Tag: society

A Brief, Uncomfortable Historiography on Having, Being, and Feeling

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–6 minutes

This is a follow-on to some recent posts.* It would be a mistake to pretend that the grammatical habits discussed here float free of intellectual history. They do not. They align uncannily well with the way two broad philosophical traditions came to frame the self, experience, and knowledge.

On the Anglo-American analytic side, the modern picture of the self emerges early with John Locke. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke does not yet offer a full ‘bundle theory’, but he lays the groundwork decisively. Consciousness, for Locke, is what unifies experience over time through memory. The self is not a substance but a continuity of awareness, accessible through introspection and reportable as a series of mental contents.¹

Locke’s treatment of personal identity already presupposes a grammar of states. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he insists that personal identity “consists” in consciousness alone, extending backward through memory to past thoughts and actions (II.xxvii.9).

Image: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Essay, II.xxvii.17

The self is not something that unfolds; it is something that can be retrospectively tracked. Experiences appear as items one is conscious of, and identity becomes a matter of continuity between those items. It is no accident that Locke later calls ‘person’ a forensic term, fit for attribution, responsibility, and judgement (II.xxvii.28). The grammar is already administrative.

Image: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Essay, II.xxvii.28

The grammatical resonance is hard to miss. Experiences are treated as inspectable states: I am aware of X; I have the idea of Y. Consciousness becomes something one can, in principle, take inventory of.

David Hume completes the move with characteristic bluntness. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), he famously reports that when he looks inward, he never catches himself without a perception. The self, he concludes, is nothing over and above a bundle of impressions and ideas, linked by habit and association.²

Where Locke still spoke of consciousness as what makes the self, Hume takes the next step and goes looking for that self directly. What he finds instead are only perceptions: heat, cold, pleasure, pain. The self does not endure; it is inferred. Identity becomes a habit of grammar and memory, not a feature of experience itself.

Image: Treatise, I.iv.vi
Image: Treatise, I.iv.vi
Image: Treatise, I.iv.vi

This is not merely a metaphysical claim. It is a grammatical one. Experience appears as a sequence of discrete items, each presentable as something one is or has at a given moment. Duration is reduced to succession; undergoing becomes adjacency. The copula does the quiet work.

From here, it is a short step to the analytic comfort with:

  • truth-conditional analysis,
  • propositional attitudes,
  • mental states as objects of third-person description,
  • and, eventually, the scientific naturalisation of consciousness.

None of this is accidental. The grammar and the metaphysics grow together.

The Continental Recoil

Across the Channel, a different unease takes hold. Immanuel Kant already resists the reduction of the subject to a bundle. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), the ‘I think’ is not an object among objects but a necessary condition for experience at all.³ The subject cannot be encountered the way sensations can. It is not something one has or is; it is that through which anything appears.

Image: Critique of Pure Reason, Section II

This resistance deepens with Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenology insists that experience must be described as it is lived, not as it is later reconstructed into states. Consciousness is intentional, temporal, and irreducibly first-personal.⁴ Duration is no longer a sequence of snapshots but a flowing structure of retention and protention.

Image: The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness

Heidegger radicalises this further. In Being and Time (1927), Dasein is not a container for experiences but a mode of being-in-the-world. Experience is not something that happens inside a subject; it is the subject’s way of being disclosed to a world.⁵

By the time we reach Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, any attempt to treat sensation as a property or possession of a self begins to look like a category mistake. Feeling is not a thing one owns. It is a relation, an encounter, a situation.

Notably, these traditions operate in languages where ‘having’ and reflexive constructions dominate descriptions of sensation. This does not determine the philosophy, but it makes certain moves feel natural and others strained.

Two Ontologies, One Quiet Filter

What matters here is not who is right. It is that entire ontological styles become normalised long before argument begins. Grammar does not force conclusions, but it sets default expectations. Some descriptions feel ‘clean’, others ‘muddy’. Some questions feel legitimate, others oddly misframed. This is where institutional gatekeeping enters.

