Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy presents a near-future history in which transnational corporations rise to power and assume the roles of sovereign states. The story begins in the mid-2020s and extends to the 22nd century. In this world, traditional nation-states have almost entirely collapsed. Robinson refers to the dominant corporate entities as metanationals or transnations. They are no longer simple businesses. They are the new governing authorities. The novels depict the rise of these entities through a series of historical stages that feel plausible even from a contemporary standpoint. Robinson’s attention to economic and political detail gives the story a sense of inevitability. The novels are grounded in real economic trends and historical precedent.  It was Carnes Lord, in a footnote in his Modern Prince, who brought my attention to Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and how its consideration has much to teach us about global politics.

The first stage occurs in the late 20th century and continues into the mid-21st century. Nation-states begin to deregulate trade, investment, and capital flows. Governments pursue policies aimed at liberalizing their economies. Corporations take advantage of this environment. Companies such as Consolidated, Subarashii, Armscor, Mitsubishi, Praxis, and Amexx become larger economically than most countries. Robinson notes that these corporations purchase entire national economies in the Global South through debt restructuring. This mirrors real-world practices of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank during the 1980s and 1990s. By controlling national debts, corporations gain leverage over entire populations. Flags of convenience, tax havens, and private security firms erode the last monopolies of Westphalian states. Robinson observes that once a corporation’s annual revenue exceeds the country’s GDP, the power dynamic reverses (Robinson, Red Mars 45). Governments can no longer impose meaningful limits on corporate action. Corporations dictate terms to nations. This stage establishes the pattern of corporate dominance over sovereign institutions. It also highlights the subtle erosion of national authority before corporate power becomes overt.

Robinson emphasizes that economic strength is central to sovereignty in this stage. Traditional state tools such as taxation, law, and military enforcement become less effective against entities that surpass them economically. The novels depict a global system in which national governments are dependent on corporate cooperation to maintain economic stability. Robinson’s narrative shows how financial power can quietly replace political authority. The trilogy suggests that when corporations achieve sufficient scale, the rules of governance are rewritten. The stage of emergence demonstrates that sovereignty is not a fixed entity. It is contingent on the relative power of actors within a political and economic system.

 Corporate Influence on Global Governance

The second stage occurs in the mid-21st century and involves what Robinson describes as a treaty of Westphalia in reverse. The largest thirty to forty metanationals form a private cartel. They negotiate collectively with international bodies such as the United Nations. Through these negotiations, they secure extraterritorial legal status. They gain the right to maintain private armed forces. They also obtain direct representation on an upgraded UN Security Council. Nation-states remain formally in place, but they operate as subcontractors to larger entities. Governments continue to provide welfare and police domestic populations. They also manage propaganda functions. Real authority and the creation of laws and budgets, however, lie with corporations. Robinson describes the United States in 2026 as already being a subcommittee of the metanational complex (Robinson, Red Mars 62). Corporations exercise indirect control over national governments while gaining formal privileges on the global stage. This stage demonstrates how global economic actors can influence international governance and legal norms.

Robinson highlights that corporations acquire privileges typically reserved for sovereign states. They gain the ability to enforce their own laws, deploy military forces, and participate in international diplomacy. The novels suggest that sovereignty is increasingly defined by capacity rather than formal recognition. National governments retain symbolic authority but have limited practical power. Robinson also illustrates the role of institutional capture. By controlling resources and setting global rules, corporations reshape the functions of existing political bodies. The stage of global influence shows that political power can be privatized without overtly abolishing the nation-state. Authority is exercised through networks of economic and institutional dependence rather than formal conquest.

This stage also underscores the ethical dimensions of corporate governance. Corporations operate primarily according to profit motives. Policies prioritize efficiency, market access, and resource control. Robinson demonstrates that this can lead to inequality and social tension. Workers, especially in the Global South, are often subject to harsh economic conditions. Governments continue to manage domestic affairs but are constrained by corporate priorities. Robinson suggests that unchecked corporate power can undermine democratic accountability while presenting itself as a neutral administrative force. This stage illustrates the early tensions between economic dominance and social justice.

 Mars as a Corporate Laboratory

The third stage occurs on Mars, which becomes a laboratory for corporate power. Mars is initially uninhabited and without sovereignty, making it ideal for corporate experimentation. A nominal authority, the United Nations Organization for Martian Affairs or UNOMA, is created as a façade. Real control lies with the corporate executives funding UNOMA. Major corporations divide Mars into concession zones, similar to the partitioning of Africa during the 19th century. Labor is imported under indenture contracts that resemble debt slavery. Resistance is suppressed through private armies such as Armscor and Amexx security. Corporations issue passports, mint currency, control orbit-to-surface access, and manage Mars as corporate property (Robinson, Green Mars 201). The colony demonstrates how corporations can operate as quasi-sovereign entities within a controlled environment, functioning outside traditional government structures.

Robinson depicts Mars as a testing ground for absolute corporate governance. The absence of preexisting political institutions allows corporations to consolidate power without negotiation or compromise. Corporate authorities implement rules prioritizing profit, security, and resource extraction. Labor systems replicate historical patterns of exploitation but are enhanced by technology and surveillance. Robinson emphasizes that control over essential goods, such as breathable air and housing, enables corporations to exercise authority without formal legitimacy. Mars becomes a microcosm for understanding how transnational corporations could transform sovereignty on Earth.

The novels explore the social consequences of this model. Settlers are subject to strict hierarchies and constant surveillance. Resistance is possible, but it carries a high risk. Robinson highlights both the human cost and the structural efficiency of corporate rule. This stage underscores the tension between economic power and individual freedom. Mars functions as a political laboratory where Robinson examines the mechanisms by which corporations can consolidate authority over populations and environments.

The Mars stage also emphasizes technological dependency. Corporate control of transportation, energy, and life support systems reinforces sovereignty. Settlers rely on corporations not only for employment but also for survival. Robinson portrays this dependency as a form of soft coercion. Authority is maintained not only through force but also through access to essential resources. This model illustrates the novel ways in which corporations can exert power beyond traditional political institutions.

 Full Corporate Domination

The fourth stage occurs when metanationals consolidate power and govern Mars directly. After the failed revolution of 2061, corporations stopped using Earth governments or UNOMA as intermediaries. They merge into eleven mega-conglomerates known as the Big Eleven. They govern Mars from a council on the summit of Clarke and Pavonis Mons. Martian law is rewritten so that the only crime is interference with profit extraction. Earth follows a similar pattern. By the 22nd century, metanationals have purchased or leased entire countries. Switzerland becomes owned by Praxis. Subarashii controls India. Robinson emphasizes that at this stage, metanationals achieve full-spectrum dominance. They control territory, population, violence, currency, and ideology. No historical empire has exercised such comprehensive authority (Robinson, Blue Mars 452). Corporations hold absolute authority over human life.

Robinson describes the mature political form of metanationals as neither feudal nor oligarchic. It resembles an absolutist corporate state. It combines elements of seventeenth-century joint-stock company charters, twentieth-century fascist corporate collaboration, and twenty-first-century surveillance capitalism. Companies like the East India Company historically governed territories under legal charters. Fascist corporate collaboration involved close ties between governments and businesses. Surveillance capitalism enables corporations to gather complete data on citizens and employees. By controlling essential resources and technologies, corporations make democratic legitimacy unnecessary (Robinson, Green Mars 389). Life itself becomes a corporate commodity.

This stage demonstrates the total privatization of sovereignty. Robinson’s narrative illustrates that corporations do not merely influence governments but can replace them entirely. Complete corporate domination requires control of legal systems, military force, and economic networks. Robinson shows that in this system, traditional notions of citizenship and public accountability are irrelevant. Authority rests on the corporation’s capacity to sustain life, extract resources, and enforce compliance. This stage represents the culmination of the historical trajectory Robinson describes.

 Resistance and the Possibility of Liberation

The final stage explores resistance and the eventual overthrow of corporate authority on Mars. Physical distance limits the ability of corporations to project military power across 50 to 400 million kilometers. The longevity treatment, initially monopolized, eventually becomes available to Martian settlers outside corporate control. Mars also lacks legacy state infrastructure, allowing settlers to create new political structures from scratch. Robinson shows that these factors enable Mars to break free from corporate dominance (Robinson, Blue Mars 489). The revolutions of 2061 and 2127 represent humanity reclaiming sovereignty before corporate authority becomes permanent (Robinson, Blue Mars 493).

The novels examine the social implications of corporate governance. Labor is exploited, resources are rationed for profit, and ideology is used to maintain compliance. Propaganda and surveillance reinforce corporate control (Robinson, Green Mars 412). Even on Mars, settlers struggle to organize outside corporate systems. The trilogy challenges traditional political theory. Sovereignty is no longer tied to democratic institutions but to control over resources, labor, and technology. Economic dominance translates directly into political authority (Robinson, Red Mars 63). Robinson warns that without active resistance, transnational corporations may permanently privatize sovereignty.

Resistance on Mars also demonstrates the role of geography, technology, and social organization in shaping political outcomes. Mars offers opportunities to experiment with alternative systems of governance. Settlers develop strategies that challenge corporate authority. Robinson emphasizes that even highly organized and economically dominant powers can be contested. Human agency, material conditions, and institutional creativity play crucial roles in political change. The trilogy presents both a warning about corporate power and a vision of liberation through strategic organization, technological innovation, and collective action (Robinson, Green Mars 421).

In conclusion, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy provides a detailed account of the rise of transnational corporations into de facto sovereign powers. The novels illustrate the stages of corporate ascendancy, the mechanisms of global influence, Mars as a corporate laboratory, the consolidation of domination, and the factors that enable liberation. The trilogy warns of the risks posed by unchecked corporate authority while showing that human agency and material conditions can reclaim political control. Robinson’s work challenges conventional assumptions about sovereignty, legitimacy, and governance. It remains a vital text for understanding the intersection of economic power, political authority, and human potential in a corporate-dominated world.

Works cited link

The post Metanationals-Transnationals as a Political Form: Corporate Sovereignty in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy

In Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek offers a Lacanian reading of two Hegelian figures of moral consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the “Beautiful Soul” and the “Law of the Heart,” criticizing Lacan’s condensation of these two figures into one. Žižek stresses the importance of keeping their distinction, describing these figures within Lacan’s own framework: the Beautiful Soul as a figure of moral withdrawal and narcissistic pleasure whose refusal to act paradoxically sustains the symbolic order it criticizes (hysteric’s attitude) and the Law of the Heart as the self-proclaimed savior who seeks to impose its own will on society (psychotic’s attitude).¹

Žižek’s analysis appears to overlook an important transitional figure of moral consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the “Knight of Virtue,” which is a necessary dialectical stage and can complicate Žižek’s binary framework and his opposition between the hysteric and the psychotic by introducing a third position that acts within the Symbolic but fails through over-identification with abstract virtue. Reintroducing the Knight restores a dialectical mediation and perhaps also invites a reconsideration of Lacan’s so-called “mistake” as a deeper intuition, a recognition of the structural entanglement between the figures Žižek distinguishes.

