Tag: review

Dis-Integrating a Dangerous Argument: A Political Polemic Examined from Outside the Binary

Posted in critical theory, Culture & Society, economics, identity, language, modernism, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, political theory, politics, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, power, psychology, society, SpotifyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each other’s work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic – heaven knows I have written my share – but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.

Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense – line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing – I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.

A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)

Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The Red–Blue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.

My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege – not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleague’s argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.

This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply – indeed does apply – to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.

My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.

The Architecture of Certainty

What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture – an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.

My colleague’s book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponents’ manipulations.

This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.

This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.

It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.

The Invention of the Enemy

One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)

This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.

To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.

This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here – only demonology.

The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence

One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.

The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather – each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.

This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.

It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.

The Projection Engine

If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection – unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.

Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying one’s own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history – each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity – its own included – is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.

This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that one’s own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from one’s own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice – whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.

The Neutral Observer Who Isn’t

What the book never acknowledges – because it cannot – is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.

This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.

The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimant’s own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.

In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.

The Fictional Symmetry Problem

One of the major deficiencies in the book – and in most modern political commentary – is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the other’s missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.

The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.

This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.

Narrative Weaponry

Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing – and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.

We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.

Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.

MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.

The Missing Category: Structural Analysis

Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisation’s uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.

None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.

Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.

This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.

Where He Is Not Wrong

Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.

But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them – not to understand them.

The Danger of Certainty

What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage – though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature – but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.

The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that one’s own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason – capital R – is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.

The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.

It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.

The irony is almost tender.

Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge one’s own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.

My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview – and mistook the one for the other.

If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.

Read next: The Republic of Recursive Prophecy – an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.

Perceptual Realism in Film

Posted in art, identity, language, perception, philosophy, psychology, technology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I watched this video so you don’t have to.

Video: Why Movies Just Don’t Feel “Real” Anymore

Only teasing. It reads as pejorative unless you catch the self-inflicted mockery baked in. This chap Tom has for film what I seem to have for language: an alarming degree of enthusiasm paired with the creeping suspicion that most of civilisation is determined to ruin the very medium we love.

I don’t actually share his fondness for film, mind you. I merely recognise the feral passion. What pulled me into this clip wasn’t cinema but dissection. The language of his breakdown dropped me neatly into my natural habitat.

I seldom watch films, television, or whatever corporate imagination-by-committee is calling itself these days. Besides being an outrageous time-sink, Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t just hold; it’s juiced up as if someone ran it through a cheap VFX plug-in. The decline in visual quality Tom describes feels depressingly familiar.

A similar aesthetic rot crept in during the digital audio shift of the ’80s. Vast new possibilities, yes, but a certain grain, a certain breath, went missing. I remember an engineering mate in ’84 being asked to record a well-known jazz artist using Sony’s shiny new digital system. He refused on technical principle, writing a blistering hand-delivered letter explaining why the end result would sound worse. He was right, of course. The label didn’t care, of course. And he walked.

The problem then resembles the problem now. Most people aren’t experiencing media in the environment it was built for. We consume films on phones, tablets, monstrous living-room billboards, or, in my case, a knackered 32-inch monitor. Half the audience barely looks at the screen anyway. They want distraction, not discernment. Some, like Tom – and to a lesser degree, me – actually notice that something in the visual vocabulary has been quietly amputated.

Perhaps that’s why I avoid the form: the predictability, the shallow craft, the sense that the whole affair is engineered for attention-drifting multitudes rather than people who actually, well, look.

Anyway, the whole point was to share the video. Naturally, I ended up editorialising. I learnt something from it. You might too.

I promise I won’t continue injecting Claude into the conversation, but this is where my brain went as I watched the linked video:

How might the indexicality of Charles Peirce relate to Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity?

Thought Process

This is an interesting philosophical question that connects two different thinkers and concepts. Let me think through this carefully.