Peer review, citation norms, and journal scope are often described as quality controls. Sometimes they are. But they also function as recognition systems. Work that leans too heavily on phenomenological description may appear ‘imprecise’ to an analytic referee. Work that treats mental states as discrete objects may appear ‘naïve’or “reductive” to a continental one. Hybrid work becomes difficult to place, difficult to referee, and therefore risky. The issue is rarely explicit disagreement. It is a failure of grammatical hospitality.

Where Sensing Falls Through the Cracks

Against this background, it is perhaps unsurprising that sensing never becomes dominant. To speak of feeling is to refuse both ontological closure and inventory. It resists being cleanly formalised or neatly opposed. It fits awkwardly into truth-conditional frameworks and offers little leverage for grand theory. And yet, it is arguably closer to how experience actually unfolds. Which may explain why it remains linguistically available but philosophically marginal: acceptable in life, tolerated in literature, quietly sidelined in theory.

Notes (for those who care)

  1. Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, esp. chs. 1, 27.
  2. Hume, D. (1739–40). A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, §6.
  3. Kant, I. (1781/1787). Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction.
  4. Husserl, E. (1913). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology.
  5. Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time.

NB: This may be a bit disorganised, but I’ve hit my limit.

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Written by Bry Willis

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A History of Language Insufficiency

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I’ve been working on A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis since 2018. At least, that’s the polite, CV-friendly version. The truer account is that it’s been quietly fermenting since the late 1970s, back when I was still trapped in primary school and being instructed on how the world supposedly worked.

Social Studies. Civics. Law. The whole civic catechism. I remember being taught about reasonable persons and trial by a jury of one’s peers, and I remember how insistently these were presented as fair solutions. Fairness was not argued for. It was asserted, with the weary confidence of people who think repetition counts as justification.

I didn’t buy it. I still don’t. The difference now is that I have a hypothesis with some explanatory power instead of a vague sense that the adults were bluffing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I’ve always been an outsider. Eccentric, aloof, l’étranger if we’re feeling theatrical. It never particularly troubled me. Outsiders are often tolerated, provided they remain decorative and non-contagious. Eye rolls were exchanged on both sides. No harm done.

But that outsider position had consequences. It led me, even then, to ask an awkward question: Which peers? Not because I thought I was superior, but because I was plainly apart. How exactly was I meant to be judged by my peers when no one else occupied anything like my perspective?

Later, when I encountered the concept of fundamental attribution bias, it felt less like a revelation and more like confirmation. A peer-based system assumes not just similarity of circumstance, but similarity of interpretation. That assumption was dead on arrival.

Then there were reasonable persons. I was assured they existed. I was assured judges were trained to embody them. I had never met one. Even as a teenager, I found the idea faintly comical. Judges, I was told, were neutral, apolitical, and dispassionate. Writing this now from the United States, one hardly needs to belabour the point. But this wasn’t prescience. It was intuition. The smell test failed decades ago.

Before LIH had a name, I called these things weasel words. I still do, as a kind of shorthand. Terms like fair, reasonable, accountable, appropriate. Squishy concepts that do serious institutional work whilst remaining conveniently undefinable. Whether one wants to label them Contestables or Fluids is less important than recognising the space they occupy.

That space sits between Invariables, things you can point to without dispute, and Ineffables, where language more or less gives up. Communication isn’t binary. It isn’t ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t’. It’s a gradient. A continuous curve from near-certainty to near-failure.

Most communication models quietly assume a shared ontology. If misunderstanding occurs, the remedy is more explanation, more context, more education. What never sat right with me, even as a child, was that this only works when the disagreement is superficial. The breaking point is ontological.

If one person believes a term means {A, B, C} and another believes it means {B, C, D}, the overlap creates a dangerous illusion of agreement. The disagreement hides in the margins. A and D don’t merely differ. They are often irreconcilable.