The Knight of Virtue, emerging between the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul, reveals the internal progression from subjective moral conviction to protest to symbolic failure. Unlike the Law of the Heart, which hallucinates universality, or the Beautiful Soul, which retreats from action, the Knight acts. But this action is futile, rigid, and performative, ultimately reinforcing the very order it seeks to oppose. It marks the dialectic’s comedic moment: the hysteric’s empty gesture, blind to its own complicity in sustaining the structure it criticizes.

Žižek’s bypassing of this figure collapses Hegel’s rich trajectory into a binary of delusion (the Law of the Heart) and withdrawal (the Beautiful Soul), flattening the tragicomic complexity of the moral subject’s entanglement with the Symbolic.

The Law of the Heart: Subjective Universality and the Collapse of Mediation

The Law of the Heart appears in the “Reason” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where consciousness tries to reconcile individuality with universality. After the alienation of the Unhappy Consciousness, Reason affirms that reality is accessible to self-consciousness and not external/unknowable. It starts by observing the world scientifically, studying nature, psychology, and itself, to uncover rational laws beneath appearances. This project fails, collapsing into reductive absurdities like physiognomy and phrenology, mistaking outer form for inner essence. Then comes a shift to practical reason, in which consciousness attempts to actualize freedom in the social world. Figures like Don Juan and Faust, who pursue fulfillment through seduction or knowledge, also fail, revealing that individual desire cannot shape the world. From these failures emerges a new figure: the “Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit,” the next shape of consciousness beyond pleasure & necessity.

In the Law of the Heart, the subject no longer pursues fulfillment in personal desire or pleasure but rather identifies an inner moral law within itself. The inner law is experienced as universal and necessary even though it is subjective. This subject believes that its inner feeling (“heart”) expresses not only a personal truth but the truth of all humanity. It speaks as if in the name of everyone, attempting to lead others to righteousness by imposing its own moral vision onto the world.

But of course, the world does not recognize this subject’s law as universal, and this leads to a clash between subjective conviction and objective reality. As competing “laws of the heart” collide, the subject experiences the world as corrupt, unjust, or deceived. There must be moral blindness, systemic corruption, or conspiracy. Then comes a spiral of rage, self-righteousness, and isolation. The subject hardens into a delirious self-certainty that demands others become like itself, and lives in paranoia and resentment. It mistakes subjective conviction for objective truth and fails to grasp the intersubjective and historical mediation of ethical life.

Žižek, following the Lacanian formulation, associates the figure of the Law of the Heart with the “psychotic attitude—that of a self-proclaimed Savior who imagines his inner Law to be the Law for everybody and is therefore compelled, in order to explain why the ‘world’ does not follow his precepts, to resort to paranoid constructions, to the plotting of dark forces.”²

But perhaps, the Law of the Heart can rather be seen as structurally unstable. It does not yet display the full features of either psychosis or hysteria, as it immediately begins to break down under the weight of its own delusion. By identifying its personal feeling with universal Reason, it stages a moment of immediate fusion between the inner and the outer. It appears as a border phenomenon in which an assumed/fantasized unity obfuscates a sharp contradiction.

Unlike a psychotic position grounded in paranoid self-legislation, the Law of the Heart can be understood more cautiously as a moment of collapsing immediacy in which inner conviction and universality are prematurely merged; a transitional collapse of mediation where subjective conviction is mistaken for universality. Perhaps what is desired is consistency in immediacy, but this subject’s ultimate experience essentially explodes into an unsettling inversion.

In fact, what Hegel shows in the Law of the Heart can be seen as a fundamental inversion: the subject believes it is expressing a purely personal moral belief, but the very act of speaking it transforms it into an impersonal demand, indistinguishable from the universality of the “way of the world” (the “fancied universal”)³. What appears as inner authenticity turns into external necessity, revealing the Law of the Heart as already caught within the structure it claims to oppose. Hegel writes: “The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit. It passes over into the rage of a consciousness which preserves itself from destruction by casting out of itself the very topsy-turvy inversion which is itself and which makes every effort to regard and to express that inversion as something other than itself.”⁴

This topsy-turvy experience is indeed tragic. In asserting its singular moral truth, the Law of the Heart inevitably converts it into a universal demand, loses its individuality, and becomes part of the world it condemns. This inversion marks its collapse: what appears as immediate unity between inner law and the world reveals itself as a confused/failed identification of individuality with universality.

So, while Žižek in his reading emphasizes psychosis (foreclosure, paranoia), the focus can perhaps be shifted to collapse through immediacy (failed mediation). Hegel’s emphasis on inversion, the transformation of conviction into universality, and the absorption of subjective law into “the way of the world” allows us to read the Law of the Heart not simply as a hysteric or psychotic, but as a threshold figure whose failure prepares the Knight of Virtue, who vanishes in Žižek’s analysis.

The project/failure of the Law of the Heart doesn’t directly lead to retreat or withdrawal (i.e., Beautiful Soul) but continues through virtue and action. The ambiguous position of the Law of the Heart makes visible the dialectical necessity of the Knight as a missing mediating moment in this journey.

The Knight of Virtue: The “Professional Protester”

As noted above, Žižek criticizes Lacan for making a “deeply significant mistake” by condensing the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul. Lacan speaks of “the Beautiful Soul who, in the name of its Law of the Heart, rebels against the injustices of the world,”⁵ thereby conflating positions that Žižek insists must be kept apart. For Žižek, the Beautiful Soul “designates the hysterical attitude of deploring the wicked ways of the world while actively participating in their reproduction,” whereas the Law of the Heart “clearly refers to a psychotic attitude” imposing its will on all of humanity.⁶

Žižek finds “Lacan’s slip all the more mysterious,” since these figures map cleanly onto Lacanian structures: the hysterical Beautiful Soul situates itself within the big Other and addresses it with a demand within an intersubjective field, while the psychotic Law of the Heart suspends or rejects what Hegel calls “spiritual substance.”⁷ So, the Law of the Heart, as a psychotic figure, hallucinates his inner law as universal, resorting to paranoia when the world resists; and the Beautiful Soul is its hysterical counterpart, retreating from action into self-righteous moral purity. Importantly, Žižek, even though he criticizes Lacan for confusing these two figures, partially defends the slip, as both figures express moral self-certainty that society registers as failure or crime.⁸ Still, he moves too quickly from delusional action to melancholic withdrawal.

To briefly return to the Law of the Heart, Hegel explains that even if the Law of the Heart becomes institutionalized, it loses its subjective authenticity and becomes estranged from the self. What was once a personal conviction now stands above it as an impersonal universal, causing deep disillusionment. The universalization removes the law’s personal meaning which was its origin. As soon as it becomes outwardly expressed, inner truth ceases to be personal. In response to this failure, the individual turns to virtue, which is not merely a moral feeling but also a commitment to redeem the world through action: a revolutionary passion that culminates in the figure of the Knight of Virtue.

Unlike earlier figures of pleasure & necessity, such as Don Giovanni or Faust, the Knight of Virtue believes in sacrificing individuality for the sake of a universal good. The Knight strives to restore humanity’s true essence and has a higher mission to redeem the corrupt world through action. However, the Knight assumes that the good exists independently and needs to be actualized through virtuous deeds. Hegel writes that the Knight’s activity and struggle become mere bluff,

something which he cannot take seriously because he holds that his real strength consists in the good’s existing in and for itself, i.e., to lie in the good accomplishing itself – it is a bluff which he dare not even allow to become serious. This is so because what he turns against the enemy and which he then both finds turned against himself and which he dares to put at risk of deterioration and damage in himself as well as in the enemy, is not supposed to be the good itself.⁹

The actions of this heroic figure remain abstract and futile. It throws words and virtue into a cruel/wicked world that does not respond. The moral ideal guiding the Knight is ultimately empty, detached from the messy, chaotic fabric of social life. Its struggle becomes a kind of shadowboxing, a performance of heroism that fails to engage with reality. While the “way of the world” is flexible, cunning, and adaptable, the Knight is rigid. It ultimately becomes comic, like a Don Quixote of morality, swinging at windmills in pursuit of a truth that perpetually remains unactualized. It is caught in empty formality. As Donald Verene says, the Knight of Virtue is “a professional protester” who can “simply change causes at will,” for whom “the fight is the thing.”¹⁰

Unlike the Law of the Heart, the Knight acts within the Symbolic, seeking to redeem the corrupted world through virtuous deeds. Unlike the Beautiful Soul, it does not withdraw, but intervenes, only to find its moral project futile. The Knight’s protest is a performance/spectacle of virtue and over-identification. Its failure as the acting moral subject exposes the limits of virtuous intervention and constitutes a necessary dialectical stage.

In Lacanian terms, the Knight does not exhibit a psychotic structure: it neither forecloses the Symbolic nor constructs a delusional universe. Instead, it remains embedded in the Symbolic, aiming to correct it. Thus, the Knight is closer to the hysteric’s position, but it does not embrace the Beautiful Soul’s passive withdrawal. Its position is a shift from demanding answers from the big Other to attempting to transform it.

The Knight is thus a hysteric in action, whose failure reveals the structural limits of the hysteric’s truth. It can name the fault in the Other and fight against it, but it cannot fix it; it only ends up reinforcing it. Its intervention inevitably collapses into complicity. In other words, it cannot ignore the mutual implication of self and Other (enemy) in the very game of truth it seeks to transform. Hegel writes:

Virtue is not merely like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny; rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons that virtue started the fight. Not merely can it not use its own weapons, it also must preserve intact those of its enemy and protect them against virtue itself, for they are all noble parts of the good on behalf of which it went into the fight in the first place.¹¹

This is an important moment in the dialectic of moral subjectivity, dramatizing the tragicomic limits of the hysteric’s truth in action.

As explained above, Žižek identifies the Law of the Heart as a psychotic structure. But this reading can overlook the figure’s internal instability/transitional nature. Rather than a full psychotic foreclosure, the Law of the Heart mistakes immediacy for universality, projecting subjective conviction as objective necessity without mediation. It is not yet hysteria, which questions endlessly the Symbolic, nor pure psychosis, but a threshold moment where the fusion of inner & outer collapses under contradiction. This is a delusional immediacy that cannot hold.