Charles Peirce’s indexicality refers to his theory of indexical signs – signs that point to or indicate their objects through a direct, existential connection (like “this,” “here,” “now,” “I”). These are part of his broader semiotics, where he distinguished between icons, indexes, and symbols.

Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity relates to his work on the phenomenology of the self. Strawson distinguishes between “Diachronic” and “Episodic” self-experience. Diachronic individuals experience themselves as continuous over time, with a narrative extending into past and future. Episodic individuals (like Strawson claims to be) experience themselves more in terms of discrete, present-centered episodes, without a strong sense of narrative continuity.

How might these relate?

  1. The indexical “I”: Peirce’s indexicality is crucial for how the “I” functions. The first-person pronoun is paradigmatically indexical – it picks out the speaker/thinker in the moment of utterance. For Strawson’s episodic self, each moment’s “I” might be more purely indexical, pointing to the present subject without necessarily carrying thick narrative continuity.
  2. Temporal indexicals: “Now” is also indexical. Episodic self-experience emphasizes the “now” of experience over temporal extension. The indexical nature of present-tense self-reference might support episodic rather than diachronic self-conception.
  3. Existential connection vs narrative construction: Indexical signs work through direct, causal-existential connection, not through resemblance or convention. Similarly, episodic self-experience might be more immediately indexical (this experience, now) rather than mediated through narrative construction.

This is a sophisticated question that deserves a nuanced response.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Propensity for Simulacra, An Excerpt

Posted in Audio, fiction, free will, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, power, psychology, quote, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

Man starts over again every day,
in spite of all he knows,
against all he knows.
— Emil Cioran

I posted Chapter 26 of my novella, Propensity. I share it here because it invokes Baudrillard’s Simulacra.

Consider it an advert – and a window into Propensity.

Simulacra – When the Camera Becomes the Conscience
Blog Post: Propensity, Chapter 26 – Simulacra
Audio: Propensity, Chapter 2 – Oversight

The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?

No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.

The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.

As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?

This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.

A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.

Editorial Review

“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.

—Reedsy Discovery Review

Meantime, give it a listen.

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Written by Bry Willis AKA Ridley Park

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2024 Adminstrative Review

Posted in philosophy, updateTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Happy New Year 2025 🥳🎉

In 2024, I produced 154 blog posts here – a total of 122K words. More importantly, in 2024 the blog had more than twice the number of visits than in 2023. It’s seen an increase in traffic every year since its inception in 2017 – despite my neglect from being distracted elsewhere.

As nickdruryfad63dc877 rightly noted, some content is less focused than others. In this case, I was busy. To borrow from Pascal, “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” As I responded to him, not only was the post meandering and an amalgamation of 4 or 5 – not necessarily mutually exclusive – topics, I didn’t even make the point I set out to make, so the topic remains a prime candidate for a future release.

I want to share more here but have other blogs and interests. It’s not a full-time profession, but it could be. Content creation is difficult. It’s even harder when one creates unevenly in several domains. We’ll see where this year goes.

Currently, I am putting the finishing touches on a Metamodernism Worldview Survey that is a culmination of earlier ideas. I am also finishing a couple of books and an essay, plus some short stories, some related to this blog, others not so much. I’ve also neglected my associated YouTube channel, so I’d like to render more content there, too.

Meantime, things to do, people to see. Cheers!

Defining Intelligence

Posted in intelligence, perception, philosophy, politics, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Using AutoCrit, I continue to share the review progress of my work in progress, Democracy: The Grand Illusion—perhaps Grand Delusion might be more fitting. In this chapter, I establish a foundation for intelligence and cognitive function.

Synopsis

The text begins by discussing the concept of intelligence, specifically focusing on IQ as a measure of cognitive abilities relative to others. It explains the origins and standardisation of IQ tests, highlighting their limitations in capturing the full spectrum of human intelligence. The discussion then shifts towards Emotional Intelligence (EQ), outlining its components and emphasising its importance in interpersonal relationships and leadership roles.