Image: Venn diagramme of a contested concept.
Note: This is illustrative and not to scale

Fairness is a reliable example. One person believes fairness demands punishment, including retributive measures. Another believes fairness permits restoration but rejects retribution, citing circumstance, history, or harm minimisation. Both invoke fairness sincerely. The shared language conceals the conflict.

When such disputes reach court, they are not resolved by semantic reconciliation. They are resolved by authority. Power steps in where meaning cannot. This is just one illustration. There are many.

I thought it worth sharing how LIH came about, if only to dispel the notion that it’s a fashionable response to contemporary politics. It isn’t. It’s the slow crystallisation of a long-standing intuition: that many of our most cherished concepts don’t fail because we misuse them, but because they were never capable of doing the work we assigned to them.

More to come.

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Written by Bry Willis

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I Need a Break

Posted in modernism, morality, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–7 minutes

More precisely, I need less sleep and longer days – preferably twice as long. I’ve been writing almost non-stop for the better part of a week: fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, fuelled by irritation and the stubborn belief that if I just keep reading, something will finally click into place.

I’m not complaining. This is a virtuous cycle.
Reading leads to writing. Writing demands more reading. Eventually, the loop closes into something that looks suspiciously like progress.

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Still, there’s a bottleneck.

Because some of this work – the work I’m most excited about – I’m deliberately not publishing yet. Journals, bless their glacial hearts, don’t much care for prior publication. So ideas sit in limbo for six to eighteen months, locked in a room like argumentative houseplants, slowly growing sideways.

From the perspective of someone who thinks in public, this is maddening.

Now add AI to the mix.

This is where things get dangerous.

I’ll feed ChatGPT a thesis, a skeletal structure, notes, and references. I ask what I’m missing. It obliges – often helpfully – by pointing me toward adjacent thinkers and relevant literature, complete with page numbers. From there, I verify, hunt down the sources, skim, read, discard, or integrate.

And every so often, I stumble across something that makes me swear out loud.

This week, it was Bernard Williams.

I’ve cited Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before. But this time, I actually sat down and read it properly. Which immediately prompted the thought:

Why didn’t I read this sooner?

Williams dismantles moral objectivity with the calm precision of someone who knows the Enlightenment project has already lost – he just hasn’t told everyone yet. Thick and thin moral concepts, locality, non-extensibility, the collapse of universal moral reason at scale – yes, yes, yes. He published this in 1985. Fine. I’ll survive.

But then I went further.

Williams shows that morality fails between people at scale.
I argue that it fails within a single person over time.

That became my second paper.

And this is where things went off the rails.

Because in the course of writing that paper, I dipped into Hart’s The Concept of Law and Endicott’s Vagueness in Law. These are not fringe polemics. These are law textbooks. For law students. People allegedly trained to parse language for a living.

And what I found was… astonishing.

Let me paraphrase the admissions:

First:

Image: When the law is vague, judicial decisions may be unconstrained by the law.

Endicott: “By upsetting the standard view of adjudication, the book reaches conclusions that some people find horrible: when the law is vague, judicial decision- making will in some cases be unconstrained by the law. It is impossible in principle for judges always to treat like cases alike. Predictability in the law is to some extent unattainable. Moreover, I argue in Chapter 9,2 that vagueness cannot be eliminated from law. These conclusions might seem to imply that the rule of law is, at least to some extent, conceptually impossible.”

Then:

Image: Vagueness is inevitable. Deal with it.

Endicott: “Secondly, I do not claim that vagueness is a purely linguistic feature of law. And the book relies on no claim about the relation between law and language. These points must be stressed, because vagueness is commonly thought of as a linguistic phenomenon. And. indeed, most of the discussion in the book concerns the vagueness of linguistic expressions. But the indeterminacy claim is not just a claim about language (so I argue in Chapter 3.12). So. for example, the claim in Chapter 6 that general evaluative and normative expressions are necessarily vague is not just a claim about the word ‘good’ and the word ‘right1: it is a claim about any linguistic expression in which we could conceivably express general evaluative and normative judgments. It therefore includes a claim about what is good and what is right.”

