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