Philosophics — Philosophical and Political Ramblings

Many people conflate ownership with control, but this is a limited perspective. This perspective bleeds in democracy, where there is only an illusion of control. I discuss this in this brief segment. Come listen.  This episode is also available as a blog post: https://philosophicsblog.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/ownership-and-democracy/ This podcast is an extension of the Philosophics blog at http://philosophicsblog.wordpress.com, where you can find related content. Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/philosophics YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjiu3TlvFJw59SDByK0-yCg

The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption continues the Anti-Enlightenment project byformalizing Dis-Integrationism as both philosophical method and ethical practice. It begins amid the ruins of Enlightenment coherence—reason, agency, progress—and refuses the reflex of reconstruction. Where deconstructionrevealed instability within language, Dis-Integrationism inhabits that instability as lived condition. It is neither despair nor nihilism but a discipline of suspension: naming seams without pretending they are whole, sitting within fragmentation without manufacturing closure.This essay contrasts Dis-Integrationism with Derridean and post-structural approaches, rejecting both the modern appetite for synthesis and the postmodern addiction to novelty. It proposes instead an ethic of maintenance—care, reciprocity, and endurance—as the only honest response to a world that cannot be redeemed. The work is offered as an open inquiry rather than a conclusion: philosophy as the practice of remaining unfinished.Full Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17281408Anti-Enlightenment Project: https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment/

Modern institutions behave as if humans are sovereign choosers. This essay argues that "agency'' is not a discovered fact but a load-bearing fiction required by Enlightenment modernity to operate courts, markets, and liberal politics. Beginning from lived coercion rather than seminar metaphysics, the essay reframes agency as differential responsiveness shaped by material, temporal, relational, epistemic, somatic, and juridical conditions. A decolonial survey demonstrates that non-Western and subaltern traditions have long treated selfhood as relational, processual, or illusory, converging with contemporary critiques from neuroscience, phenomenology, and social theory. The proposal is not fatalism but a non-binary model of agency as gradient capacity—more or less responsiveness within constraints—supporting ethics of maintenance and politics of condition stewardship over retribution and moral theatre. The conclusion situates this reframing within Dis-Integrationism: if there is no sovereign self, then systems premised on aggregating such selves cannot cohere without fictions, and we should stop pretending they do. 👉Full Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17276732👉 Anti-Enlightenment Project: https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment/

This is a reading of an essay by Bry Willis that continues the Anti-Enlightenment project through an archaeological examination of modernity’s most enduring fiction: the “normal” human. It traces the evolution of Homo Normalis from a statistical artefact into a moral ideal, revealing how legibility—the power to render life visible, measurable, and administrable—became the operating logic of Western governance.From Quetelet’s l’homme moyen and Galton’s eugenic arithmetic to Foucault’s biopolitical regimes and the affective capitalism of the present, the essay follows the transformation of normality from virtue to infrastructure. Psychology, sociology, and critical theory each inherit the same compulsion toward legibility: the drive to make persons, populations, and emotions governable under the rhetoric of care.The text culminates in a refusal—an “ethics of variance”—that rejects the metaphysics of wholeness and perfection. It argues that lucidity, not redemption, remains the final virtue: to know the apparatus intimately enough to decline its myth of order while continuing to live within it.The entire essay, including citations and references, is archived at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17290628.(Part of the Anti-Enlightenment Series, alongside “Against Agency” and “The Discipline of Dis-Integration.”)https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment

The provided text is an essay by independent scholar Bry Willis, titled "The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption," which formalises a new philosophical method called Dis-Integrationism. This approach is positioned as a continuation of the Anti-Enlightenment project, rejecting the modern tenets of reason, agency, and progress, and refusing the human instinct for synthesis or closure. The essay contrasts Dis-Integrationism with deconstruction and post-structuralism, advocating for a "discipline of suspension" that acknowledges fragmentation as a lived condition rather than a problem to be solved. Key to the philosophy is an ethic of maintenance and care—a sustained labour of tending what exists without expecting a final, redemptive outcome. The work is presented as open inquiry and includes an appendix of ten principles, emphasising attention, duration, and the refusal of finality.Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17281408