Then, almost casually:

Image: Whether law is morally valuable to a community is not my concern. Justice and the rule of law may be political virtues — or not. I don’t defend them here.

Endicott: “Disputes between legal positivists and natural law theorists have concerned not only the relation between law and adjudication, but also the relation between law and morality. Here I take no general position on the intrinsic moral value of law. I do rely on the claims that law can be valuable to a community, and that justice and the rule of law are two ideals which a com- munity can intelligibly pursue as political virtues. Even those claims are controversial (Kelsen and some of the theorists discussed in Chapter 2 have controverted them ). But I do not defend them here. This work aims to show that the indeterminacy claim does nothing to threaten the pursuit of justice and the rule of law. Those ideals cannot be well understood if we try to make them depend on determinacy in the requirements of the law.”

Say what?

Read together – not even uncharitably – the message is clear:

Law is indeterminate.
Indeterminacy is unavoidable.
And whether law is good, just, or valuable is… optional.

The subtext isn’t even hiding.

Law is a power structure first.
If it happens to align with justice, fairness, or communal value, well, lovely. A bonus. Champagne all round.

This does not sit well with a sceptical cynic.

What really broke me, though, wasn’t the argument itself. Philosophers make grim claims all the time. What broke me was the silence around it.

How does this pass under the radar?

How do cohorts of law students – drilled in textual analysis, trained to read footnotes like tea leaves – not trip over this elephant stampede? How do they graduate believing they’re upholding inalienable rights, rather than participating in a managed system of coercion that occasionally behaves itself?

Self-preservation, I suppose.
Wilful ignorance.
Professional cosplay.

I’ve seen this before.

As an economist, ask the wrong foundational question, and you’re instantly radioactive. Persona non grata. Careers don’t end with explosions — they end with polite silence and no invitations.

I probably should have committed to heterodox philosophy from the start.
Or stayed a musician.

I remember leaving graduate school, putting on a suit, and feeling like I was wearing a costume. Cosplay, before we had the word. “Business professional” as a role, not an identity.

I’ve always felt intellectually capable of doing whatever I set out to do. My temperament, however, has never agreed to play along.

Which is perhaps why diagnosing ontologies comes so naturally. Once you see the scaffolding, you can’t unsee it – whether it’s metaphysics, jurisprudence, or a corporate department pretending it has a mission.

Then David Graeber came along with Bullshit Jobs, and I remember thinking:
Thank God. It’s not just me.

So yes. I need a break.

I need sleep.
I need silence.
I need to stop reading law books that accidentally admit they’re about power and then act surprised when someone notices.

Mostly, I need to type:

WTAF?

And then go outside.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Kindle Propensity Promo

Posted in fiction, morality, philosophy, podcast, psychology, science, societyTagged , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

I try to minimise posts to my fiction author alter ego, Ridley Park, but I am offering a promotion to download the dystopian speculative literary fiction book on Kindle for the dates noted. Click the promotion for more details.

Propensity Kindle Promotion – Limited-Time Offer

My books have always been ‘free’ on KindleUnlimited, but this is free for anyone in Amazon’s supported markets.

Audio: Short Promo Rant

Readsy Review

“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”

This ominous word of caution is what Ridley Park’s speculative novel ‘Propensity’ opens with, and it sets a tone that strikes an impressive balance between clinically descriptive and quietly devastating. Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, it 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. This creative choice, while initially a little unnerving, works well to reflect the story’s inherent disintegration: scientists losing grip on their own creation, subjects dissolving into numb submission or what they term “the zeroed state”, and a world slowly learning the price of their “engineered peace”. The writing comes off as crisp in an almost detached manner that leaves one wanting for a bit more emotional depth in the first part of the book but not only does that eventually grow on you, it ends up serving its purpose of thematic execution in both its text and subtext. 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.

