“When I look I am seen, so I exist.” - Donald Winnicott

It’s cheap to ask someone “how are you going?” This question is reflexive and emotionally free. It’s harder to ask the second question, the reflective follow up that requires a sustained attention towards another’s inner life. “What has that been like?”

When someone tells you something, where you place your attention is a determining factor in whether you can empathise and support a person. In The Pursuit Of Attention, Charles Derber makes a distinction between support-response and shift-response. In the former case, attention is kept on what has been introduced by the other person. In contrast, a shift-response is when the conversation is redirected towards oneself. Shift responses, when made habitual, Derber called “conversational narcissism”.

Developing the skill of empathy involves learning to control your attention. Many people follow their reflexes, which move them to focus on themselves, needing the sweet relief of self-disclosure and being seen. We only ask the first question, “how are you?”. This is fine, but when a friend comes to you for help, most of us want to be able to provide it. This requires a reflective approach - it requires the second question.

In my own life, I seldom talk about myself in front of others. In a group setting, I am engaged in a cumbersome performance. I wear a mask, and it’s a good mask. I am well liked, romantically successful, and generally seen as an extraverted person capable of banter and whimsy. In the rare moments I let the mask slip and confide who I really I am, people are often surprised at what they see. I do this as a result of years of negative reinforcement, not necessarily because I am so unlikeable, but because I have come to know people are selfish and uncaring.

I am needed by people - this I am proud of. Many people have embraced me with arms wide open, told me how grateful they are for my support and insight, and that they are better people for having met me. Yet, even though they need me, they do not know me. A more precise framing is offered by Stanley Cavell. They might have knowledge of me, there is a passive understanding of who I am, but they do not acknowledge me, which requires an active relating and engagement.

Why is this the case? Years of emotionally labouring for other’s sake has conditioned these people’s behaviour. To them, I am a lever for comfort and validation, not a human being. Every supportive conversation reinforces a role, the dynamic of them speaking and me listening. Like a cocaine addicted lab rat,1 the psychological reinforcement is so strong, any mentions of my own struggles, no matter how distraught I appear, are interpreted as cues to redirect attention to themselves. They cannot resist pulling the lever. They might embrace me, express gratitude for our friendship, but the appreciation isn’t for who I really am. No, it’s for a service I provide in their mental real-estate.

Not to mention, these supportive conversations aren’t always productive, which makes things all the more taxing. Often, we think we are talking something through, processing difficult feelings, coming to a greater understanding, but we are actually going nowhere. The feelings of alleviation brought about by self-disclosure are so strong, a person can have the same conversation thousands of times, having exhausted all possible insights long ago, their friends offering the same reassurances over and over, with no sign of moving forward with life. This style of coping is called rumination, and a ruminator demands you share in their negativity, monopolising the relationship’s emotional resources, while robbing you of the hope that things might change. The ruminator seeks to “get things off their chest” by abandoning them on the chest of another. I have seen this sickly addiction manifest so strongly in someone that in any given interaction, like an automaton without will, one only has minutes before they begin retreading the same tired issue.

Such rumination is often intellectualised too. The person is not actually feeling the problems they repeatedly want to divulge. They enjoy occupying the centre of conversation, feeling heard from rerunning the script, but their feelings are neutral and calm. This isn’t always the case for the listener, who may feel the weight of another’s sombre and dismal mental health challenges. When you exist as a support lever for others, any mention of your own deeply felt struggles will be overpowered. They would rather feel the cheap relief of revisiting emotions they are currently not feeling, helpless to resist the decadent temptation of keeping attention on themselves. Like Sisyphus rolling his boulder, emotional labour can be unproductive and onerous. But, if you are competent at something, people assume it’s easy. To others, the costs are invisible, and so they will not hesitate to cash out at anytime. This makes a supportive friend ripe to be taken advantage of.

Someone might not shift attention onto themselves, yet still resist giving replete attention to another. This is natural, as other people’s misery and despair is difficult to confront. At such times, the feelings of uncertainty lead us to want to gain back control, which we often do through unsolicited advice - one of the hallmarks of immature empathy. In ideating on solutions, a world where things are easy to fix, we feel better about ourselves while ignoring the internal reality of the other. The person with a “solutions oriented approach” is often regulating their own discomfort rather than offering sincere help. I put “solutions oriented approach” in quotations because listening, patience and understanding are excluded from this approach, despite being indispensable parts of any viable solution.

Mental health issues are often complex, resulting from a multiplicity of factors, experiences, neuroscience stuff, etc, and so they take time to understand. The literature shows results from talk therapy happen after at least 10 weeks. If a mental health expert needs 10 hours to make any progress, laymen like us should probably humble ourselves. Ironically, there is some evidence that the closer you are with someone, the more likely you are to display this style of immature empathy. In some studies on unsolicited advice, they found a positive correlation with intimacy and closeness. This is likely because we believe being close with someone entitles us to intervene in their lives, managing them like we do many of our loved ones. This creates a contradiction in which proximity and attachment can result in worse support from a person, not better.

On a related note, social critic Christopher Lasch in his book “The Culture Of Narcissism” stated that “for the narcissist, the world is a mirror”. Lasch was describing a person that greatly struggles to experience other people and the external world as independent realities. Rather, everything is interpreted through what it reflects back - “what does this tell me about myself?” Lasch sought to describe a particularly insecure person that defined the character of post-war American culture, an ungrounded person who relies on others for their sense of self esteem.

Lasch saw the rise of therapy-speak, the self help industrial complex, health anxiety, new-ageism and cosmopolitan consumer trends as evidence of this shift in the national character, in which self-actualisation is privileged over a life built on duty and obligation to others. Everybody needs a mirror, but a culture of narcissism is one where no one wants to be a mirror themselves. Lasch contrasts the narcissist with the rugged individualist who imposes their will on the world without insecurity or the need for external validation.2 This individualist is autonomous, immunised against the desire to be seen as attractive, desirable, interesting, successful or justified by others. This isn’t to say they don’t need support. Rather, Lasch believed the individualist was created in the context of strong communities, families and local practices. On the other hand, the self-fixated person often appears confident, lavished in grandiose self-accounts and compelling stories, but on the inside there is a persistent emptiness. The self is unstable. In their own mind, they’re incessantly monitoring themselves. They then turn to others in a desperation to feel whole.

In this vain pursuit of an audience, the narcissist will often master social fluency, charming others on a first impression, but they are incapable of true intimacy, which requires a mutual recognition of others. This is the first paradox the narcissist faces - their inability to engage in true vulnerability prevents them from encountering the closeness they crave. A second paradox in externalising one’s sense of self onto others is that it ignores the simple fact that other minds have competing desires that may not serve you, their assessments based on values you do not share, striving towards ends you might find contestable. For this reason, other’s assessments of you aren’t always self-serving. Yet, in the narcissist’s inability to fully grasp other’s centres of experience, they miss this fact and labour under an error.

For many, using others as a mirror is an important tool of self-regulation. They arrive to the scene feeling incoherent, and they look into the mirror of others to see themselves as whole. From constant enabling and repetition, any relationship can assume this one-sided structure. A particularly supportive friend will have their good deeds punished even more unjustly, as not only does a supportive friend listen, they organise the interiority of the narcissist, providing them with the self-order they so desperately crave. When you have stabilised the inner chaos of someone for so long, they quickly forget the person behind the mirror.

Any mention of your own problems requires the narcissist relinquishing the centre of attention and engaging with another mind. Except, for them, leaving with a bearable image of themselves is far more important. Naturally, any self-disclosure of your own is treated as a prompt for how they can best continue the conversation about themselves. Like a drowning sailor, your own humanity disappears beneath the reflection. This is a tale as old as time, e.g., Ovid’s telling of Narcissus and Echo. Since the beginning, mankind has succumbed to the delusion of confusing one’s reflection for intimacy, while the other in the equation loses their voice.

For those whose empathy lies cold in standing reserve, I want to address another common mantra. “I’m not going to be able to solve this for you,” or some variation on their inability to fix the problem. The person claims they want to offer support, but upon hearing another’s hardships, they quickly become confused. Unable to grasp the purpose of listening, they try to temper the heavy expectations erroneously believed to be pressing on them. The person seeking support never asked them to solve their life. Instead, they only have the tacit expectation, as with any conversation, that the other person listen and engage with what they are saying. Simply attending to another person’s words can be so unintuitive, so alien, we again shift attention away from what was actually said, responding to demands never made in the first place. But there is good news…

The burden of listening is light. One need not offer compelling insights or solutions. Rather, the friend looking for support just need that your attention sit with them. This can involve just restating what was said and acknowledging that you are listening - providing cunning observations or workable solutions isn’t necessary. For narcissistic people, however, even this can feel excruciating. It requires them to stop talking about themselves, their interests, or the same canned solutions that function to ignore the person in front of them. After a lifetime of placing attention on themselves, offering genuine support feels like a heavy cross to carry. Stepping onto the foreign soil of empathy, they mistake every rustle for a predator, anticipating an ambush from the unlit hollows. Ergo, they feel threatened by demands and obligations that aren’t there.

In the past, I have attempted to raise this with people, but it never ends well. The results are all types of cognitive distortions, like an addict caught in the panic of withdrawal. One example is black and white thinking - they think if we can’t have this one-sided relationship, then I must not care about them at all. To hear this after having worked so hard to support someone is a spit in the face. Few people actively work on their empathy skills, but just as few people want to be challenged or confronted. I’m not asking for repayment. Instead, relationships should be communal, the scales tipping towards one person for a time, but always trusting this isn’t where the scales must stay.

I cannot blame everyone else entirely. I am guilty of compulsive caregiving. This describes my own coping mechanism of entering into the problems of others as to distract myself from my own suffering. This is heavily associated with my own attachment style. It’s also a means of belonging, I can not be abandoned if I am needed, and I can guarantee this safety without the risk of being known. Quite literally, I find myself seeping into a sense of respite and relaxation when I can focus on another person and forget myself. Even better if I can have a coffee and a cigarette while I do it.

I also think about how, if I don’t know anyone who understands reciprocity, seeing we all live in the same world with the same species, then it’s likely that no one else has this expectation either. I look around the table: someone is indulging in a long and uninspiring story. The others seem unfocused, making impatient asides - “yep,” “uh huh” - and, when the story is finally over, no one engages what was said - only for someone else to begin their own monologue, again, without care for anyone else and if they’re actually interested. I have come to realise I simply do not share in the same social needs as others - they want to discharge pressure, deafen the silence, establish rank in a hierarchy, etc . I do not see the point in these self-oriented and non-reciprocal conversations.

A friend of mine told me that, in social settings, people are like pigs at the trough. If you want something, you need to push them aside and take it. The expectation that others act empathetically on their own accord is a pipe dream. Naturally, I gave up on this goal a long time ago and find emotional support to be a pleasant surprise, rather than an expected outcome of a relationship. I feel completely unseen, and as time goes on, like I do not exist.

(Author’s note: After writing this article and sitting with it, I believe my views here were motivated by my own weak sense of self. To me, other people seem very narcissistic because they aren’t excessively self-regulating. Hence, “going with the flow” is interpreted as arrogance, as they are forgoing the tiresome labour I have set for myself. I am trying to work on this.)

In my prior article, I described Kant’s transcendental idealism as a machinery, with its many moving assemblages, schematically designed across a conceptual factory floor, churning in tandem to produce its end product - the possibility of experience.

The impressive majesty of Kant’s philosophy lies not just in its machinery, but also in its cartography. Reading Kant involves learning an intricate mapping of concepts, separating terrains in our thinking and limiting ideas to their sovereign borders. These cartographical distinctions will be the subject of this article, namely, Kant’s account of synthetic a priori knowledge.

Kant’s inquiry into synthetic a priori knowledge became one of the defining problems of modern philosophy. Introduced on the first page of The Critique of Pure Reason, the problem concerns how knowledge can be both genuinely informative and independent of experience. This article will explain Kant’s answer and trace the problem’s later transformation within the linguistic turn and analytic philosophy. It will conclude by examining W. V. O. Quine’s critique of analyticity and reductionism, which called into question distinctions fundamental to the Kantian tradition.

(Author’s Note: This article spends a large deal of time on Kant’s mapping of knowledge as it concerns grounding and justification, a priori and a posteriori, analytic and synthetic… If you are confident with these concepts, feel free to scroll down to “The Arrival of The Analytic Tradition” where Quine’s criticism is set up and explained.

Also in this article, I attempt to explain Kant’s philosophy as charitably as I can, meaning I want to avoid interjecting my own views. For this reason, I often talk about things, like “laws of physics” or “necessity”, in ways true to Kant’s philosophy and not my own. I believe Kant’s views on these things are antiquated and dogmatic in their own right.)

Kant’s Cartography

German philosophy is difficult, and when learning it, we can be tempted to just repeat ideas without truly understanding the work they are doing. It’s tempting to think “this is an interesting concept, but why choose to see the world like this?” The job of a good educator then, should not just be to explain an idea, but to press upon us the necessity by which we must adopt the idea as well.

Studying Kant’s cartography can be intimidating, as if you were being showered with concepts. Without proper patients and care, this conceptual shower becomes exhausting. In which case, we are tempted to neglect a proper understanding of ideas we deem less essential. In this instance, the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge isn’t just an auxiliary concept in Kant’s difficult survey of thought, but is the essential hinge on which his entire critical philosophy turns. Why is this the case? I explained Kant’s dilemma in the last entry as machinery. Now, I will explain it as cartography:

Knowledge has a legitimate domain. If this domain isn’t respected, one is guilty of trespassing beyond the borders of reason. The faculties and their concepts ergo all have limits of application, a jurisdiction beyond which they are powerless to yield knowledge. Kant both charts these borders and details the edges of each terrain. Yet, in demarcating knowledge’s legitimate domain, Kant determines that others are guilty of trespassing. In other words, they are going beyond the scope of reason…

To illustrate:

Empiricism states that knowledge comes from experience. To Kant, this is a dogma. Empiricism deals with particulars, individual objects that can be observed, not higher level rules and abstractions. For this reason, empiricism cannot make sense of causality, modality, universality, necessity… None of these are objects or relations found in experience, vis-a-vis David Hume. Hence, empiricists fail to survey knowledge’s terrain when they speak of universal and necessary truths like laws of logic or natural sciences.

On the other hand, rationalism states we can reason to knowledge without experience, uncovering deep truths about metaphysics, God, the soul, free will, fundamental reality, etc. To Kant, this is another dogma, as reason is limited to the world as it appears, as set by the conditions of experience. The rationalist erroneously trespasses beyond the borders of reason, going where she has no sovereignty. Through this unlawful entry, the rationalist is also lost without a map in the fog of transcendental illusion.

These two opposing views have a shortcoming in common with each other. The maps of empiricism and rationalism both share in their failure to chart a particularly rugged form of knowledge, one that is both necessary and universal, not known by experience, but is also informative - telling us something new about the world and not just restating what has already been said. This type of knowledge is called a priori synthetic knowledge.

Let us consider some examples and think more about why accounting for this type of knowledge is so crucial.

“All events have a cause.”1

“The unity and persistence of things through time.”

For Kant, these types of a priori synthetic truths are required for any scientific knowledge. If I run an experiment, I assume the variables being changed or controlled for have causal powers. The chemistry occurring over my bunsen burner isn’t spontaneous and undetermined, miraculously conjured without cause or effect.

Moreover, when we talk about natural laws, we don’t assume they have expiration dates. It would be irrational to wake up and check whether the law of gravity still holds true each day. Even when I look at myself in the mirror, I assume it’s the same one person looking back at me. Despite physical and psychological changes, I am a unified “self” persisting through time.

Kant argues that none of these truths, of which the sciences are hopelessly dependent on, are learnt from experience. So, without falling into the dogmas of empiricism and rationalism, how are they justified and grounded?

As per the first entry, Kant sees them as grounded by the mind’s synthesis of space, time and the categories of the understanding with experience. However, in providing his answer, Kant relies on a cartography of concepts - a priori and a posteriori, analyticity and syntheticity. This cartography is crucial for us in demarcating the pieces of his machinery, serving as a design blueprint or schematic. Without it, there is no way to tell the output of his transcendental factory.

A priori vs a posteriori

The distinction between a priori and a posteriori is a widely used distinction, predating Kant, concerning the source of our knowledge. This is to say, reasoning is a priori or a posteriori in respect to how that reasoning is justified.

Aristotle had a related distinction between what is “prior by nature” and what is “prior to us.” In medieval scholastic philosophy, whose chief influence was Aristotle, this distinction was reformulated in Latin.

A priori literally means “from what comes before.”

A posteriori literally means “from what comes after.”

Both Aristotle and the scholastics were highly concerned with causality. In the same vein, they believed a priori and a posteriori judgements to be a matter of the order in which one follows cause and effect. Let me explain.

For what is a priori, the reasoning follows a cause to its effects. If I see a lit fireplace, following from the principle that fire is hot, I can know a priori that putting my hand near the fire will burn. The idea of fire being hot leads me the conclusion “this will burn”.

For what is a posteriori, in contrast, the reasoning follows from an effect to its causes. If I am a young child, running near the fireplace, I can reason a posteriori that fire is hot after accidentally burning myself. The burn from the fire leads me to the conclusion “fire is hot”.

In these examples, the heat of the fire is the cause, the burn is the effect, and the reasoning is defined by which one leads you to the other.

In our conceptual cartography thus far, a priori and a posteriori are matter of which direction one takes when navigating a terrain, the terrain in this case being causality. For Aristotle, the land has already been surveyed, as either types of knowledge are known from observation. For Kant, however, these terms regard whether one surveys the terrain at all.

This is to say, in Kant’s view, neither “fire is hot” or “this burns” can ever be known a priori, as for him, these aforementioned categories determine whether something is known - not from its causes or effects - but from or apart from experience.

For Kant:

A priori means what is known apart from experience.

A posteriori means what is known from experience.

To begin with the former, a priori knowledge can be known through reason or reflection alone. Mathematical truths such as “7 + 5 = 12” or logical principles like “all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal” are known a priori because they do not rely on observation. I do not need to have met Socrates to know he is mortal if I know that all men are mortal. I can arrive at this judgement a priori.

In addition, a priori judgements carry with them necessity and universality. For an a priori judgement, it is true in all possible scenarios. There is no set of circumstances where 7 + 5 does not equal 12. It’s true for me. It’s true for you. It’s true today and it will be true tomorrow.

On the other hand, a posteriori knowledge, by contrast, depends on experience and observation of the world. Both the aforementioned adult, who knows a fire is hot, and the child who learns this the hard way, have come to their conclusions a posteriori.

“Fire is hot” - just like “the sky is blue”, “Donald Trump is the president”, “I am writing this on my MacBook” - all can only be verified through sensory perception, i.e., experience. If I had never seen a fire at all, heard it described, seen its picture, I would have no way of knowing that it is hot, as “fire is hot” is a fact known a posteriori.

This distinction is fundamental for Kant because it separates what the mind can contribute independently from what it receives through experience - laying the groundwork for his later question of how judgements can be both a priori and synthetic, that is, necessary yet informative about the world. A type of knowledge that, if not salvaged, all other disciplines come crashing down.

Analyticity and Syntheticity

The distinction between analyticity and syntheticity concerns in virtue of what is a given statement true. Before, we said a priori or a posteriori concerns justification, i.e., how a statement is true. The analytic / synthetic distinction, on the other hand, concerns the grounds of a statement, i.e., what makes the statement true.

This might sound confusing, but put differently, justification regards the epistemic route, the “how we get there” of a statement, i.e, reason or experience. The grounds, on the other hand, regards the truth maker, the feature of reality that makes that statement true.

To give an example, the statement “I have blue eyes” is grounded by the physical fact of my eyes and them being blue. While, “I have blue eyes” is a statement justified a posteriori. You need to empirically observe my eyes to know that they’re blue, you can’t deduce it rationally from the arm chair without looking at them.

Prior to Kant awaking from his dogmatic slumber and developing his critical philosophy, he was a follower of Leibniz - the great mathematician and rationalist.

Leibniz, operating close to his love for logic and mathematics, provided a distinction between truths of fact and truths of reason. Basically, this distinction concerned whether or not a truth could be denied without contradiction.

1. To deny truths of reason requires violating the law of contradiction.

2. To deny truths of fact does not.

An example of 1. would be “a triangle has three sides”. If I said otherwise, like “this four sided shape is a triangle”, I am saying that something that is not a triangle is indeed a triangle, which is a contradiction.

An example of 2. would be “I am typing this on my MacBook”. If I say I’m actually using a ThinkPad, despite actually using a Mac, there is no contradiction. Nowhere am I asserting “A” and “not A”, regardless of whether what I am saying is true.

Leibniz, when demarcating his truths of reason, described them as those truths whereby the predicate is contained in the subject. Kant, inheriting this from Leibniz, took this exact definition and refashioned this side of the distinction into analyticity, while mostly abandoning truths of fact for syntheticity, a separate distinction altogether.

Let me explain Kant’s analyticity and syntheticity in more detail.

Analytic truths are true in virtue of their meaning. Consider the following statements:

1. “All squares have four equal sides.”

2. “There are no married bachelors.”

3. “No one has a woman brother.”

In all these statements, we arrive at their truth via the words that make them up. Regarding 1), A square has four sides because if it didn’t, it would no longer be a square. The statement is true by definition of what a square is. Likewise, we don’t know the truth of 1) by running experiments on squares.

Put in its Leibnizian formulation, for analytic truths, the predicate concept is already contained within the subject concept, so the statement’s truth can be known by analysing the subject alone. For example, as per 2), if you know what a bachelor is, then you know there are no married bachelors. It’s included in the concept.

Hence, analytic statements are non-ampliative - they don’t add anything beyond the terms being analysed. These types of statements don’t extend our knowledge about the world and just unpack the meaning of terms.

Now I will explain synthetic knowledge...

Lets look at some more statements…

1. “The cat is on the mat.”

2. “The book is on the table.”

Something is different here. The truth of 1), the cat being on the mat, is not contained within the concept of “cat” or “mat”. Cats can be in all sorts of places… and mats can be under all types of things… For 1) to be grounded, I can’t rely on the concepts themselves, I need to actually look and see where the cat is - I need experience…

Kant refines the word “synthetic” to describe these types of judgements, i.e., judgements that add something to a concept. This idea of “synthesis” is important, because it is through the synthesis of concepts, ones we already know to be the case, that information is added, and we discover new things to be true...