Hegel does not conclude with the Law of the Heart’s paranoid delusion or jump ahead to the moral withdrawal of the Beautiful Soul. From this structural collapse, a further development arises in the guise of the Knight. The Knight of Virtue is a necessary dialectical mediation that continues the Law of the Heart’s project but moves it into the domain of action. However, this action remains abstract, disconnected from the historical and ethical substance it would need to transform reality. Its moral protest sustains the very order it seeks to challenge. Thus, without the Knight of Virtue, Žižek’s reading bypasses the dialectical passage from delusion to withdrawal, missing the tragicomic structure of moral failure and the collapse of virtuous action (before the emergence of Sittlichkeit).

The Beautiful Soul: Inward Purity and Moral Inaction

Through the figures of the Law of the Heart and the Knight of Virtue, Hegel makes the transition from “Reason” to “Spirit,” where the reconciliation between individuality and universality becomes something possible through the foundation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), a shared cultural and institutional life where freedom is actualized collectively.

In the “Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality” section of the Phenomenology, Hegel traces the rise and fall of the moral worldview. Following the failures of ethical life, the Enlightenment, and the Reign of Terror, self-consciousness turns inward, grounding duty in internal conviction rather than external authority. Morality now rests on self-imposed duty: the subject sees itself as autonomous, believing that recognizing duty suffices for moral action. To sustain this, it posits a higher reality where morality aligns with happiness, nature, or divine justice. But these assumptions compromise its autonomy, exposing it to external guarantees. What appears as pure duty conceals expectations of reward, and moral striving becomes endless and self-deceptive. Morality collapses into hypocrisy.

This contradiction gives rise to the next stage, Conscience, where morality is re-founded on the self-certainty of personal conviction. The subject believes in the truth of its own inner moral judgment, and this leads to a shift from abstract duty to the immediacy of moral action. But without external criteria, this certainty risks becoming arbitrary; any action may now be justified as “moral”, simply because the subject believes it to be so.

This tension deepens and the subject retreats into purity and isolation, culminating in the figure of the Beautiful Soul: a subject who, fearing moral compromise, refuses to act. It fears that acting will taint its inner purity, so it withdraws from the world and clings stubbornly to a self reduced to pure abstraction. In its refusal to engage with imperfection, it paradoxically undermines morality itself, which can only become real through action. Hegel writes that the Beautiful Soul “lacks the force to relinquish itself, that is, lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to suffer the burden of being.”¹²

The Beautiful Soul remains unable to give itself substance, to turn thought into being or commit itself decisively, and the empty object it produces leaves it acutely aware of its own hollowness. In the end, its “burning embers gradually die out,” and “the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.”¹³

As Donald Verene notes, the Beautiful Soul retreats into inwardness, seeking inner illumination over public action. It withdraws from politics, science, and social life, reducing philosophy to solitary revelations devoid of dialogue, irony, or eros.¹⁴ It becomes harmless, ineffectual, and purely self-referential, unintelligible/unchallenging to the practical world. It is very sensitive and profound, waiting for a moment of pure authenticity and understanding. This is the melancholy of the Beautiful Soul. Verene emphasizes how this figure has no sense of humor: “The bacchanalian revel of the forms of the Phenomenology is closed to the philosophy of the beautiful soul because such a soul has not and cannot have a sense of humor. Irony, through which appearances are laid open, is not a meaningful thought for it … The beautiful soul takes itself seriously, so seriously it has left the world for itself.¹⁵

Hegel contrasts the Beautiful Soul with the Judging Consciousness (the “hard heart”) that condemns others while claiming moral superiority. This conflict results in mutual accusations of hypocrisy and evil, as each side perceives the other as impure. This impasse can only be overcome through confession and forgiveness as a speculative act, leading to the stage of Religion.

Verene stresses that the Beautiful Soul is a dangerous stage, a moral and intellectual posture that pretends to the highest truth but, in fact, represents a degeneration of Spirit. It is self-satisfied and stagnant. It claims a pure inward access to the Absolute, bypassing the messy, imperfect reality of social existence, moral struggle, and communal life. Thus, Verene emphasizes that it presents an obstacle to speculative thought by absolutizing the subject’s pure inwardness and offering a form of withdrawal masquerading as profundity. The inaction of the Beautiful Soul follows from the fact that, as it passes from Reason, it knows infinity is within itself: “Reason has shown it that the infinite is just something to cultivate in itself apart from the finitude, the specific activity, of the world. The beautiful soul as such is a personality type. It is a delicate creature that cannot act but can have strong pronouncements in language about what goes on around it. It will judge events, but only in language. It cannot act.”¹⁶ Thus, the Beautiful Soul is not only a failed ethical figure but a philosophical danger, reducing philosophy to poetic solitude rather than speculative movement.¹⁷ Its philosophy is a private, poetic inwardness/dwelling, cut off from the shared and revelatory movement of Spirit in Hegel’s dialectic. It is essentially anti-communal, anti-speculative, locked in monologue.

Action, Delusion, and Withdrawal

Žižek’s critique of the Beautiful Soul unfolds the relation between action, symbolic failure, and the ethics of reconciliation. Beautiful Soul is a model of moral self-deception: a subject who complains about a corrupt world but fails to see their own role in sustaining it. It views itself as a victim of hostile conditions that hinder the realization of good intentions, but this attitude of complaint helps reproduce the world it condemns. Žižek extends this idea to the political dissident under “real socialism,” whose moral identity depends on the continued existence of the totalitarian enemy.¹⁸ The dissident does not desire change but the enemy’s permanence, as it is an external anchor for their righteousness. Referencing Lacan’s Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, Žižek says that the Beautiful Soul refuses to see that the world’s disorder is a message directed at it: a return of its own position in inverted form. Even when rejected, this message still reaches its target; the world continues to reflect the subject’s truth.¹⁹ Reconciliation can only occur when the individual recognizes themselves in what they oppose, accepting that the negativity they condemn is inseparable from their own way of being.

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek links the Beautiful Soul to Hegel’s thesis that Substance is Subject (not a harmonious whole but the movement of failed subjective projections).²⁰ The subject attempts to impose a moral vision on reality, only to see it inverted as crime, failure, or hypocrisy. This shared logic partly explains why Lacan’s “mistake” in condensing the Law of the Heart and Beautiful Soul: in both cases, subjective righteousness registers socially as transgression.²¹ The Hegelian “negation of negation” does not restore identity but insists on the necessity of failure. The subject’s critical rejection is answered by the world’s rejection of its illusion of innocence.²²

Reconciliation, for Žižek, does not mean moral purification of the world but recognition of complicity.²³ The Beautiful Soul must accept that the chaos it observes is part of its own being. Evil does not lie in action but in the moralizing gaze that sees only particularity and pathology. Žižek, citing Hegel’s concept of das Ungeschehenmachen, the retroactive redemption of failure, emphasizes that truth emerges not by erasing failure, but by integrating it retroactively into Spirit’s development: “The sinful act is retroactively liberated, through the truth that it made possible through its very failure. … We do not simply cancel the act; rather, we just cancel out its failure … an inversion that Hegel called ‘the cunning of reason.’”²⁴ So, the Beautiful Soul’s refusal to act or forgive positions it as the obstacle to reconciliation and speculative movement.

Even though the Beautiful Soul appears passive, Žižek argues that this passivity is actively sustained. It derives jouissance from its self-sacrifice and moral purity. The truly ethical gesture is not self-sacrifice, but the renunciation of the identity built through sacrifice.²⁵

Perhaps this logic invites a speculative typology: might the Beautiful Soul be viewed as an actively passive hysteric, whose inaction is a concealed activity, and the Knight of Virtue as a passively active hysteric, whose action remains abstract, futile, and ultimately reinforces the symbolic order it desires to redeem?

Verene’s image of the Knight as a protester who changes causes easily, interested more in protest than principle, would strengthen this comparison. Together, Žižek and Verene suggest that both figures entangle activity with passivity, inverting moral action into performance.

The Comedy of Moral Consciousness

While these Hegelian figures are often treated as moments in a tragic dialectic of subjectivity, Zupančič’s reading of Hegel allows us to see them as comic figures, embodying the internal irony and absurdity of moral consciousness. Adopting Zupančič’s lens, it is possible to see how the Beautiful Soul’s refusal/withdrawal, the Law of the Heart’s overreach and delusions, and the Knight of Virtue’s failed action demonstrate what happens when the subject’s relation to the Symbolic collapses from within.

This comedy is the moment in which the contradiction becomes visible, and certainty reveals itself to be slippery and tricky, as the subject’s own symptom. Zupančič writes that it is no coincidence that “comedy ranks high” in the Phenomenology.²⁶ In fact, comedy emerges at the threshold of Absolute Knowing, within the culmination of Revealed Religion. It is the moment when the subject ceases to seek the Absolute in a beyond and recognizes itself as the bearer of truth through comic reversal rather than tragic alienation. Zupančič writes,

could we not say that the entire movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit is surprisingly akin to the comic movement as described by Hegel: different figures of consciousness which follow one upon the other in this gigantic philosophical theater go, one after another, through a twist in the process by which a concrete universal is being produced and self-consciousness constituted—that is, in which substance becomes a subject.²⁷

The comic subject laughs because it knows that the supposed divine Other was always also itself in disguise. Comedy is not just an aesthetic category but a speculative form of truth, the final self-negation of the alienated Spirit before the ultimate reconciliation. Comedy arises through a reflexive act, in which the subject steps back from its predicament with humility and the capacity to forgive. Perhaps, forgiveness is at the core of the comedic/reflexive act.

There is a comic moment in how the Beautiful Soul, with its perfectionist withdrawal and the way it takes itself very seriously, emerges as the inverse of the Knight of Virtue, while the Knight of Virtue is the transitory figure of pure, emptied-out action in the face of the world’s evils. The Law of the Heart has already withdrawn, not like the Beautiful Soul, but in its own fictions/ conspiracies about the world that does not accept its precious gift of the heart. The three figures are comic in their misjudgments, misguided certainties, and tragic attempts to reconcile with the world.

The comic moment of the quixotic Knight of Virtue lies in the formality of its protests, the way it shadowboxes, in its acting within the Symbolic, and in sustaining its illusion of virtue while disavowing complicity. Thus, in the Lacanian and Žižekian formulation, this figure may be viewed as a perverse supplement to the hysteric, as a moral agent whose action (protest) maintains the order it claims to resist, and unwittingly reinforces the structures of evil. In this sense, the Knight of Virtue may also be read as a comedic resolution to the tensions staged by the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul. Unlike the Beautiful Soul (who refuses to act) or the Law of the Heart (who acts from inner madness), the Knight of Virtue acts out morality as a role, an empty, sham protest.