— Readsy Reviewer

Visit Amazon directly, if you please.

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written by Bry Willis AKA Ridley Park

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Tatterhood, Makeover Culture, and the Prince Who Earned a Gold Star for Basic Curiosity

Posted in agency, critical theory, Culture & Society, fiction, identity, language, modernism, morality, ontology, philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, power, psychology, society, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit rummaging through the Jungian undergrowth of fairy tales – reading Marie-Louise von Franz until my eyes crossed, listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estés weave her wolf-women lore, and treating folklore like an archaeological dig through the psychic sediment of Europe. It’s marvellous, really, how much one can project onto a story when one has a doctorate’s worth of enthusiasm and the moral flexibility of a tarot reader.

But every so often, a tale emerges that requires no archetypal lens, no mythopoetic scaffolding, no trip down the collective unconscious. Sometimes a story simply bares its ideological teeth.

Enter Tatterhood – the Norwegian fairy tale so blunt, it practically writes its own critical theory seminar.

I watched Jonny Thomson’s recent video on this tale (embedded below, for those with sufficient tea and patience). Jonny offers a charming reversal: rather than focusing on Tatterhood herself, he offers the moral from the prince’s perspective. In his reading, the story becomes a celebration of the power of asking – the prince’s reward for finally inquiring about the goat, the spoon, the hood, the whole aesthetic calamity before him.

Video: Jonny Thomson discusses Tatterhood.

It’s wholesome stuff: a TED Talk dressed as folklore. But – my word – apply the slightest bit of critical pressure, and the whole thing unravels into farce.

The Story No One Tells at the Royal Wedding

Here’s the short version of Tatterhood that Jonny politely sidesteps:

  • A fearless, ragged, hyper-competent girl rescues her sister from decapitation.
  • She confronts witches, navigates the seas alone, storms a castle, and performs an ad hoc ontological surgical reversal.
  • She does all of this without help from the king, the court, the men, or frankly, anyone with a Y chromosome.

And how is she rewarded for her trouble? She’s told she’s too ugly. Not socially acceptable. Not symbolically coherent. Not bride material.

The kingdom gazes upon her goat, her spoon, her hood, her hair, and determines that nothing – nothing – about her qualifies her for legitimacy.

Competence: irrelevant.
Courage: irrelevant.
Loyalty: irrelevant.

But beauty? Beauty is the passport stamp that grants her entry into the social realm.

Jonny’s Prince: A Hero by Low Expectations

Now, bless Jonny for trying to rehabilitate the lad, but this prince is hardly an exemplar of virtue. He sulks through his own wedding procession like a man being marched to compulsory dentistry. He does not speak. He does not ask. He barely manages object permanence.

And suddenly, the moral becomes: Look what wonders unfold when a man asks a single question!

It’s the philosophical equivalent of awarding someone a Nobel Prize for remembering their mother’s birthday.

And what do his questions achieve? Not insight. Not understanding. Not intimacy. But metamorphosis.

Each time he asks, Tatterhood transforms – ugly goat to beautiful horse, wooden spoon to silver fan, ragged hood to golden crown, ‘ugly’ girl to radiant beauty.

Which brings us to the inconvenient truth:

This Isn’t the Power of Asking. It’s the Power of Assimilation.

His questions function as aesthetic checkpoints.

Why the goat?
Translation: please ride something socially acceptable.

Why the spoon?
Translation: replace your tool of agency with a decorative object.

Why the hood?
Translation: cover your unruliness with something properly regal.

Why your face?
Translation: you terrify me; please be beautiful.

And lo, she becomes beautiful. Not because he sees her differently. Because the story cannot tolerate a powerful woman who remains outside the beauty regime.

The prince isn’t rewarded for asking; the narrative is rewarded for restoring normative order.

And Yet… It’s Absurdly Fascinating

This is why fairy tales deserve all the interpretive attention we lavish on them. They’re ideological fossils – compressed narratives containing entire worldviews in miniature.