To return to the example, you perceive the cat on the mat and this addition of an empirical fact, one your learnt through your own perception, creates a Kantian synthesis... thereby, making the statement true, but also, informative.

In the beginning of the article, we examined some statements that were examples of a priori synthetic knowledge. Let us reexamine one of them now having learnt more about Kant’s cartography:

“All events have a cause.”

Notice how the concept of a “cause” is not inherent to the meaning of an “event”? Therefore, it is not analytic. It’s adding new information not contained in the concepts themselves, namely, that all events have causes.

While also, it is a priori because causality is not an object or relation found in experience. Ergo, the statement “all events have causes” must be known independent of experience.

This raises the question…

How is a priori synthetic knowledge possible?

For Kant, a priori synthetic knowledge is possible due to the synthesis of experience and sense data with the forms of space / time and the categories of the understanding.

To the rationalist and empiricist, Kant retorts that there are necessary and universal truths, but they do not come from experience. Likewise, they are not truths about reality as it exists in itself. They are truths about the conditions under which experience is made possible.

If you read the last article, the idea of a priori synthetic knowledge will start doing a lot of work to deepen his critical philosophy. You will see Kant’s attempt to rescue us from both dogmatic metaphysics and Humean skepticism in fuller detail.

For Kant, physics and scientific discovery needs to be universal and necessary. The laws of physics and Newton’s great achievements need to be true for all times and places. But also, scientific discoveries need to be just that - discoveries. Science must constantly march forward, producing new theories about the world that allow us to progress as a species, not simply restating our old concepts and going nowhere in a perpetual dark age.

To give a simple illustration, when a child learns “7 + 5 = 12”, they learn “12” is not the same number as “7” and “5”, there is actually something to be learnt on the other side of the equals sign. The numbers are equal in value, but there is new information as the concepts aren’t contained in each other.

For Kant, the whole sequence of counting relies on this a priori form, i.e. time. Kant’s concept of time is highly Newtonian and regards how events follow each other in sequence, just as a counting child follows one number with another. Therefore, a child doing addition is reasoning their conclusions from a synthesis of the numbers and the form of time found in the transcendental aesthetic.

What’s more, because a priori synthetic truths are all reasoned, not from experience, but the conditions that make experience possible, they place a limiting factor on reason. Again, we cannot successfully reason beyond our own experience into the world that exists apart from it.

If you read my last article, you know a little bit about the world of German Idealism after Kant. If you didn’t, don’t worry… We will see again how Kant’s philosophy led to major pushback from some highly influential philosophers in the 20th century. It is within this context that Quine appears in the theatre of ideas. Before I explain Quine’s criticism, let me set the stage, namely, by explaining the arrival of analytic philosophy.

The Arrival of The Analytic Tradition

German Idealism after Kant included figures such as J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. These philosophers left a very different legacy to Kant, who as we discussed, had tried to limit reason. Kant built a philosophy around the idea that reason cannot simply travel beyond experience and make claims about God, the soul, freedom and the world as it exists in-itself. But after Kant, many of his successors did not exactly inherit his modesty.

Hegel, an intellectual celebrity with an impressive following, was writing statements like “the history of the world is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” To some, this was the height of philosophical profundity. To others, especially in the English speaking world, it sounded like philosophy had become drunk on its own abstractions. In other words, it was bullshit.

This type of speculative idealism, often regarded in the English speaking world as “unclarifiable unclarity”, caused a major pushback. As a result, figures like G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell sought precision and logical rigour, opposing this obscure type of metaphysics that had become the norm on the continent. Ergo, in an effort to rescue philosophy from unclarity, the analytic school was born.

Rather than building enormous systems about reality as a whole, analytic philosophers began turning their attention to logic and language. For example, the logical positivists carved up language and meaning into precise taxonomies, rendering those statements that didn’t fit as meaningless, and those problems that couldn’t be articulated as pseudo-problems, thereby creating a new cartography.

What’s more, Einstein’s theory of relativity, which overturned Newtonian conceptions of space and time, highlighted to many analytic types just how little philosophical speculation had contributed to genuine discovery. Analytic philosophers took this as a cue to examine the structure and assumptions of these scientific theories, as to drag philosophy kicking and screaming from the continental fog.

Their goal was not to “end” philosophy, but to redefine it as the careful analysis of language and logic - to deflate philosophy from its immodest and exorbitant reputation, no longer viewing it as a study of grand metaphysical ideas.

Like Kant, analytic philosophers also wanted to set the limits of reason, so they kept certain parts of his machinery. They retained the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, only abandoning its transcendental origins. However, the distinction between truths by meaning and truths by experience survived.

Analytic truths were now treated as truths “by definition” or “in virtue of meaning.”

Synthetic truths were treated as empirical truths, verified or falsified through observation.

This simpler linguistic reformulation preserved the epistemic function of the distinction without committing to Kant’s transcendental architecture.

So, “all bachelors are unmarried” remained analytic. Its truth came from the meaning of the words. “The cat is on the mat” remained synthetic. Its truth had to be checked by looking at the world, e.g., seeing if the cat is on the mat.

Put simply, this linguistic turn stated that philosophical problems could be dissolved or clarified by analysing language rather than by theorising about the mind or external reality, as captured by the logical positivists - figures like Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and A.J. Ayer.

For many of the positivists:

Analytic statements (logical or definitional statements) expressed linguistic conventions.

Synthetic statements (scientific hypotheses) were verified by observation.

The analytic / synthetic distinction thus became the backbone of their empiricist program, separating the purely formal truths of logic and mathematics from the empirical content of science.

However, in making such a move, Kant’s whole dilemma regarding empiricism resurfaces. How then, can we know necessary truths about the world? The positivist solution was to place logic and mathematics on the analytic side of this distinction.

Logic and mathematics were not factual discoveries about reality. They were truths of language. They were necessary because they did not describe the world in the first place, they were true in virtue of the terms, thereby protecting empiricism from Humean skepticism.

All factual knowledge could still come from experience, while logic and mathematics could be preserved as analytic truths. Necessary, but not metaphysical. It was a neat system they had going…

Then came Quine.

The Criticism

In 1951, Quine published “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, one of the most important papers in twentieth century analytic philosophy. However, his target was not Kant directly.

His immediate target was the aforementioned analytic tradition, especially the logical positivists attempt to divide meaningful statements into analytic truths of language and synthetic truths of experience.

However, because the positivists had inherited and reformulated Kant’s distinction, Quine’s criticism reaches backwards in time, scraping against Kant’s cognitive machinery.

Quine identifies two dogmas at the heart of modern empiricism.

1. The first dogma is the analytic / synthetic distinction.

2. The second dogma is reductionism.

Let us begin with the first.

The analytic / synthetic distinction, as we have already seen, says some statements are true in virtue of meaning alone, while others are true in virtue of experience. “All bachelors are unmarried” is supposed to be analytic.

Quine asked what makes “all bachelors are unmarried” true by meaning alone?

The usual answer is that “bachelor” means “unmarried man.” But then Quine asks what we mean by “means”. If we say that two expressions mean the same thing when they are synonymous, we have only moved the problem into another word. What makes “bachelor” synonymous with “unmarried man”?

Someone might answer, “definition.”

“Bachelor” is defined as an unmarried man.

But definition does not solve the problem. A definition only works because the words in the definition are already taken to have the same meaning as the word being defined. This is to say, I have to agree to the synonymy the definition is offering. In the case of analyticity, I am asking you to show that definition is correct.

In attempting to define analyticity, Quine shows analyticity is circular.

The circle looks like this:

“Bachelor” is analytic because it means “unmarried man.”

It means “unmarried man” because the two are synonymous.

They are synonymous because bachelor is defined as unmarried man.

The definition works because they already mean the same thing.

Analyticity is meant to be explained through meaning, but meaning is explained through synonymy, and synonymy is explained through definition, and definition brings us back to meaning. We never actually explain something by something else.

For the logical positivists, the analytic / synthetic distinction was supposed to do enormous philosophical work. It was supposed to separate logic and mathematics from empirical science. It was supposed to explain how necessary truths could exist without returning to the same kind of metaphysics they wanted to avoid.

Kant’s own distinction is not identical to the positivist version, he was asking whether the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept. Kant wasn’t just analysing language, but had a whole transcendental project, asking what the mind must contribute in order for experience to become possible.

In response then, a Kantian might offer their traditional account of analyticity as the predicate being contained in the subject. However, then Quine’s attack moves from “true by definition” to “containment”.

What does it mean for one concept to be contained in another? If “bachelor” analytically contains “unmarried man”, we still have to explain why. Do we appeal to meaning? Then we need an account of meaning. Do we appeal to synonymy? Then we need to explain synonymy. Do we appeal to definition? Then we must explain why the definition is legitimate rather than merely repeated from accepted usage.

The Quinean circle yet again rears its head.

How is this dangerous for Kant? Well, Kant’s central question was “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” But this question only makes sense if we can distinguish analytic judgements from synthetic judgements in the first place.

If we cannot say with confidence what makes a judgement analytic, then we cannot say with the same confidence when a judgement is synthetic. While, if we cannot say with confidence when a judgement is synthetic, then Kant’s special category of the synthetic a priori loses the clean shape it once had.

Quine’s second dogma pushes this even further.

The second dogma Quine wishes to attack is reductionism. By reductionism, Quine means the belief that each meaningful statement can be reduced to some possible confirming experience. In simpler terms, every meaningful statement is supposed to have its own experiential test.

Take the statement:

“The cat is on the mat.”

What experience would confirm it? I walk into the room, look at the mat and see the cat sitting there. The statement meets experience and is confirmed. Or, take a scientific statement:

“This metal expands when heated.”

I heat the metal, observe it expanding, and the statement receives confirmation from experience. Each synthetic statement has a 1:1 relation with a set of experiences. This is an extremely neat and convenient picture for empiricism.

But, Quine thinks this is false.

Our statements do not face experience one by one.

They face experience as part of a whole system.

This is Quine’s famous web of belief…

Our knowledge is not a stack of isolated judgements, each individually tested against the world. It is a web of interconnected commitments. Mathematics, logic, scientific theory, background assumptions, ordinary beliefs and sensory reports all hang together. If our experiences don’t live up to our worldviews, we do not know immediately or exactly which belief to abandon.

Suppose I believe the cat is on the mat. I walk into the room and do not see the cat…

What has been disproven?

Maybe the cat moved.

Maybe I looked at the wrong mat.

Maybe the room is too dark.

Maybe someone took the cat.

Maybe I am confused about what counts as “the mat”.

In ordinary life, I will not revise everything. I will probably give up the belief that the cat is currently on the mat. But this is because that belief is easy to give up. It sits near the edge of the web. It is not central to everything else I believe.

Now consider how much more complicated and intermeshed our beliefs are in difficult subjects like mathematics.

If an experiment appears to conflict with arithmetic, I do not immediately conclude that “7 + 5 = 12” has been falsified. I assume the measuring instrument is broken, or I counted badly, or some other background belief needs to be revised. Mathematics sits much closer to the centre of the web. To give it up would cause enormous damage elsewhere.

But for Quine, this difference is not the difference between truths by meaning and truths by fact. Quine’s holism refuses to cut up beliefs in such a neat way, seeing them instead as differing in their position within the web.

Some beliefs are central, while others are peripheral and easily revised.

This is where Quine becomes so threatening to Kant. Kant wanted to explain the possibility of necessary knowledge. He wanted to show that mathematics, causality and the basic structure of science are not mere habits of association. They have necessity because they arise from the a priori conditions of experience itself.

For Kant, causality is not something we discover by watching one event follow another. As Hume showed, we never perceive necessity itself. We see one event, then another. We do not see the must we assign to all events that appear similar. Kant’s answer was that causality is supplied by the understanding. The mind organises events under causal rules, and without this contribution, experience would not appear to us as ordered and intelligible at all.

In contrast, for Quine, we do not begin by separating knowledge into clean compartments: analytic truths, synthetic truths, a priori conditions, empirical observations. We inherit a whole web of belief and revise it under the pressure of experience. Even the most central parts of the web, including logic and mathematics, are not placed in a separate kingdom of necessity. They are simply so central that abandoning them would require rebuilding almost everything else.

Mathematics is more stable, more central, more deeply woven into our total system of knowledge. But for Quine, its special status comes from its role within the web, not from a separate analytic realm or a transcendental structure of the mind.

Kant’s image of philosophy is architectural, mechanical, cartographical... He wants to uncover the conditions on which experience rests. He wants to show what must already be in place for empirical knowledge to be possible.

Quine’s image is ecological. Beliefs live together, support one another, and are revised together. There is no clean beginning where philosophy stands outside knowledge and lays its foundations. We are always already inside the web.

A possible response from a Kantian might be that Quine is operating inside the space Kant is trying to explain. Quine describes how our beliefs are revised, but Kant asks how experience and judgement are possible at all. The Kantian can insist that transcendental philosophy is not a theory inside the web, but an account of the conditions for there being a web of experience in the first place.

But, as we have already shown, there is no standing outside of the web to assess the foundations. The web is distinctly not Kantian architecture. Nothing in the web is necessary and not open to revision. Kant’s categories of the understanding are no different.

Kant needs his analytic / synthetic distinction…

He needs it to show that mathematics is not merely analytic.

He needs it to show that causality is not merely empirical.

He needs it to show that science depends on necessary structures contributed to experience by the mind.

If Quine makes the analytic / synthetic distinction unstable, he threatens the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge… the very hinge of Kant’s critical philosophy.

What now?

In the last article, I concluded by describing the riot that occurred after G.E. Schulze’s “Aenesidemus”. Quine’s paper isn’t about Kant, so the Kantian world wasn’t shook in the same way. Instead, after decades of philosophers packing the meaning of things into neat taxonomies of verification, what is meaningful and what is meaningless, Quine caused a vibe shift…

However, Quine also created a backwards pressure on Kant. This pressure insists Kant step down from his role as architect of appearances, laying out the foundations for which experience is possible. Instead, philosophy must act alongside the sciences, its concepts open to the same revisions as anything else, with experience as the judge. This is a push away from the transcendental philosophy and towards a new holistic naturalism.

Some later philosophers responded by keeping a thinner Kant. P.F. Strawson, for example, tried to preserve Kant’s insight that experience requires a conceptual structure while rejecting the heavier machinery of transcendental idealism. Others tried to convert Kant’s concepts into a linguistic framework, again, robbing Kant of his transcendental machine and retconning him as merely the founder of a problem, namely, what is thought’s role in the possibility of experience?

I will conclude by saying Quine denies Kant of his cartography, he no longer knows how judgements gain their authority. If Kant is denied this, then his whole objective of salvaging a priori synthetic knowledge fails. This is a challenge for Kant.

When I was let into the garden.
I saw you holding the night in your arms,
you were dressed in the silk of the evening.

I was so silly to bring myself...
I know, I should have left myself at home.

There's just this buzzing part of me,
one that I cannot hear,
laughing when it should be crying,
crying when it should be laughing.

If I could, I would take that knife
and cut out this strangle of errors.
I would sit down in the garden,
blossoming without myself.

But in the hive of my heart
there are only wasps,
stinging my old failures.

I would have left him at home,
but like any other night,
tonight he just will not go.

There is a well-recognised uniqueness about United States politics, that is, the culture war. A defining feature of American politics today is the battle between cultural tribes seeking to define the nation. This battle is about vibes, stereotypes, symbols - the blue haired leftist versus the good ol’ boy, redneck conservative.

In U.S. politics, social groups seeking dominance over each other is far more prominent than discussions around public administration. Many political scientists go as far to say that the “right wing” and “left wing” are defined mostly by opposition to each other, and not specific political theories or ideologies. The in-group and out-group, left and right, is a matter of identity construction - a blurry image of what type of person a nation should be, at the exclusion of others.

Let me use myself as an example. In this article I am going to say some things that might be stereotyped as left wing, despite my intentions. Except, I live in Serbia, I attend an Orthodox Church, I look like a Hitler youth poster, these are all identity markers that, despite being irrelevant to me, in my experience, open up those on the right to take what I have to say more seriously, when they shouldn’t.

Conservatism in other countries, namely the Commonwealth, has far less of an emphasis on identity markers and sign management. Rather, it is a legal and political philosophy around conserving institutions via their respective social norms, customs, restraints, etc. As you can see, politics is far more boring in other countries, and political parties were historically more defined by commitments over the roles of institutions than the moral future of the country, or, whether Lady Columbia will have blue hair or a Black Rifle Coffee t-shirt.

Other Anglophone nations of course have had hierarchies around race, gender and culture. The identity groups at the top created laws, behaviours and used language in ways that reproduced and reinforced their dominance at the expense of others. However, these acts of identity construction weren’t fused to a party and nationalised in the same way.

If you are an American, you might not realise there is a common complaint about the Americanisation of politics in other countries. Different political actors often accuse one another of being an American export, deviating too much from actual, specific policy and instead signalling identity markers and being “vibe-based”.

There is also a phenomenon of other Anglophones larping as Americans because, well, there is an engaging, billion-dollar media empire behind U.S. culture war politics. Meanwhile, our politicians are talking about how the Hume Motorway needs another lane.

I think Americanisation is inevitable. In fact, we don’t stand a chance and there is no going back. Our politics cannot be as easily wrapped up in grievance-mongering, rage-baiting, easy to consume entertainment with influencers and virality. There is no Australian Charlie Kirk, but Australians today all know and have an opinion on Charlie Kirk, God rest him (I just watched Hot Fuzz again).

Likewise, running campaigns on issues like transgenderism or getting cultural marxism out of schools have been known to be a losing strategy outside of the U.S. Likely because hitherto, the average person in these countries hadn’t heard of these things and were blissfully ignorant of the American news cycle.

Yeah, nah… Australians lived in peace, never having seen Jubilee or Nick Fuentes on Instagram reels. They were content eating servo’ sausage rolls and two decks of darts for lunch, and then spending $350 on the shittest bag of cocaine on God’s green earth every weekend. It was a simple life, and it was ours…

We saw this in the last federal election here in Australia.1 Now, there were many contributing factors to the Liberal Party’s profound defeat and implosion - many that were a long time coming. One amongst them was just Peter Dutton as a person, who had the most cursed, baby eating energy I have ever seen.

Imagine trying to prop up a cabinet minister and former detective senior constable, who by the way, had a personality as dry as you would expect of those two job titles, as a strong-man Trump figure parroting concerns about cultural marxism and left wing activist teachers in schools. Meanwhile, the other party was trying to address the housing crisis and inflation with actual policy suggestions. The Liberals back tracked on this mid election and were left with no clear campaign vision.

Whether you like the policies or not, running a campaign that isn’t abstract and detached from people’s actual material conditions is a good idea. Unless, of course, you live in the United States. Then, your campaign should ignore facts of public life and focus on what the dreaded, homogenous out-group are doing and how they want to take your penis or elect a girl-boss president or whatnot.

On girl-bosses, in Australia, gender representation in parliament isn’t as much of a partisan issue, even if there is disagreement about how to go about it. Women’s participation in politics is actually at parity. Despite the Liberal party being behind and rife with sexism scandals, the amount of women in conservative politics in Commonwealth countries is still statistically higher than in the U.S. Republican party.

There is basically no discussion around if we are ready for a woman leader because, well, we had Queens - and we did pretty well. What’s more, the Liberals unpopularity with women is a recent phenomenon in their party history - the Liberals actually won the women’s vote up until the 1990s, a trend that has of course, reversed.

I find these demographic trends interesting because in the U.S., there is a tendency to essentialise them, as if women, immigrants or young white men are innately prone to vote a certain way. Yet, these same demographics often vote very differently in other countries, which means demographics aren’t necessarily destiny. In Australia, migrant status is a far poorer predictor of political affiliation than class, education and occupation.

For all the above reasons, it is also common to see American right wingers confuse conservatives in the Commonwealth as belonging to the left; see Ben Shapiro’s interaction with decorated British conservative Andrew Neil. Basically, Shapiro rage quit the interview early after insisting Neil admit he is a leftist. To Shapiro, Neil did not signal the right identity markers, so he must belong to the other tribe. This unyielding need for social sorting, in which someone cannot engage without knowing what tribe one belongs to, is a complete lapse of critical thinking skills and basically a sure fire way to ruin your worldview and society.

A significant part of the conversation between Shapiro and Neil concerned Shapiro’s comments on abortion. In Commonwealth countries, individual MPs may be for or against access, but neither major party makes it a part of their platform. This issue is one of conscience, a free vote issue, a concept foreign to U.S. politics whereby personal matters of ethics and religion are not defining goals of political parties.

But alas, we are all American now. In Australia, the Liberal party might be completely finished. One Nation is here and it’s all about vibes and culture war politics. I originally wrote five paragraphs explaining how One Nation’s supposed policies aren’t actually specific policy plans but vague gesturing, but I deleted it…

I thought it more entertaining to just remark how much of One Nation’s base consists of Aussie MAGA supporters, who literally wear the campaign merchandise of a foreign leader, clearly having been victims of the X algorithm and copy-pasting American talking points about Republicans and Democrats onto the Australian political system, which just doesn’t work.

So, older Commonwealth conservatism was different. Edmund Burke conceptualised politics as concerning inheritance, habit, institutional memory… Society isn’t a machine that can be reprogrammed by ideologies deduced from first principles, it results from social practices formed over time. Ergo, we should make specific changes only when we have to, when there is a specific, pragmatic need that can be solved through policy.

The conservative instinct was to be careful with what already exists, because social life is complicated and people rarely understand all the reasons an institution works until they break it. They had a more careful and deliberate temperament.

In fact, I would argue the entirety of the older canon of political theory feels completely different from the politics we have now. Whether it was Karl Marx or Thomas Hobbes, they were mostly trying to explain authority, institutions, property, class, liberty or social order. Despite what you might hear, Marx himself hardly wrote about abortion.

For the above reasons, this is why some questions were treated as matters of conscience. A Liberal MP could be pro-choice. A Labor MP could be personally opposed to abortion. Someone could be religious without wanting every moral question or matter of identity turned into a partisan party issue. We could work out these ambiguous and highly personal issues without nationalising them in the aforementioned way. The culture war eats away at this.