This aligns with Lacanian idea of perversion, a structure in which the subject disavows symbolic castration and finds enjoyment in performing the Law as the agent of the Other’s enjoyment. The Knight rigidly enacts moral law as a personal mission, disavowing its own desire while positioning itself as the agent of a universal good. Like the pervert, the Knight refuses symbolic castration, clinging to moral certainty and denying the contradictions within the social order. It does not act for personal gain but as an instrument of a higher cause, sustaining the Law’s illusion through formal, abstract protest. Its virtue is ultimately a performance/spectacle disconnected from real social reality.

Thus, the Knight demonstrates the comic truth of moral action, where protest becomes a mode of symbolic enjoyment. The condensation of these figures misses this performative excess that distinguishes the Knight from both the Beautiful Soul’s withdrawal and the Law of the Heart’s romantic expressivism. Verene’s description of the Knight as a professional protestor further clarifies this: The Knight does not seek reconciliation or transformation but sustains its identity through perpetual resistance.

Verene’s insight also aligns with Zupančič’s comedic lens: the Knight becomes a figure of moral farce, virtue as a role, a costume, and a perpetual rehearsal rather than conviction. Building on Verene, it may be argued that the Knight is morally mobile, as its cause is contingent, but its structure (action, protest, intervention) is fixed.

Hysteric on Horseback

The Knight of Virtue can be viewed as the hysteric’s double, as it not only speaks truth to the big Other, but attempts to correct it, and becomes entangled in its mechanisms. Following Žižek’s Lacanian reading, unlike the Law of the Heart, the Knight does not foreclose the Symbolic. It does not hallucinate or conspire but acts within the Symbolic. It is not like the withdrawn/melancholic hysteric frustrated with the Other but still believes in its authority. This figure does not merely lament the corruption of the world; it engages it with moral fervor, but in a manner disconnected from ethical substance. His actions remain empty because they are untethered from concrete historical necessity.

This figure illustrates the comedic failure of over-identifying with the universal (a structurally absurd heroic idealism). Including the Knight of Virtue in the analysis of the Hegelian figures of moral consciousness offers a more dialectically complete view of moral subjectivity, where the subject’s insistence on transforming the world from a position of inner certainty, alongside the futility of abstract virtue in a world that no longer demands it, becomes ironic and even absurd.

The Knight projects its private moral certainty onto the world, demanding it conform to its ideal of virtue. In this sense, the Knight is not merely a hysteric or a passive soul avoiding action, but an active agent of moral formalism who refuses to risk the “good” through dialectical engagement and instead imposes it unilaterally. This makes it closer to a perverse figure, as it disregards the mediating structures of the ethical in favor of self-authorized conviction. It is not just inward, like the Beautiful Soul, nor self-legislative, like the Law of the Heart, nor entirely passive or accusatory.

The Knight is a figure of active morality, motivated by abstract universality, yet ultimately and performatively powerless (a structurally comic figure). It neither produces jouissance nor derives pleasure from sacrifice; it fails because it acts out of sync with social reality and not because of narcissistic withdrawal, as in the Beautiful Soul.

This makes the Knight of Virtue a philosophically awkward and structurally transitional moral agent. It faces its comic failure when encountering a world that does not respond. Therefore, it seems like a bridge between tragic moral assertion and hysterical withdrawal.

Link to Footnotes and Bibliography

The post The Vanishing Knight of Virtue: On Žižek’s Reading of Hegelian Moral Consciousness appeared first on The Miskatonian.

In my hand is a pen slowly being emptied of black ink as I guide it to scratch the smooth tooth of a cream-coloured page in a notebook. Lines connect and become letters and words. Later, I will type this into a computer. Beyond that, my words, these echoes of the thoughts I’m thinking and feelings I’m feeling now, will find a home in the digital realm. And eventually they, like the leaves scattered around me by rain and wind, will be distributed into the world. And then, hopefully, someone — I mean you — will read them to be stirred by them. I have a few books with me, but we’ll get to those later. I honestly can’t imagine a more serene atmosphere in which to contemplate the end of the world.

“We are going to destroy society by automating as many jobs as we can,” said some or other big tech bigshot in an interview I stumbled upon on the internet somewhere. Well, that’s not exactly what he said or how he said it, but that’s how it sounded, and so this is how I remember it. I almost expected him to say, “What do you want us to do, not destroy society!?” Many are worried about what the so-called AI revolution will amount to. Will we be forced to give our meaningless jobs to robots? Will guillotines be built by future robot armies, and will human beings be beheaded for being too human? It’s so peaceful where I am right now, but I have in mind an image from a movie in which a machine with a skeletal hominoid foot, in a gesture of disdain, crushes the skull of a person long gone. A voice-over in my remembrance of that film tells me about a war between man and machine. Is that where we’re headed? Is that where we are?

An old poll by Ipsos and Reuters speculates that around 60 percent of Americans believe AI threatens the future of humanity. That’s zeitgeist meteorology, a measure of feelings and imaginings, but it’s telling in its own way. Although we’ve had a fairly long time of people believing, on the whole, that technology and humanity can co-exist, now, more than perhaps ever before, many are convinced that technological progress is ruining our lives. Lift your nose up, if you will, and catch a whiff not just of the coffee — which is really good, by the way — but also of the paradoxes of modern freedom. Despite our astonishing freedoms, the build-up to a total technological takeover seems unstoppable. We are free, apparently, and yet the future has somehow already been determined for us. Man wants to be free, but is everywhere in chain reactions.

Of course, when a glorified calculator wanders mindlessly into an uncanny valley and trips over various signs of its own nonsentience, it’s easier to laugh than to be worried. It can be fun, for instance, to see what digital undeath does when it attempts to paint a flabby nine-horned gopher-cow imperturbable in a field of ice-cream in the style of Egon Schiele or write a self-deconstructing marketing pitch for a brand of foot remover in the style of HP Lovecraft. What emerges is seldom close to what you and I are capable of imagining. But some AI is unnervingly good even with all kinds of tasks, including creative ones. Ludditism has begun to look far more appealing to me than I ever thought it would. Is it time to call, in the style of Mario Savio, for people to put their bodies upon the keyboards and the hardware and the code and the algorithms and all the apparatus, and make it stop?

This sense of powerlessness over a constantly encroaching cyborg theocracy has something to do with how we tend to feel about technology itself. As Hans Jonas has written, technological acts soon seem to “make themselves independent.” Tools reliant on our intentions soon become machines free from our intentions. Technologies, suggests Jonas, gain an autonomous momentum through which they “overtake the wishes and plans of [their] initiators. The motion once begun takes the law of action out of our hands, and the accomplished facts, created by the beginning, become cumulatively the law of its continuation.”

Martin Heidegger suggests, similarly, that technology operates well beyond instrumentality as if it has a mind of its own. In his view, technology doesn’t actually work for us but apart from us and even against us; it does not serve us but, in constraining revelation, acts as our destiny. In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul suggests a similar thing. He views technology as defiantly autonomous. It is governed by what he calls self-augmentation, which means that technique always gives rise to more technical problems and, consequently, the necessity of even more technique and more technology. Technique metastasises. People start to exist for the sake of their inventions. They are rendered more and more passive. Implied by the Jonases, Heideggers, and Elluls of the world, who are by no means alone in their hot takes, if you think you can control technology, think again.

Ellul says somewhere, although I can’t find where right now, that the autonomy of technology exists at the expense of human autonomy. It does not take much to feel the sense of what he is saying. At least a few times a week, I have the sense that I am at the mercy of my emails. I know they’re just tame little pixels coagulating into the shape of bureaucratese, but they often do seem to possess something of the residual being of Cthulu. My autonomy is definitely curbed by that hellish invention. And yet, in all of what I have just noted about the totalitarian drift of technology and the way that it encroaches on our freedom, there is a significant problem. The problem is that autonomy is a myth. Moreover, the suggestion that technology must inevitably become more than itself until it dialectically consumes all that is non-technological betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of technology. It assumes, if only implicitly, that technology has desires of its own. But, no, we are the ones who desire and we do not desire autonomously. We can quite easily, therefore, if only inadvertently, read desire into our inventions.

We should expect this, given René Girard’s discovery that desire is mimetic. Desire, he contends, is mediated. No desire erupts spontaneously within the confines of supposed individuality. Rather, every desire emerges in our interactions with others whom we emulate. We want what others want out of a sense that we lack what they have; we assume that if we desire in the way they do, we will be able to make up for our own deficits and perhaps even transcend them in the way those others seem to have done. We are created, which is to say it is ingrained in us, to interpret and take on the desires of others.

And so, when we use technologies, it is not only probable but almost inevitable that we will find desire in them, even when it is not to be found; and we will, in turn, copy their so-called desires. We’ll often miss that we’re working on rumour and not fact. As Iain McGilchrist writes in The Master and His Emissary, our imitative capacities have driven us to imitate machines. We have begun to humanise machines even while we dehumanise ourselves. Imagine how much more we will read desire into our technologies as those technologies increasingly simulate human thought. The confusion between what is merely mechanical or algorithmic and what is human is only likely to grow.

For Girard and other mimetic theorists, copied and pasted desire doesn’t just draw us into harmony with others. Desire is also the hinge on which every rivalry turns. Conflict requires interdependence, and interdependence requires shared desire. This is interesting to consider, given the recent apparent resurgence of the rivalry between human beings and technology. No doubt, machines can and do encroach on the territory of people. It is fair to be upset that AI might take your job, just as it is fair to be upset at the prospect that a machine might do all your writing and lovemaking for you. It is one thing to imagine machines taking over things you hate, but quite another if they’re doing things you enjoy. But in this rivalry between human beings and machines, we need to be absolutely clear on one thing: machines do not want anything. If we read desire into machines, we are wrong. If we continue to read desire into machines, we will go wrong.

When confronted with simulations of human intelligence, we need to be especially on guard against reading desire into the electronic, robotic, digital undead. If there is a rivalry, it exists primarily among those developing what Ellul mistakenly calls self-augmentation, which is really mimetic escalation. Technological development metastasises because of the tense rivalries of technocrats, not because tech has a will of its own. There is likely also rivalry between ordinary people and those technocrats and programmers who want to make machines simulate the human. These rivalries are rivalries in search of the manifestation and augmentation of what is increasingly inhuman. And it is our job, as I see it, to refuse to give in to such a picture of the world.

How do we do this? Well, the first step is acknowledging the myth of autonomy and naming the mistake of reading desire into machines. I don’t mean that we mustn’t put up some kind of fight against the possibility of the rule of AI; we should certainly not be naive about what we’re facing. But to see clearly what is going on, we must be rid of the myth that holds that autonomous machines are encroaching on our own autonomy. We must be rid of any tendency to read desire into our inventions. You do not have to do what machines want because they don’t want you to do anything, even if the human agents who have designed them do. Machines are, in fact, wanting and will always be wanting. To recognise this is to recognise that there is no mechanical compulsion we must adhere to. You do not have to switch on a computer. You do not have to use the AI. You do not have to eat the proverbial microchipped bugs.

