist confirms with his neuroscientific gloss: the Enlightenment dream was always a category error.
Reason doesn’t grant sovereignty. Perception doesn’t compel assent. Superior faculties don’t self-authenticate. These things only work – only mean anything, only confer any advantage – within cultures that already recognise and value them. Outside those contexts, they’re noise. Gibberish. Hallucinations requiring surgical intervention.
The one-eyed man arrives in the land of the blind expecting a kingdom. What he gets is a reminder that kingdoms aren’t built on faculties; they’re built on consensus. On shared stories, shared practices, shared ways of being-in-the-world. Culture is the bedrock. Reason is just a tool some cultures happen to valorise.
And here’s the uncomfortable corollary: if reason is parochial, if rationality is just another local dialect, then the Enlightenment’s grand project – its universalising ambitions, its colonial export of Western epistemology, its presumption that everyone, everywhere, should think like 18th-century European philosophes – was always a kind of imperialism. A metaphysical land-grab dressed up in the language of liberation.
The Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals. It told us the cave was a prison and the valley was backward and anyone who didn’t see the world our way was defective, uncivilised, in need of correction. It never occurred to the Enlightenment that maybe – just maybe – other cultures had their own Masters, their own forms of contextual sense-making, their own ways of navigating the world that didn’t require our light.
Wells understood this. Plato suspected it. McGilchrist diagnoses it. And Erasmus, bless him, never saw it coming.
VII. The Enlightenment’s Paper Crown
The Enlightenment liked to imagine itself as the adult entering the room, flicking on the light-switch, and announcing that, at long last, the shadows could stop confusing the furniture for metaphysics. This is the kind of confidence you only get when your culture hasn’t yet learned the words for its own blind spots. It built an entire worldview on the hopeful presumption that its preferred modes of knowing weren’t just one way of slicing experience, but the gold standard against which all other sense-making should be judged.
Call it what it is: a provincial dialect masquerading as the universal tongue. A parochial habit dressed in imperial robes. The Enlightenment always smelled faintly of a man who assumes everyone else at the dinner table will be impressed by his Latin quotations. And when they aren’t, he blames the table.
The deeper farce is that Enlightenment rationality actually believed its tools were transferrable. That clarity is clarity everywhere. That if you wheel enough syllogisms into a space, the locals will drop their incense and convert on sight. Wells disabuses us of this; Plato sighs that he tried; McGilchrist clinically confirms the diagnosis. The emissary, armed with maps and measuring sticks, struts into the valley expecting coronation and is shocked – genuinely shocked – to discover that nobody particularly cares for his diagrams.
The Enlightenment mistake wasn’t arrogance (though it had that in liberal supply). It was context-blindness. It thought procedures could substitute for culture. It thought method could replace meaning. It thought mastery was a matter of getting the right answer rather than belonging to the right world.
You can all but hear the emissary stamping his foot.
VIII. The Anti-Enlightenment Position (Such as It Is)
My own stance is drearily simple: I don’t buy the Enlightenment’s sales pitch. Never have. The promise of universal reason was always a conjuring trick designed to flatter its adherents into thinking that their habits were Nature’s preferences. Once you stop confusing methodological neatness with metaphysical authority, the entire apparatus looks less like a cathedral of light and more like a filing system that got ideas above its station.
The problem isn’t that reason is useless. The problem is that reason imagines itself sovereign. Reason is a brilliant servant, a competent emissary, and an atrocious king. Culture is the king; context is the kingdom. Without those, rationality is just an embarrassed bureaucrat looking for a desk to hide behind.
This is why I keep banging on about language insufficiency, parochial cognition, and the delightful way our concepts disintegrate once you wander too far from the lifeworlds that birthed them. The Enlightenment thought the human mind was a searchlight. It’s closer to a candle in a draughty hall. You can still get work done with a candle. You just shouldn’t be telling people it can illuminate the universe.
So the anti-Enlightenment move isn’t a call to smash the instruments. It’s a call to read the room. To stop pretending the emissary is the Master. To stop assuming sight is a passport to sovereignty. To stop wandering into other cultures – other caves, other valleys, other hemispheres – with a ruler and a smirk, convinced you’re about to be crowned.