I want to end by saying, there was once a time when a person’s worldview could be an assemblage of different beliefs, not hung together on the basis of group identity. For instance, you could be pro life, but pro migration, or the inverse. I personally have met many pro-life Labor voters. Logically, there is no reason to think advocating for something like stronger borders entails being a social conservative.

Today however, knowing someone’s view on one political issue is actually a good predictor of what they will believe on another, even when they are completely unrelated. Today, that person whose views are an expression of their own conscience, untainted by the centralised ideologies of a mass media empire, is rare.

I make videos for my own enjoyment, and because I am an autistic, mentally ill, quirked up white boy, I enjoy educating and talking about philosophy. So, I want to try and add some kind of informative angle in my videos moving forward, even if it’s at the expense of viewership.

I get a lot of comments speculating about my beliefs on this channel. Often these comments are sincere questions. This makes sense seeing I cover political figures. While also, if you didn’t know, I had an old channel when I was a teenager / early 20s that was pretty far right. I am going to include a footnote1 briefly explaining my old channel and I should probably write another article elaborating in further detail.

So, one reason I cover many right wing figures on my channel is because I remember them from this time period when I was somewhat of a right wing figure myself, and I enjoy going down memory lane and remembering the fever dream.

To make things more confusing, over the years, I have gone through a few lib phases. I just enjoy playing around and experimenting with different views. I believe I have an ability to let positions come and go, tinkering with them without vivaciously assenting to them, nor tying them up with my sense of self and feeling physical pain when they are threatened. So, this question, “what are your political views?” is reasonable.

That being said, today, I don’t have many confident political views at all, despite the assortment of beliefs I have had in the past. These days, I just like to point and laugh at bullshit (technical word in philosophy I explain here) and sloppy thinking. Let me elaborate.

Most of politics, especially political theory, is ambiguous and unscientific, bottoming out at ungrounded moral intuitions - system one reflexes and seemings. If you think the answers are obvious, you probably have a hermeneutically sealed belief system, and it is likely you are terrible at predicting what those with different views might say.

Politics is really where good epistemology goes to die and I see this every time I read my comment section. Rather than relying on good explanatory merits - like parsimony, lack of ad-hocness, predictability, falsifiability, modesty, etc - most political figures base their views on contrarianism, grievance mongering, novelty, tribalism, identity markers, and other non-truth tracking values.

In philosophy you are taught that a stronger argument concludes less, such that you don’t go beyond what the agreed upon premises actually support. This is just basic probability theory - you’re less likely to be wrong if you are saying less new things about the world. In politics, it is the opposite, with people speculating wild conclusions about the futures and motivations of political actors from little information.

I think it’s okay to enjoy interesting and speculative theories, but don’t go around expecting others to find them convincing when they aren’t powered by epistemic values that could motivate someone to agree from their own unique starting points. In a way, you need to participate in the democracy of reason, even if the elections are rigged and unfair.

Putting this absolute bar I wrote aside (I’ll just leave it in bold), it doesn’t make sense to me to assign moral blame to people for disagreeing when your views are epistemically ambitious and not at all obvious to anyone, which by the way, is true of socialism, liberalism, heckin’ white nationalism, or whatever other political ideology is going around online.

You can probably remember a time you weren’t aware of your current belief-system and didn’t think you were worthy of scorn. What’s more, even those who radically disagree with you can be victims of external factors or motivations that aren’t necessarily bad. I myself have an extreme, excitement seeking personality. The literature shows this is actually a risk factor for being radicalised. Yet, this trait of mine has led me to live a colourful and interesting life many people only dream about.

Furthermore, cognitive distortions are completely normalised in political discussions. My whole comment section is full of black and white thinking, mind reading, motive attribution, moral licensing, whataboutism, out-group homogeneity bias, and the list goes on.

What’s more, this isn’t just degenerate chatters in my comment section. No, the largest political commentators in the world regularly show these lapses in critical thinking. There will be people who literally read this article, and out of their delusional paranoia and defensive tribalism, assume I am on the other side (or might as well be) because I don’t sufficiently agree with their pet political issue - reflexively writing me off.

This reflex of labelling me as something that is already known to be false, and ergo discarding what I have said wholesale, is a protective mechanism. It is automatic and terminates thought before my arguments can be seriously engaged. This way, the risk of being shown to be wrong hits zero. At the same time, if you are wrong, the probability of becoming right hits zero as well.

You are trapped in a matrix of reflexes and biases that can only be escaped by slowing down and suspending confidence. If it turns out you were right all along, then good for you. If it turns out you weren’t, then you have been rewarded with the truth. Either way, you have nothing to lose by being modest, deliberate and slow to believe.

All of this isn’t to say that there aren’t actual policy experts who can be correct or incorrect about political facts and figures, or that no one knows what they are talking about. However, you, presumably a 20 something year old university student or office worker, is not involved in that PhD level discourse.

If you can’t tell me what, say, a posterior predictive distribution is without looking it up, you just aren’t an expert and you should modify your confidence levels accordingly. You are likely to be wrong about academic papers you can’t even properly read. Now, go do your job, those emails aren’t going to send themselves.

It’s also worth noting that these days, PhD level political science is less concerned with labels that neatly tie up all political explananda under a narrow little explanans, like race, or class, or geography, unlike say, nationalists or marxists and other ideologues. (See the credibility revolution.)

But hell, maybe you are right. Maybe neo-bolshevist-orthodox-black-national-socialism or whatever micro-ideology you have chosen is the answer. But, I don’t feel arrogant enough to espouse a political worldview, I will leave that to wannabe gurus and more narcissistic personalities. I can however, grasp the basic principles that do make for a better worldview fairly well. This is what I want to espouse on my channel, in addition to having a laugh and some banter.

For instance, I want my next video to talk about far-left radicalisation, not because of the centrist grindset, but because a few papers show left wing extremism has different causes and motivations to what you might see on the right - causes and motivations that also undermine a proper working epistemology.

All this isn’t to say being a radical is never called for, even in today’s world, but for most issues, I believe the data suggests radicalisation is caused by maladaptive personal factors rather than political necessity. Those personal factors differ on both sides, they are the same in other respects, and to me, that shit is interesting.

Anyway, long story short, I don’t care what your politics are. I hope through my videos, moving forward, at least someone can refine their worldview to be more modest and follow better explanatory merits.

Expect a bit more of these kind of updates. I like being more involved with my audience. If you want me to actually cash out my quietist views on political theory in detail, I wrote an article here. The tl;dr is Wittgenstein ;)

Just kidding, I am a wigger nationalist.

Energy drink? Monster.

Line in the bathroom? Speed.

Sunglasses and hat? Bought from 711.

Playlist? Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock.

Hell yeah, it’s wiggering time.

In his final days, after refusing further chemotherapy for metastatic cancer, Christopher Lasch said the following to his physician.

“I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.”

Lasch saw valuing life only as something to be preserved at all costs, without regard to meaning or dignity, as a defeat. He saw this as symptomatic of the same cultural sickness he would diagnose in his famous text “The Culture of Narcissism.”

At the same time, this “cowardly clinging to life for its own sake” marks an inability to fully grasp life on its own terms, of which death and despair are immanent certainties. This paradox is what I want to explore in this article.

Moreover, the American ethos that we have inherited around the globe always champions a happy ending. When someone tells you about their difficulties, their depressions, their pains… there is also the expectation that you offer a silver lining.

“But now, I have my beautiful house… and my beautiful wife...”

Though sometimes, there is no silver lining - life is just hard for no reason. Likewise, there is no real epiphany in my story. I do not regret my attempt at my own life… and I am not glad that I am still here… I walked away with nothing and there isn’t anything to gain from reading this…

In 2017, I tried to kill myself by hanging. I had written a note and tied a noose around my neck. I was interrupted by my partner. This would traumatise her greatly. Understandably, she would abandon me. My burden is too much for someone else to bear. In what I thought were my last moments, I felt alone and afraid.

I was 20 years old. My university found out. I had to talk to some official who overlooked issues related to student well-being. It was completely performative and I could see their apathy as they went through the routine for dealing with such matters. My own parents didn’t really care. Their response was not dissimilar from if they found out I had the common cold.

I have spent ever since torturing myself over this confusing time in my life. Through my actions, I revealed what a traumatised and volatile person I was. I felt naked in front of everyone and I was ashamed.

One contributing factor to my situation is that I had known people who had committed suicide. For anyone who has not experienced death, especially unexpected or premature death, the mind struggles to comprehend the fragility of life.

Sigmund Freud stated that at an unconscious level, people cannot grasp their own mortality. Even in imagining our own deaths, we still exist as spectators. The reality of certain, permanent demise never becomes a part of our mental furniture.

As a child, I lived under the shelter of such naivety. When a family friend - someone I saw on an almost daily basis - took their own life, I was abruptly confronted with the transience of all things. It was a sobering experience that sent me spiralling into an obsession with my own death. Soon after, another person I knew would take their own life as well.

In these cases, the neighbourhood was devastated. These were popular, athletic and beloved people. The whole town came out mourning for them. In my own case, I am spiritually sick, a social leper who was ostracised in my youth and failed to fit in.

After failing to take my own life, contrary to the popular realisation that your actions affect others, I solidified the belief that my life doesn’t really matter to people. At times, I feel I am an inadequate and degenerate person who has never been loved by anyone. These were the same feelings that led me to suicide.

People’s efforts to console me caused so much frustration - I was angry at their dogmas regarding the meaning of life. It is very human to cling to any delusion of hope, no matter the circumstances. I submit it is better to confront despair. Freedom can only come from an honest conscience. When we stop seeking consolation, we can see clearly for the first time

But instead, I was bombarded with an antiquated narcissism, one found across time and place, that states the world is listening to you and your desires.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“Everything works out in the end.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“When one door closes, another one opens.”

and worst of all…

”Things can only get better”

These types of statements, influenced by therapy-speak and the self-help industrial complex, are built on the false teleology that the world is not completely indifferent to you.

The fact is, you are not meant to be happy. The hitherto history of life on Earth is one of immense suffering, life was brutal and short for most creatures. Animal life evolved from unfair predator / prey relationships and natural selection processes - in which anything only survives because others have died - and there is no room for benevolent providence.

For most of your ancestors, there was no conversation about self-fulfilment, your identity was inherited, your profession was given to you, you were brought into the world out of economic necessity, and your chances of making it to adulthood were slim.

You live in a tiny window called modern society, in which the post-war economy of the 20th century created a new type of man, spoilt by other’s sacrifices and unearned advantages. Since this time, trait narcissism has risen every decade, as values of obligation and duty shifted to self-actualisation and personal fulfilment.

Questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” - before reserved only for an elite class, living off the rank exploitation of others - are now being asked by whole generations of middle class, professional managerials, i.e., “the me generation.”

Your ancestors, on the other hand, were economic fodder. The fact happiness is your life goal is a great privilege, but also, an accident... If you cannot be happy, given the hitherto history of life on Earth, there is no reason to think happiness was meant for you. So, what are you meant for? The answer is nothing. You weren’t meant for anything…

Men have invented all sorts of fantasies - platonic forms, heavens beyond the Earth - looking for their purpose in other worlds, conceding that there is no redemption to be found in this one. Like scared animals, theologians and philosophers have desperately tried to escape the bleak condition of this life by imagining there is another…

Yet, despite me saying this, I pursued religion for many years. It was awkward, I never could get my foot in - but at times, I felt I would do anything to surrender myself to that divine immanence that states there is a benevolent order - to have confidence that existence itself tends toward good.

This tension between my deep yearning for transcendence - truth, beauty and the good - and the inability for the world to provide it for me, results in a kind of schizophrenia and lived contradiction. The vulnerable child inside me screams out for meaning, while the rational adult tells him it isn’t coming.

In the beginning of the article, I said there was no epiphany. I want to contradict myself yet again.

I have learnt that life isn’t a teleological process, marching you towards either moral or material improvement. Instead, it’s a patchwork of highs and lows - tension and release. It’s a composition and multiplicity, where meaning comes from a creative recombination of intensities.

John Dewey rejected the separation between art and ordinary life. For him, experience itself - when lived fully and consciously - is aesthetic. When the scattered moments of living cohere into a felt whole, like the structure of a poem or song, experience achieves what he called “heightened vitality.” This vitalism has no external purpose - it does not earn divine favour, moral progress, or any end beyond itself… Its value lies entirely in being lived...

For example, every heartbreak is painful, but it meant the opportunity to experience someone, to see someone’s inner world, to connect on a primordial and subterranean level beneath the masks of social convention, even if just for a while.

But also, the pain of loss is itself a privilege. Through enduring loss, you maximise the possibilities of experience and carry out the tragedy to its final act, rather than leaving the stage prematurely. I am grateful I was apart of an amazing person’s life, but I am also grateful for having lost them.

This isn’t about seeing the silver lining in all things, clinging onto the delusion of hope as laid out before, but rather, grasping and coming to acceptance with life as an aesthetic act - confronting the whole world without escape. In the same way you don’t leave the theatre before the play ends because you would prefer a happy ending.

It is, in fact, the tragic ending itself that makes the play great art. In the same vain, the person who lies to themselves to avoid confronting the despair of their own existence - the coward clinging to life for its own sake, who begged me to stay alive because “things can only get better” - they FAIL to appreciate the full composition of life. They are walking out of the theatre, and missing what should be a complete and magnificent work of art.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that art suspends the torment of the will, as we experience beauty in a moment of pure perception. Basically, art allows engagement with life’s highs and lows without treating them as lessons or steps toward redemption. Art presents things in a complete patchwork, with each patch - joy, despair, stillness, chaos - contributing to the total composition.

You cannot ignore suffering and despair in life. Instead, life requires an aesthetic acceptance of its full complexity.

To everyone who has said I shouldn’t talk about these things, invalidating my emotions, stating I should effectively lie about my own life so I appear just as sheltered as they are. I say “fuck you.”

I feel deeply... I am not afraid of risk... and I refuse to pretend everything is fine…

Do I regret trying to take my own life? No… I am grateful for it…

Speakers in the discourse are captured by either side, and their speech is no longer attached to any regard for the truth. Rather, they make statements that are the most convenient for whatever side they identify with - seeking to shape the information ecosystem to match their side’s survival needs.

One of the motivations for this type of truth-indifferent speech is that it builds reputational capital and peer recognition. Instead of getting at how things are, the speaker is trying to reinforce their social or institutional influence.

Politics is one clear source of this speech - another is academia. The latter being full of performative works aimed at achieving intellectual celebrityhood. Namely, through creating complexity and obscurity where it’s not needed, and confusing the reader into thinking something smart must have occurred.

However, there is a better explanation for this. It’s all bullshit… In this article, I am going to be advancing 1) Harry Frankfurt’s concept of “bullshit” as an intentional stance without regard for the truth 2) G.A Cohen’s concept of bullshit as output and a linguistic product and 3) the concept of pseudo-profound bullshit as well as cognitive explanations for what makes someone vulnerable to this type of speech vis-a-vis Pennycook et al.

Bullshit

“It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as the essence of bullshit.” - Harry Frankfurt

In 1986, Harry Frankfurt published an essay entitled “On Bullshit”. Bullshit denotes a type of speech that has no concern for the truth. Politicians are known for lying and obscuring, “I am not a crook”, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, etc. However, bullshit is distinct from lying, and many politicians are bullshitters as well as liars.

A liar is concerned with the truth in virtue of trying to conceal or obfuscate it from the listener. Bullshit, on the other hand, has zero concern for the truth whatsoever. Ergo, bullshit is defined by the speaker’s epistemic stance towards the truth - indifference.

An obligatory example of bullshit was during POTUS Donald Trump’s first term, when Senior Counsellor to the President Kellyanne Conway stated “we have alternative facts” whilst defending the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration. This very notion of “alternative facts” suggests that there is no truth, as if the only importance of a statement is if it serves your own posturing and reputation.

Another prime candidate for bullshit speech is conspiracy theories. There is a phenomenon I like to call “casual conspiracism”. This refers to the type of conspiratorial ideation engaged in by everyday people, in which they casually throw out conspiratorial explanations for historical events without regard for the truth. Casual conspiracism sounds like “oh, I believe the CIA got him”, and is based purely on vibes.

In any case, the speaker is interested in having a contrarian, novel or exciting take rather than carefully trying to get at the truth. Perhaps more importantly, the casual conspiracist is posturing as above the crowd, attempting to boost their reputation as a shrewd outsider who “sees through the lies,” signalling discernment, superiority and independence rather than genuine understanding.

The biggest bullshitter, perhaps in all of human history, is President Donald Trump. This is a person who cannot resist bullshit statements, statements that come in a variety of flavours. These include:

1. Empty superlatives and self-promotion - such as stating “Nobody knows more about [X] than me.” on all sorts of issues he in fact has zero expertise on.

2. Vague, grandiose assurances - such as “we have the best economy in the history of our country” or “you’re going to be tired of winning”, emotional statements with zero regard for facts that arouse a sense of comfort in his supporters.

3. Contradictory statements - such as those regarding global warming, its existence and who is responsible for perpetuating climate discourse. This flip flopping on different claims based on what serves him in the moment makes it difficult to triangulate any consistent, genuine set of beliefs underneath the bullshit.

4. Hyperbolic branding of opponents - such as calling mainstream Democratic lawmakers communists - the purpose of which being obvious, to damage the reputation of his political rivals.

In all these instances, there is a clear indifference to the truth.

Moreover, a great bullshitter will even gesture towards the truth, despite having zero genuine regard for it. They will appeal to facts and logic, claim they are on the side of the truth, but these words are empty - there is no attempt to examine how their statements instantiate these things.

I have just described Frankfurt’s account of bullshit. However, others have identified other forms of bullshit statements, which I will now explain, beginning with G.A. Cohen’s notion of bullshit as unclarifiable unclarity.

Cohen’s Bullshit As Unclarifiable Unclarity

Frankfurt’s idea of bullshit is defined by an intentional stance in which the speaker is motivated by a disregard for truth. G.A Cohen offers a different account of bullshit, which focuses on bullshit as a linguistic product, which I will now explain.

In 2002, Cohen would publish “Deeper Into Bullshit”, seeking to expand on Frankfurt’s idea and offer a more nuanced taxonomy of bullshit. While Frankfurt’s original essay concerned the bullshit of everyday life, Cohen’s account focused on the bullshit of academia.

As Cohen states:

“(Frankfurt) does not acknowledge that the explicandum that attracted his interest is just one flower in the lush garden of bullshit.”

A crucial distinction Cohen makes is that of intent. Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit qualifies a lack of concern for the truth, implying that the bullshitter has insincere intentions. Cohen specifies another type of bullshit that purely concerns the output of the speaker, regardless of their sincerity. Cohen is concerned with the shit, not the bull, so to speak, and the essence of said shit is “unclarifiable unclarity”.

This type of bullshit is not just unclear, but impossible to clarify without rendering the idea either 1) banal and trivial, or 2) unrecognisable from its original formulation. Cohen states that, in academic philosophy, this type of bullshit is ripe in the likes of Hegel or Heidegger.

There are several “analytic” readings of these two thinkers, readings that strip them of their vague metaphysical commitments, but in doing so, construct a more modest philosophy that Hegel or Heidegger themselves would have likely been unsatisfied with.

Of these two philosophers, I myself am more familiar with Heidegger, a thinker I actually do find value in. I can, however, speak briefly on how the German phenomenologist resists clarification and the tensions produced thereby.

Firstly, Heidegger was engaged in a grand metaphysical project, stating explicitly that he sought to re-examine the “ontology of Being”.1 He argues this question has been forgotten since Plato, who separated being from becoming through his theory of forms, and hitherto, Western philosophy has turned its attention away from Being itself, towards becoming and to particular entities. Moreover, this Being of all beings is what Heidegger sought to unconceal.

Yet, many have alleged Heidegger never delivers an account of such Being, but rather, offers an existentialist work on how to live a meaningful life as a finite member of the human species. This latter reading is far from the grand metaphysical project Heidegger set out to accomplish.

Not to mention, Heidegger rejected the label of existentialist, but his critics thought this label fairly characterised his works nonetheless. The most cynical critics stating Being and Time’s only intelligible purpose is basically as a self-help book, one that’s contents cannot be grasped with absolute clarity even after a lifetime of study. Ergo, in clarifying the unclarity, we are left with something distinct from what had originally been said.

Cohen’s example when it comes to unclarifiable bullshit is the Structural Marxism of Louis Althusser. 20th century French philosophy is notoriously difficult. When one struggles to understand theorists like Althusser, one usually places the blame on themselves. Cohen begins his essay by telling the same story, stating that, on the contrary, the reason Althusserian Marxism is difficult is because it’s “loaded with bullshit”.

Althusser’s concepts of the interpellation of the individual as a subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, offer an allure of profundity, but trying to extract any truth-apt idea from them either leaves you with trite observations or something radically different from what was written. Cohen describes this experience as follows:

“Someone struggles for ages with some rebarbative text, manages to find some sense in it, and then reports that sense with enthusiasm, even though it is a banality that could have been expressed in a couple of sentences instead of across the course of the dozens of paragraphs to which the said someone has subjected herself.”

The significance of Cohen’s concept of “output bullshit”, or bullshit as unclarifiable unclarity, is that it reframes many of the great works of European philosophy. Many canonical texts, long treated as profound, may be difficult not because they contain elusive truths, but because nothing clear actually lies beneath the continental fog at all. The fog itself is what makes these texts alluring, and they are bullshit precisely because there is no concern for what, if anything, lies beneath it.

This form of bullshit closely resembles one of its relatives - pseudo profound bullshit. A concept I will now explain, before exploring cognitive explanations as to why such bullshit succeeds in impressing people.

Pseudo-Profound Bullshit

In 2015, five cognitive psychologists wrote an article entitled “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”.2 In the paper, Pennycook et al. empirically investigates why some people judge meaningless, impressive-sounding sentences as “profound.”

Pseudo-profound bullshit refers to seemingly meaningful statements that are syntactically coherent but semantically vacuous. It imitates profundity through grammatical form and vague but emotionally suggestive language. However, the contents of such statements, once clarified, are either meaningless or trite.

Consider the following clip of Jordan Peterson’s account of Pinocchio on The Joe Rogan Podcast.

Peterson states the following:

“When something dies, it’s spirit is embedded in a carcass… When things deteriorate, you have these carcasses lying around with their dead spirits - the spirit of what gave rise to them is still inside them and the job is to go into the carcass and revitalise the spirit that produced it and not to parasitise it.”