Given various seeming catastrophes lurking on the horizon, we should be asking and answering the question of who, not what, we want to emulate while we’re fighting for the future. In one of his letters, St. Paul offers himself up as an example for his disciples. “Imitate me as I imitate Christ,” he says. This is not an arrogant claim. He recognises that his desires are not self-created, and so recognises, too, that it is better to be intentional about who he emulates than to be simply at the mercy of whichever swarm he happens to be living in. He knows how easy it is to fall into the trap of emulating the wrong others and the wrong desires. “Emulate me,” he therefore says, “as I emulate the true human.”

That is perhaps more difficult to do than to emulate our own desires projected onto dead code. But, as the old saint reminds us, human beings are transformed by their relation to others. And this is to say, by implication, that we aren’t organised in a technological fashion. Human beings are destined to be the manifest obliterators of the procedural algorithms of computers. Granted, that’s easier to believe when you are outside on a brisk and beautiful autumn morning with a pen in your hand and a notebook to write in. Hope is easier to find when you are not sitting at a desk behind a screen.

The original article can be seen on the Substack of Dr. Duncan Reyburn, which you may find here.

The post What Machines Want appeared first on The Miskatonian.

When a discussion on what the future may hold arises, surgical modification, mechanical augmentation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and gene splicing inevitably become focal points. Humans have been obsessed with transcending their physical forms and becoming transhuman since the dawn of ancient civilization. This drive—the desire to escape the limitations of the biological substrate—is best exemplified by the story of Icarus, who fashioned wings of beeswax and feathers to conquer the sky. In the modern era, this “Icarus Complex” has found a home in literature and interactive media, ranging from the scientific romances of H.G. Wells¹ to the gritty, high-tech futures of William Gibson’s Neuromancer².

With the advent of computer games, storytelling has moved beyond the passive observation of these myths and into a realm of interactivity. This interactivity has inspired many games that take place in the future or within utopian and dystopian milieu³. Of these, BioShock is a significant foray into the genre, presenting multiple overlapping technological themes. It is not just the presentation of futuristic technologies that makes the game compelling, but the complex philosophical and ideological narratives that run through them. The game engages players in a vast array of choices, where the ramifications of those choices impact how the world and its characters perceive the player. This demonstrates the shift in cultural and power balances based on what is prioritized—be it power or empathy, retribution or forgiveness.

Thesis: The Paradox of Posthuman Agency

The central irony of BioShock lies in its subversion of individualist agency. As a posthuman, will the player choose to hang onto elements of humanity or relinquish that part of themselves?. As Lars Schmeink states, “The autonomy of the self, the questions of agency and free will, are turning into the battlegrounds for the human-posthuman predicament⁴ .” BioShock places the player in the middle of this conflict, forcing them to confront these questions and then act upon them, and again, live with the consequences.

While you will potentially end the game more powerful as an individual, it may be a fitting end for a player who is perceived as a monster. Conversely, if a player chooses a more humane and empathetic approach, some NPCs may be helpful and lend a hand throughout the game. The game asks its audience to consider the risks of excessive power wielded by corporations, the role of technology in our lives, and, ultimately, what it means to be human⁷. As Andrew Ryan repeats multiple times throughout the game, “a man chooses, but a slave obeys .” This discourse suggests that being human is possibly more about what humans can maintain of their humanity rather than what modifications they make to their bodies. The material aspect of existence is not as crucial as decisions and actions.

The Market of the Flesh: DNA Manipulation and CRISPR

One form of transhumanism in the game occurs from gene splicing⁹. While much of the promise of gene splicing has not yet been realized, it has begun to occur in medical technology. An excellent example is CRISPR, a technology that may be used to modify living organisms at their most fundamental level. By introducing modifications to DNA, one may change how living organisms react to their environment and internal stimuli. CRISPR Therapeutics has already released its first treatment, CRISPR/Cas9, based on gene splicing¹⁰.

However, the unregulated nature of this technology in the game serves as a warning. If the market determines costs, will one find themselves taking out a mortgage on their home for an extra fifty years of life?. Will the less affluent resort to illegal activities to obtain the money necessary to expand their lifespan?. Would a person be willing to steal and sell a baby to obtain the funds to live additional years?. This question is at the heart of BioShock, where the player is faced with the option of killing a little girl to harvest maximum ADAM or taking a much-reduced amount and risking weakness¹¹. This raises questions about how these scenarios play out in a market where businesses charge what the market will bear. Currently, the future of gene splicing appears unregulated, much like in Rapture¹². An unregulated market for genetic modification indicates that humans will be left to make choices for themselves, for better or worse.

Cybernetics and the “Will You Kindly” Conditioning

Cybernetics in BioShock allows humans to be modified by large corporations. The most glaring example is the Big Daddy—men modified to act as bodyguards for the Little Sisters. Outfitted with a protective suit and a giant drill, they exude a pungent smell that attracts little sisters and repels humans. The player’s character, Jack, is likewise a product of this cybernetic dystopia, grown in a lab as a clone of Andrew Ryan.

Yet, the most dystopian part of the game is the mental modification. By placing a “limiter” on the mind, the creators of Rapture forced the player to follow commands without fail if they contained the words “will you kindly”. This suggests that human beings might be manufactured and controlled as the perfect enslaved people. If transhumanism is treated as a drug, it creates the ultimate addicts. People will seek to self-modify for physical capability, but the insertion of Pavlovian programming could turn that desire into permanent slavery. The player seems to be in control until the conditioning and false memories are revealed, proving that even the choice of harvesting is an illusion¹³.

Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Survival

Throughout Rapture, automated security systems such as flying robots and stationary turrets enforce a lawless order. The game also presents self-service kiosks that allow for the purchase of supplies, yet hacking these kiosks is encouraged¹⁴. In our world, hacking is a crime that usually lands someone in jail, but in the underwater city, the dividends of theft are high. Though AI is not the focal point, the game points to the idea that in a highly automated world, hacking and theft will become tools of survival.

Conclusion: The Persistence of the Human

The city of Rapture presents the player with the promise of Atlantis—a paradise superior in technology and ideology¹⁵. Instead, it is a place of unmistakable terror and violence¹⁶. With its lack of regulation, it is the perfect backdrop to explore the ramifications of technology. It asks questions about the exploitation of workers¹⁷ and the genetic manipulation of children¹⁸. This assumption of progress forgets the long history of anthropocentric oppression of the “other “¹⁹.

At the start of the game, Jack is at his least modified but possesses the least humanity because he has no freedom of choice. Only when he is fully modified and finally breaks his conditioning does he possess his humanity. This sends a message: humanity is not tied to the physical body. One can be a “monster” without any enhancement, as seen in the greed of Andrew Ryan and Fontaine. Ultimately, BioShock suggests that if we can hold onto empathy and social awareness, technology will not take away our humanity. As Ryan stated, “a man chooses and a slave obeys²⁰ “; the true human is the one who chooses to remain so despite the weight of the “Great Chain.”

Link to footnotes and bibliography

The post Between Man and Slave: BioShock’s Critique of the Great Chain appeared first on The Miskatonian.

What is leisure?

According to Josef Pieper,

Leisure is a form of silence—that kind of silence which is a prerequisite for understanding reality: only the silent can hear, and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as used here, does not mean a “closed mouth” or a mere “absence of noise”; rather, its closest meaning is that the soul’s capacity to respond to the reality of the world remains undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of the mind, a contemplative stance … and the capacity to place oneself within the whole of creation.1

To be at leisure does not mean being unemployed or lazy. Leisure does not simply imply the absence of work, but rather a mental and spiritual state of calmness that allows things to flow naturally. Pieper compares such a person to someone who falls asleep. In order to sleep, a person does not need to carry out something actively. He simply needs to come to peace and let things flow on their own. Precisely being active prevents sleep, and being active while not allowing the mind any leisure prevents our soul from intellectually and really grasping the whole of the world in which it lives, because “the human soul is sometimes visited by an awareness of that which holds the world together precisely in these quiet and receptive moments.” 2

Leisure, therefore, is not the absence of our daily tasks or duties, even though almost all of us perceive leisure in this way. Leisure is, better said, the freedom of time. It is a time in which one finds freedom. Consequently, for someone to find freedom, he must first know what freedom is. This short piece is not the place to treat the concept of freedom at length, but a comparison that Aristotle makes between metaphysics and the free man will suffice for us. He says: “Just as a free man exists for himself and not for another, so too this science (metaphysics) is the only one among the sciences that is free.”3 A free man, therefore, exists for himself and is not the slave of someone else. In the same way, leisure exists for itself and is not in the service of something else. By this, of course, I mean that it is not actively in the service of something else. Passively, since leisure allows the mind to remain open to the reality of the whole of creation, it becomes, ironically, more productive for the human being than his most sweat-inducing activity.

But what does truly happen in our world? It is noisy, resounding from all sides. Our world is built for people who do not rest—indeed, who are not meant to rest. We have become like those poor mobile phones that are kept on charge while being used, which, although they need rest in order to recharge, are abused by being used until they overheat so much that they freeze. Such robotic activity is characteristic of a consumerist world that does not wish to make room for contemplation. The belief that the one who works a great deal and works hard does well is typical of our time, but entirely contrary to the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The essence of virtue consists in the good, and not in the difficult.”4 Something difficult is not necessarily good. Nevertheless, people today are encouraged to work so hard that when they rest, they feel unproductive or even lazy. Even the rest they take is only in the service of work, to recharge their energy so that they may work the next day. It should not be this way. Man ought to work in the service of rest.

Our very nature confirms such a thing. While we are at work, we eagerly await the arrival of leisure time and holidays. The money we earn, we wish to turn into gifts and food and drink for celebrations. This connection between leisure and celebration, Pieper explains very well, and he even takes it to an even deeper level:

The spirit of leisure, it can be said, lies in “celebration.” … But if “celebration” is the essence of leisure, then leisure can be made possible and truly justified only on the same basis as the celebration of a feast, and that formation is divine worship.5

Pieper explains how divine worship is for time what the temple is for space. The temple is a space set apart for the gods, a land in which one neither lives nor cultivates. In the same way, divine worship is a time set apart, which likewise is not used for ordinary things, but specifically for its appointed purpose.