The provided text consists of excerpts from an essay by independent scholar Bry Willis titled "Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self," which challenges the foundational Enlightenment concept of the sovereign, autonomous human agent. The author argues that "agency" is a necessary fiction used to maintain modern institutions like courts, markets, and liberal politics by enabling systems of retribution, debt, and blame. Willis proposes replacing the binary concept of agency with a "gradient model" of "differential responsiveness," defining action as a scalar capacity for response that is continuously shaped by material and social constraints. The essay synthesises contemporary critiques from neuroscience and social theory with decolonial and non-Western traditions (such as Buddhist anattā and African Ubuntu) that already treat the self as relational and constrained. Ultimately, the work advocates for an ethic of condition-stewardship and maintenance over moral judgment, concluding with the concept of "Dis-Integrationism," which suggests that systems built on the premise of aggregating autonomous selves must necessarily collapse once the fiction of the agent is removed.Full Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17276732Summary: https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/06/against-agency-the-fiction-of-the-autonomous-self/

The provided text is an essay titled "Temporal Ghosts — Tyranny of the Present" by independent scholar Bry Willis, which addresses the concept of presentism, defined as the systematic privileging of the current generation over future ones within modern institutions. The essay argues that this bias is not merely an error but a structural, constitutive feature of Enlightenment democracy that binds the unborn to decisions regarding law, property, debt, and environmental risk. Willis employs a diagnostic approach across six domains—politics, property, law, economics, environment, and technology—to demonstrate how immediate benefits are secured for the living while costs and irreversibilities are externalised into the future. By referencing historical debates (Burke versus Paine) and contrasting Western frameworks with non-Western traditions, the analysis claims that presentism is a "temporal impossibility theorem" because institutions treat the silence of the unborn as illegitimate consent. Ultimately, the work serves as a companion piece to the author's prior work, Rational Ghosts, continuing a critique of the foundational fictions of Enlightenment rationalism.https://zenodo.org/records/17263384

The provided text, an excerpt from the socio-political philosophy blog "Philosophics," offers a severe critique of democracy, arguing that it is fundamentally unstable and lacks true legitimacy. The author uses the metaphor of the three-body problem from celestial mechanics—where adding a third element renders the system unpredictable—to introduce the political instability called the millions-body problem. This problem arises because aggregating millions of subjective preferences leads to contradictions rather than a singular "will of the people." The source highlights the Condorcet paradox and McKelvey’s chaos theorem to demonstrate that voting outcomes are mathematically unstable and easily manipulated by vote order or framing. Ultimately, the text dismisses majority rule as a "ritual of laundered coercion," maintaining that democratic mandates are temporary illusions masking underlying political turbulence.https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/03/democracy-and-the-millions-body-problem/

This extended segment on the essay titled "Rational Ghosts – Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail" by independent researcher Bry Willis, presents a structural critique of modern democratic systems. The author argues that democracy is inherently flawed because its Enlightenment blueprint assumed citizens were perfectly rational and consistent, a premise contradicted by evidence. Willis leverages three primary areas to demonstrate this mismatch: psychology, which shows voters are biased and tribal; mathematics, citing Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem to prove preference aggregation is incoherent; and sociology, using Dunbar’s number to highlight the impossibility of scale in national solidarity. The essay asserts that democratic stability over the past two centuries was merely contingent upon temporary factors like economic prosperity and external threats, which are now collapsing, revealing the system's fragility and structural mismatch. Finally, the author suggests alternatives like subsidiarity, deliberative democracy, and sortition that accommodate actual human cognitive limits rather than denying them. - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17250225- https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/02/rational-ghosts-why-enlightenment-democracy-was-built-to-fail/