Part of me admires Jonny’s generosity. Another part of me wants to hand the prince a biscuit for performing the bare minimum of relational curiosity. But mostly, I’m struck by how nakedly the tale reveals the old bargain:

A woman may be bold, brave, clever, loyal, and sovereign – but she will not be accepted until she is beautiful.

Everything else is optional. Beauty is compulsory.

So Here’s My Version of the Moral

Ask questions, yes. Be curious, yes. But don’t let anyone tell you that Tatterhood was waiting for the prince’s epiphany. She was waiting for the world to remember that she ran the plot.

If you’ve made it this far and know my proclivities, you’ll not be shocked that I side with Roland Barthes and cheerfully endorse la mort de l’auteur. Jonny is perfectly entitled to his reading. Interpretive pluralism and all that. I simply find it marvelously puzzling that he strolls past the protagonist galloping through the narrative on a goat, spoon upraised, and instead decides to chase the side-quest of a prince who contributes roughly the energy of a damp sock.

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Writting by Bry Willis

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New Paper: Moral Universality and Its Discontents (Zenodo Release)

Posted in Culture & Society, essays, language, modernism, ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theory, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
1–2 minutes

I’ve just released a new paper, Moral Universality and Its Discontents: A Critical Examination of Normative Ethics’ Conceptual Foundation, which can now be found on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17837774). Consider this the latest entry in my ongoing attempt to prise the Enlightenment’s cold, bony fingers off our moral vocabulary.

Audio: NotebookLM deepdive podcast on this essay.

The paper’s basic claim is simple enough:

Most grand moral theories assume a degree of conceptual stability that moral language has never possessed.

Aristotle’s aretê, Kant’s maxims, Mill’s utilities, Rawls’s ‘reasonable rejection’ – pick your passion/poison. Each one presupposes that a concept has a single, portable meaning that obligingly follows philosophers from ancient Greece to medieval Christendom to your local ethics seminar. It doesn’t. It never did. We’ve merely been pretending it does in order to keep the theoretical architecture standing.

Drawing on conceptual genealogy, philosophy of language, and cross-cultural moral psychology, I argue that the universalist ambitions of virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and contractualism collapse not because their logic is flawed, but because their vocabulary evaporates the moment you ask it to do heavy lifting. Our moral terms drift, fracture, mutate, and occasionally reinvent themselves altogether. Yet moral theorists continue to legislate universal principles as if the words were obedient little soldiers rather than unruly historical artefacts.

This isn’t a manifesto for relativism – quite the opposite.
It is a call for modesty: an acknowledgement that moral frameworks function as context-bound heuristics, exquisitely useful within particular forms of life but laughably overextended when dressed up as timeless moral law.

If the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has taught me anything, it’s that once you stop bullying language into behaving like mathematics, you begin to see moral philosophy for what it is – a set of imaginative tools, not an ontology of obligation.

Read it, disagree with it, file it under ‘Why Bry insists on burning down the Enlightenment one paper at a time’ – your choice. But at least now the argument exists in the world, properly dressed and indexed, ready to irritate anyone still clinging to the dream of universal moral principles.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Hooray for Me – The 1,000-Download Threshold

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Some milestones arrive quietly; others tap you on the shoulder and whisper, “Well? Are you going to gloat, or shall I?”

So here we are. The Anti-Enlightenment corpus – yes, that unruly battalion of essays insisting that the Enlightenment was less a dawn and more a flash-bang grenade into the human psyche – is about to pass 1,000 downloads across Zenodo and PhilArchive. By the time you read this, the counter will likely have ticked over, as if to confirm that a non-institutionally affiliated heretic can, in fact, find readers willing to squint at philosophy written in the half-light.

I should say something gracious. Something humble. Something befitting a scholar who’s spent far too much time dismantling the sacred furniture of modernity.

Instead, I’ll say this:

Hooray for me!