I do not want to go too deeply into the issue of the Sabbath, but I want to connect it somewhat with our reality. The Word of God says: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy”.6 According to apostolic tradition, the Church has set apart Sunday for divine worship, because it is precisely the day when Christ rose, the “first” day of the week that commemorates the day of creation, and at the same time the “eighth” day that inaugurates the new creation. The Catholic Church teaches that

On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are bound . . . to abstain from those labors and business concerns which impede the worship to be rendered to God, the joy which is proper to the Lord’s Day, or the proper relaxation of mind and body.7

Rest from the ordinary tasks of daily life is not simply a command. It arises from the natural law, and therefore, it is something necessary for human nature. He who does not rest cannot work. He who does not rest cannot think. He who does not rest cannot worship. He, then, who does not rest, is not a complete human being.

It was impossible for me not to include the rest of the Lord’s Day in this writing, and equally impossible for me not to see the connection between the lack of rest and the lack of divine worship. We live in a highly confusing time. On the one hand, we have more time and resources to advance in life far beyond all our predecessors in history. On the other hand, we are deeply submerged in the everyday, highly stressed, and mentally exhausted. I think this mental and spiritual fatigue, which also leads to physical exhaustion, is an unavoidable consequence of the absence of true rest in leisure time.

Our leisure is by no means free. It has been enslaved by empty habits, by excessive scrolling through “reels” and “shorts,” which have reduced our time for concentration. According to studies, the average attention span in 2004 was two and a half minutes, whereas in 2012 it was only 75 seconds.8 I will leave to you the imaginary calculation for the year 2026, when even the algorithms of “reels” and “shorts” will recommend that we keep videos under 30 seconds so that they are fully watched. It would not be surprising if many people who started this article have not reached this paragraph. This shows that our brains are adapting to a world for which they were not created.

We were made to contemplate, not to act robotically. We were not programmed to carry out things habitually, without thought, desire, or impulse. We were created in the image of God, and if God Himself rested after creation, then we, too, must rest. If God rested to contemplate His creation, His love for it, and His glory, how much more do we need to rest, we who do not know as the Almighty knows, do not have power over our lives as the Omnipotent, and do not have the inexhaustible strength of Him who is eternally Blessed. We need to pause the flow of our lives for a moment, to think deeply about the things that truly matter: our soul, our holiness, the love we have for God and for the people in our lives. But in order to think about these things, we must first reflect on their source. Certainly, the Christian is clearer about this, since it has been revealed to him that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights”9, but even one who is not a Christian must pause and philosophize about these fundamental things in life. Neither Plato nor Aristotle knew this biblical verse, yet in their own way, they reflected on truth, on life, on the divine, and on everyday existence.

Far from philosophizing, we have fallen prey to a mechanism that decays the brain, and therefore the soul. We go to work bored, carry out our tasks with complaints, and come home exhausted; we spend a few hours on the phone and go to sleep. Even when we eat, we cannot remain without screens. This happens because we do not take a moment to think. Our soul and mind are shrinking day by day. We do not have the capacity to reflect on the fundamental truths of life; indeed, we mock those who try to speak to us “about faith” or about philosophy. I understand that not everyone is in a position to grasp that divine worship is the essence of life, but we are all capable of understanding that each of us must set aside specific moments to close the doors to the world, turn off the screens, shut our senses to the everyday world, and open our eyes and ears to the voice of silence, of calm, and of the divine order that reigns in creation. This kind of rest is owed to our mind and body. To sit in silence, to think, to breathe without worrying about the tasks we must carry out tomorrow—and we will discover that life is deeper, that our concerns do not deserve such clamor, and that our soul and body were created for something higher.

It is no surprise that a world that does not rest does not worship. Nor is it surprising that a world that does not rest fails to understand where it comes from and where it is going. It is, therefore, no surprise that our world is content to follow the flow of daily life robotically and does not reflect on the basic truths of life: What is man? Where did he come from? What is his ultimate purpose? What is moral? What is ethical? By what impulse should we wake in the morning? Why must we work? All of these questions, which seem monstrous, are at the heart of our everyday life, but they receive answers only in truly free time. Dispersed leisure is worse than work, because work at least has direction and outcome, but one who is distracted during leisure wastes both the time and the freedom that could have been discovered in that time.

What encouragement can we find? The words of Pope Benedict XVI, preached on August 21, 2011, during an audience with hundreds of thousands of young people in Madrid, give us hope and speak to our hearts to move forward with faith and courage:

You will be swimming against the tide in a society with a relativistic culture which wishes neither to seek nor hold on to the truth,” he added. “But it was for this moment in history, with its great challenges and opportunities, that the Lord sent you, so that, through your faith, the Good News of Jesus might continue to resound throughout the earth.10

Through the cultivation of spiritual values by the wise use of leisure, we can stand up to a relativistic world that neither wishes to philosophize itself nor wants to allow others to reflect on the basic things of life. Resources are (overly) inexhaustible. Work and money are more abundant than ever. Knowledge knows no limit. Everyone has immediate access to the information they need. Yet only the one who lives wisely, the one who truly reflects on the truths of life, the one who esteems leisure as he esteems life itself, will know how to seek truth and holiness, and will surely find them and be blessed in his days.

Links to References

The post Leisure in a Noisy World appeared first on The Miskatonian.

To explore that question is to uncover the intellectual currents that prefigured the later emergence of liberal thought: ideas of individual conscience, the limitation of authority, and the moral worth of reason that began to take form amid the conflicts of Church and state, faith and philosophy. Thinkers such as William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua articulated visions of political legitimacy rooted not in divine right but in consent, law, and the autonomy of human reason. Early humanists, such as Petrarch, rediscovered classical ideals of civic virtue and moral agency, laying the cultural groundwork for the later rise of Renaissance individualism. Even the legal and parliamentary developments of late medieval England hinted at the rule of law and representation, the seeds from which modern constitutionalism would eventually grow.

Thus, to understand what Pournelle meant by calling himself a “14th-century liberal” is to recover a lost genealogy of political thought, a period when “liberal” could not yet mean “progressive,” but rather signified an appeal to the freedom of the soul, the dignity of conscience, and the governance of reason. This essay will examine the historical and philosophical substance behind that phrase by tracing the proto-liberal currents of the fourteenth century: the intellectual revolutions of nominalism, the conciliarist challenge to ecclesiastical absolutism, the rise of civic humanism, and the gradual assertion of law over power. Through these developments, we can discern the first contours of a worldview that, centuries later, would evolve into what we now recognize as liberalism.

The Anachronism of Liberalism

The very notion of a “14th-century liberal” appears, at first glance, an anachronism. The 1300s were an age of hierarchy, not equality, a world in which the cosmos, the Church, and the political order were conceived as reflections of a divinely ordained structure. The medieval imagination was not yet attuned to the idea of the autonomous individual as a bearer of natural rights. Instead, it conceived of man primarily as a member of a community (spiritual, political, or familial) bound by duties rather than endowed with liberties.

Yet the fourteenth century was also a time of intense crisis and transformation. Secular rulers challenged the papal monarchy; the Black Death and economic upheavals undermined feudal relations; the Great Schism shattered the unity of Christendom; and universities became laboratories for new modes of reasoning. Out of this turbulence arose thinkers who, often unintentionally, began to lay the foundations for a new conception of the human person and of political legitimacy. The idea of libertas, freedom, was still framed in moral and spiritual terms. Still, it began to take on social and political dimensions as the relationship between ruler, subject, and law was reconsidered.

The term “liberal” itself, in the medieval lexicon, referred not to political ideology but to the liberal arts—the disciplines that freed the mind from ignorance. Yet this linguistic root is telling: liberalitas meant the cultivation of the intellect and the exercise of reason, the very capacities that later liberalism would elevate as the basis of human dignity. In this sense, the intellectual movements of the fourteenth century can be seen as the early stirrings of a liberal spirit: a turn toward reason, conscience, and human agency as sources of moral and political order.

Nominalism and the Individual: William of Ockham

One of the most significant figures in this intellectual transformation was William of Ockham (c.1287–1347). A Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian, Ockham is remembered primarily for his nominalist epistemology, which denies the real existence of universals apart from individual things. To Ockham, universals were merely names (nomina), useful mental constructs, but not realities in themselves. The only true realities were individual entities.

This philosophical move had profound political and theological consequences. By denying the objective existence of universals, Ockham implicitly undermined the metaphysical basis of corporate entities such as “the Church” or “the Empire,” which had been understood as mystical bodies possessing their own reality and authority. In their place, he emphasized the primacy of individual persons, whether as believers or citizens. The Church, for Ockham, was not an ontological unity but a community of believers, and its authority rested on the consent of those individuals, not on divine fiat mediated through the Pope.

Ockham’s political writings, especially Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico and Dialogus, further developed this idea. He argued for the limits of papal authority, insisting that secular rulers possessed independent legitimacy derived from natural law and the consent of the governed. He maintained that no one should be compelled to act against the dictates of conscience, an early articulation of the freedom of conscience that would later become a cornerstone of liberal thought.

Ockham’s insistence on the autonomy of secular power and individual conscience marks one of the earliest philosophical assertions of what might be called a “proto-liberal” anthropology. His thought dissolved the monolithic unity of medieval authority, opening the way for a conception of politics grounded in the individual, rather than in an organic or divine hierarchy.

III. Conciliarism and the Origins of Constitutional Thought

If Ockham’s nominalism provided the philosophical basis for individual autonomy, Conciliarism supplied its political counterpart. The Conciliarist movement emerged in the early fourteenth century as a response to the papal claims of absolutism and the crises of the Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism. Its central idea was that the authority of the Church resides not solely in the Pope but in the community of the faithful, represented by councils.

The most important thinker in this tradition was Marsilius of Padua (c.1275–1342), author of Defensor Pacis (1324). Marsilius argued that the trustworthy source of political authority is the people (universitas civium), who collectively possess the power to establish laws and choose rulers. The Church, he claimed, should have no coercive power in temporal affairs; its role is purely spiritual, and its governance should be subject to general councils rather than papal autocracy. Marsilius’s vision of the state was one of secular law, popular consent, and limited clerical authority, ideas that anticipate the constitutionalism of later centuries. “The legislator or the first and proper efficient cause of law is the people or the whole body of citizens,” Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, I.12.

Marsilius’s notion of a community of citizens collectively forming the legislator foreshadows the sovereignty of the people articulated by thinkers like Locke and Rousseau. While his “people” were not the democratic masses of the modern era, but the corporate citizenry of a medieval polity, his insistence that legitimate power arises from human consent rather than divine right represents a decisive break from medieval hierocracy.

John of Paris (Jean Quidort, d.1306) likewise advanced the principle that both papal and royal authority are limited by natural and divine law, and that secular government enjoys legitimate independence from ecclesiastical control. Together, Marsilius, Ockham, and the Conciliarists developed the intellectual tools that would later enable political theorists to challenge absolutism and assert the supremacy of law and representation.