Underneath these brittle idols lies the far messier truth that cognition is parochial, language insufficient, and ‘rationality’ a parlour trick we perform to impress ourselves. I’m not proposing a new catechism, nor am I pining for some prelapsarian alternative. I’m simply pointing out that the Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals.
The task, then, is to grow comfortable with the dimness. To navigate by flicker rather than floodlight. To admit that the world was never waiting to be made ‘clear’ in the first place.
This doesn’t mean abandoning reason. It means remembering that reason is the emissary, not the Master. It means recognising that our schemas are provisional, our maps incomplete, our procedures useful only within the cultures that endorse them. It means learning to bow – to culture, to context, to the irreducible messiness of lifeworlds we don’t fully understand and can’t procedurally master.
The one-eyed man never was king. At best, he was an enthusiastic tourist with a very noisy torch. The sooner he stops shining it into other people’s faces, the sooner we can get on with the far more interesting business of navigating a world that never promised to be legible.
Not a kingdom of sight. Just a world where the emissary remembers his place.
This is the proof copy of The Illusion of Light. I reviewed it, approved it, and signalled ‘good to go’. This is being printed and distributed through KDP. I’ve used them before. They’ve been reliable.
EDIT: On the upside, I’ve been notified that the hardback version is available, but it doesn’t appear to be available in France and Canada, two target regions. Hopefully, it becomes available outside of the U.S. soon.
EDIT : J’ai été informé que la version reliée est désormais disponible. Malheureusement, elle ne semble pas encore l’être en France ni au Canada, les deux régions que je visais en priorité. Espérons qu’elle franchira bientôt les frontières du système et sera distribuée ailleurs qu’aux États-Unis.
International marketplaces. It takes 3-5 business days for your hardcover to show as in stock.
Until now.
My approval triggered a workflow. I know workflows. I used to design them. I also know how dumb they can be.
KDP’s process flagged an error: the text on the spine might not be on the spine. ‘Might’. Theoretically. It could be offset, cut off, or printed on a fold. I understand their reasoning – high-speed printers, mechanical variance, and return risk. I also understand statistics, and a single observation doesn’t make a trend. But anyone with eyes can see at least a couple of millimetres of clearance at the top and bottom. This isn’t a case of ‘maybe’. It’s fine.
What fascinates me here is the ritual of compliance. Once a process is codified, it becomes self-justifying. The rule exists; therefore, it must be obeyed. There is no appeal to reason – only to the flowchart.
In the 1980s, when I was an audio engineer recording to two-inch magnetic tape, some of us liked to record hot, pushing the levels just past the recommended limits. You learned to ride the edge, to court distortion without collapse. That’s how I designed the spine text. Within tolerance. With headroom.
The problem is that modern systems don’t tolerate edges. There’s no “override” button for informed judgment. My remediation path is to shrink the type by half a point, resubmit, and pretend the machine was right.
What’s absurd is the timing. The same system that generated the proof approved this layout days ago. An automated OCR scan could have caught this phantom error earlier. Instead, the machine waits until the human signs off, then throws a flag so the process can justify its existence.
KDP is still faster and saner than IngramSpark. But this is capitalism distilled: survival by being marginally less incompetent than your competitor. Optimisation, not in the sense of best possible, but of barely better than worst acceptable.
The lesson, as always, is that processes begin as aids and end as prisons. The workflow, like the Enlightenment, believes itself rational. But the longer it runs, the less it serves the human at the console and the more it worships its own perfection.
Want to talk about meta? This underscores the contents of the book itself. What the Enlightenment once called Reason, modernity now calls Process. Both pretend to neutral objectivity while enshrining obedience as virtue. The bureaucracy of light has become digital – its catechism written in checkboxes, its priests replaced by automated validators. Every workflow promises fairness; each only codifies submission. The real danger isn’t that machines will replace judgment, but that we will stop noticing when they already have.