The provided source, an essay titled "Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail," presents a significant critique of modern democratic systems, arguing that they are founded upon an unrealistic assumption of the perfectly rational, informed citizen. The author asserts that this concept of the "rational ghost" ignores psychological realities, such as cognitive biases, and mathematical limitations, referencing Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which proves the failure of voting systems to accurately translate public preference. Furthermore, the critique highlights sociological scale issues, citing Dunbar's number to show how effective community trust breaks down in large nation-states, reducing national discourse to mere "imagined communities." The essay concludes by proposing alternative, less "haunted" governance models, such as sortition and subsidiarity, suggesting that political institutions must be designed for actual humans rather than for mythical, idealised citizens.https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/02/rational-ghosts-why-enlightenment-democracy-was-built-to-fail/

The philosophical essay from Philosophics criticises the focus on white supremacy as the primary villain in socio-political analyses, arguing that this perspective mistakes a symptom for the structural rot. The author contends that narratives, such as the widely circulated "7 Signals" deck, frame the decline of white supremacy as an impending resolution, which offers false comfort by presenting too neat a moral arc. Instead, the piece asserts that racism and white supremacy are merely manifestations or "peeling paint" of a deeper systemic crisis involving the exhaustion of late-stage capitalism and the collapse of the Enlightenment project's promises. The true problem is the unravelling of institutions and the systemic rot that allows supremacy to simply rebrand itself when one mask, such as whiteness, falls away, warning against mistaking cosmetic decline for fundamental structural change.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/30/missing-white-supremacys-woods-for-the-tree/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=social

The provided text is an essay from the Philosophics Blog titled "Scaffolding, Rhetoric, and the Illusion of Objectivity," written by language philosopher Bry Willis. Willis argues that objectivity is an illusion within the social and moral domains, asserting that what is considered "truth" is instead a rhetorical and provisional consensus (scaffolding, not granite). The essay's five premises assert that subjectivity is the baseline, relativity is emergent from shared subjectivities, and morality is prescriptive rather than propositional, aligning with non-cognitivism. Willis contends that while institutions must invoke objectivity for theatrical utility, this necessity does not prove its existence, advocating for an ethic of care to maintain the shared, contingent structure of social reality. The piece is aimed at an academic readership already familiar with post-structuralist and anti-realist thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty, whose arguments support the thesis that permanence is a mirage.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/24/stop-pretending-we-live-in-marble-halls/

The philosopher Bry Willis, writing on his Philosophics Blog, argues that reason and rationality are frequently overvalued and misunderstood in modern society, despite being treated as ultimate truths. Willis defines reason as the faculty of inference and rationality as the practice of applying that faculty, asserting that both exist on a spectrum rather than as absolutes. The central thesis is that when reason is worshipped as absolute, it becomes pathological, leading to maladaptive behaviour that borders on psychiatric conditions like obsessive consistency. Willis proposes that true rationality requires emotional ballast and contextual awareness, demanding the ability to temper logic, equivocate, or even lie when a kind response is more effective than a cold fact. Ultimately, the piece contends that rationality that cannot bend is no rationality at all, functioning merely as a tool with a specific range of application.

Philosopher Bry Willis from the "Philosophics" blog critiques the century-old crowd psychology thesis proposed by Gustave Le Bon, who suggested that rational individuals become irrational only when merging into a crowd. The author contends that this view, rooted in an Enlightenment belief in the inherently rational person, is overly flattering and inaccurate according to modern behavioural science. Citing work from Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely, the piece argues that humans are fundamentally and predictably irrational due to ingrained cognitive biases. Therefore, the text concludes that crowds do not corrupt a rational base but instead amplify and accelerate an existing irrational baseline, making Le Bon's observations about the dangers of the crowd correct but insufficiently bleak.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/22/the-myth-of-the-rational-base-le-bon-and-the-crowd-revisited/