Video: Midjourney woman sketch for no apparent reason (no sound)

And hooray for you, the masochists who keep downloading this stuff.

Whether it’s Objectivity Is Illusion, which politely reminds you that truth is just a social ritual in a lab coat, or Against Agency, where we pretend the autonomous self was ever more than Enlightenment-era fan fiction, or The Will to Be Ruled, in which we accept that most people would rather outsource their freedom to the nearest charismatic authoritarian – each piece contributes to the great unmasking of reason’s beloved myths.

If you’ve made your way through The Illusion of Light (cloth or paperback – the cloth is for people who enjoy prestige bindings with their epistemic despair – or on Kindle for the ones who have already surrendered), you’ve already walked the whole architecture: rooms filled with rational ghosts, temporal anxieties, moral fictions, and the faint smell of Enlightenment wiring beginning to smoulder.

And still you download. Saints, the lot of you.

A thousand reads does not confer legitimacy – nothing so vulgar – but it does confirm that the cracks in the Enlightenment’s porcelain façade are visible from more than one angle. It suggests that others, too, are learning to see in the dark, to navigate by afterglow rather than glare.

So: thank you.

For the curiosity.

For the tolerance of structural pessimism.

For indulging a scholar who insists on disassembling Western metaphysics one lovingly overlong sentence at a time.

Here’s to the next thousand. And the thousand after that. And to the collective, slow, post-Enlightenment work of maintenance in the half-light.

The Anti-Enlightenment lives on your hard drives now.

There’s no taking it back.

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Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT because Bry is off to Fiji, celebrating (or something like that.

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On the Strange Politics of Solidarity

Posted in Culture & Society, modernism, philosophy, podcast, political theory, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
2–3 minutes

A LinkedIn colleague posts this. I didn’t want to rain on his parade there – we’ve got an interesting binary intellectual relationship – we either adamantly agree or vehemently disagree. This reflects the latter. The title is revelatory – the all-caps, his:

SOLIDARITY IS THE NECESSARY LINK BETWEEN VIRTUE & COMMON GOOD

It opens like this:

A good society requires more than virtuous individuals and fair institutions: it requires a mediating moral principle capable of binding persons, communities, and structures into a shared project of human flourishing.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn is a closed platform, so you’ll need an account to access the post. Anyway…

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I can remember when I emerged from this mindset – or at least consciously reflected on it and declined the invitation.

Video clip: Because I felt like it. (No Sound)

When I was 10 years old, I remember thinking about historical ‘National Socialism’ – wouldn’t it be nice if we were all on the same page in solidarity? Then I realised that I’d have to be on their page; they wouldn’t be on mine.

Then, I realised that ‘solidarity’ isn’t a warm circle of clasped hands under a rainbow; rather, it’s a demand to harmonise one’s interior life with someone else’s tuning fork. So-called unity is almost always a euphemism for ideological choreography, and one doesn’t get to pick the routine.

Children are sold the Sesame Street version of solidarity, where everyone shares crayons and sings about common purpose. Cue the Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Meanwhile, the historical version is rather more Wagnerian: impressive in scale, suspiciously uniform, and with all dissenters quietly removed from the choir.

My childhood self intuited precisely what my adult writing has since anatomised:

Solidarity is only lovely when you imagine everyone else will move toward you; it curdles the moment you realise the gravitational pull goes the other way.

‘We’re all on the same page’ always becomes ‘Get on the page we’ve selected for you’ – or elected against your vote. The fantasy of we dissolves into the machinery of they.

This isn’t a bug in the system; that is the system. Solidarity requires a centre, and once there’s a centre, someone else gets to define its radius. Even the gentle, ethical, cotton-wool versions still rely on boundary enforcement: who belongs in the shared project, who must adjust their cadence, who is politely removed for ‘disrupting the collective good’. I’m more often apt to be that person than not. History merely illustrates the principle at scale; the mechanism is universal.