The narrative further delves into Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which challenges the idea that intelligence is a singular ability measured solely by traditional IQ tests. The text elaborates on various types of intelligences proposed by Gardner, such as linguistic, musical, spatial, naturalistic, and intrapersonal intelligence.

Moreover, cognitive biases are explored in detail within democratic processes through real-world examples like confirmation bias or groupthink. Strategies to mitigate these biases are suggested for improving decision-making within democracies.

The text concludes with a call for embracing diverse forms of intelligence within democratic systems while acknowledging and addressing cognitive biases to enhance governance effectiveness.

Audience

The target audience for this text appears to be individuals interested in psychology, education theory, and political science, or those exploring the intersection between human cognition and democratic governance. Readers seeking an in-depth analysis of different forms of intelligence alongside discussions on democracy would find this text engaging.

Those less inclined towards academic or theoretical discourse may not be the primary target audience. To make it more relevant to a broader readership base outside academia or specialized fields:

  • Simplifying complex terminology
  • Providing relatable examples
  • Incorporating practical applications

Structure and Organisation

The structure follows a logical order starting with defining traditional measures of intelligence leading up to discussions on multiple intelligences and cognitive biases impacting democracy. Each section flows cohesively into the next without abrupt transitions or disjointed topics. No significant issues with organisation are evident; each subsection builds upon previous concepts effectively.

Clarity

Overall clarity is maintained throughout most sections; however:

  • Complex sentence structures could potentially hinder comprehension for some readers.
  • Jargon related to psychological theories might require additional clarification for lay audiences.
    Providing simplified explanations where needed can enhance reader understanding without sacrificing depth.

Argument and Persuasion

Opinions presented focus more on informing than persuading; strengths lie in presenting well-supported arguments backed by historical context (e.g., case studies). Logical construction aids credibility but lacks explicit attempts at persuasion beyond informative purposes.

Tone

The tone remains informative yet engaging throughout without veering towards overly formal or casual language usage which suits an academic discourse effectively.

Interest and Engagement

The text manages to maintain interest through its exploration of diverse aspects related to human intelligence; however certain sections discussing specific types like “Naturalistic Intelligence” might require additional engagement strategies such as case studies showcasing individuals excelling in that particular domain.

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The conclusions drawn at the end tie together various points introduced earlier effectively providing clear insights into how embracing diverse forms of intelligence can enhance democratic decision-making processes – offering strong closure that resonates with preceding discussions.

The text concludes by emphasising the importance of understanding intelligence in a multifaceted manner, encompassing both IQ and EQ as well as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. It highlights the limitations of relying solely on IQ tests for measuring intelligence, pointing out cultural biases and the narrow scope of such assessments. The discussion on emotional intelligence (EQ) adds depth to the exploration, underscoring its significance in interpersonal relationships, leadership, and mental health. By integrating multiple intelligences into the context of democracy, the text suggests a more inclusive approach to decision-making that values diverse forms of intelligence beyond traditional analytical skills. Overall, the conclusion effectively ties together key points introduced throughout the text, providing a comprehensive perspective on human intelligence and its implications for democratic systems.

Bonus

References and Citations

Democracy and Political Systems

  • Bogdanor, V. (1997). The monarchy and the constitution. Clarendon Press.
  • Brams, S. J., & Fishburn, P. C. (2007). Approval voting. Springer.
  • Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its critics. Yale University Press.
  • Dahl, R. A. (2006). On political equality. Yale University Press.
  • Diamond, L. (1999). Developing democracy: Toward consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Edwards, G. C. (2011). Why the Electoral College is bad for America. Yale University Press.
  • Farrell, D. M. (2011). Electoral systems: A comparative introduction. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Kriesi, H. (2005). Direct democratic choice: The Swiss experience. Lexington Books.
  • Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of democracy: Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries. Yale University Press.
  • Ober, J. (2008). Democracy and knowledge: Innovation and learning in classical Athens. Princeton University Press.
  • Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster.
  • Reynolds, A., Reilly, B., & Ellis, A. (2005). Electoral system design: The new international IDEA handbook. International IDEA.
  • Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.
  • Shugart, M. S., & Wattenberg, M. P. (2001). Mixed-member electoral systems: The best of both worlds?. Oxford University Press.
  • Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton University Press.
  • Tocqueville, A. de. (1835). Democracy in America. (H. Reeve, Trans.). Vintage Books.

Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology

  • Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1916). The development of intelligence in children. (E. S. Kite, Trans.). Williams & Wilkins.
  • Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 171-191.
  • Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. Basic Books.
  • Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.
  • Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. Free Press.
  • Kaufman, A. S. (2009). IQ testing 101. Springer Publishing Company.
  • Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence? In P. Salovey & D. J. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Educational implications (pp. 3-31). Basic Books.
  • Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
  • Sternberg, R. J., & Kaufman, S. B. (Eds.). (2011). The Cambridge handbook of intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
  • Terman, L. M. (1916). The measurement of intelligence. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Wechsler, D. (1949). Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WISC). Psychological Corporation.

Classical Works and Philosophy

  • Plato. (c. 380 BCE). The republic. (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.; C. D. C. Reeve, Rev.). Hackett Publishing Company.

AutoCrit is an AI-based editorial application. I am a member of their affiliate programme, so I gain minor financial benefits at no cost to you if you purchase through a link on this page.

The Matter with Things: Chapter Eight Summary: Creativity

Posted in art, intelligence, language, music, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Index and table of contents

Intro

Creativity is the eighth chapter of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.

In the last chapters, the topics were about different intelligences. As we’ll see, intelligence is one of the factors for creativity, but there are more. Let’s crack on.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

Content

Creativity is an elusive phenomenon that cannot only not be summoned at will, the very act of trying inhibits it. Unlike left-hemisphere-oriented intelligence, there are no simple tests for creativity because of their very nature. Assessing the left-hemisphere is relatively simple because it is systematic and any tests have definite known solutions—whether calculating some figure, solving a puzzle, choosing analogies, or recounting some trivia. There is no such test for creating something not yet created, but there are some proxies that most people categorically fail.

Psychologist, Colin Martindale, had this to say about the personal characteristics of creativity

“Creativity is a rare trait. This is presumably because it requires the simultaneous presence of a number of traits (e.g., intelligence, perseverance, unconventionality, the ability to think in a particular manner). None of these traits is especially rare. What is quite uncommon is to find them all present in the same person.”

— Colin Martindale

Whereas the left hemisphere is analytical, the right hemisphere (hence creativity) is a Gestalt. When given a difficult time-boxed challenge, the left hemisphere dominant individual who does not arrive at the expected response on time will commit to and defend an incorrect response (think escalating commitment), and the right hemisphere dominant individual will simply not commit to a response under the thought that there were still options to be explored.

Effectively, creativity can be broken down into three phases: preparation, incubation, and illumination.

In essence, for the creative individual, the best we can do is to leave well enough alone. Anything but space and permission will kill the creative impulse.

Preparation is simply the accumulation of a particular domain of knowledge. For an artist, it will be to understand, perhaps, colour, shape, texture, form, shadow, media, or so forth; for a musician, it might be to understand melody, harmony, tempo, timbre, dynamics, and so on; for a mathematician, it might be basic arithmetic, theories, proofs, and on and on. It’s also important to note that accumulated information in multiple domains also forms a foundation leveraged by many polymaths.

Incubation is simply waiting for something to grow in the prepared garden. Incubation is an unconscious activity and cannot be controlled or accessed by the conscious mind. In fact, conscious effort and introspection will serve only to impede cultivation. Digging up planted seeds to see how they are growing will only hinder the process.

Illumination is the final phase. Again, this is unwilled. Prepared and incubated flowers bloom. Of course, this is an imperfect metaphor because the ground must already have been fertile at the start. Tossing seeds on fallow ground still yields no blooms no matter how carefully attended.