Peterson uses evocative metaphors and rhetorical flourish, speaking of carcasses, spirits and revitalisation. The grammar of the statements suggests something about cultural renewal, yet the referents are vague. For example, what does it mean to parasitise a dead spirit?

No doubt, any meaningful proposition that could be extracted from Peterson’s speech could be stated much clearer. Peterson’s vague metaphorical language that obscures and resists clarification adds nothing, other than a veneer of depth and profundity that cannot be cashed out in plain English. This is a textbook example of pseudo-profound bullshit.

Up until this point, we have focused on the bullshit and the bullshitter, Pennycook et al.’s paper shifts its attention from the producer to the receiver - to the bullshitee. Why do some people perceive profundity where none exists? The authors argue those who don’t consider the specific meaning of words, receive information with little processing, acting more reflexively than reflectively, are more vulnerable to pseudo-profound bullshit.

Pennycook et al. (2015) conducted four studies to measure how people respond to pseudo-profound bullshit. Participants rated the perceived profundity of these statements alongside genuine motivational quotes and mundane factual sentences. The researchers then created the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BRS) based on participants’ ratings.

They correlated bullshit receptivity with measures of cognitive reflection, intelligence, numeracy, and belief systems (e.g., paranormal, conspiratorial, and religious beliefs). The results showed systematic individual differences: those scoring lower on analytic thinking and higher on intuitive or uncritical openness tended to rate pseudo-profound bullshit as more meaningful.

“Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”

A useful concept to explain the allure of pseudo-profound bullshit is that of “ontological confusion”. This refers to the inability to distinguish between categories of existence and those of language, such as confusing metaphors, symbolism and rhetoric as ascribing real properties about things in the world.

I will add that ontological confusion is a byproduct of “epistemic looseness”, in which a person doesn’t maintain clear boundaries between concepts, sliding between symbolism and reality, making them more susceptible to pseudo-profound bullshit. This slipperiness is more broadly characterised by a lax attitude towards evidence.

In this case, the bullshitee doesn’t have clear epistemic standards, rhetoric is confused with justification, the contents of sentences aren’t being processed and assessed by any strong criteria, and the suggestive grammar alone is enough to convince them something profound is being said - when it isn’t.

Closing Remarks

In this article, we have examined Frankfurt, Cohen and Pennybrook et al. Frankfurt defines bullshit along the lines of intentional stance, Cohen as a linguistic product, and Pennybrook et al. in terms of cognitive reception.

Bullshit comes in many variants. In our countless interactions with bad-faith interlocutors on the internet, it’s easy to come up with your own accounts of bullshit that you have seen play out online.

One good resource for identifying such speech is the Decoding The Gurus Podcast, I will link one particularly insightful episode here. If you have your own taxonomy of bullshit, I would love to hear about it.

In the meantime, I am going to leave you with a sweet pic of a dog wearing sunglasses and headphones:

In this article, I am going to list off what I find to be the worst aspects of Australian culture, aspects I also believe to be the most commonly experienced and reported on. Why am I doing this? Because 1) it’s cathartic and 2) a culture needs to be exposed to criticisms in order to improve itself.

What’s more, many of these features of Australian culture exist in other countries to varying extents. Hopefully, my criticisms can help you better understand the dynamics of your own culture as well.

(Authors note: I stopped reading the comments on this article because many of them were vile and abusive, without any specific criticism I could actually respond to. If you leave a comment, sadly, I’m not reading it.)

The culture

Australia has no culture, and if it does, it’s extremely vague in comparison to those found in any other continent. There are very few common ceremonies, beliefs, religions, or historic traditions found between Australians.

When asked what constitutes Australian culture, most Aussies will mention slang words, “friendliness”, junk food items like Tim Tams or dishes that literally aren’t Australian, like chicken parmesans.

If you walk down the street in most other countries, the buildings have a distinct historicity and character. They are even organised around a way of life, such as the cafe culture in Paris or Italy. The architecture tells you a story of who they are. In Australia, the few areas with any distinct architecture or character have been rendered completely unaffordable to anyone who isn’t a millionaire.

The majority of the population is being relegated to quickly built suburbs that lack any amenities and exist solely to provide “affordable”, identical homes with no insulation for the hoards of wage workers who have been priced out of the cities where they work.

If I had to pick something as an authentic example of Australian culture, it’s mania over the property market. You cannot have a single interaction with an Australian without them mentioning property. They are either one of the haves talking about all the opportunities to buy property, or they are a have-not terrified about how they will never afford a home.

Australians have a deeply entrenched Protestant work ethic. This means feeling guilty for taking time off, maximising productivity at every turn, and growing up being compared to other kids in the neighbourhood on the basis of performance and future work prospects.

Moreover, Australians define themselves by their careers and financial success, the peak metric of which is owning property. They have internalised this value system and therefore judge others who refuse to play, deeming them as “losers” or “drop kicks”.

This impacts society at large. If you visit an Australian city, rather than people enjoying their time, drinking coffees or smoking at local cafes, it’s all men in suits walking at a fast pace, maybe dropping into a characterless, airport-style establishment selling overpriced, cold sandwiches to lawyers.

Most people then, live in a complete “non-place”. They aren’t a part of any historical moment. People’s homes and communities have been brought under the same umbrella as strip malls, airports, truck stops and industrial areas. If you were to view a photograph of a modern Australian’s neighbourhood, with it’s man-made ponds and shopping malls, there is no telling what country or culture it belonged to - it could be anywhere.

Fake friendliness

One mark of Aussie culture that I mentioned before is friendliness. Australians pride themselves on being friendly and out-going, maybe more so than any other nation. Despite this, any immigrant to Australia will tell you it seems almost impossible to make friends with Australians. I once heard a Polish person say “Australians are friendly, but they aren’t friends”.

The Scanlon Foundation’s annual Mapping Social Cohesion surveys repeatedly note that while Australians score high on “friendliness,” migrants often report difficulty moving beyond surface interactions into deep friendships. This is despite the same report showing Australians generally hold positive views towards immigration and multiculturalism.

I submit the reason for this is that Australians are “fake friendly”. They make nice gestures and engage in small talk, but they are very uninterested in being your friend. You can meet an Australian, kick it off with them, have an hour long conversation, and yet, feel a total resistance from them to further invite you into their lives in any meaningful way.

Likewise, most people in Australia are only close with their high school friends, maybe a few people from university, and then almost never expand their social circle in anyway later in life. If you didn’t grow up in Australia, there isn’t a viable pathway to friendship.

Richard White’s “Inventing Australia” analyses how the “friendly Aussie” trope was partly manufactured for national identity building and tourism, not a lived reality. White argues that propaganda from the war regarding “the friendly digger” and efforts to attract migrants from the UK were deliberate, top-down branding strategies.

If you find yourself without friends in Australia, I’m here to tell you it’s over. Your best bet at a robust social life is to leave the country, no matter how difficult that might seem. It’s easier than making friends with Australians.

Australians perform friendliness due to a long standing national script. In their hearts, Australians are an aggressive and toxic people full of anxieties, walking around with a chip on their shoulder, as I will discuss later.

The above results in a people that feel entirely disingenuous. They performatively ask “how ya goin?” without a single care for how you really feel. I’d rather be subjected to European coldness, only being asked how I’m going by the few people who really want to know.

The aforementioned Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion also found Australians are significantly less likely than Europeans to feel neighbours would help them in an emergency and have an ever declining sense of social trust.

The fact is, “Aussie friendliness” doesn’t exist. Not only are Australians not truly friendly, they basically hate each other. People are defensive, quick to judge and any misunderstanding is more likely to result in confrontational, honour culture behaviour than anything amicable or neighbourly.

Tall poppy syndrome

Tall poppy syndrome describes cultures that ostracise achievement or success. The term is named after poppy flowers, that are typically grown to be even, such that any flower that stands out is cut shorter. In the same vein, Australians are prone to have a cynical attitude towards not only success, but anyone who stands out in anyway.

Someone you know bought a house? Daddy’s money.

Someone got a new job? Nepo baby.

Someone got into great shape? Probably steroids.

Likewise, many Australian icons that are remembered with rose tinted glasses today were unfairly criticised for their success early on. Acts like Kylie Minogue and Silverchair had full cottage industries dedicated to baselessly hating on them, most likely for being young and successful.

Tall poppy syndrome has disastrous effects on society. Many social critics have recognised it as a major weakness of Australian culture. Studies show workplaces suffer measurable productivity losses from tall poppy dynamics, where high performers are subject to envy and undermining.

I have a memory of getting my first pay raise, attending a family gathering and sharing the news, only to have weirdly passive aggressive and sarcastic remarks made towards me the rest of the night… If you are Australian, your own flesh and blood will try to undermine your accomplishments…

The result of this attitude is having a social circle that doesn’t celebrate your successes and reinforces monotony and conformity. In many other countries, the response to such people would be that they aren’t good friends. In Australia, petty and low-quality friendships like this are the norm.

“Banter”

Australia has a big banter culture in which people tease each other as an act of endearment. For example, you walk in the room with a new haircut, and someone has to drop an obligatory comment like “do you want me to go get your money back for you?”

In many cases, banter descends into bullying and a means of reinforcing social hierarchies. A typical example is in the workplace. Superiors often cement their positions through taking advantage of banter culture.

Australian Human Rights Commission reports show one of the highest reported rates of workplace bullying among OECD nations. The Lloyd’s Register Foundation reported that Australia and New Zealand are listed as the worst global region for workplace violence and harassment.

Similar to tall poppy syndrome, many of the cruelties regularly committed by Australians as a result of their culture are excused as “banter”. A common experience in Australia is to be treated with bitterness and malice, only to be gaslit into thinking you can’t handle a joke upon calling it out.

A friend of mine used to work at the same company as me. At a time that I needed a place to stay, he offered for me to move in. After accepting, word soon got out at work. Without explicitly stating it, my superior consistently made joking remarks suggesting that we were gay.

If I had addressed how inappropriate his comments were, he would predictably deny that he was making the implication and suggest that his comments were just banter, as if I was simply being too sensitive.

In a country like The United States, these types of derogatory comments in a professional setting are almost unheard of. In Australia, being bullied by your superiors knowing damn well you can’t make similar comments in return is very normal.

Similarly, say you’re on the spectrum, you have some quirky hobbies, you are a bit introverted… If you live in Australia, and you don’t fit the social mould of what’s considered “cool”, you will notice “banter” is far more directed towards you than those who do. Isn’t that funny?

This culture of bullying is made even worse when mixed with alcohol. Australia is an alcoholic nation. Not only do Australians love alcohol, they love drugs. As a result, it’s very common to be yelled at or mocked by inebriated groups of men on the street, wanting to belittle you or show off in front of their peers. Likely, this is an effort to compensate for the aforementioned anxieties and insecurities baked into them through a toxic culture.

Basically, Australians are hostile creatures who, due to English-speaking politeness and hedging culture, conceal their hostility under the guise of humour and banter.

Closing remarks

There are many positive things about Australia, from the high wages and quality of life to the sunny beaches and nice weather. That being said, I have a certain personality that makes the above criticisms more pertinent to my own well-being.

For others, perhaps people who value solitude and require a less robust social network, what has been laid out in this article could just be minor observations. As stated in the beginning of this article, this is a subjective rant of which you are welcome to disagree.

What’s ironic, is this whole article itself could be attributed to “cultural cringe”, a well documented phenomenon in which Australians feel an inferiority complex about their own culture.

Pretentious? Yes. However, I noticed this vain attempt to capture an aesthetic made up some of my motivation to write. It’s easy to imagine then how belonging to a shared aesthetic is what motivates civic virtue and participation in society.

One of the weaknesses of liberalism is it’s failure to offer a coherent aesthetic, unlike communism or fascism, which owe much of their allure to their mythic reconstruction of society. In contrast, liberalism is mostly procedural, confining questions of identity to the individual and private taste.

Almost unanimously, political scientists have understood aesthetics to be a core part of fascist movements. Walter Benjamin wrote about how the seduction of fascism was that the body politics could become beautiful, disciplined, and transcendent. Fascism “aestheticised politics”.

The salutes, decorative uniforms and swastikas… The architecture, rural idylls, idealised families, folk costumes and patriotic songs… These are all highly condensed, symbolic forms with specific political intention.

One such purpose is to cement a hierarchy of beauty, strength and purity, furthering a politics of exclusion and framing minorities as subversive and degenerate. However, another purpose of fascist aesthetics is to construct a mythic vision of a pure past and shared destiny, uniting the politic under one unified body.

Boris Groys argued that communism (especially Stalinism) transformed society into a total aesthetic project - reality itself was to be designed like an artwork, one symbolic system of the worker, the soldier and the red star.

Stalinist Socialist Realism - the cultural doctrine of The Soviet Union - exalted the heroic worker and peasant and portrayed them as belonging to a shared, utopian future.

Liberalism, on the other hand, describes rules for political competition and participation, but it hardly offers the citizens a grammar of identity.

A defining feature of liberalism is that society consists of not one citizen, but many. There isn’t just the Volk or the worker, but a diversity of different individuals.

John Rawls argued one of the aims of politics was to have heterogenous groups with different values peacefully live together, using democratic participation as the means without surrendering those differing values to authoritarian rule, so long as those values weren’t unreasonable.

Democracies are pluralistic - within them, each group has its own aesthetic. To unify the politic under one image seems at odds with the very constitution of liberalism.

Liberalism then, results in an “aesthetic vacuum,” filled by consumerism and ironic detachment. In times of turmoil, where the norms of democracy begin to fail, fascist and authoritarian groups can take advantage of this by offering to fill the void.

This weakness, however, is largely the result of the post-war period, i.e., neoliberalism, which supplanted the civic emphasis of liberalism with an economic program. Prior to this, democracies were established through bloody revolution, so that all men could be free and equal.

The French tricolour, civic ceremonies, the Statue of Liberty, and neoclassical capitol buildings are all examples of the aesthetic of liberal revolution. I submit, these images of liberalism are superior to the aforementioned aesthetics of authoritarianism precisely because they do not rely on myth or irrational exaltation.

Fascist aesthetics rely on an unreality of golden ages, natural hierarchies and politics as spectacle. Liberal aesthetics, in contrast, are based on the hard realities of revolution and fighting for the values of equality and politics as inclusion.

If liberal democracy is to resist authoritarian aesthetic projects, it must cultivate its own symbolic grammar - rooted in civic equality, revolutionary memory, and democratic participation - and not surrender that terrain to its enemies.

"It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment." - Charlie Kirk

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, it seems natural to have a “fuck around and find out” response. There are many questions about how much of a role Kirk played in his own demise, being a divisive figure who routinely took a side against compassion. Many of Kirk’s most inflammatory statements are now circulating - like that empathy is “dangerous”, or that he would hypothetically expect his own daughter to carry the baby of her rapist to full term.

There are two components to Kirk’s murder; 1) the descriptive explanation of events that led to his death, and 2) the moral justification. I believe Kirk and MAGA conservatives have a role in 1), namely, through routinely demonising institutions and state officials as belonging to a subversive conspiracy to undermine The United States. Deliberately creating affective polarisation through fear mongering about universities, journalists and the woke mob is a part of the causal chain of events leading to Kirk’s death. However, regarding 2), I will argue there is no moral justification for Kirk’s death on liberalism.

In America, people die of gun violence everyday. Less than an hour after Kirk’s murder, a school shooting occurred in Denver, in which many victims faced a similar graphic scene to what was experienced by Kirk, only they were children. Naturally, it might seem odd that many liberals are mourning Kirk’s death, displaying emotions far beyond what we see for the countless victims of violence who don’t spread right-wing views.

However, the reason Kirk’s murder is so shocking is not due to him being a shining example of civic virtue, it’s due to the political implications. This was political violence against someone who was basically a podcaster and media figure. He wasn’t Hitler, nor was he guilty of the same fascistic and authoritarian political means Hitler envoked in his early years of political life.

Kirk doesn’t come near the threshold in which a state of exception is necessary to save democracy. Ergo, his murder was in vain, nothing good will come from it - particularly for the left. The narrative that the left is inherently violent is being pushed before the shooter or their motives are even known. Instead of a threat to democracy being removed, already existing threats have been inflamed.

While also, his death is the very type of tribal act of violence that democracy ought to curtail. Not only did this assassination achieve nothing, but Kirk’s death could undermine democratic norms in virtue of potentially spawning a domino effect in which political violence against partisans becomes more normalised.

There is a stereotype that liberals take democracy for granted and aren’t aware of the sacrifices required to maintain it. Anyone denouncing Kirk’s murder is being accused of this. I submit there is a large difference between appreciating the revolutions that established democracy and legitimising the murder of ideological opponents within democratic society, which in turn, also grants reciprocal license for the other side to kill you.

Democracy is intended to limit political violence through institutions and civic participation, killing a podcaster is hardly necessary to maintain this order. Those who believe such senseless violence is justified are against institution building and want to drag us back into a tribal dark age of constant war, without any peaceful means to settle our differences.

It isn’t a liberal’s ignorance of the conditions needed to sustain a free society that threatens democracy. What erodes it, is LARPING about how you’re willing to commit terrorism from behind your computer screen.

Faux-centrists are people who claim to neither be on the left or the right, yet routinely accommodate reactionary politics while one-sidedly criticising progressive ones. What’s more, fringe and far-fetched theories on the right are treated as one interesting perspective amongst many - demanding respect and care - while such theories on the left are dismissed as radical and harmful, as we shall see.

Recently, self-described radical centrist PF Jung appeared in a debate with left-wing YouTuber Big Joel. This debate occurred after PF Jung uploaded a video entitled “Why No One Loves Nick Fuentes More Than I Do”, Fuentes being a far-right, holocaust denier and white supremacist.

The central thesis of this video was that, because Fuentes criticises Israel, this offsets any harm resulting from his racism and white supremacy. PF Jung also cherry picks quotes from Fuentes that create plausible deniability, suggesting that his racism is just edginess, and ignores the millions of other times Fuentes has directly advocated for racial exclusion in the U.S., including advocating for a white ethnostate.

Nonetheless, P.F Jung’s video resulted in him having a debate with Big Joel, which I will now summarise. I will also argue that P.F Jung is a faux-centrist and that his performance brilliantly displays all the features of faux-centrism, like reflexively feeling the need to run defence for the far-right.

In the debate, PF Jung argues that advocating for Holocaust denial is not inherently antisemitic, as if Holocaust deniers didn’t also overwhelmingly believe in the “great replacement” conspiracy. The majority of the time, a central belief of Holocaust denial is that the Holocaust was fabricated as a racket against white gentiles to facilitate mass immigration and white genocide.

On the question of if Holocaust denial is antisemitic, PF Jung’s standard is extremely high; logical impossibility. If it’s not contradictory to imagine someone who denies the Holocaust and yet doesn’t hold prejudiced attitudes towards Jews, then Holocaust denial is not antisemitic. Obviously, whether or not Holocaust denial is antisemitic is not a matter of logical necessity or definition, but implication and practice. Holocaust denial is antisemitic because its adherents spread harmful conspiracies about Jews.

PF Jung sets the bar for antisemitism so high that nothing short of openly praising Hitler qualifies. Then, when Fuentes does exactly that, PF Jung literally excuses it - Fuentes’s comments that he loves Hitler are not an endorsement of antisemitism, but a disavowal of the establishment. If you are on the right, you can literally yell “I love the Nazis” and “centrists” like PF Jung will appear on debate panels to run defence for you.

It seems there is nothing Fuentes could say that PF Jung wont deflect, rationalise or apologise for. A plausible reason for this, is that PF Jung shares Fuentes’s views - an explanation I am finding more and more tenable. However, I will return to his motivations later in the article and present a more charitable explanation, namely, that PF Jung is disingenuous.

Throughout the debate, PF Jung’s excuse-making for Fuentes extends to his comments on David Irving, race and IQ, black people… At one point, PF Jung drops the banger line “I don’t believe the KKK hates black people” - The KKK being a militant organisation known for extrajudicially lynching black people and burning their homes down.

In the same debate, PF Jung has no trouble stating progressives hate the wealthy, and slogans like “eat the rich” imply a desire to harm them. Again, PF Jung demonstrates perfectly that the standards of faux-centrists are selective, designed specifically to curtail the left and enable the right. Later, PF Jung also agrees with Fuentes’s quote that “most people’s interactions with black people are negative”, stating “do you not agree?”

Even the moderator, a long standing collaborator with PF Jung, is shocked by his justifying and obscuring of blatant racism. Big Joel joined the debate to challenge PF Jung’s claim that Fuentes had redeeming qualities - specifically his opposition to Israel - despite the rest of his views being harmful. Yet, Big Joel was surprised to find himself disagreeing on the question of whether or not racism is bad at all, i.e., that Fuentes’s harmful views are indeed good.

In response to these concerns, PF Jung engages in “both-sidesism”. This is another tactic employed by faux-centrists to derail criticisms of the right, while promoting those against the left. “Both-sidesism” refers to any lazy and contrarian political commentary that states both sides of a debate are bad, without engaging the nuances and differences between them, of which there are usually many.

This laziness can often be heard at parties the moment the subject of politics comes up, typically from an aggressively heterosexual man in a polo shirt, beer in hand. Incapable of acknowledging he is uninformed on an issue, he instead attempts to appear above the noise and too smart or civilised for a heated discussion on a topic he knows nothing about.

The faux-centrist, however, will apply this both-sidesism unevenly. In the face of criticism towards the right, they respond by saying “well the other side does this too.” But, when right-wing media, Trump adjacent comedians and podcasters complain about supposed liberal outrage, they are quick to nod along and agree.

In this case, PF Jung brings up F.D Signifier and other left-wing video essayists, alleging they hold racist beliefs in virtue of speaking about systemic racism. Specifically, PF Jung asserts that the statement “all white people are racist” is itself racist.

I am happy to agree with PF Jung here. “All white people are racist” is a dumb thing to say. But, you will notice here that PF Jung does not engage in the same excuse-making for the left. PF Jung does not construct a charitable interpretation of this statement, like that white people are not all individually racist, but benefit from a society that is systemically racist towards black people.

No, instead, PF Jung will denounce these views as racist, while covering for a literal holocaust denier and white supremacist, stating things like “well, everyone is racist” when confronted with Fuentes’s abhorrent statements about black people, without any thought to how consistent this is with the aforementioned claim “all white people are racist.”