Language philosopher Bry Willis shares his socio-political ideas on Philosophics Blog, focusing on a concept the author terms "Dis-Integrationism." This philosophical perspective critiques Modernity’s perennial habit of tearing down existing foundations (like those established by Descartes or Nietzsche) only to rush into constructing new, equally fragile metaphysical "bedrocks," such as rationalism, rights-talk, or even theological belief. The author argues that both philosophical and religious systems mistakenly present their human-made structures (e.g., morality, scripture, reason) as eternal, unchangeable foundations, thereby "gaslighting" people about reality. Dis-integrationism is presented as the necessary pause, the refusal to immediately re-integrate fragmented ideas, and the acknowledgement that all floors we stand on are built, not naturally occurring geology.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/21/dis-integrationism-why-the-floorboards-always-creak/

Language Philosopher Bry Willis from the socio-political philosophy blog titled Philosophics, specifically a post from September 2025 titled "Perspective Is Everything." This commentary focuses on the intense political and ideological divisions within the United States, which the author sarcastically calls the "United States In Name Only." The core argument examines how different cohorts perceive the rhetoric of political figure Charlie Kirk; while one side views him as a pious Christian leader, the author's camp sees him as an opportunist peddling hate. The blog post uses this disparity to discuss the theme of wilful blindness and differing perceptions of hate speech, noting that what one group considers "common sense," another views as a hostile takeover of public discourse.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/19/perspective-is-everything/

The provided text is an excerpt from a philosophical blog post titled "The Morality We Can’t Stop Wanting" published on Philosophics, which explores the universal human need for morality but argues against its objective existence. The author posits that the human moral impulse is merely an evolutionary and social habit ("we’re the kind of animal that survives by narrating rules"), not evidence of a Platonic "Justice." The post critiques philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s attempt to resurrect Aristotelian teleology to ground ethics, asserting that this is merely wish-thinking, while endorsing Nietzsche’s honesty about the lack of cosmic foundations for morality. The author further incorporates Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome to suggest that morality is contingent and messy, arguing that life continues despite the non-existence of a solid moral floor.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/19/the-morality-we-cant-stop-wanting/

Language philosopher Bry Willis discusses the dismissal of terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. A judge ruled that while the murder was heinous, it did not meet the statutory definition of terrorism as there was no evidence of a desire to terrorise the public or engage in a broader campaign of violence. This decision highlights the elasticity of the term "terrorism" in legal contexts, where prosecutors may employ it to seek harsher penalties, while judges are bound by specific legal definitions. The article argues that such legal disagreements expose the insufficiency of language to precisely define complex acts and demonstrate how judicial hierarchy and interpretation ultimately determine the legal classification of an event.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/18/luigi-mangione-is-not-a-terrorist/

The provided text argues that Modernity and the Enlightenment are not actual historical phases humanity has progressed through, but rather a marketing campaign or a myth. The author posits that the archetype of the rational, autonomous individual, central to Enlightenment thought, does not accurately reflect human behaviour, even among historical intellectual figures. Through a critique of philosophical concepts, economic theories, and democratic ideals, the text suggests that society is a "cultural chimera," a blend of premodern beliefs, rationalist aspirations, and postmodern scepticism, rather than a purely rational age. The piece concludes by stating that we are defending a "ghost" of a phase that never truly existed, clinging to a simulacrum of reason that underpins our institutions.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/13/modernity-the-phase-that-never-was/

The provided texts offer a critical analysis of science fiction and fantasy genres, particularly through the lens of Modernist thought. Bry Willis, who writes fiction as Ridley Park, express a discomfort with these genres, finding them didactic and prescriptive. Bry specifically criticises Octavia Butler's Dawn for its archetypal portrayal of its protagonist, Lilith, arguing that it reinforces rather than destabilises gender norms, a point illuminated by the theories of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Park expands on this, suggesting that science fiction and fantasy function as political catechisms, with the former appealing to progressives and the latter to conservatives, both ultimately promoting a form of role conformity. Ultimately, both writers prefer literature that embraces ambiguity and unsettles the reader, rather than providing reassuring answers.https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/10/butler-versus-butler-on-a-bed-of-beauvoir/https://ridleypark.blog/2025/09/10/sci-fi-fantasy-and-the-politics-of-imagination/