In essence, for the creative individual, the best we can do is to leave well enough alone. Anything but space and permission will kill the creative impulse.

McGilchrist discusses generative, permissive, and translational requirements.

“The key element in generation seems to be the ability to think of many diverse ideas quickly, demanding breadth, flexibility and analogical thinking – seeing likeness within apparent dissimilarity.” This can be summed up as divergent thinking. This is the openness afforded by the right hemisphere as opposed to the convergent behaviour of the left. As it happens, this is where artificial intelligence falls flat as it is predicated on convergent activity.

The right hemisphere Gestalten surveys the environment and notes otherwise unperceived parallels. It is not a systematic approach. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

“Talent hits a target no-one else can hit;
genius hits a target no-one else can see”.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer sums it up nicely, “Talent hits a target no-one else can hit; genius hits a target no-one else can see”.

Citing Isaac Asimov writing about Darwin’s insight, he notes that before Darwin, many people had read Malthus and studied species, but they lacked the creative spark that Darwin had.

Steve Jobs noted that

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things … A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So, they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

— Steve Jobs

This is a failing of the business world and of specialisation more generally. McGilchrist writes, “Linear approaches and analytic thinking, characteristic of the left hemisphere, are fine in the right context, and may at a subsequent phase take part in creativity by narrowing things down and eliminating some of them, but on their own will not achieve creativity”.

There is a direct link between intelligence and creativity. Ego crushes creativity.

There is a direct link between intelligence and creativity. Ego crushes creativity.

He again cites Asimov:

“My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it …The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing.”

— Isaac Asimov

Some people excel at maths, but many are systematic and procedural left-hemisphere types; they apply logic and reason—insert tab A into slot B. The famous mathematicians understand the procedures, but their ideas come from intuition rather than reason. The left hemisphere doesn’t recognise this as a viable vector, and therein lies the rub. “Math is not about following directions; it’s about making new directions,” writes mathematician Paul Lockhart.

This is why we hear so many accounts of aha moments, something coming to one person in a dream or Isaac Newton’s falling apple anecdote.

“These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all.
A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward”

Albert Einstein

Einstein told Max Wertheimer, founder of Gestalt psychology, “These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward”. Words are a left-hemisphere phenomenon.

Many accomplished musicians hear a piece whole. All they need to do is to compose it to staff paper or perform it. We hear this regularly: “I was driving from here to there and it just came to me. All I needed to do is to remember it long enough to get it down.”

I found McGilchrist’s inclusion of hemispheric damage quite interesting. He provides many examples of artists, composers, and poets, but I’ll only summarise them. For musicians and Artists with right hemisphere damage, those who even retained the urge to create did so at a lower quality level. However, those with left hemisphere damage operated at the same level and oftentimes at a higher level, without the inhibition and censorship of the left hemisphere.

It’s important to note that most people rely on both hemispheres. When I write left hemisphere dominant, I mean to say that either the right hemisphere simply underperforms or that the left hemisphere does not cede control back to the right hemisphere. Generally speaking, both hemispheres experience the world, and a strong right hemisphere will act as air traffic controller, or perhaps have the right of first refusal, but this is a loose metaphor because sometimes the left hemisphere just fields an experience and takes its best guess how to handle it even if it should have been fielded by the right hemisphere and even if the left hemisphere provides the wrong answer. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of the ego and identity, so it is somewhat relentless and defensive even when it is wrong.

As a side note, I trust that political identity and escalating commitment are left-hemisphere activities and why modern Western politics feel so intractable.

After a strong argument for right hemisphere dominance and divergent thinking being hallmarks of creativity, he offers some counter-evidence and counters some of it.

A paper by Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso co-authored a book citing instances of convergent thought processes that led to something innovative or creative. At the onset, McGilchrist calls them out for conflating problem-solving with creativity. In the end, the left hemisphere does play a role. He calls this the translational phase. Essentially, this is Mozart having heard his symphony and needing to put his thoughts to paper. Or the poet.