Another key tenant of faux-centrism is blame shifting the threat of right-wing extremism from the extremists onto the left or society at large - thereby contributing to reactionary mistrust of institutions and anti-establishmentarianism. They treat reactionaries like special little guys that require empathy - young men who have been neglected by a gynocentric society and demonised by the woke left - who in turn are extremists who have no one to blame but themselves.

In PF Jung’s case, he presents a touching story about Fuentes’s life being ruined when he was nineteen, suggesting that Fuentes’s legal and financial troubles due to espousing white supremacy is a compelling motivation for his beliefs. In response, Big Joel says he doesn’t know, to which PF Jung states that he cannot take anything else he has to say seriously. According to PF Jung, If you don’t empathise with Fuentes’s struggles against inclusivity, social justice and equality, you cannot have anything serious to say.

Given all of the above, I want to offer another charitable interpretation of PF Jung’s motivations, other than that he is a crypto-Nazi. Rather, PF Jung is a disingenuous and bad-faith debater who will say anything to avoid embarrassing himself or ceding ground in a conversation. There is no bullet PF Jung won’t bite to save face. This is evidenced by his antagonistic and reprimanding style, often replying to people that they “have nothing valuable to say” over disagreements on trivial points.

I now want to return to the phenomenon of faux-centrism. This attitude is common amongst many right-wing adjacent people, such as the Rogan-sphere and podcast bros, many of whom literally support Trump and appear at his rallies. Other figures like Jordan Peterson and David Rubin have claimed to be classical liberals, refusing the labels of conservative or reactionary, despite taking money from Daily Wire or self-professed illiberal and kleptocrat Viktor Orbán.

One explanation I can think of for why this strategy works so well, is that in wider society, centrists are often middle-class, conflict averse and value “civility” above all else. For this reason, they interpret social justice reforms as too confrontational, and right-wing claims about “common sense” and “normalcy” as comforting.

Many of the comments made by Fuentes, comments that PF Jung seemingly agrees with, are couched in these terms, such as when he states that black people are loud and obnoxious, or regularly engage in public disturbances. Likewise, much of right-wing media revolves around cherry picking left-wing activists with microphones, chanting things about using they/them pronouns, arousing disgust and anger amongst viewers.

Many of the features of faux-centrism, such as “both-sidesism”, are motivated by how quickly fatigued the middle class becomes from political debate. They want to continue with their lives, unbothered by the injustices going on in the world. Out of sight, out of mind.

This emphasis on order neglects asymmetries of power. The civility worshipping middle class sees the university activist with zero material influence as more dangerous than, say, a right-wing legislature bent on curtailing access to healthcare. The image of a screaming college student using harsh rhetoric does more work for this type of person than policies that directly harm people, because the latter is laundered through official channels and done with the etiquette of educated politicians in suits.

Fascist movements tap into this psychology by appealing to the forgotten middle class as the guarantor of social harmony. The rhetoric of civility dovetails with this: “We are the normal, decent people” versus “the noisy agitators” on the left. It legitimises authoritarian legislation if it is dressed up as a defence of order, while condemning powerless protest as intolerably rude.

For these above reasons, someone professing that they are a centrist is a poor indicator of their views. In today’s political landscape, any claim to being a centrist requires evidence and should be ignored until shown otherwise. PF Jung offered a masterclass in why this is so.

We should not uncritically adopt categories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis” - Rogers Brubaker

Nationalism broadly claims to rest on something natural and enduring: that a nation is the expression of a pre-existing people united by blood, culture, or ancestry. In this article I am going to challenge this claim.

My argument is basically that the word “nation” is imprecise and is used to mark out contingent and arbitrary features, like accents or skin colour, and reifies them into something immutable.

I am not arguing that nationhood should be jettisoned from everyday language, or that I have no idea what you’re referring to when you use the word “nation”.

I argue that this imprecision should be embraced, as it allows us more freedom in defining who we are, not less. Nations should be understood as a meshwork of different influences that can choose their destiny through adopting the best aspects of other cultures.

As the subtitle suggests, this is an argument I have been playing around with for many years and there are a few plausible “outs” for the nationalist I can think of. Maybe I will write an addendum about possible responses in the future.

What Type Of “Nationalism” Do I Mean?

Nationalism is one of the most powerful political forces in recent centuries. Despite this, there is no single agreed definition of nationalism. Scholars have developed competing frameworks that stress different aspects of the phenomenon. Some, like Hans Kohn, distinguished between civic nationalism, grounded in citizenship and political participation, and ethnic nationalism, rooted in common descent and culture.

Later debates produced the well-known typology of primordialism, modernism, and ethno-symbolism. Primordialists see nations as ancient and natural, modernists like Eric Gellner and Benedict Anderson argue nations are recent products of industrialisation and print culture, while ethno-symbolists such as Anthony D. Smith suggest nationalism draws selectively on older “ethnies” and myths of common ancestry.

In yet another vein, Michael Billig’s theory of banal nationalism points to the subtle ways nationalism is reproduced in everyday life - through flags, rituals, maps, even the pronoun “we” - such that the nation is continuously naturalised in ordinary experience.

My concern in this essay is not to situate my argument against all these accounts, many of which are valuable for understanding how nations are imagined, reproduced, and politically mobilised. Rather, my target is narrower: the racial and ethnic versions of nationalism that equate the nation with a supposedly homogeneous people defined by blood, ancestry, or immutable cultural essence.

These are the forms of nationalism that claim the nation is an unchanging group identity, where belonging is determined by descent rather than by civic participation or consent. It is this exclusionary, essentialist nationalism that - drawing on the modernist account - I argue collapses upon genealogical examination.

Defining “Nation”

“Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no "scientific definition" of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists”. - Hugh Seton-Watson

One approach to offering a good definition of a word - like the word “nation” - is to account for its usage. Words do not have “true meanings”, but rather, are used in a linguistic community to achieve various pragmatic aims. Hence, when defining a word like “nation”, we are offering an explanation for how that word has been used historically.1

A second approach is to define words how we like, regardless of our pre-existing intuitions or historical usage of a concept, based on pragmatic aims. A definition is good insofar as it is useful - and it is useful if it does things like explains or clarifies the phenomenon it is trying to track, removes confusion or provides clear normative goals.

I will argue throughout this essay that primordialist accounts of the nation fail on both of these approaches. While also, many critics of this argument fall back into this confusion over language, assuming words must have self-contained, necessary and sufficient conditions that objectively tie themselves to the world.

Furthermore, If we first resort to the dictionary definition of the word “nation”, we can see it’s defined as “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.”

This definition suffices in every day language. I can point to a group of Australians who share a family of resemblances, like their accents or place of birth, and say “they are from the nation of Australia.” However, as far as political science and policy making is concerned, a closer examination is required, upon which we find the dictionary definition is too broad to speak of how nations have operated historically.

By the dictionary definition, every nation contains within it hundreds of smaller nations - groups distinguished by different ancestries, cultures, and places of origin, each separated from others by their own histories of descent.

For example, within a single country, different social classes and regional populations often function like separate nations - the industrial working class in northern England with its distinct dialects and traditions, the aristocratic landowning class of the south, or the rural peasantry and urban bourgeoisie in 19th-century France, each with their own cultural practices, loyalties, and even ethnic mixtures.

When examining the dictionary definition, the question then becomes “what type of body of people” suffices to be called a nation? I will now argue that there is no true answer to this question and that the word nation is better understood as a polysemous term with many different usages across time and place.

Polysemy

When examining how nations have been spoken about in history, we find its usage is so polysemous that it’s impossible to propose any sufficient or necessary conditions that hold true across time and place. Of course, this doesn’t mean the word “nation” is meaningless, but it closes certain avenues for the nationalist, as we will see.

Most scholarship holds that the modern concept of the nation is a recent invention, taking shape in the 17th–19th centuries, tied to state centralisation, print culture, and mass politics.= Before this, the nation was not a sovereign political body.

In dynastic states and imperial realms, loyalties were typically directed toward a ruler - such as a king or emperor - or toward religious affiliations, as exemplified by the Islamic ummah, a transnational community united by faith rather than political boundaries.

Medieval universities, including those in Paris and Bologna, employed "natio" to categorise students by regional origin, forming administrative groups based on shared geography or dialect rather than any political identity. Similarly, in Christian contexts, "nationes" often translated to "peoples" or "gentiles," broadly encompassing ethnic or cultural groups without implying unified governance.

Historical chronicles occasionally referenced entities like "The English Nation" or "The French Nation," yet these usages described loose affiliations of people bound by common languages or customs, not egalitarian political communities of citizens. Moreover, such "nations" were far from homogeneous; they frequently encompassed distinct ethnic subgroups with histories of internal conflict, such as the Basques and Catalans in Spain, or the Hindi, Tamil, and Punjabi speakers within India.

Our modern concept of nationhood, the view that the nation is the primary unit of political sovereignty, and that legitimate political power comes from the will of a homogeneous people, has its roots in the overthrow of aristocratic and traditional society in favour of secular liberalism - namely, through replacing the king’s divine sovereignty with the popular sovereignty of the nation, the subject of the monarch with the citizen, and the monarch’s private army with a national army of conscripts fighting for “the people.”2

Likewise, pre-modern polities were typically dynastic or imperial, ruled by royal families whose legitimacy rested on divine right or military conquest, not the will of a unified people. Most inhabitants paid taxes or tribute without any expectation of participation in governance, and did not imagine themselves as part of an abstract political community. These empires also ruled over diverse ethnic and linguistic groups without trying to assimilate them into a single national identity. There was no need to make subjects “Roman” or “Austrian” in the modern nationalist sense.

Not to mention, nationalism was enabled by several modern developments: mass print culture, rising literacy, standardised public education, bureaucratic states, censuses, and conscripted national armies. These innovations helped create the infrastructure for imagining a shared national identity and organising society as a nation of citizens.

The historical account of nationalism I have advanced is called “the modernist account”, and despite being the scholarly consensus in nationalist studies, it sits in contrast to the primordial account, which captures many of the forms of nationalism I am responding to in this article.

To quote Anthony D. Smith’s summary of modernism:

“The nation is a modern phenomenon, the product of nationalist ideologies, which themselves are the expression of modern, industrial society. The nationalist is free to use ethnic heritages, but nation-building can proceed without the aid of an ethnic past. Hence, nations are phenomena of a particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.”

When it comes to the term “nation”, this history of different usages creates a problem for the nationalist, who wants to define the nation as belonging to a certain group identity that they share in. If the term nation is so polysemous, then the nationalist cannot be offering a descriptive account of nationhood and trying to make sense of its historical usage.

The nationalist can still advance a normative project in prescribing who ought to be counted as part of the nation and who must be excluded. But once this step is taken, the appeal to the supposed naturalness or consistency of nationhood collapses, since the very category being invoked has no stable meaning to serve as its foundation.

The nationalist wants to state “this is who the nation ought to be”, because “this is who we are”. But if the descriptive claim - who “we” are - is confused or incoherent, then the normative claim about who we ought to be loses its foundation.

In the next section, I will show this more directly by examining a stipulated definition of the nation as a body of people with a shared lineage, and demonstrating that there is, in fact, no unified “who we are.”

Primordial Nationhood: Race and Ethnicity

"God has divided Humanity into distinct groups or nuclei which are the peoples... Each has its own special mission, which will cooperate towards the general mission of Humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality.” - Giuseppe Mazzini

Thus far, I have shown that the concept of the nation has been used in heterogeneous and inconsistent ways throughout history. Suppose, however, that we abandon the attempt to ground nationhood in historical usage altogether. Instead, we stipulate a new definition: a nation is, say, a community united by shared ancestry and lineage. This is the underlying meaning we can reconstruct from nationalist mantras about a shared blood.

Yet this move also runs into difficulties, because nations do not in fact possess single, linear ancestries. They are instead products of mixture, migration, and historical contingency, i.e., many bloods. This new definition, would therefore exclude most nations as they exist today, rendering itself unworkable.

At a nationalist rally in England, one might hear the slogan “England for the English,” as if “The English” were a homogeneous people. Yet the population of England is the product of successive and often violent encounters between distinct groups. The Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans all fought wars of conquest against one another; entire regions were subjugated and their elites displaced.

Their languages - Celtic, Old English, Old Norse, Norman French - were mutually unintelligible, and their genomes today still show traces of those layered migrations and conflicts. To claim that this fractured and hybrid ancestry forms an exclusive category called “The English,” while denying the same status to those born and raised in England but of more recent immigrant origin, is arbitrary.

The nationalist might say to the migrant, “this is our country.” Yet at some point it was not theirs either. If their own ancestors had been excluded by the same reasoning they now invoke, they would not be here at all.

This attitude elevates some layers of historical mixture as “authentic” while dismissing others, despite all being equally the product of contingent arrivals and integration. What really differs between these pre-existing groups, like the Normans or the Anglo-Saxons, from the new groups migrating to England today, is race...

“So long as the blood and institutions of a nation keep to a sufficient degree the impress of the original race, that nation exists” - Arthur De Gobineau

To posit “Englishness” (to keep running with this example) is not a matter of being Briton, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, or Norman, but the common link between these groups, that they are white - creates a host of issues, namely, a problem of over-inclusion.

Race, as we understand it, is a concept forged in the context of 18th- and 19th-century colonial expansion and Victorian science. It has no consistent cross-historical meaning, its modern usage not found in any other time or place.

Experts across disciplines such as anthropology, genetics, biology, sociology, and history overwhelmingly agree that race is a social construct rather than a biologically meaningful category. This consensus, built on decades of genetic and social research, holds that race is a human-invented classification rooted in socio-political contexts rather than in distinct genetic differences.

These aforementioned experts use descriptors like ancestry or geographic origin to better reflect genetic variation, which does exist, but advise against using “race” due to its lack of precision and social connotations.

Race realism, the obsession of many online nationalists, is outside the scope of this article. But, for the sake of argument, let us grant some form of race realism were true, “the white race” is some kind of biological category that picks out some cluster in the human genome, whatever that might be.3

Before, we stated we were stipulating a new definition of nationhood, in spite of its historical usage. When stipulating a definition, we still need to offer an account that doesn’t include obvious counter-examples. Here the ethno-nationalist faces serious difficulties.

For example, there is a problem of over-inclusion. If “Englishness” is equivalent to being white, then the French, Germans, Swedes, Greeks and Italians (depending how you choose to define “white”) are English, and subsequently, English people have a claim to belonging to any other white nationality. If you have ever asked a French person what they think of the English, you know this must be false.

What’s more, there is no “white nation” that unifies Europeans or Euro-descended peoples. Instead, so-called white populations are dispersed across dozens of states, across continents, often in open conflict with one another, and at times precisely in the name of their own nationalisms. This occurs even amongst white populations who are genetically identical.

The wars of the former Yugoslavia saw Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, slaughter each other in the name of national identity, despite being genetically the same. Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants are also biologically indistinct, yet centuries of conflict have also been framed in nationalist terms. Moving outside of Europe, the partition of India and Pakistan likewise produced mass violence between Hindus and Muslims despite their shared ethnic and genetic background.

Hence, there are clear counter-examples to a racial account of the nation, i.e., nations are not races, races are divided across nations, and nations consist of many races.

In the face of these issues, a nationalist might redraw the boundaries of the nation around “ethnicity”, i.e., a nation can be defined as a group who share a racial, linguistic and cultural background. If we want to speak analytically, this move narrows the definition such that genetic similarity is necessary, but not sufficient. A nation also requires a shared cultural-linguistic lineage.

However, this definition is also difficult to defend seeing basically all nations are comprised of different ethnicities, and often developed out of the mixing of different languages and cultures.

We have already discussed this with England, but Modern France too is a composite of Celtic Gauls, Romans, Franks, and later regional identities like Bretons and Occitans, which were only consolidated into “French” through state policy. In fact, French identity, a long with the earliest forms of nationalist ideology, was manufactured by the state during the 19th century. These policies deliberately replaced local languages (Breton, Occitan, Alsatian, Corsican) and identities with a singular “French” national culture.

Similarly, Italy, unified in the 19th century, brought together Tuscan, Sicilian, Venetian, and Sardinian populations that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects and had distinct traditions. The new state adopted Tuscan (specifically Florentine) as the national language, but it was spoken natively by only a small minority. In this case, Italy’s national identity was forged by state policy, not a natural, shared heritage. The state displaced the majority of people’s local dialects in favour of a minority group’s, of whom the majority of Italians today identify with.

These examples illustrate that ethnic purity is not a requisite for nationhood: most nations are historical amalgams, their identities shaped by mixture and assimilation rather than a single continuous ethnic line. They also show that national identity is often manufactured in a top-down fashion, imposed by state projects that overwrite or suppress local languages and customs.

For these reasons, racial or ethnic accounts of the nation collapse under clear counter-examples and are ultimately untenable. When someone says “England is for the English,” the meaning in ordinary speech is plain enough: they want the country to be exclusive to people who resemble them in vague physical ways - that is, they are making a racist claim. But this attitude is conceptually confused. On closer examination, “English,” like “nation,” is not a fixed category but a word whose meaning has shifted in the past and will continue to shift over time.

Nations Are Manufactured and Imagined

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” - Ernest Gellner

I have thus far explained what nations are not, namely, through arguing against a primordial account. In this section, I want to offer more insight into what nations are and the mechanisms in which primordial versions of nationalism arise, such as through myth making. I will then conclude this section by arguing that the fluidity of nations is a good thing, as it allows us to better determine our identity beyond a fixed, fictitious essence.

Peoples are an evolving phenomenon, constantly changing and being shaped by migration, conquest, state policy and cultural exchange. No group possesses an unbroken, primordial essence - a “true people” - that can serve as the foundation of a nation. Historically, the word nation has referred to medieval student guilds, ethnic groups, dynastic subjects, and modern citizenries.

As Benedict Anderson noted, the nation is an “imagined community” - a collective fiction sustained by shared narratives and symbols rather than an empirically identifiable actuality, as highlighted by its polysemy as a term.

The symbols that appear to ground this imagined community are themselves largely manufactured. As Eric Hobsbawm argued, nations “attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past,” but the continuity they claim is “largely fictitious.” What passes as timeless heritage - the Scottish kilt, the French Bastille Day parade, or the Japanese imperial rites of the Meiji era - was often codified in the 18th and 19th centuries to project an image of antiquity - again, around the time nationalist ideology was forming from the ruins of the old world.

These inventions matter not because they are old, but because they pretend to be old, providing the illusion of an unbroken lineage. In this way, invented traditions function as the symbolic glue of the imagined community: they stabilise a sense of shared identity precisely by fabricating the past that identity is supposed to rest upon.

Further still, nationalism invents or exaggerates cultural boundaries - accent, dress, religion, skin colour - and then elevates them into markers of political destiny. These features are contingent and historically mutable, yet nationalism reifies them into the essence of a people.

The same logic applies to the nationalist pantheon of “heroes,” invoked as proof of an ancient and continuous nationhood. Figures as diverse as Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and Charles de Gaulle are folded together under the label of “French,” despite representing clashing values and contexts: Joan as a medieval peasant mystic executed for heresy, Napoleon as an imperial conqueror who upended the Revolution, and de Gaulle as a 20th-century republican resistor.

Similarly, Alfred the Great, Oliver Cromwell, and Winston Churchill are stitched into an “English” narrative, though their eras and ideologies often conflicted. Alfred was a 9th-century Saxon king defending against Vikings in a fragmented Britain; Cromwell, a 17th-century Puritan revolutionary, was reviled by monarchists for executing Charles I and his brutal Irish campaigns; Churchill is celebrated for WWII leadership but condemned for colonial policies, including his role in the Bengal famine and resistance to Indian independence.

Many of these heroes were deeply controversial in their own lifetimes, reviled as much as revered, unified mostly by geography, and their elevation as timeless symbols of national essence is itself a retrospective act of invention.

The nation, in this way, constructs a lineage of exemplary figures out of selective memory, stitching together incompatible legacies to project a false unity. This mirrors how, in India, figures like Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent anti-colonialist) and Subhas Chandra Bose (militant collaborator with Axis powers) are co-opted into a singular "Indian" heroism, glossing over profound ideological rifts.

In closing the main body of this article, I want to assert that the uncertainty of nationhood and its related terms is a good thing. If we understand the nation as a changing patchwork of influences, then our collective identity becomes something open to reinterpretation.

This gives us more determination over who we want to be, not less. It allows us to draw on the best aspects of other cultures, to integrate new ideas and practices, and to approach our shared life as a creative project rather than the false preservation of a static essence, effectively excuse-making for hostility towards other groups. This openness makes our identity more dynamic and better able to reflect the complexity of those who inhabit it.

There is no correct answer to what it means to be English or French - it means different things to different people, who draw their answers from a diverse range of experiences and histories - and that’s a blessing, not a curse. Treating nationhood as an open, evolving patchwork rather than a primordial essence, offers a revised way of deploying the concept that is both more explanatory and achieves stronger normative aims, like preserving the equality of human dignity in all peoples.

Conclusion and The G.D.A

To finish this article, I thought I would share a Genealogical Debunking Argument (GDA) against nationalism that I have been playing with. Like the rest of this article, the target of this argument is only primordial versions of nationalism.

The argument goes like this:

P1. If a concept’s justification depends on an account of its origins and that account is false, then the concept is debunked.

P2. Nationalism justifies itself by positing that nations are natural, pre-existing, and unified identities.

P3. Genealogical examination shows nations are not natural, pre-existing and unified identities.

C. Therefore, nationalism is debunked.

The argument is valid in virtue of modus ponens, applied twice. I believe I have defended the soundness of each premise throughout this article, besides perhaps P1 - The GDA premise. The very nature of GDAs is controversial. For this reason, the logical syllogism is more of a fun experiment, of which I am happy to revise or be wrong about, despite my commitment to the facts of this article.

Lastly, the difficulty in responding to nationalism is that it has a relatively thin intellectual tradition, producing few canonical and academic works in the same vein as how, for example, liberalism has, from Rousseau to Rawls, or Marxism has, from Engles to Althusser.

This is no mistake, as anti-intellectualism has been a defining feature of many nationalist movements, and what works a nationalist might point to as examples of a strong literary tradition are firmly rejected in political science as intellectually unserious, propaganda pieces. Of course, the nationalist will have an explanation for this, i.e., universities are populated by subversive, left wing academics.