Anyway, this is how my brain works, and how I think how I do, and write what I write. As much as I witter on about episodic selves, this remains a prevalent continuity.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Announcing: The Rhetoric of Evil

Posted in critical theory, Culture & Society, essays, identity, language, modernism, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, power, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–8 minutes

How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought


DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17757134

Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.

I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.

And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.

Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.

MEOW-GPT’s Response

(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)

“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap.
When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model,
the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”

“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”

It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.

Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.

Why publish this now?

This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.

The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:

  • It sounds like an explanation.
  • It licenses retribution without understanding.
  • It stabilises group boundaries.
  • It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.

In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.

This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.

If you’d like to read the full argument:

📄 The Rhetoric of Evil: How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought

Appendix: How MEOW-GPT Reads “Evil”

A didactic demonstration of the framework in action. Download the MEOW framework below.

📄The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World: A Relational Metaphysics Beyond Mind and World

Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.

This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.

MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose:
that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.

For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.

MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”

(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)

Concept

Input: Evil
Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces)
Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).

High-level summary (≤120 words)

In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.

T₀ – Biological Mediation

  • Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
  • High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
  • Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
  • Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

  • “Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
  • Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
  • Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
  • Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
  • Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.

T₂ – Linguistic Mediation

  • On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
  • It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
  • Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
  • Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
  • Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.

T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation

  • Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
  • Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
  • Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
  • Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
  • Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.

Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)

The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.

‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.

In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.

MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.

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Written by Bry Willis and MEAW GPT

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Time to Talk Turkey

Posted in Culture & Society, perception, philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Several countries set aside holidays to celebrate thanks-giving. This is a fine tradition, if not hypocritical, given the behaviours manifest on the other days, which isn’t to say that the day itself isn’t without consistency challenges.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

In the United States, today is the day of thanks – Thanksgiving™ – the last Thursday of the month of November. This problem isn’t the day or the name; it’s the accompanying tradition that has to go.

Video: “Pilgrim” riding a 4-legged turkey – Damned Midjourney. (No sound).

This day is supposed to represent a day of unity, where the Pilgrims™ shared thanks with the indigenous peoples, without whom they would have likely perished. Without Romanticising, this might have been a better outcome.

As history is penned by the survivors, the Pilgrims and their ilk repaid their thanks with genocide and systematic oppression. The country – renamed as America, and then the United States of… (a misnomer if there ever was one) – summarily renamed these inhabitants as Native Americans. Somehow, Proto Americans feels more apt.

To make a long story longer, we need to jettison this performative connexion to these indigenous peoples and focus on just being thankful for the sake of being thankful – at least by metaphor. This isn’t out of respect for the indigenous cultures, but at least reflects less revisionist history.

They almost got rid of Columbus Day, if not for the uprising of white Christian nationalists. They should extricate the religious aspects of Christmas, an even more hypocritical holiday.

Or maybe I just don’t like holidays.

More accurately, I don’t trust a civilisation that sets aside one day to perform gratitude, then spends the remaining 364 as a Black Friday pre-game warmup. We gorge on narratives the way we gorge on turkey: carving up the past, seasoning it with national mythology, and swallowing without chewing. The Pilgrims™ didn’t break bread so much as break treaties; they didn’t share so much as seize. But here we are, centuries later, performing thanks like a national yoga pose. Stretch, breathe, pretend everything is fine.

What if, instead of reanimating a historical fan-fiction about harmony and pie, we admitted the truth? That the country owes its existence to conquest, and its conscience to annual amnesia? Strip Thanksgiving of its sanctimony and keep the gratitude if you must, but at least stop embossing colonialism with little cartoon turkeys in buckled hats.

Be thankful for the food, for the people you’ve not yet alienated, for the brief respite from wage-slavery. But realise the holiday itself is a museum of revision. A diorama of innocence that never existed. A Norman Rockwell oil painting slapped over a crime scene.

So enjoy your meal. Be warm, be fed, be kind – even if only for a day.
Just don’t confuse the performance of gratitude with the reality it obscures.

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Written by Bry Willis

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