The Early Humanist Turn: Petrarch and the Dignity of Man

By the late fourteenth century, a parallel transformation was underway in Italy: the Renaissance humanist revival. Figures such as Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304–1374) turned to the study of classical antiquity, not merely as a literary or scholarly pursuit, but as a moral and civic one. Humanism emphasized the capacities of reason, virtue, and self-cultivation. In contrast to the medieval focus on divine transcendence, the humanists celebrated the potential of the individual to achieve excellence within the earthly realm.

Petrarch’s writings, while still profoundly Christian, reoriented moral thought around the inner life and moral autonomy of the person. His famous Secretum dramatized the conflict between faith and reason, duty and desire—marking the birth of the introspective self that would later occupy the center of liberal individualism. Moreover, Petrarch’s civic ideals, inspired by the Roman Republic, exalted active citizenship and the pursuit of virtue in public life.

This humanistic anthropology subtly redefined liberty: not merely the absence of constraint, but the cultivation of self-rule through reason and education. The “liberal” man was thus one who exercised freedom through moral and intellectual mastery. This conception would, centuries later, evolve into the liberal emphasis on education, autonomy, and the dignity of the person.

The Legal Foundations of Liberty: Law and Representation

While these intellectual shifts were taking place, institutional developments in medieval Europe, especially in England, were laying the groundwork for modern constitutional liberty. The Magna Carta (1215) had already established the principle that the king was subject to the law, and not above it. By the fourteenth century, the English Parliament had become an established institution, embodying the principle that taxation and legislation required the consent of the governed—even if that “governed” class was limited to nobles and landholders.

These developments reflected a growing conviction that law derives its legitimacy from consent and serves as a limit to arbitrary power. The emergence of representative assemblies across Europe, such as the Cortes in Spain, the Estates in France, and the diets in the Holy Roman Empire, signaled the gradual institutionalization of this principle. Although these were not liberal democracies, they embodied the embryonic idea of government by consent, which would become a hallmark of liberal political philosophy.

In this sense, the fourteenth century represents the constitutional adolescence of Europe: an era in which the vocabulary of liberty, law, and representation began to detach itself from purely theological roots and take on a secular political meaning.

The Meaning of a “14th-Century Liberal.”

To be a “14th-century liberal,” then, would not mean advocating for parliamentary democracy or free markets. Instead, it would entail a commitment to reason, conscience, and law as checks on arbitrary power, whether that power was exercised by kings or by popes. It would involve a belief in the moral dignity of the individual and in the idea that legitimate authority must rest on consent and justice, not on divine prerogative.

Such a figure might stand with Marsilius of Padua in defense of the community’s right to make its own laws; with William of Ockham in defense of the freedom of conscience; and with Petrarch in the conviction that human reason and virtue are the proper foundations of moral life. He would oppose tyranny, whether temporal or spiritual, while affirming a world ordered by moral law rather than brute power.

Pournelle’s self-description, in this light, becomes intelligible: the “14th-century liberal” was not a progressive, but a moral realist, one who sought liberty within the framework of order, faith, and rational law. It was an affirmation of the ancient and medieval conception of freedom—not as license, but as the disciplined exercise of reason in harmony with the good.

VII. From Medieval Liberalism to the Modern Age

The ideas that emerged in the fourteenth century would not bear fruit until centuries later. Yet the genealogy of modern liberalism can be traced directly through this lineage. Ockham’s nominalism prefigured the individualism of the Reformation; Marsilius’s theory of consent anticipated the social contract; Petrarch’s humanism paved the way for Renaissance selfhood; and the parliamentary experiments of England foreshadowed constitutional government.

By the seventeenth century, these dispersed strands converged in the works of John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes, who formalized the liberal doctrines of natural rights, contractual government, and the rule of law. What had begun as theological and philosophical disputes within medieval Christendom evolved into a secular political philosophy that redefined liberty in universal terms.

Yet the medieval roots of liberalism remind us that its deepest impulses were not revolutionary but reformative—an attempt to reconcile human freedom with moral order, reason with faith, and law with conscience. In that sense, the “14th-century liberal” represents not the negation of the medieval world, but its most enlightened expression.

Conclusion

To ask what a “14th-century liberal” would be is to recognize that liberalism, as both an idea and a disposition, has a longer and more complex genealogy than modern history often admits. Long before Locke and Mill, before the Enlightenment and the revolutions, some thinkers insisted that authority must answer to reason, that conscience cannot be coerced. That law must serve justice rather than power. In Ockham’s defense of individual conscience, Marsilius’s theory of popular sovereignty, and Petrarch’s celebration of human dignity, we find the first stirrings of a tradition that would one day call itself liberal.

Jerry Pournelle’s self-description as a “14th-century liberal” thus captures a paradox that is both moral and historical: the conviction that true liberty is not the emancipation from order, but the flourishing of the human person within it. The 14th-century liberal stood at the threshold of modernity, gazing forward from the world of faith toward the world of reason, asserting, even in an age of hierarchy, that the human mind and conscience are free.

The post Liberty Before Locke: Seeds of Freedom in Dante’s Century appeared first on The Miskatonian.

The proposed research aims to explore the concept of “fragmented knowledge”, which is that the notion that knowledge, as it is received, interpreted, and reconstructed over time, is inherently fragmented and distorted. This fragmentation often results in various epistemological fallacies that can affect the development and understanding of new concepts. This study seeks to elucidate how these fragmented pieces of knowledge influence philosophical thought and the broader epistemological landscape, particularly considering the heterogeneity inherent in the notion of knowledge itself (Cléro, 1970). I further investigate how these fragments, exacerbated by cognitive vulnerabilities and the need for heuristics, contribute to epistemological challenges, especially in an era where digital dissemination accelerates knowledge exchange (Nguyen, 2023). This perspective aligns with a “hostile epistemology” framework, which scrutinizes how environmental factors exploit inherent cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities in knowledge acquisition and processing, particularly given the overwhelming volume of information we constantly encounter (Nguyen, 2023).

This necessitates a deeper understanding of how epistemic processes are compromised, leading to an ignorance crisis despite advanced methods of knowledge acquisition and communication (Simion, 2024). This essay also addresses how disinformation and knowledge resistance, coupled with an over-reliance on readily accessible information, contribute to the propagation of false beliefs and hinder the development of accurate conceptual frameworks (Simion, 2024).

Through this examination , i will critically assess the role of contemporary information environments, such as social media and AI-driven knowledge delivery systems, in both facilitating and exacerbating knowledge fragmentation and the subsequent emergence of epistemic fallacies (Anderau, 2023; Clark et al., 2025).

Fragmented Knowledge as an Epistemological Concept

The notion of fragmented knowledge refers to epistemic states in which agents possess partial, decontextualised, temporally disjoint, or insufficiently integrated information within coherent conceptual frameworks. Fragmentation does not merely denote ignorance or lack of information; instead, it describes a condition in which agents hold some epistemically relevant content yet lack the structural unity required for reliable understanding or justified belief. This structural disintegration can impede the development of comprehensive experience and the formation of collective knowledge, particularly within complex epistemic networks (Milano & Prunkl, 2024).

I believe that this distinction is pivotal. Whereas ignorance constitutes the mere absence of knowledge, fragmented knowledge represents its flawed or imperfect possession. Likewise, uncertainty pertains to varying levels of confidence, whereas fragmentation relates to the organization and integration of epistemic material. An epistemic agent might exhibit both confidence and informational awareness, yet remain epistemically deficient if their inputs are disaggregated and inadequately synthesised. This condition frequently manifests as “informed ignorance,” wherein individuals amass copious data points without the capacity to forge a unified, precise understanding, thereby exacerbating the global ignorance crisis (Cohen & Garasic, 2024; Simion, 2024).

The heterogeneity of knowledge, as emphasized by Cléro (1970), further complicates this picture. Knowledge is not a monolithic entity but comprises diverse forms: propositional, procedural, testimonial, and practical,each governed by different epistemic norms. Fragmentation arises when these heterogeneous elements fail to cohere, yielding epistemic states that appear robust locally yet collapse under broader scrutiny. This structural incoherence is amplified by digital platforms, which often prioritize engagement over epistemic coherence, leading to further epistemic fragmentation through algorithmic filtering and the formation of ‘filter bubbles’ (Mattioni, 2024).

Fragmented knowledge can therefore be understood as a hybrid phenomenon: it arises partly from cognitive limitations intrinsic to epistemic agents, and partly from external informational structures that shape how knowledge is acquired, transmitted, and retained. Establishing this dual character provides the conceptual foundation for analysing both the mechanisms and consequences of fragmentation. I will further work to delineate these mechanisms, explore their role in fostering epistemological fallacies, and propose strategies for mitigating their pervasive impact on philosophical and, even more importantly, epistemological discourse.

Mechanisms of Knowledge Fragmentation

A convergence of cognitive and structural mechanisms drives knowledge fragmentation. At the mental level, agents operate under conditions of bounded rationality: limited attention, finite memory, and constrained processing capacity. These limitations necessitate reliance on heuristics, cognitive shortcuts that enable efficient decision-making but often at the cost of epistemic precision. Such reliance can lead to oversimplification, selective attention to information, and the decontextualization of complex concepts, fostering “informed ignorance” where individuals possess information but lack an accurate understanding (Cohen & Garasic, 2024).

Heuristics promote fragmentation by privileging salience over relevance and accessibility over coherence. Information that is emotionally charged, recently encountered, or socially reinforced tends to dominate belief formation, even when it lacks contextual grounding. Over time, this produces epistemic assemblages composed of disconnected informational fragments rather than integrated bodies of knowledge. Furthermore, the digital transformation of knowledge order, characterized by flexible phases and flattened hierarchies, exacerbates fragmentation by destabilizing traditional epistemic practices and enabling the rapid dissemination of epistemically toxic content (Mattioni, 2024; Neuberger et al., 2023).

Temporal factors further exacerbate fragmentation. Knowledge is rarely acquired continuously or systematically; instead, it is accumulated across disparate contexts and moments. Without deliberate epistemic integration, earlier informational fragments may persist unchallenged, coexisting with newer inputs in ways that generate inconsistency or false coherence. This temporal discontinuity is particularly problematic in domains where information evolves rapidly, leading to outdated or conflicting understandings that resist revision. Moreover, the erosion of human connections and the rise of micro-identities in digital spaces further accelerate this fragmentation, creating parallel social realities that lack cohesion with broader societal understanding (Kossowska et al., 2023). This phenomenon contributes to an overall epistemic crisis in which traditional knowledge orders are destabilized, leading to widespread false beliefs and distrust in expertise (Neuberger et al., 2023; Simion, 2024).