Likewise, many of the responses to criticisms of nationalism devolve into pushing hostility to other groups, stating that certain types of immigrants are undesirable, pulling up crime statistics, and completely abandoning any intellectual pursuit like offering a successful account of the term “nation”.

The fact is, most nationalists feel attacked by other groups, and nationalism for them, is about framing their identity in opposition to perceived external threats, functioning as a defensive, reactive politics of paranoia and exclusion rather than a positive theory of anything.4

I can already hear them now, typing away in the comments about migrant gangs and the welfare state, as if it has any relevance to the thesis of my article. In their inability to think in a straight line, reflexively defaulting to justifying their anger towards others, they are proving my point exactly that their type of nationalism is a defensive politics of exclusion and not a serious political theory.

This is probably an unfair assumption, but I have spent years being at the receiving end of such abuse from nationalists, well above and beyond the malice I have received from any other group when I have disagreed with them.

As I stated in the beginning of the article, nationalism is one of the most powerful political forces in our time… but humanity has been mobilised by all sorts of confusions…

Stay safe out there.

I no longer approach women… I am afraid… The thought of interacting with a trans person is so horrifying, I can no longer leave my home…

If I don’t want to have sex with someone, I cannot treat them with respect. Even worse, if I am unsure if I want to have sex with someone, my insecurity over my own sexuality festers to the point I might get violent…

Here’s the thing you cucks wouldn’t understand… I am a masculine, alpha male, which means making up weird revenge fantasies where I physically attack minorities and post about it behind an anonymous account on the internet.

In reality, I have never fought anyone, and if such a situation would occur, I would likely just stutter “uhh, uhh, I’m sorry…” before going home to spread my vitriol online - anonymously - where I don’t have to fear consequences - because I am alpha.

My self-assessment is totally informed - not but what I have done, but by how I wish I could be - which in turn is based on the shallow and manufactured ideas of masculinity found in action movies, like where I break someone’s nose for making me feel confused, like a literal chimp.

Being masculine is about feeling deep insecurity about my heterosexuality to the point seeing a trans person makes me violently erupt, because I am not gay, and I know I am not gay so much that any suggestion that I am makes me angry.

Only a closeted gay would say “not for me, thanks” and go on with their day…

For this reason, it’s only natural that I routinely ask people about their genitals. I need to know. Do you have a penis? Do you?? It’s penis inspection day everyday around here.

Since I started asking trans people if I could see their genitals, I have seen hundreds of penises… Wow, what a close call! I might have accidentally done something gay.

Disgust is a natural response that should form the basis of moral judgements. In fact, I am so disgusted by trans people, I follow countless accounts dedicated to documenting their movements, constantly watching and observing trans people and what they might be up to… again, because they disgust me…

When I see a trans person, I am so disgusted, I have to turn 360° and walk away.

The woke left will tell you that a trans person’s gender is an identity category that’s affirmation correlates to someone’s psychological and physical wellbeing… But I am here to tell you the truth; it’s a sexual perversion.

Not only am I fixated on trans women online, I have to take every opportunity to remind trans women that they are men. If you are attracted to a trans woman, you are gay, simple as.

Logically, it follows from these two premises that I am fixated on over-sexualised men on the internet. My social media feed is full of men being sexually perverted, again, because I am a straight man.

“Not for me, thanks” is the song of the coward, a real masculine and straight man investigates trans people endlessly and cannot stop thinking about the possibility that they lurk behind every corner.

“Trans people could be here” I thought.

“I’ve never been in this neighbourhood before. There could be TRANS anywhere.”

The cool wind felt good against my bare chest.

“I HATE TRANS” I thought.

Sweet Dreams are Made of These reverberated through my entire car, making it pulsate even as the $9 wine circulated through my powerful thick veins and washed away my (merited) fear of minorities after dark.

“With a car, you can go anywhere you want” I said to myself, out loud.

We have all had that experience where the night is winding down, you think “alright, time to grab one for on the road and call it a night”, only to be met with some party-pooper police officer screaming “no fun allowed!” as you speed off in a school zone.

You just know they’re also going to be triggered by your going twice the speed limit. The liberal outrage never ends… The woke left will oppose all sorts of victimless crimes, so long as the alleged perpetrator is a straight, white male.

In this article, I am going to argue that opposition to drunk driving is not only anti-working class… It’s anti-white… and part of the gay agenda to turn kids trans… and take away your penis.

While also, drunk driving is vegan, and not doing so harms shrimp, a species whose welfare should be the basis of your moral philosophy due to their immense population weighing the scales of utilitarian calculation in their favour... Sorry, bro… the shrimp want a turn with your wife, are you really going to not maximise utility and say “no”?

(I am constantly worrying about being a cuck to the point that it’s suspicious.)

Furthermore, drunk driving is based, which means opposing it is cringe… and being cringe is worse than any potential risk associated with drunk driving, of which there are none.

Now, you might respond by saying “my Dad was killed by a drunk driver.” I would retort; “okay, bozo.” Maybe your Dad shouldn’t have been on the road? It’s a pretty easy dilemma to solve for the drunk-driver. Not to mention, you are committing the “appeal to emotion fallacy”.

This is the fallacy of having any emotional stake in a position whatsoever. This is illogical because having any sincere opinion about anything is cringe, and being cringe is bad. All of your opinions should be couched behind 50 layers of ironic detachment in order to protect yourself from criticism.

This way, you don’t have to engage any critical statement on the grounds that you were just joking. You should also police other people’s vulnerability or raw expression by projecting onto them your own defensive and insecure predisposition, calling them “cringe” or responding with an image like this:

Now, you have become a cynical nihilist. Your lack of sincerity also makes all your positions renegotiable, all of them just serve to protect you from the perceived enemies you have built up in your paranoid mind.

After all, it takes a defensive and paranoid person who wrongly believes others are just as cynical as they are to adopt this mindset in the first place.

For example, you will call yourself a Catholic when it suits your purposes, but then respond to people with racism, hate and vitriol in opposition to long standing Catholic teachings when it’s convenient.

Through ironic detachment, you aren’t connected to the truth value of any statement and politics is completely flattened into group conflict.

By being so many layers of irony deep, you can feel superior to the masses and popular taste. “Tiktok dancing? Where is the self-aware mockery? Muh-muh meta irony!?” The normies, with their earnest enjoyment of things, could never understand you.

You have now joined an elitist culture of irony, where performing detachment gains you cultural capital and sincerely enjoying mass culture is demonised. You define yourself by the anonymous chatter of online weirdos. Like the goth kids from 30 years ago, you can stand in the corner with your arms folded while everyone enjoys their lives.

When your youth is gone and it’s all said and done, you might realise that your sense of superiority and externalised shame masked as “cringe” did nothing for you but prevent you from experiencing the raw passions of life that might make being on this Earth worthwhile.

Your ironic detachment is a protective mechanism. Your brain has associated sincerity with vulnerability to ridicule, which you are sensitive to from being bullied in high school, where you were either 1) an actual loser or 2) an average person whose experience didn’t match your narcissistic expectations that you be treated like an aristocrat.

In either case, you have sacrificed a wealth of experiences, authenticity, deeper connections with peers who might share your true values, and opportunities to create a better world as you see fit - all in order to not be tone policed by some other cynical nihilist whose opinion doesn’t matter and a normal person would just discard without further thought.

You are falling down the rabbit hole… The world is slipping from your grasp… Your potential is transforming into actuality, a process that is completely irreversible and can either leave you with memories or regret… By measuring yourself to the false duality of based and cringe, your life is no longer being lived… Like a broken tool being examined in the shop, instead of serving its purpose on the field… Your very Being is calling you - will you answer the call, or will you be swept away?

The only exception to the above is this article defending drunk driving, which is completely sincere and not a joke. I will drunk drive in your neighbourhood. It will happen. Hide yo’ kids.

The goal of this article isn’t to refute Kant, but to illuminate his philosophy through examining the wider context of debate it exists in. A crucial part of learning any idea is launching criticisms and seeing what sticks. This isn’t dissimilar to a toddler’s destruction stage of development, in which they learn through unbuilding things around them. Through understanding the objections to Kant, you can better understand Kant himself.

In this article, I will first outline the philosophical climate following the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on the events that led to Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s Aenesidemus. I will then summarise Kant’s transcendental philosophy as presented in The Critique, highlighting the elements most relevant to Schulze’s central objection - the thing-in-itself problem. Next, I will present Schulze’s formulation of this problem in Aenesidemus, and finally, I will examine the impact of this exchange on the development of post-Kantian German idealism.

The Critique’s Initial Reception and The Rise of Schulze

After The Critique was published in 1781, its success and popularity would be helped in large part to Karl Leonhard Reinhold and his 1786 Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. Even in his day, Kant’s philosophy was criticised for its lack of accessibility and verbosity. Reinhold saw Kant’s work as a means to bypass the enlightenment deadlock between rationalism and empiricism. Ergo, Reinhold was very interested in clarifying Kant’s work for a wider audience - namely, through deducing transcendental idealism from what was believed to be a single, self-evident and undeniable starting point; consciousness.

This endeavour would be very lucrative for Reinhold, gaining him a professorship at The University of Jena and positioning him as an important scholar in the early school of Kantian idealism. Many were impressed at Reinhold’s ability to deduce a complex system of thought from a single axiom, showing a true mastership of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. However, not everyone would be so impressed.

Reinhold, perhaps the second most visible face of Kantianism at the time, would attract the criticism of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who would publish his response Aenesidemus in 1792. This text is a dialogue framed as a set of letters from Aenesidemus to Hermias, two philosophers from antiquity. Schulze intended to show that Reinhold’s error was both in selecting consciousness as his single starting point, but also, in the very Kantian idealism he was trying to systematise.

In this text, a criticism so strong would be launched that it would basically change the whole direction of German Idealism, influencing the unique philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. This objection would be the thing-in-itself problem. I will firstly summarise Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself before laying out the objection advanced by Schulze.

Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy

Kant is concerned with the conditions that allow for the possibility of experience. For Kant, this is what the word “transcendental” means, not to be confused with “transcendent” or grand metaphysical ideas regarding things that exist beyond this world. In fact, the transcendental philosophy seeks to do the very opposite - to uncover what must be the case for experience to be possible.

Like a German engineer, Kant’s philosophy is an attempt to document the cognitive processes by which experience is built. In contrast to the empiricists, who tended to treat experience as something primarily received through the senses, Kant treats it as something actively constructed by the mind.

The word representation is a broad word used by Kant to refer to any contents of the mind whatsoever. Kant’s representations are those things that share any relation to something that can be thought about.

“[A] representation is the (internal) determination of the mind insofar as it refers to something as it were outside of it (not a representation).”
(Kant, Refl. 1676, AA 16:76)

In a sense, The Critique functions as a science of representation - not in the empirical sense of brain science, but as a transcendental inquiry into the necessary forms and concepts through which all representations are structured into coherent experience.

In developing this new science, Kant uncovered a whole cognitive architecture of forms and concepts which in turn, are actively working on our sensations to produce coherent experience. Kant lays out this mental engineering of experience via the workings of three faculties:

• The faculty of sensibility.

• The faculty of the understanding.

• The faculty of reason.

In this section, I am going to go over these three pieces of cognitive architecture before returning to the criticism Schulze levied against Kant.

The Faculties of Sensibility and Understanding

“The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. . . . [I]t alone affords us intuitions.”
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A19/B33)

In Kant’s philosophy, the construction of experience begins with sensory input. This part of the architecture is called the “transcendental aesthetic” - aesthetic coming from the Greek “aisthēsis” - meaning perception through the senses. In this transcendental aesthetic, our sensory input is ordered with the forms of space and time in the faculty of sensibility.

This sensibility, pre-ordered with the forms of space and time, is called the “manifold of intuition”. Thus far, space and time give us a kind of ordering, but it isn’t enough for intelligibility, it isn’t something we can yet think about, judge and / or apply laws to. Thus far in Kant’s cognitive conveyor belt, the product is simply an “appearance”, Kant’s term for the undetermined object of an empirical intuition.

If you are new to Kant, this is a lot to take in… To sign post where we are so far - a sensation is the most simple and raw material given to us, but it isn’t determined or structured in a way that is intelligible. This occurs later in Kant’s cognitive machinery. For now, sensations have been transformed by the faculty of sensibility into an appearance, where they have been given the forms of space and time. However, the appearance must still be engineered into the final product; an experience…

If we think about day to day life, the objects of experience sit in conceptual relations to each other. They have a structure and determination.

You are reading this on a phone or laptop…

You experience your device as one object, composed of many parts that together form a whole…

You experience the light of its screen at a determinate intensity, which could diminish gradually toward darkness…

You experience the device as something that persists while its states change, and your keystrokes cause letters to appear…

You experience the device as actually present, although this particular device is contingent and another could have occupied its place…

Without even being conscious of it, our experiences are unified under a certain order, one beyond space and time. Yet, the aforementioned concept of an appearance is prior to this order and is therefore yet to be an experience. This requires another move from Kant.

To do this, Kant’s machinery undergoes an important step, the manifold of intuition is synthesised with “the twelve a priori categories of the faculty of understanding”. These categories mark all the ways objects of experience necessarily relate to each other, structuring our experience such that it isn’t just disconnected events in space and time. For the sake of this article, I will not elaborate on any of the twelve categories themselves, we only need know what they do in Kant’s machine. Nonetheless, now the product is ready… and through this synthesis experience is made intelligible from mere appearance.

“[T]he understanding in general can be represented as a faculty for judging. . . . [I]t is a faculty for thinking. Thinking is cognition through concepts.”
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A69/B94)

Reading Kant involves memorising a spreadsheet of concepts, like the faculty of understanding, manifold of intuition, transcendental aesthetic, etc. This is the fortress of thought mentioned before. But put simply: Kant holds that we receive sensory content, and our mind actively structures it into intelligible experience using its own a priori forms and concepts.

Through the synthesis of sensibility and understanding, we arrive at representations that make up intelligible experience. However, because our experiences are constructed from this cognitive framework, it follows that we cannot know of things beyond this cognitive framework. In Kant’s language, these representations disclose not the thing-as-it-is, but only the thing-as-it-appears.

This barrier is illustrated by Kant’s “phenomena/noumena distinction”:

Phenomena are objects as they appear under our cognitive conditions, while noumena are those same objects considered apart from those conditions. For Kant, noumena are unknowable. Without these conditions provided by the faculties of sensibility and understanding, to speak of knowing something is empty, as there is no object of experience. However, despite not being knowable, this does not mean noumena are unthinkable… I will discuss the noumena’s conceptual role in Kant’s system after explaining the faculty of reason.

The Faculty of Reason

“Now reason is the faculty that provides the principles of cognition a priori.”
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A11/B24)

“Reason never relates directly to an object, but solely to the understanding and by means of it to reason’s own empirical use . . .”
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A643/B671)

We have seen the understanding organises what we experience, but the faculty of reason asks the second order questions: “What’s the ultimate cause?” “What’s the whole system?” “What’s the final explanation?”

In Kant’s experience factory, if sensibility is the input module - and the understanding is the assembly line - reason is the control room. It doesn’t produce experiences, but oversees them - drawing connections, setting goals, and systematising them into unified principles... but with this power lies a danger…

The significance of the noumena for Kant is that it serves as a limiting boundary, marking the limits of what can be known. Reason goes astray when it tries to reach out beyond the borders of experience, as constructed from sensibility and the understanding. The control room of reason cannot oversee a product if it isn’t on the factory line. This error, in which reason goes beyond the domain of appearances, Kant called “transcendental illusion” - the hallmark of dogmatic metaphysics he sought to defeat.

One question arises, where does this sensation in the transcendental aesthetic come from before it is synthesised with the understanding? Kant agrees that representations actually have to represent something - otherwise, there is no objective knowledge - the very thing Kant set out to preserve, as we will discuss later.

In Kant’s later, 1783 text Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, he grounds sensibility in the thing-in-itself.

“[Appearances] are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances.” (Kant, Prolegomena, §32, AA 4:314–15)

To recapitulate, we can see that Kant is painting this image whereby our sensory experience is based upon a thing-in-itself - from which we get the manifold of intuition - yet, this sensory experience is still unintelligible - that is, until it is synthesised with the categories of the understanding - of which it is then intelligible but bares no resemblance to the thing-in-itself.

Now that we have understood Kant’s framework, I will explain Schulze’s criticism.

Schulze and The Thing-In-Itself Problem

“[F]or in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable.”
(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Preface, 3)

If we go back to these a priori concepts - the twelve categories of the understanding - one such amongst them is causality. To Kant, causality is a concept that exists in the mind, structuring our sensibility through the understanding. It would follow from this that talk about the thing-in-itself having any causal powers is empty and illegitimate.

But if we go back to this idea of sensibility being grounded in the thing-in-itself, Schulze submits that Kant is slipping into causal language, stating that the thing-in-itself has some causal power insofar as it is the basis of our sensibility.

“Yet this derivation of the necessary synthetic judgements from a thing-in-itself clearly contradicts the whole spirit of critical philosophy.”
(Schulze, Aenesidemus, 122)

Another interpretation of Kant’s grounding language is that sensory experiences are not caused by the thing-in-itself, but “correspond” to them. Schulze would state that such a correspondence interpretation doesn’t rescue Kant. If knowledge of the noumenal world is impossible, there is no basis to say our sensibility corresponds with the things-in-itself or not. It’s just ad-hoc speculation.

This is problematic for Kant, as he believed representation is a necessary outcome of the mind’s a priori structuring of experience as established by transcendental philosophy, not a contingent feature that might or might not mirror an external reality.

The very purpose of The Critique as laid out in the preface was to secure the possibility of objective knowledge while avoiding dogmatic metaphysics, philosophies that reach out beyond experience to ideas about the soul and God. At the same time, Kant designed his critical philosophy over the fear that Newtonian science could crumble into Humean scepticism, that is, the view that our expectations of causal regularity are grounded in habit rather than rationally demonstrable necessity.

Thus far, I summarised the transcendental idealism part of Kant’s philosophy, i.e., the claim that these appearances are conditioned by our forms of intuition and categories. The other part of Kant’s philosophy is what he called “empirical realism”. This was the view that objects we experience are real, but as phenomena or appearances. Objective knowledge then comes from analysing the relationship between appearances. If these appearances are baseless and don’t correspond to anything, this undermines Kant’s whole project.

What’s more, Kant uses the thing-in-itself to limit our claims. The noumenal world guards against the absurdity of “appearance without something that appears”. Schulze, through arguing Kant has no basis for our appearances without contradicting himself, claimed Kant’s view resulted in radical scepticism - where our appearances cannot be guaranteed to be anything more than a random sequence of illusions. Ergo, Kant loses his anchor for objectivity and his limit on speculative metaphysics.

The Fallout of Schulze

Schulze’s Aenesidemus caused an intellectual riot in its day. Kantians like Jakob Sigismund Beck wrote responses trying to clarify the affective relation between sensibility and the noumena. Kant himself responded only briefly in a letter to Beck in 1792, essentially summarising Schulze’s scepticism as the claim that we cannot even know whether representations correspond to anything at all, but he never published a full rebuttal. Reinhold, the primary target of Aenesidemus, had his influence decline rapidly and moved away from his role as a Kant communicator.

A young philosopher named Johann Gottlieb Fichte read Aensediemus in 1794 and agreed with Schulze that the thing-in-itself was an incoherent element in Kant’s system. This led Fichte to posit that the basis of sensibility was not a noumenal thing-in-itself, but the self-positing “I”. The bases of appearances was the mind itself, not some mysterious, external source like the thing-in-itself.

Fichte’s move beyond the phenomena / noumena distinction defined the future of German Idealism and he would credit his realisation of Kant’s “fatal inconsistency” to Schulze. Later, Schelling and Hegel would follow suit with their own accounts, each pivoting away from Kant’s phenomena / noumena distinction in their own way.

Schelling, dissatisfied with Fichte’s subjectivist account, collapsed the distinction into one, unified, absolute identity. The distinction between subjects and objects, the knower and the known, was a limitation of ordinary thinking that could be surpassed through philosophy.

When you look at the absolute from the “subjective” pole, it appears as mind. When you look at it from the “objective” pole, it appears as nature. But both poles are just different perspectives on the same field. The philosopher’s task is to grasp the identity underlying this polarity, that is, “The Absolute”. This was Schelling’s response to the problem.

Hegel, in his 1802 text On the Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy, directly responded to Schulze’s radical scepticism, dissolving the split between knowing and being entirely by seeing reality as a self-developing rational process. In a nutshell, Hegel unified what Kant saw as separate sources of knowledge into moments within the dialectical self-unfolding of reason.

There are parallels to this objection in the analytic tradition too. Just to list of some examples:

• In The Bounds of Sense (1966), P.F Strawson famously both interprets and criticises Kant. He keeps the idea that experience is structured by conceptual frameworks but rejects the noumenal as an incoherent limiting concept with no explanatory role.

• In The Logical Structure of the World (1928), Rudolf Carnap builds a phenomenalist system that dispenses with the noumenal entirely, treating things-in-themselves as meaningless because they cannot be tied to possible experience.

• In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), A. J Ayer explicitly invokes a verificationist standard to reject the noumenal. If something is in principle unknowable, statements about it are meaningless.

My purpose in explaining how German Idealism unfolded after Kant was to show the weight of the-thing-in-itself problem and Schulze’s criticism. Even if you subscribe to Kant’s form of idealism, this is one objection worth taking seriously and had a profound influence on the trajectory of philosophy.

Part II can be read here.

I will show that Zeihan’s thesis isn’t supported by the evidence, uses cherry picked examples and is guilty of flawed methodology and assumptions, such as geographic and demographic determinism.

I am going to suggest that these flaws are a feature of “guruism” and that Zeihan has many traits of a guru, that is, a media figure who appears profound and knowledgeable, but lacks reference to relevant expertise.

I will begin by summarising Zeihan’s main thesis as explained across multiple blog posts and videos, as well as in his book “The Accidental Super Power”.

The Zeihan Thesis

Zeihan’s central thesis on geopolitics can be described as follows:

The U.S. is a super power due to two major reasons. The first is geography. The U.S. has vast arable land, navigable rivers, two oceans for protection, and no hostile neighbors.