He goes off on a bit of a tangent noting how words pale concepts, and divergence and convergence are no exception. This fits in with my own insufficiency of language theory, but McGilchrist and I have different rationales for our arguments, so I’ll not side-track this summary.

He cites some statistics correlating creativity with mental health disorders and incidences of suicide. This will set the reader up perfectly for the next chapter about schizophrenia and autism.

Perspective

In summary, creativity has got me riled up more than in the previous chapters. This is partially due to how it comports with my own observations. I have always felt that humans are not very creative or innovative despite protests to the contrary. In fact, I’ve often commented when I’ve heard people say something like “artificial intelligence will never create the next…” Fill in the blank: Mozart, Picasso, Michelangelo, Nabokov, Wordsworth. Or Einstein. Of course, neither will a human be the next of these.

All these people are right cerebral hemisphere dominant. AI operates systematically, in the manner of the left hemisphere. None of these people built up systematically. Instead, their ideas were wholly formed, and their creations were reductive rather than additive. Famously, Michelangelo was to have said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” He sees the solution first and then builds towards it.

In my professional life, I have been a strategist as a management consultant as well as a business analyst. In each case, I could quickly assess a situation and then spend weeks or months defending my intuition with words, diagrams, and numbers.

As a business analyst, I would offer a recommendation, and this would need to come with an estimate to deliver the recommendation. This figure would come to me in a matter of minutes. Then, per protocol, I would need to enter micro-level details into a pricing model so it could calculate from the ground up. First, this was time-consuming. Second, this would be circulated for review where different people would (almost invariably) reduce the number of hours estimated, typically due to pressure to reduce the cost. Ultimately, a number would be output and tendered to the client or the person footing the bill. Again (almost invariably), the number initially intuited was more accurate and reflective of what was ultimately invoiced. Unfortunately, business is a left-hemisphere endeavour, and that will be its Achilles’ heel and denouement.

This wraps up the chapter on Creativity. The next chapter is “what schizophrenia and autism can tell us”, and is the end of part one of The Matter with Things.

What are your thoughts and experiences with creativity now that you’ve heard McGilchrist’s take?

Leave comments below.

Book Review: Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Posted in consciousness, free will, identity, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, reality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is a work of non-fiction by horror author Thomas Ligotti. There is an audio podcast version and a YouTube video version. Feel free to leave comments in the space below or on YouTube.

Transcript

In this segment, I’ll be reviewing a book by Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, A Contrivance of Horror.

I haven’t done any book reviews, but since I tend to read a lot of books, I figure why not share my take and see how it’s received? If you like these reviews, click the like button and I’ll consider creating more.

Let’s get started.

First, I’ll be providing a little background, and then I’ll summarise some of the content and main themes. I’ll close with my review and perspective.

The author is Thomas Ligotti. He is a published writer in the horror genre in the vein of Lovecraft’s atmospheric horror. I’ve not read any of his work and haven’t read much fiction in ages.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is Ligotti’s first work of non-fiction. The book was originally published in 2010. I read the 2018 paperback version published by Penguin Books.

Conspiracy Against the Human Race falls into the category of Ethics and Moral Philosophy in a subcategory of pessimism. The main thesis of this book is that humans ought never to have been born. Following in the footsteps of anti-natalist David Benatar, who published Better Never to Have Been Born in 2007, Ligotti doubles down on Benatar’s position on the harm of coming into existence and argues that humans should just become extinct. Moreover, we should take out life in general.

In the book, Ligotti posits that consciousness was a blunder of nature and is the root of all suffering. He argues the derived Buddhist position of dukkha, which translates as Life is suffering. He establishes that most people are aware of this fact, but that we are nonetheless wired to be biased toward optimism through delusion and what a psychoanalyst might call repressed memories. Moreover, pessimists are a cohort not tolerated by society, who don’t want their delusions shattered.