The Story Continues: Behind the Scenes
Image: Screenshot of Illustrator layout
I’ve reduced the font size on the spine from 14 points to 13.5. It still technically bleeds over a guideline. I hope I am not forced to reduce it to 13. A reason for text on the spine is to make it visible. Hopefully, the black-and-white vertical separation will help in this regard. Fingers crossed.
I finished Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I mentioned the other day. Unfortunately, my initial optimism was premature. Everything I enjoyed was front-loaded: the first four chapters set up a promising critique of mechanistic rationality and the collapse of shared meaning. Then the book turned into a long, therapeutic sermon. I should have stopped at Chapter 4 and saved myself the sunk-cost regret.
It isn’t that nothing follows; it’s just that what follows is so thin that the cost-benefit ratio goes negative. Once Desmet moves from diagnosis to prescription, the argument collapses into a psychologist’s worldview: an entire civilisation explained through mass neurosis and healed through better intuition. He builds his case on straw versions of reason, science, and modernity, so his ‘cure’ can look revelatory.
The trouble is familiar. Having dismantled rationalism, Desmet then installs intuition as its replacement – an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist can’t stop therapising; he privileges the psychological lens over every other possibility.
The result is a reductionist parascience dressed as social theory. The totalitarian mind, in Desmet’s telling, isn’t political or structural but psychological – a patient waiting for insight. I don’t doubt his sincerity, only his scope. It’s what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.
Desmet’s project ultimately re-enchants what it claims to critique. He wants rationalism redeemed through feeling, order reborn through connection. Dis-Integrationism stops short of that impulse. It accepts fracture as the permanent condition – no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reason’s own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.
I’ve just released a new book, The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment, now available in paperback through KDP and distributed via Amazon. In November, a clothbound edition will follow through IngramSpark, extending availability to libraries and independent bookstores worldwide, including Barnes & Noble in the United States.
Image: Front cover of The Illusion of Light. Links to Amazon for purchase. The ‘Free Preview’ claim is untrue, as there is no Kindle version available. An ebook will be available presently.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
About the Book
The Illusion of Light opens where the Enlightenment’s glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself – after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernity’s metaphors of light and progress became instruments of management: how objectivity hardened into ritual, agency into alibi, normality into control.
Rather than rejecting the Enlightenment outright, the book lingers in its afterimage. It argues for a philosophy practiced in the half-light – a mode of thought that values nuance over certainty, care over mastery, and maintenance over redemption. To read by residual light, as the preface suggests, is to learn to see again when the world stops pretending to be illuminated.
The preface is available on this prior post, written and audio versions.
The Broader Project
The Illusion of Light forms the threshold of the Anti-Enlightenment Project, a series examining the afterlives of modern reason – how its ideals of progress, agency, objectivity, and normality continue to govern our politics, sciences, and selves long after their foundations have cracked. Each volume approaches the same question from a different room in the old House of Reason: Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration.
Taken together, they offer not a manifesto but a practice: philosophy as maintenance work, care as critique, and composure as the only honest response to the ruins of certainty. More to follow.
Not the darkness after the light, but the shadow the light forgot it cast
The Enlightenment promised light. What it delivered was fluorescence – bright, sterile, and buzzing with the sound of its own reason.
The Anti-Enlightenment Project gathers a set of essays, fragments, and quotations tracing how that light dimmed – or perhaps was never as luminous as advertised. It’s less a manifesto than a map of disintegration: how agency became alibi, how reason became ritual, and how modernity mistook motion for progress.
Preprints and essays (Against Agency, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, and others to follow)
Related reflections from Philosophics posts going back to 2019
A living index of quotations from Nietzsche to Wynter, tracing philosophy’s slow discovery that its foundation may have been sand all along
This isn’t a war on knowledge, science, or reason – only on their misappropriation as universal truths. The Anti-Enlightenment simply asks what happens when we stop pretending that the Enlightenment’s “light” was neutral, natural, or necessary.
It’s not reactionary. It’s diagnostic.
The Enlightenment built the modern world; the Anti-Enlightenment merely asks whether we mistook the glare for daylight.
Philosophics 