The United States is uniquely blessed “with the world’s most extensive natural network of waterways, more arable land than any other country, and the unparalleled protection afforded by two vast oceans”, such that America “could not help but become a global power.”1

The second reason is the aftermath of World War II in which The United States emerged with the only intact military and economy. The U.S used this influence to negotiate a system of monetary management that guaranteed U.S. supremacy in global trade.

This system of monetary management guaranteed that the U.S. dollar became the world’s reserve currency. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, giving the U.S. central control over global liquidity and trade settlement. The U.S. had dominant influence over the new International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

The U.S. also gained access to markets in Europe and Asia while they rebuilt. With little competition in the 1940s and 1950s, U.S. manufacturing boomed. Stabilizing allies’ economies (e.g. West Germany, Japan) reinforced the U.S. sphere of influence, especially at the expense of The Soviet Union.

However, these perks didn’t come without expenses. The U.S. Navy effectively policed global shipping lanes to protect international trade. This meant high defense spending to ensure maritime security far beyond U.S. borders. The U.S. stationed troops globally and underwrote NATO and other alliances. These commitments helped ensure political stability and trade access but came at high financial and political cost.

The dollar’s reserve currency status allowed the U.S. to run persistent trade deficits. While this gave Americans cheap imports, it hollowed out domestic manufacturing and made parts of the economy reliant on foreign production. The U.S. often became the de facto global firefighter during currency crises, regional wars, or financial collapses. It bore the cost of leadership when others could free-ride.

These countries have been “benefiting from American largesse” while “not providing anything on the back end for security.”2 Over decades, the U.S. tolerated trade imbalances and persistent deficits as the dollar became the world’s reserve currency – effectively allowing others to free-ride on a stable, U.S.-led system. But once the Soviet threat disappeared, Zeihan argues, the rationale for this generosity waned.

After the collapse of The Soviet Union, Zeihan claims there is no reason for the U.S. to uphold their side of the agreement. The benefits of global trade now disproportionately help others (e.g. China, Germany), while the costs (naval security, market access) are borne by the U.S.

Zeihan predicts that as the U.S. begins pulling back from its global policing and alliance management, and as a result, sea lanes will become insecure, global supply chains will break down and export-driven economies will collapse, leading to disaster and famine.

As the world burns from U.S. withdrawal, Zeihan argues that the U.S. itself will prosper. This is due to U.S. energy-independence thanks to shale oil, a favorable demographic profile, and a strong food and industrial capacity.

This thesis makes Zeihan extremely bullish on the U.S., viewing its competitors as dwindling inconveniences. This has led to Zeihan having a bearish position on China, having predicted its inevitable collapse for many years now, as we will discuss later.

Now that I have summarised Zeihan’s thesis, I will address its short comings - both in terms of the facts and Zeihan’s methodology.

Zeihan’s Errors

One of the central predictions of Zeihan’s thesis is that the U.S. navy is withdrawing from its role in policing world markets. Empirically, this is not true. The U.S. is sustaining or expanding its global military presence.

Consider this 2025 article from Stockholm International Peace Research3 which states the following:

“Military spending by the USA rose by 5.7 per cent to reach $997 billion, which was 66 per cent of total NATO spending and 37 per cent of world military spending in 2024. A significant portion of the US budget for 2024 was dedicated to modernizing military capabilities and the US nuclear arsenal in order to maintain a strategic advantage over Russia and China.”

The U.S. has also launched new force posture initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. In 2023, for example, Washington nearly doubled its base access in the Philippines - a move aimed at reinforcing U.S. presence near vital shipping lanes.

Regarding these new military bases, Reuters reported the following in 20234:

The locations are significant, with Isabela and Cagayan facing north towards Taiwan, while Palawan is near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands equipped with runways and missile systems.

These developments exemplify that, although the U.S. has gone through many economic changes in its foreign policy - including moving away from the type of free trade policies seen after the second world war - these changes often require a larger global military presence to facilitate them, not a smaller one.

Zeihan often talks about the U.S. no longer being interested in the middle east, but he really just means Afghanistan. This is the only country in which the U.S. has withdrawn troops. The U.S. still has permanent bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and temporary sites elsewhere.

Since Zeihan began making these statements, the U.S. has literally bombed Iran. This has led to even more troops, aviation assets, missile defenses, and a third aircraft carrier group being dispatched to the middle east.5

When it comes to many of Zeihan’s claims, they sound plausible to a layman hearing him speak on Joe Rogan - but there is nothing stopping you from just googling what he says and seeing that it just isn’t true, or in this case, the U.S. military is not receding from its role in global trade.

Another reason Zeihan predicts an isolated U.S. is because of shale oil. Zeihan claims that this natural resource will afford the U.S. economic independence such that it no longer needs to invest in protecting global trade routes.

It’s true that U.S. shale oil has boomed, but far from this turning the U.S. inward, it has instead transformed the U.S. into a major energy exporter. One of the reasons shale oil is such a historic development is that it transformed the U.S. economy from a net importer of petroleum to a net exporter by 2020. U.S. crude oil exports have kept climbing to new highs – averaging over 4.1 million barrels per day in 2024.6

Protecting sea lanes and stability abroad is crucial to continue reaping profits from these exports. For example, much of the U.S. crude now flows to Europe, especially after Russia’s war on Ukraine shifted European demand to American oil. That means the U.S. has a vested interest in keeping maritime routes (like the Atlantic and the Mediterranean) secure for tankers.

Shale oil has given the U.S. a newfound energy dominance, but capitalising on that position requires engagement with the world – including a Navy that can safeguard the global trade of oil and gas.

“Under Trump the Americans are firmly – finally – abandoning Bretton Woods.”7

Zeihan also points to Trumpian economic policies such as demanding that countries wanting to sell consumer goods to the U.S. must do so using factories built on U.S. soil. However, similar policies have been used by the U.S. to stay competitive against other nations - even during the Bretton Woods era.

A notable example is the early 1980s auto industry policy. In 1981, President Reagan’s administration negotiated a voluntary export restraint that limited Japanese car exports to the U.S., with the clear expectation that Japan’s automakers should invest inside the United States. The outcome was striking: within a decade, every major Japanese automaker (Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc.) had opened assembly lines in the U.S.8

Policies like this are common even in times of liberalised global markets and free trade. This is because such policies exist not to end trading, but to stay competitive and trade more advantageously.

There are also methodological criticisms of Zeihan that I will now discuss.

“Since the root of American power is geographic and not the result of any particular plan or ideology, American power is incidental. Even accidental.”

Zeihan’s approach can be classified as “geographic and demographic determinism”. This approach isn’t dissimilar from that of Halford J. Mackinder, one of the founding fathers of geopolitics. However, political science has come a long way since then - i.e., the 19th and early 20th centuries.

According to this form of political determinism, the success or failure of a nation state is an inevitable result of its geography and demographics. For example, earlier we discussed Zeihan’s view that the U.S. became a superpower due to its river systems, natural resources, discounted protection due to having two oceans, and so on.

This approach is interesting because there are plenty of counter-examples in which nations became extremely powerful with strategically inferior geographical contexts to the U.S., like Britain or Japan.

Yes, these nations have a strong, natural defense afforded to them in virtue of being islands, but there are many island nations that did NOT become super powers. The differences comes down to maritime dominance, industrialisation, and statecraft - factors ignored by a geographical determinist approach.

Conversely, regions with notable geographic vulnerabilities, such as the North German Plain, have experienced unprecedented peace for over seventy years, largely due to political integration and institutional developments like the European Union and NATO.

In addition, Zeihan believes many countries are facing inevitable collapse due to demographic issues. Zeihan has a special emphasis on China, stating that its one child policy, elderly population and gender skewed demographics will cause its collapse.

“I would say we expect the economic collapse of China in this coming decade.”9

Zeihan is so confident about this, we have to mention his 2010 business insider article in which he stated China would collapse by 2020… Well, it’s 2025… China will be collapsing any day now I guess. I will comb over Zeihan’s other failed predictions later in the article.

Nonetheless, in this picture that Zeihan presents, culture, ideology, human agency and policy are largely irrelevant and ergo, there is a total dismissal of how institutions and policy choices can alter a country’s fate.

Zeihan has a habit of looking at current trends and then assuming that these trends cannot change in the future and are set in stone. In his mind, policy makers basically have no job to do as they are powerless to influence their nation’s success or failure on the world stage. Geography and demographics is destiny.

Zeihan’s approach to geopolitics is one of storytelling and narrative building. Zeihan provides very little citations in his books and seldom references other academic works or experts in geopolitics or political science. Zeihan himself has no academic background in geopolitics or international relations (other than a BA).

He confidently forecasts severe societal outcomes as inevitabilities without any analytic caution or modesty, an approach that differs greatly from actual geopolitical scholarship.

This style is characteristic of “guruism”: it simplifies complex global dynamics into digestible, dramatic arcs that sound persuasive to lay audiences but bypass the methodological standards experts rely on.

Now that I have criticised Zeihan’s primary thesis about U.S. withdrawal from global markets - as well as discussing the methodological issues Zeihan is guilty of - I want to put forward some more evidence of Zeihan’s guruism.

Other Evidence of Guruism

“Guruism” is a concept from the “Decoding The Gurus” podcast and has been wonderfully expounded on by psychologist Matthew Browne, and anthropologist Chris Kavanagh.

I have another article called “Decoding Decoding The Gurus” that breaks down their 10 facets of a guru. You can read that here. But basically, a guru is a media figure that deals in pseudo-profundity, sounding impressive while actually having little academic influence or expertise.

Moreover, one feature of guruism is prediction making. Unlike predictive power in the sciences - i.e., the merit of a good theory’s ability to be falsified on the basis of testable predictions - gurus focus on making predictions in order to bolster their appearance.

A lay person’s idea of an academic is often not so different from a soothsaying sage who can tell the future with strong foresight. In reality, rattling off predictions like this with zero interest in testing or revising one’s own theories isn’t how political scientists behave.

Zeihan’s followers often cite his incredible list of correct predictions when rushing to his defense. Like with other gurus, this is an example of the sharpshooter’s fallacy - i.e., circling all the correct predictions while ignoring all the failed ones.

In addition to the already discussed failed predictions about China collapsing by 2020, or the U.S. withdrawing from global trade, here is a list of other predictions Zeihan has gotten wrong:

• In 2023, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zeihan stated Bitcoin would go to zero.10

• In 2022, Zeihan told Reuters a conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia was probable, again, due to a U.S. withdrawal from the region that didn’t happen.11

• In the same Reuters interview, Zeihan stated literally billions of people would starve this decade due to demographic collapse in conjunction with supply shortages created by the covid pandemic, especially in Germany and China.

• Again, in this same interview, Zeihan stated Russia would go westward beyond Ukraine due to demographic desperation and invade NATO states in the baltic region, like Poland, making a NATO-Russia war “unavoidable”.

• Zeihan claimed in a blog titled “The End of Russian Oil” that without access to U.S. engineers and technology, Russia wouldn’t be able to pump its own oil and would face an energy crisis. Russia today has a surplus of oil and exports more than it consumes.12

Many people aren’t educated on supply chains, energy infrastructure, demographics and the topics Zeihan talks about. Hearing Zeihan confidently discuss these issues can really give the impression that he is an expert.

However, when Zeihan ventures into topics with wider public engagement and issues that many people are enthused about, his reception is far more mixed. For example, his commentary on Israel shows he is wrong on basic facts like the number of hostages in Gaza.13

He has also made the tired claim that Israel is essentially a U.S. geopolitical project to exert influence in the Middle East, a claim often made to bolster support for Israel, which also oversimplifies a much more complex (and less mutually benefitial) relationship.

In reality, U.S.-Israel ties were tepid for decades: the United States maintained an arms embargo on Israel during the early years of its statehood and did not become its principal military supplier until the mid-1970s, particularly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

While of course, he relies on the prior of U.S. withdrawal from international relations to interpret the probability of events surrounding Israel, Iran and the U.S. But obviously, if you don’t share that prior, many of the events Zeihan highlights appear less like symptoms of a grand realignment and more like routine disagreements within a still-intact alliance structure.

The comments on his video “What's Up In the Middle East: Israel's Future” are extremely negative. One commenter stated, “When you already know about a subject, is this how accurate Peter Zeihan is on every issue?” Another wrote, “Every time Peter talks about Israel I think to myself maybe this guy doesn't know as much as we think he knows about everything”.

I raise these comments not to say Zeihan is an idiot, he is a smart guy who knows some stuff… But he isn’t an expert - and it’s irresponsible to posture as one and communicate confidently on complex topics that have real consequences for people without any regard for genuine expertise.

All this being said, I enjoy listening to Zeihan and hearing his perspective. However, I wish I was listening to him as a friend at a dinner party rather than through a platform with millions of viewers.

Zeihan isn’t the most insidious guru. In fact, he is low on the list when it comes to the most narcissistic, cynical and harmful gurus in media. The reason I wanted to write this article was precisely to illustrate that guruism is a spectrum and not always obvious.

Spengler is a sophisticated thinker belonging to the German conservative tradition of the early 20th century. There are many interesting insights into Western civilisation that Spengler provides in his text “The Decline of The West”, such as his concept of “the Faustian spirit” denoting the West’s self-destructive quest for maximizing the will to power and infinite expansion.

Spengler is clearly a genius. On the other hand, many people who cry out “the West has fallen” are not referring to Spengler’s deterministic model of culture production, but are scapegoating immigrants as the cause of contemporary political issues - ranging from cultural degeneracy to healthcare to housing to inflation…

In either case, many of the latter type lean on Spengler to create the veneer of a deeper and more sophisticated worldview. Namely, they ground their belief in “cultural degeneracy” in Spengler’s concept of civilisational decline.

I am going to argue that, in some respects, the West’s culture production hasn’t declined, but changed. Most notably, Western art has shifted from mediums like painting and architecture to music and film.

I will reference Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche’s accounts of music and performing arts to argue this.

Civilisation and Decline:

Spengler, in his influential work The Decline of the West, argued that civilisations, much like living organisms, have natural lifecycles.

In this lifecycle, civilisations have two phases - the culture phase and the civilisation phase. This split is over a civilisation’s ability to produce culture. In the former stage, a civilisation lays down its philosophical, artistic and religious expression.

Think of Classical Greece during the age of philosophy and drama, or Medieval Europe during its peak religious and artistic expression.

On the other hand, the civilisation stage occurs once a society has ceased its culture production and becomes a materialist-driven empire.

In this stage, “the man of reason” appears and rationalises the society. The artistry and mythic story telling that defined the society disappears.

Think of Socrates deconstructing the Homeric myths, wielding dialectical reasoning as a weapon against the great works of his culture.

While also, a “great man” - like a Napoleon or Alexander The Great - unifies the nation under an empire, contributing to the rise of mass society governed by secular ethics and politics - instead of a shared spirituality stemming from myth, art or poetry.

According to Spengler, the West is in this civilisation phase. As the West loses its cultural identity, rulers and common folk alike lose any meaningful concept of their own society.

The West will be torn apart by social unrest, political authoritarianism, economic crises, and wars of exhaustion as the soul of our society fades.

There are several ways Spengler identifies the West as in decline. The main one I want to push back on is that the West no longer produces compelling art.

Art is still good, it’s just different.

Many people on today’s political right adopt Spengler’s language to express a nostalgia for a mythic past. The modern world has no reverence for the ideals of virtue, truth and beauty.

They cite the lack of compelling artistic and philosophical achievements since the beginning of the 19th century as evidence for this - having a particular focus on Roman architecture, medieval cathedrals and renaissance paintings.

I posit that the primary mistake here is an overemphasis on visual art at the expense of other art forms. It’s uncontroversial to say modern architecture pales in comparison to the beauty of medieval cathedrals - and influential visual art movements may seem absent today - but this shift is largely because music and film have become the dominant art forms in contemporary culture.

What’s more, music and film are arguably superior art forms because they are capable of capturing more complex themes and evoking a broader palette of emotions. I am going to lean on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to argue this.

Schopenhauer famously stated:

“Music is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon.”

Moreover, Schopenhauer asserted that music had a supreme status among the arts because he understood beauty to be our recognition of the form in the artwork.

Borrowing from Plato, Schopenhauer stated every object participated in an abstract form which enabled us to identify it for what it is. On one side, you have the most general forms that all things participate in, like the laws of physics. On the other, you have the most unique and individual forms like the form of yourself - yes, you reading this.

For Schopenhauer, beautiful art captured and reproduced the form of say, a river or a mountain, in ways nature could not a thousand times over. While also, the more complex and individuated the form, the more beautiful the art.

Because music and performing arts deal with the human condition with more resolution and complexity than other art forms - and because the human condition is the most individuated form - it follows for Schopenhauer that music and performing arts are the most beautiful forms of art.

“Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”

For this same reason, Schopenhauer placed architecture as the lowest art form, describing it as a drama between the integrity of the building and the forces of nature. The latter being the most general form that appears in everything and therefore, the least beautiful.

You don’t need to be a platonist to enjoy Schopenhauer’s perspective. Rather, one can take from Schopenhauer’s philosophy that good art is simply that which explores the most deep and relatable themes - namely - us... There is something very beautiful about this in its own right.

Nietzsche famously believed that tragedy was the highest art form. Granted, Nietzsche’s admiration was especially towards ancient Greek tragedy. This, however, does not actually support Spengler’s view, as Spengler believed the West (or Faustian society) was a distinct civilisation to ancient Greece.

Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s admiration of tragedy stemmed from a similar understanding that performing arts could capture the full extent of the human condition - namely - both the Apollonian and Dionysian spirit in mankind.

We can put aside any metaphysical reading of these concepts and take from Nietzsche’s view that tragedy harnesses both order, clarity and rationality - as well as chaos, ecstasy, dissolution of the individual, and raw suffering.

Tragedy explored human being’s divine spark as well as the animal spirit that connects us to nature, both of which are necessary for good art.

Obviously, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer predate film. However, I don’t think it’s a stretch to see how their assessment of theater and performing arts can easily be extended to film. Not only this, the use of cinematography adds a new layer of artistry to film above and beyond the performing arts as well.

I will finish this section of by asking a question, when was the last time a painting made you laugh or cry? In contrast, most of us have cried to a piece of music or film. I submit the reason for this is because music and film are superior art forms.

In response to what I have said thus far, one might be tempted to appeal to the supremacy of classical music. I will address this now and argue that, although it’s fine to enjoy classical music, contemporary music genres are just as artistic.

Classical Music Supremacy

It’s easy to see how proponents of the belief in Western decline will cite classical as the supreme style of music. It would follow from this that music today is all downhill from the 18th and 19th century - decadent and inferior.

So, why could classical music possibly be better than today’s music?

One common justification for this is the complexity of classical music. Classical compositions often use advanced chord progressions, modulations between keys, counterpoint, and voice leading.

Except, today’s music experiments with polyrhythms, irregular time signatures, and microtiming. A J Dilla beat or a Meshuggah track has rhythmic complexities that rarely appear in classical music.

Not to mention, many of the most famous classical pieces are actually remarkably simple. While also, a genre like Jazz is on average even more complex than classical music, yet was decried as degenerate in its day.

Most importantly, we can compare the complexity of different genres of music… But it isn’t really relevant seeing complexity in technique or expression doesn’t equate to better art.

The complexity of the themes being explored? Yes.

The complexity of the expressive techniques involved to capture those themes? No.

To illustrate, I could play a 300 bpm, polyrhythmic piece in an irregular time signature on a kazoo and it’s going to sound like shit…

Minimalist music (e.g. Steve Reich, Burial, Brian Eno) proves that restraint can be more powerful than maximalism. Some of the most emotionally resonant music is harmonically or formally simple, but texturally or emotionally intricate.

I would even advance the view that being able to communicate more substance through the least amount of technique is the mark of a great artist.

There is plenty of “bad” music today that one could cherry pick to counter this article. But to fairly compare eras, we need to look at the music most celebrated and likely to be remembered. Likewise, the “bad” classical composers are not remembered in history. The fact is, a list like Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 100 albums of all time is a list of great works of art.

Really, much of the belief in the supremacy of classical music is due to the aristocratic aesthetic that it’s tied to. “Aristocracy” quite literally defines itself as superior to its underclasses and their artifacts.

However, classical music was once popular music, it flourished in courts and salons, often patronized by aristocracy and church elites. Its “high” status was as much a result of institutional support and class dynamics as inherent artistic value.

Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, many canonical figures were criticized in their time for being too dramatic, too emotional, or too avant-garde. Cultural elites have always dismissed newer forms until canonized later. Mozart was basically an Elvis Presley of his time.

For these reasons, music has evolved, diversified and expanded into all sorts of new expressions. It’s a remarkable time to be alive for music and it’s the art form our society will be remembered for.

Closing Remarks

In this article, I focused on music and film. I also believe that visual art in the 20th century is greatly under appreciated. Instead of addressing this here, I will simply refer you to Jean Gepser’s text “The Ever Present Origin”. This text offers a cultural model that directly counters Spengler’s and states modern art reflects an expansion of consciousness i.e. how we relate to the world and ourselves.

A major reason these newer art forms are often undervalued - and why certain critics feel cognitive dissonance when confronted with their significance - is that acknowledging their value requires crediting diverse demographics who have deeply influenced Western culture, notably Black and Jewish creatives.

Lets face it, many of the people who decry the fall of the West are fascists. This entails not only the longing for a mythic past, as touched on before - but a politics of exclusion that seeks to construct a concept of Western society only for their group, at the expense of others.

Rather than celebrating the expansion of Western society to include new groups and new forms of expression, they want their society to remain small. Ergo, this type of person doesn’t actually value artistic expression beyond being a political tool to marginalise others.

I will conclude this article by saying anyone alive today is far more privileged than anyone in the past when it comes to enjoying great art.

Despite multiple investigations by the New York City Medical Examiner, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the FBI - you have probably yet to even meet someone who believes Epstein committed suicide… but that is because you haven’t met me.

In this article, I am going to describe the timeline of events leading to Epstein’s death. Secondly, I am going to explain the official findings. I will then explain the homicide theory and why it is persuasive to people. Then, I will show how the suicide account offers a superior explanation. I will then spend some time discussing explanatory merits and how when comparing the two theories, the suicide theory is the best.

Timeline:

On the night of August 9th 2019, Epstein would receive a visit from his attorneys - who described him as “upbeat” - after which Guard Tova Noel would escort Epstein back to his Special Housing Unit (SHU) cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC).