Philosophically, Ligotti is a determinist. I’ve created content on this topic, but in a nutshell, determinism is the belief that all events are caused by antecedent events, leading to a chain of causes and effects stretching back to the beginning of time and bringing us to where we are now. If we were able to rewind time and restart the process, we would necessarily end up in the same place, and all future processes will unfold in a like manner.

Ligotti likes the metaphor of puppets. He employs puppets in two manners. Firstly, being the determinist he is, he reminds us that we are meat puppets with no free will. Our strings are controlled by something that is not us. This something ends up being Schopenhauer’s Will, reminding us that one can want what we will, but we can’t will what we will. This Will is the puppeteer. Secondly, puppets are soulless, lifeless homunculi that are employed in the horror genre to create unease by means of an uncanny association.
He cites the work and philosophy of Norwegian author Peter Zapffe, who also elucidates human existence as a tragedy. Humans are born with one and only one right—the right to die. And death is the only certainty. The knowledge of this causes unnecessary suffering.

Quoting Ligotti,

“Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die. No other right has ever been allocated to anyone except as a fabrication, whether in modern times or days past. The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The inalienable rights of certain people, on the other hand, seemingly remain current: somehow we believe they are not fabrications because hallowed documents declare they are real.”

Ligotti reminds us that consciousness is a mystery. We don’t really know what it is or what causes it other than it exists and we seem to have it, to be cursed with it. He adopts Zapffe’s position that consciousness is also responsible for the false notion of the self.

As all life is, humans are the result of an evolutionary process. Consciousness was just the result of an evolutionary blunder. He cites Zapffe and conveys that “mutations must be considered blind. They work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.”

Whilst pessimists view consciousness as a curse, optimists such as Nicholas Humphry think of it as a marvellous endowment.

He summarises the reason humans have it worse than the rest of nature:

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”

I’ll repeat that: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious.

He cites Zapffe’s four principal strategies to minimise our consciousness, isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation

  1. Isolation is compartmentalising the dire facts of being alive. So, he argues, that a coping mechanism is to push our suffering out of sight, out of mind, shoved back into the unconscious so we don’t have to deal with it.
  2. Anchoring is a stabilisation strategy by adopting fictions as truth. We conspire to anchor our lives in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
  3. Distraction falls into the realm of manufactured consent. People lose themselves in their television sets, their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, et cetera. Anything not to think about the human condition.
  4. Sublimation. This reminds me of Camus’ take on the Absurd. Just accept it. Embrace it and incorporate it into your routine. Pour it into your art or music. Ligotti invokes Camus’ directive that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, but he dismisses the quip as folly.

Ligotti underscores his thesis by referencing the works of other authors from David Benatar to William James.

Interestingly, he suggests that people who experience depression are actually in touch with reality and that psychology intervenes to mask it again with the preferred veil of delusion and delf-deception. Society can’t operate if people aren’t in tune with the masquerade. Citing David Livingstone Smith in his 2007 publication, Why We Lie: The Evolution of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, Ligotti writes:
“Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the “healthy” and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, “fear of life,” refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter.”

Ligotti returns to the constructed notion of the self and presents examples of how a lack of self is an effective horror trope, citing John Carpenter’s The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

He spends a good amount of time on ego-death and the illusion of self, a topic I’ve covered previously. He mentions Thomas Metzinger and his writings in several places including his Being No One, published in 2004, ostensibly reinforcing a position described as naïve realism, that things not being knowable as they really are in themselves, something every scientist and philosopher knows.

He delves into Buddhism as a gateway to near-death experiences, where people have dissociated their sense of self, illustrating the enlightenment by accident of U. G. Krishnamurti, who after some calamity “was no longer the person he once was, for now he was someone whose ego had been erased. In this state, he had all the self-awareness of a tree frog. To his good fortune, he had no problem with his new way of functioning. He did not need to accept it, since by his report he had lost all sense of having an ego that needed to accept or reject anything.” Krishnamurti had become a veritable zombie. He also cited the examples of Tem Horwitz, John Wren-Lewis, and Suzanne Segal, but I won’t elaborate here.