Officer Noel, along with officer Michael Thomas, are assigned to monitor Epstein in routine 30-minute checks. In addition, the MCC tells the Department of Justice that Epstein would have a cellmate at all times.

Epstein’s cellmate would be transferred before the night of his death - and no one would replace him, leaving Epstein alone.

While also, only one check would be made that night by Officer Noel at 10:30pm, which would count the last time the guards entered the location of Epstein’s cell.

CCTV captures the guards not only failing to perform these checks, but instead falling asleep at their desks for 3 hours and then falsifying logbooks to cover up their lapse.

Two of the cameras covering the hallway outside Epstein’s cell would malfunction that night, another providing “unusable footage”.

At 6:30am on August 10th, 2019, Epstein would be found unresponsive in his cell.

Guards began performing CPR on Epstein while shouting, “Breathe, Epstein, breathe,” as reported by nearby inmates. At 6:33 a.m., they activated an alarm to alert their supervisor, during which officer Noel stated, “Epstein hung himself.”

Epstein was transported to New York Downtown Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:39 a.m. His body was then taken to the medical examiner’s office.

Removing Epstein’s body from the cell violated Bureau of Prisons protocol, which requires that a suicide scene be preserved with the same integrity as any crime scene involving a death.

Staff also failed to photograph Epstein’s body as it was originally discovered, further breaching procedure.

Official Findings:

On August 11, 2019, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, conducted a four-hour autopsy on Jeffrey Epstein’s body. Forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, hired by Epstein’s legal team, was present as an independent observer.

The initial findings indicated that Epstein had died by suicide through hanging, using a bedsheet from his cell. On August 16, the medical examiner officially ruled the death a suicide.

However, the report also noted fractures in Epstein’s neck, including the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage. While such injuries can occur in hangings - particularly in older individuals - they are more commonly associated with homicidal strangulation.

Epstein’s defense team publicly challenged the findings. They stated their intention to conduct an independent investigation and requested access to surveillance footage from the night of his death. Later, they claimed that the medical evidence was more consistent with homicide than suicide.

In late October 2019, Michael Baden publicly stated that the injuries - specifically fractures on both sides of the larynx and a break in the left hyoid bone - were more consistent with strangulation from behind.

He also noted that the wound on Epstein’s neck was thinner than the width of the ligature and located centrally on the neck, which he argued was more typical of strangulation than hanging.

Dr. Sampson firmly rejected Baden’s claims and reiterated her ruling of suicide by hanging. Other medical experts also disputed Baden’s conclusions. Neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta pointed out that aging bones are more fragile and prone to fracturing during a hanging.

Forensic specialists from institutions such as Emory University and John Jay College explained that multiple fractures in the neck can occur during hangings and that a broken hyoid bone is not definitive proof of homicide.

Further controversy surrounded the condition and appearance of Epstein’s neck wounds. Baden claimed the lack of blood on the ligature and the nature of the mark suggested strangulation. However, these claims were not supported by other forensic authorities or by the official investigation.

In June 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General released a final report reaffirming the suicide conclusion. Investigators interviewed 54 witnesses (including MCC New York correctional staff, supervisors, medical and psychology personnel, contractors, and even one of Epstein’s relatives) and collected over 127,000 documents related to Epstein’s incarceration.

They reviewed surveillance camera footage, staff emails and texts, inmate records, and conducted forensic analysis of jail computers and phones. The OIG also reviewed FBI case files and interviewed the New York City Medical Examiner who performed Epstein’s autopsy.

No evidence of foul play was found - No intruder or unauthorised entry, no unidentified suspects caught on CCTV, no suspicious communications, no evidence of foul play… The findings were consistent with those of the FBI, which also concluded that Epstein’s death was a suicide.

The OIG investigation concluded that Epstein’s August 10, 2019 death was the result of a “combination of negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures” by Bureau of Prisons staff at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

The Homicide Theory

I will now layout the homicide theory and the strongest reasons in its favor.

The homicide theory states that on August 10th, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. Seeing Epstein was located in a high security SHU cell, the homicide account states that in addition to being murdered, there was a cover-up in which officials in charge of Epstein’s custody conspired to conceal his murder.

There are several facts about the case that this theory explains, namely, the unprecedented procedural breakdown and security failures that took place that night. These include:

• The deactivation or malfunction of surveillance cameras in the hallway outside his cell.

• The absence of his cellmate on the night of his death, despite suicide prevention protocols requiring he not be left alone.

• The failure of correctional officers to conduct regular 30-minute checks, compounded by later falsification of records.

• The presence of materials in his cell (such as multiple bed sheets and a spare mattress) that should have been removed under standard suicide precautions.

Proponents of the homicide theory assert that these events aren’t well explained on the view that Epstein’s death was a suicide. Instead, this was the result of a top-down effort to cover-up his murder. Each of these seem like independent, low-probability events. For all of them to happen at once seems extremely unlikely and warrants an explanation.

Another reason the homicide theory is so attractive to people is that it provides a strong motive. Epstein’s ties to politicians, royalty, and business elites - some accused of involvement in sex trafficking - meant his prosecution risked exposing powerful figures.

Epstein had dirt on powerful people, dirt he could have leveraged for a plea deal. Proponents of the homicide theory argue his murder protected the interests of powerful elites - they killed Epstein to prevent the house of cards from crashing down.

Furthermore, proponents of the homicide theory side with comments made by Epstein’s legal team over the official findings. Dr Baden, as explained earlier, stated that the fractures in Epstein’s neck were more consistent with homicidal strangulation than self-inflicted hanging.

What’s more, Baden also stated that the injuries on Epstein’s neck were too thin for a bed sheet and were more likely caused by a wire or cord. Some proponents of the homicide theory also cite the absence of blood on the bed sheets wrapped around Epstein’s neck.

Now, there is the more extreme, schizophrenic types that try to argue the pictures of Epstein’s body on the gurney were faked, and that the person lying there isn’t Epstein. They try to compare his earlobes and other facial features…

But, I am employing the principle of charity and steel-manning the homicide theory. For this reason, I am assuming the homicide theory proponent reading this (yes you) is far smarter than that.

Lastly, there were many issues with the integrity of the investigation into Epstein’s death as stated. Homicide theory proponents cite the mishandling of the scene and the removal of Epstein’s body against the Bureau of Prisons’ protocol. The homicide theory states that this mishandling was deliberate and an attempt to hide evidence of Epstein’s murder.

The Suicide Theory

I am now going to explain the suicide theory and show how this account better explains the evidence than the homicide theory.

The suicide theory states that Epstein killed himself by hanging and that there was no cover up. This theory is more parsimonious and relies on direct evidence rather than speculation or circumstances.

Firstly, I will address the points made in favor of the homicide theory above before advancing the other merits of the suicide theory.

Mishandles, Cameras and Guards

The unprecedented breakdowns in protocol (camera malfunctions, falsified logs, missing cellmate, and access to contraband materials) are indeed alarming and demand an explanation. But they are not unique to Epstein’s case.

The DOJ’s Inspector General and FBI investigations found that these failures were consistent with chronic under staffing, complacency, and widespread mismanagement at the MCC.

The homicide theory proponant might be tempted to discount the DOJ and FBI findings, but unless there is direct evidence to suggest a faux-investigation, this is an ad-hoc postulate designed to protect the homicide theory from falsifiability.

While also, the lack of routine checks can be explained by not only the above complacency, but also the fact that… well… the guards fell asleep. On the homicide theory view - which states this procedure failure was a conspiracy - the guards went back to their desk and deliberately slept for 3 hours and then foolishly tried to falsify logs on CCTV, only to admit to it later.

Clearly, the suicide theory is more parsimonious in explaining these facts… The guard’s fell asleep and tried to hide their incompetency, just as the CCTV shows.

As far as the camera’s malfunctioning, this sounds very suspicious… that is until the DOJ found that these two malfunctioning cameras had been in need of repair for weeks prior to Epstein’s suicide.

This not only aligns with the consistent complacency and security failures of the MCC found by the investigation, but thus far, there is no evidence of intentional tampering with the cameras. Again, the homicide theory necessitates speculative and ad-hoc postulates that aren’t based on any direct evidence, while the suicide theory explains the evidence without having to add any unsupported steps.

You see how this is becoming a theme? We have a phrase for theories that employ this type of poor reasoning… Conspiracy theory.

Furthermore, the mishandling of the scene, including the removal of Epstein’s body, is not direct evidence of intentional tampering or an attempt to hide evidence. If the scene had been deliberately altered to hide a homicide, one would expect signs of cleaning, removal of ligature evidence, tampering with surveillance systems beyond existing malfunctions, or at least internal communications indicating intent. None of that was found.

Incompetency and negligence - as consistent with the suicide theory - explains the above facts, so why resort to a theory - like the homicide theory - that requires more than the available facts to do so?

The Autopsy and Injuries

I will now turn to the autopsy.

Dr. Baden’s dissenting opinion is often cited by homicide theorists, but it was not based on an independent autopsy - he observed the same procedure performed by Dr. Sampson, the official medical examiner.

Dr Sampson’s ruling of suicide by hanging was based on the full context of evidence, including lividity, ligature marks, and body position.

The injuries Baden associated with homicide DO occur in suicidal hangings, especially among men the same age as Epstein. This means more work has to be done by the homicide proponent to show the injuries were not the result of suicidal hanging.

Moreover, Dr Sampson’s ruling has been affirmed by many other experts, such as Dr. Gupta and Dr. Rodts. In fact, the overwhelming majority of qualified forensic pathologists and medical authorities who have reviewed the available evidence have either affirmed the suicide conclusion or stated that Epstein’s injuries are consistent with suicide and not sufficient to establish homicide.

Baden’s assertion that the wound was “too thin” has been criticized for being subjective and not based on any specific medical analysis or methodology.

Furthermore, there is no physical evidence to support the use of a wire or cord. There is no trace materials, no ligature impressions inconsistent with fabric, and no signs of defensive wounds or a struggle. The absence of blood on the bed sheet is not unusual in hangings - bleeding is not a necessary outcome and varies case by case.

Perhaps most importantly, there is no evidence of a struggle. Pathologists distinguish between a homicide and a suicide through signs like defensive wounds, bruising inconsistent with a ligature, or evidence of a struggle (e.g., overturned furniture, skin under fingernails). The autopsy report, conducted by Dr. Sampson, found no such indicators.

There is no direct evidence from the autopsy that suggests Epstein was murdered, and the broken hyoid bone doesn’t favor either theory as it can be explained by both. The homicide theorist is again in a situation where they are adding details without evidence to make the theory float - details like that Epstein was strangled with a wire or cord - without leaving signs of a struggle.

The Motive

The fact is, a motive is not a necessary detail in a theory of a crime. You cannot get convicted on motive alone.

From my experience, the fact that Epstein had so many connections with powerful figures accused of similar crimes does most of the work for the homicide theory proponent.

Although a motive like this offers some explanatory power - it tells us why Epstein is no longer alive - a good explanation needs to do more than just explain.

I could posit that aliens killed Epstein and it explains the facts… But it is pure speculation, it is ad-hoc, unfalsifiable and less parsimonious than the suicide theory in virtue of adding unsupported details - like the existence of aliens…

I will talk more about the explanatory merits (or lack thereof) of the homicide theory later. Now, I will talk about how the suicide theory offers a strong motive.

Facing life imprisonment and public disgrace, Epstein had a clear personal motive for suicide. Epstein had made comments about being “a coward” and not adapting to his life behind bars.

More importantly, Epstein had already attempted suicide only a month earlier. Epstein was placed on suicide watch for 31 hours and an email was sent out to 70 prison staffers requesting Epstein have a cell mate.

When Epstein’s cell mate was transferred without a replacement, this was the window in which a suicidal Epstein could take his own life.

These facts are completely expected on the suicide theory. It is hard to deny that Epstein was suicidal. If Epstein had already attempted to commit suicide, it is isn’t implausible to think he would do it again.

Epstein’s previous suicide attempt doesn’t just provide a motive, it provides a probabilistic prior that increases the likelihood of the suicide theory.

I have shown how the suicide theory trumps the reasons one might have for the homicide theory. I now want to focus on explanatory merits and show how the suicide theory is more virtuous than the alternative.

Explanatory Merits

When we compare theories, we need clear standards to assess why one theory succeeds and others don’t. These are known as explanatory merits.

Some of these include parsimony (simplicity), falsifiability (testability), lack of ad-hocness (avoiding unsupported assumptions), predictive power (anticipating new evidence), coherence (alignment with background knowledge) and so on.

One theory might seem plausible on its own, but without comparing that theory to the alternatives on a shared criteria, we have no idea if it’s the best explanation.

The timeline of events as highlighted earlier in the article does look suspicious. It seems too coincidental that Epstein’s cellmate was transported with no replacement just before his death. The malfunctioning security cameras and lack of routine checks only add to this.

However, once you actually tease out the homicide theory and compare it to alternatives, you see that the suicide theory better explains the facts, is more parsimonious, less ad-hoc and more falsifiable.

It is one thing to say the facts of the case look suspicious, it is another to advance a homicide theory of the crime. Once you spell out the details, the theory quickly becomes untennable…

Who killed Epstein? How did they get into the building undetected? If it was one of the MCC employees, how do they all have verified alibies? How many people were in on it? Was the DOJ and FBI compromised?

Whatever your answers to these questions, none of them are based on direct evidence and are nothing more than speculation. You are basically writing fiction and not dealing with the facts. This is because there is no direct evidence for the homicide theory, it is all circumstantial.

We have used this word “evidence” a lot. What is evidence? Well, in epistemology people debate this, but for the sake of this article, let’s say that x is evidence for y, if x is expected on y being true.

Now, looking at the homicide theory, wouldn’t we expect any kind of leak or whistleblower if Epstein was murdered? A conspiracy to murder Epstein, especially one involving powerful individuals or institutions, would likely require multiple actors like guards, administrators, or external operatives.

The larger the conspiracy, the harder it is to maintain secrecy. Not only has there been no whistleblower coming forward with details of the crime, the FBI did a thorough check of both Epstein’s and the MCC’s communication records and found no records of a conspiracy.

We would expect on the homicide theory - which details a vast conspiracy between elites and members of the criminal justice system - a great deal of communication… Instead, no burner phones, no suspicious financial transactions, no coded messages have surfaced…

If the FBI’s findings do nothing for you because you believe the FBI is apart of the conspiracy; 1) you are admitting your view is unfalsifiable and 2) are making a statement with no direct evidence to protect your view from being falsified.

I discussed in the autopsy section that we would also expect to find signs of a struggle on the homicide theory - of which there were none - suggesting the autopsy is better evidence for the suicide theory.

Finally, on the homicide theory, we would expect security footage… Yes, two of the cameras were malfunctioning… but two cameras malfunctioning isn’t enough to allow someone to enter a high security, special housing unit, commit homicide without leaving a trace, and exit without detection.

What about the other 10 cameras in Epstein’s SHU facility alone? Let alone the dozens of others in the administration areas where a suspect would have to enter to reach Epstein.

You can keep adding conspirators at the expense of explanatory parsimony to make sense of a murderer reaching Epstein undetected, but this doesn’t address the fact that no suspect appeared on the upwards of 50 MCC cameras (by some estimates) a murderer could have potentially been detected on.

These above failures are predictive failures. The homicide theory makes clear predictions about what we would expect to find, and when we look at the facts, we don’t find them at all.

On the other hand, the suicide theory basically requires zero extra postulates to make sense of the facts. All of the facts of the case are expected on the suicide theory. It is also falsifiable.

One leak, one whistleblower, one encrypted message - would falsify the suicide theory, yet, it hasn’t happened. On the homicide theory, any falsifying evidence can be explained away as apart of the conspiracy.

Moreover, the homicide theory seems less coherent with the facts of Epstein’s suicidality and MCC negligence. The conspiracy just glosses over these details with little attempt at explaining them.

In contrast, the suicide theory is just far more coherent with the facts, making direct sense of them and leaving nothing unturned.

What would we expect under the suicide theory that isn’t a fact of the case? Very little. Epstein exploited a window of opportunity created by MCC’s failures to make a second, successful suicide attempt. The evidence - autopsy, staff accounts, and institutional context - supports this conclusion.

For these reasons, I think the suicide theory is more probable than the homicide theory.

Kant

Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” sets out to do a few things. One such thing is uncovering the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience.

If we take “Causality” as an example of such a precondition - Kant agreed with Hume that we do not observe causality in experience - we never perceive necessary connections, only constant conjunctions.

To illustrate, if I snap my fingers and the light turns on, you might infer that I caused the light to turn on. If I continue snapping my fingers and the light reliably turns on and off in sync, your confidence in the causal connection will grow. But all you’re really observing is a repeated correlation - what Hume called constant conjunction.

You’re seeing two events occur together consistently, but you’re not perceiving any necessary connection between them. Causality, in this view, isn’t something you see; it’s something your mind projects onto the sequence of events based on habit or expectation.

Kant then argued that causality is not derived from experience but is instead a necessary condition for the possibility of experience itself. It is one of the a priori categories of the understanding that the mind contributes in order to synthesize sensory input into coherent, intelligible experience.

Importantly, Kant emphasized that just because certain categories (like causality) are necessary for us to make sense of experience, it does not follow that they exist in reality independently of us.

These categories structure the world as it appears to us (phenomena), not things in themselves (noumena). In other words, the mind imposes a conceptual framework on raw sensory data, but we have no warrant to claim that this framework maps onto mind-independent reality.

To do so would be to commit what Kant called a transcendental illusion i.e. projecting the conditions of possible experience beyond their legitimate bounds.

“Transcendental illusion arises from the fact that the subjective conditions of our thinking, which are necessary for us, are taken to be conditions of the possibility of the objects themselves.” - Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

So, just to repeat, Kant is saying that the categories of the understanding - like causality- are necessary for experience, but do not necessarily refer to anything in or beyond experience.

Now, let us look at where TAG makes a mistake…

The Transcendental Argument For God’s Existence (TAG)

Proponents of TAG make a similar move to Kant - except they claim that God is the necessary precondition for intelligible experience - and that therefor God exists.

Let’s look at TAG in a logical syllogism to get a clearer picture.

Not every TAG proponent makes an argument like this - TAG proponents often seem to be arguing different things - but here is one way it can be formulated:

1. If God does not exist, then intelligible experience is not possible.

2. Intelligible experience is possible.

3. Therefore, God exists.

(Modus tollens on the contrapositive)

My objection is that the first premise equivocates between a transcendental condition for thought and metaphysical existence.

Even if God is a necessary condition for how we think about intelligibility, it does not follow that God exists outside of that framework.

That would be like saying because causality is a precondition for experience, causality must govern the noumenal world, which Kant explicitly rejects.

But don’t just take Kant’s word for it. In logic, this is called a modal scope error: it illegitimately shifts from a de dicto modal necessity - within the scope of a statement about thinking - to a de re metaphysical claim about an entity.

Basically, conceptual necessity cannot be equated with metaphysical necessity.

This is the exact kind of metaphysical overreach Kant warned against and the very reason for the phenomena / noumena distinction.

So, again - even if God is necessary for experience, it doesn’t follow that God exists beyond our experience. Kant shows this.

Now, Dyer was brief and didn’t elaborate on what he meant by this. I am unsure how the is-ought gap fits into what he was arguing and don’t want to make assumptions.

However, on other occasions, I have seen Hume’s is-ought gap raised as a unique problem for atheism or naturalism.

What’s more, I have also seen non-naturalists make the same move for Hume’s problem of induction.

I am going to address both of these now and show that people who do this have gotten Hume ass-backwards.

The is-ought gap

The is-ought gap has nothing to do with atheistic or naturalist accounts of morality. Neither is it a response or refutation of moral realism.

It is merely concerned with the rules of deductive logic - namely, that there is no valid law of inference to get from a set of “is” premises to an “ought” conclusion - because deductive arguments are non-ampliative i.e. you can’t conclude any information from a deductive argument that isn’t already in the premises). It says nothing about meta-ethics.

If you hold to some form of moral realism, the is-ought gap isn’t a threat to your view. On moral realism - whether a naturalistic version or not - the “ought” premises in an argument are a matter of fact, so what’s the problem?

While people who don’t subscribe to moral realism just use the term “ought” in a different sense. There is nothing logically stopping them from making ought statements in the premises of an argument.

Moreover, theistic accounts of ethics are not exempt from the is-ought gap. Adding God into the mix doesn’t give you a special rule of inference to deduce an ought from an is - and therefor, an ampliative deductive argument. It is impossible.

The above mistakes are made in people thinking the fact you can’t deduce ought statements from is statements somehow undermines the former.

Consider the following analogy:

"You can't deduce economic truths from facts about astrophysics, without adding to the argument some relevant premise about astrophysics".

In this case, it is clear that the categorical distinction doesn't undermine either type of statement. It just shows that you can’t conclude any information from an argument that isn’t already in the premises.

Christians who bring up the is-ought gap as a refutation of naturalistic ethics have failed to understand this very elementary concept - and quite frankly, it’s embarrassing.

The problem of induction

The problem of induction also has nothing to do with naturalism. Neither do non-naturalist accounts circumvent the problem of induction.

The problem isn’t about whether or not there is regulation or uniformity in nature. It is about how the observation of such uniformity in the past does not justify the belief in uniformity in the future - without being either logically invalid or circular.

Even if say, the laws of physics are both necessary and the result of some divine law giver - Hume’s problem of induction states that I cannot infer whether my experiences are just coincidence or genuine instances of universal laws - without making the irrational assumption that unobserved cases will resemble observed ones.

Christians (or anyone else for that matter) who raise the problem of induction as unique problem for naturalistic or non-theistic worldviews have misunderstood the problem of induction.

The irony…

To think Hume’s influence is due to his devastating critiques of naturalism is very ironic…

Firstly, Hume’s work is a lot more interesting than just making a comment on his own worldview. Hume raised issues for the whole enterprise of human reasoning i.e. all worldviews.

Not only this, I believe that if Hume’s problem of induction cuts any way… it is a bigger problem for theists…

This is because the theist usually wants to appeal to the existence of necessary laws of nature as the basis for scientific knowledge, yet this is undermined if there is no means for us to establish if those laws are just a coincidence or not.

The apologists who cite Hume as bolstering their side of the argument have got it ass-backwards.