Russian Romantic author, Leo Tolstoy, famous for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was another pessimist. He noticed a coping approach his associates had employed to deal with their morality.

  1. Ignorance is the first. As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. For whatever reason, these people are simply blind to the inevitability of their mortal lives. As Tolstoy said these people just did not know or understand that “life is an evil and an absurdity”.
  2. Epicureanism comes next. The tactic here is to understand that we are all in here and no one gets out alive, so we might as well make the best of it and adopt a hedonistic lifestyle.
  3. Following Camus’ cue, or rather Camus following Tolstoy and Schopenhauer, he suggests the approach of strength and energy, by which he means the strength and energy to suicide.
  4. Finally, one can adopt the path of weakness. This is the category Tolstoy finds himself in, writing “People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally—to end the deception quickly and kill themselves—they seem to wait for something.”

The last section of the book feels a bit orthogonal to the rest. I won’t bother with details, but essentially he provides the reader with examples of how horror works by exploring some passages, notably Radcliffe’s, The Mysteries of Udolpho; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher; Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu; and contrasting Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet.

This has been a summary of Thomas Logotti’s Conspiracy against the human race. Here’s my take. But first some background, as it might be important to understand where I am coming from.

I am a Nihilist. I feel that life has no inherent meaning, but people employ existentialist strategies to create a semblance of meaning, much akin to Zapffe’s distraction theme or perhaps anchoring.
This said I feel that, similar to anarchism, people don’t understand nihilism. Technically, it’s considered to be a pessimistic philosophy because they are acculturated to expect meaning, but I find it liberating. People feel that without some constraints of meaning, that chaos will ensue as everyone will adopt Tolstoy’s Epicureanism or to fall into despair and suicide. What they don’t know is they’ve already fabricated some narrative and have adopted one of Zappfe’s first three offerings: isolation, which is to say repression); anchoring on God or country; or distracting themselves with work, sports, politics, social media, or reading horror stories.

Because of my background, I identify with Ligotti’s position. I do feel the suffering and anguish that he mentions, and perhaps I am weak and rationalising, but I don’t feel that things are so bad. I may be more sympathetic to Benatar’s anti-natalism than to advocate for a mass extinction event, though I feel that humans are already heading down that path. Perhaps this could be psychoanalysed as collective guilt, but I won’t go there.

I recommend reading this. I knocked it out in a few hours, and you could shorten this by skipping the last section altogether. If you are on the fence, I’d suggest reading David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been. Perhaps I’ll review that if there seems to be interest. If you’ve got the time, read both.

So there you have it. That’s my summary and review of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race.

Before I end this, I’ll share a personal story about an ex-girlfriend of mine. Although she experienced some moments of happiness and joy, she saw life as a burden. Because she had been raised Catholic and embodied the teachings, she was afraid that committing suicide would relegate her to hell. In fact, on one occasion, she and her mum had been robbed at gunpoint, and her mum stepped between my girlfriend and the gun. They gave the gunmen what they wanted, so the situation came to an end.

My girlfriend laid into her mother that if she ever did something like that again and took a bullet that was her ticket out, she would never forgive her. As it turned out, my girlfriend died as collateral damage during the Covid debacle. She became ill, but because she was living with her elderly mum, she didn’t want to go to hospital and bring something back. One early morning, she was writhing in pain and her mum called the ambulance. She died later that morning in hospital, having waited too long.

For me, I saw the mercy in it all. She got her ticket out and didn’t have to face the hell eventuality. Not that I believe in any of that, but she was able to exit in peace. Were it not for the poison of religion, she could have exited sooner. She was not, in Tolstoy’s words, weak, so much as she had been a victim of indoctrination. I feel this indoctrination borders on child abuse, but I’ll spare you the elaboration.
So, what are your thoughts on this book? Is there a conspiracy against humanity? Are optimists ruining it for the pessimists? What do you think about anti-natalism or even extinction of all conscious beings or the extreme case of all life on earth? Is Ligotti on to something or just on something?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.