Structural mechanisms also play a decisive role. Modern epistemic agents are deeply dependent on testimony, mediated sources, and institutional knowledge systems. This epistemic dependence increases vulnerability to fragmentation, as agents often lack the means to verify or contextualise the information they receive independently. Fragmentation thus emerges not merely from cognitive weakness, but from the architecture of contemporary knowledge transmission itself. This reliance on external sources, particularly in rapidly polarizing digital environments, can lead to epistemic fragmentation, where conflicting narratives replace shared understanding and objectivity in reasoning collapses (Lee et al., 2025).

Epistemological Fallacies Arising from Fragmentation

Fragmented knowledge systematically gives rise to distinct epistemological fallacies. One prominent example is false coherence: the tendency to impose an illusory unity on disparate informational fragments. Agents may infer overarching explanations or patterns where none are epistemically warranted, mistaking narrative plausibility for justification. This fallacy is particularly pernicious in public discourse, where simplified narratives often gain traction despite lacking empirical support or logical consistency. This can lead to significant societal epistemic fragmentation, where a lack of trust in common epistemic authorities proliferates disagreement over factual beliefs (Abiri & Buchheim, 2022). This condition is far more perilous than the dissemination of mere misinformation, as it corrodes the foundational trust necessary for collective knowledge production and societal cohesion (Abiri & Buchheim, 2022).

Another recurrent fallacy is overgeneralisation from partial information. Fragmented knowledge often involves extrapolating broad conclusions from narrow evidential bases, particularly when fragments are emotionally salient or socially reinforced. This undermines both justificatory standards and reliability conditions for knowledge. Such inductive leaps, unsupported by comprehensive data, lead to an exaggerated sense of understanding, contributing to a crisis where individuals struggle to discern reliable information from unreliable sources, especially in an environment saturated with politically motivated reasoning and disinformation (Simion, 2024; Stones & Pearce, 2021). Furthermore, the proliferation of generative AI systems exacerbates this by creating recursive knowledge loops that lack robust empirical anchoring, further destabilizing epistemic infrastructures (Singh, 2025).

Fragmentation also contributes to epistemic overconfidence. Possessing multiple fragments can create the subjective impression of comprehensive understanding, even when critical gaps remain unrecognised. This form of overconfidence is especially resistant to correction, as agents interpret challenges as threats to coherence rather than opportunities for epistemic revision. This cognitive bias is often reinforced by epistemic vices such as rigidity and indifference, which hinder critical self-assessment and the integration of contradictory evidence (Meyer, 2023).

At the collective level, fragmented knowledge produces group-level epistemic failures, including polarisation and echo-chamber effects. When fragments circulate within homogenous communities, they acquire artificial stability, reinforcing shared misconceptions and insulating them from external critique. Fragmentation thus undermines not only individual epistemic agency but also the social mechanisms upon which knowledge depends. The advent of generative AI further complicates this landscape by creating new pathways for amplified and manipulative testimonial injustice, alongside hermeneutical ignorance and access injustice, thereby undermining collective knowledge integrity and democratic discourse (Kay et al., 2024).

Hostile Epistemology and Environmental Exploitation

The framework of hostile epistemology offers a powerful lens for understanding why knowledge fragmentation persists and intensifies. Hostile epistemic environments are structured to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities rather than to mitigate them. They prioritise engagement, speed, and affective response over accuracy, coherence, and epistemic responsibility (Nguyen, 2023).

In such environments, fragmentation is not accidental but incentivised. Algorithms reward content that captures attention quickly, regardless of its epistemic quality. This encourages the dissemination of isolated fragments stripped of contextual scaffolding, as such fragments are more likely to provoke immediate reactions.

Hostile epistemology shifts explanatory focus away from individual epistemic failure and toward systemic design. Epistemic agents are placed in environments that systematically undermine their capacity for responsible belief formation. Fragmentation, on this view, is an expected outcome of rational agents operating under adversarial informational conditions.

This perspective also illuminates the moral dimension of epistemic harm. When environments are structured to exploit cognitive weaknesses, responsibility for epistemic failure becomes distributed across agents, institutions, and technological systems. Fragmented knowledge thus emerges as a structural injustice rather than merely a personal shortcoming.

The Ignorance Crisis and Knowledge Resistance

The persistence of fragmented knowledge contributes to what has been described as an ignorance crisis: a condition in which increasing access to information coincides with declining epistemic reliability (Simion, 2024). Fragmentation plays a central role in this paradox by generating epistemic states that resist correction.

Disinformation thrives in fragmented epistemic environments by exploiting existing informational gaps and cognitive biases. Once integrated into an agent’s fragmented belief set, false information becomes difficult to dislodge, particularly when it aligns with prior commitments or identity-defining narratives. This resistance is often compounded by socially supported ignorance, where communities reinforce and validate beliefs that conflict with expert consensus, leading to entrenched “bad beliefs” that are epistemically irrational yet socially normative (Müller, 2024; Woomer, 2017).

Knowledge resistance further entrenches fragmentation. Agents confronted with corrective evidence may reject it, not because of lack of access, but because it threatens their perceived coherence. Fragmented knowledge thus becomes self-stabilising: attempts at correction are interpreted as attacks rather than epistemic improvements. This phenomenon is particularly salient in the digital age, where epistemic fragmentation is exacerbated by societal divisions and a lack of trust in common epistemic authorities, rendering traditional fact-checking less effective (Abiri & Buchheim, 2022).

This dynamic undermines traditional epistemological assumptions about rational revision and convergence on truth. In fragmented environments, epistemic disagreement does not resolve through shared evidence, but instead hardens into mutually insulated belief systems. Consequently, the very notion of a universally accessible and coherent body of knowledge is challenged, leading to a profound re-evaluation of epistemic foundationalism in an era of information overload and partisan divides (Strömbäck et al., 2022). Therefore, this research aims to provide a robust framework for comprehending these dynamics, fostering a more nuanced understanding of how knowledge is constructed and deconstructed in complex socio-technical systems.

Digital and AI-Mediated Knowledge Environments

Contemporary digital environments significantly amplify epistemic fragmentation. Social media platforms fragment knowledge through brevity, context collapse, and algorithmic curation. Information is presented as isolated units optimised for consumption rather than understanding, encouraging shallow engagement and rapid belief formation. Furthermore, generative AI exacerbates this by creating recursive knowledge loops that lack robust empirical anchoring, further destabilizing epistemic infrastructures (Kay et al., 2024).

AI-driven knowledge systems introduce additional complexities. While such systems can enhance access and efficiency, they often operate in an opaque manner, obscuring the sources, limitations, and confidence levels of the information they provide. Automated summarisation and content generation risk further decontextualisation, producing outputs that appear authoritative yet lack epistemic transparency. This inherent opacity can foster an unwarranted trust in AI-generated content, potentially exacerbating the spread of fragmented or even disinformative knowledge (Simion, 2024).

Speed and scale are decisive factors. The accelerated circulation of information leaves little opportunity for reflection or integration, reinforcing heuristic processing and fragment retention. AI systems may therefore mitigate certain epistemic burdens while simultaneously intensifying fragmentation if deployed without epistemic safeguards. The challenge, thus, lies in developing AI systems that not only provide information but also facilitate a deeper understanding of their epistemic provenance and limitations, fostering a more robust and integrated knowledge ecosystem (Clark et al., 2025).

The epistemic challenge posed by these systems is not merely technological but normative: determining how knowledge ought to be structured, delivered, and evaluated in environments that prioritise efficiency over understanding. This is especially critical given that generative AI can fragment societies into separate epistemic communities, thereby eroding the common factual ground necessary for democratic discourse and collective action (Abiri & Buchheim, 2022).

Mitigation Strategies and Epistemic Repair

Addressing fragmented knowledge requires both individual and structural interventions. At the individual level, epistemic virtues such as humility, intellectual patience, and sensitivity to evidential gaps can mitigate fragmentation. Practices that slow cognition and encourage integration—such as reflective deliberation and source triangulation offer partial resistance. However, these individual-level strategies are often insufficient in the face of systemically hostile epistemic environments (Coeckelbergh, 2025).

However, individual strategies are insufficient in hostile epistemic environments. Structural interventions are therefore necessary. These include designing platforms that introduce epistemic friction, promote contextualisation, and foreground uncertainty rather than suppress it. Institutional safeguards, such as epistemic auditing and transparency standards for AI systems, are also essential. Such measures would help counteract the propensity of advanced AI to exacerbate cognitive overload and propagate biases that undermine diverse global knowledge systems (Ofosu-Asare, 2024; Salem, 2025).

Crucially, mitigation strategies must avoid epistemic idealisation. Fragmentation cannot be eliminated; it can only be managed. Epistemic repair is necessarily partial and fragile, constrained by the very cognitive and environmental factors that generate fragmentation in the first place. Therefore, a robust framework for understanding and addressing fragmented knowledge must acknowledge its pervasive nature while focusing on strategies that enhance epistemic resilience and foster more integrated forms of understanding (Wihbey, 2024).

Conclusion

We conclude that Fragmented knowledge is not an abnormal deviation from ideal epistemic conditions but a structural aspect of modern epistemic life. It results from the interaction of cognitive limitations, diverse knowledge types, and hostile informational environments. Its effects—epistemic fallacies, ongoing ignorance, and resistance to correction—present significant challenges to traditional epistemological frameworks. The spread of artificial intelligence further complicates this landscape, as AI systems can both worsen fragmentation through biased information sharing and provide potential opportunities for more robust knowledge integration, depending on their design and ethical use (Coeckelbergh, 2025; Ofosu-Asare, 2024).

Recognising fragmentation as a systemic phenomenon necessitates a shift toward non-ideal epistemology, one attentive to real-world constraints and adversarial conditions. Only by acknowledging these constraints can epistemology remain responsive to the epistemic crises of the digital age. This understanding informs the subsequent exploration of specific mechanisms underpinning fragmentation and their manifestation in historical and contemporary philosophical discourse. The following sections will therefore delve into the precise mechanisms by which knowledge can become fragmented over time and how these processes contribute to the formation of epistemological fallacies, ultimately proposing strategies for enhancing knowledge synthesis (Pillin, 2025). This includes exploring the role of epistemic responsibility in hybrid human-AI knowledge systems, recognizing that defragmentation, while epistemically rational, often necessitates practical considerations for its successful implementation (Pillin, 2025). Furthermore, such an approach requires a nuanced understanding of how individuals integrate disparate pieces of information and how AI-mediated processes can either hinder or facilitate this integration (Clark et al., 2025; Rich, 2023).

Link to References

The post Informed Idiots: The Luxury of Knowing Everything and Believing Nothing appeared first on The Miskatonian.

The tension that runs through this transformation is not between science and spirituality as such, but between openness and closure. This tension has been present in the distinction between faith and belief, in the difference between authentic spirituality and fanaticism, in the role of uncertainty, and in the way scientism now functions psychologically like a religion. At stake is not whether science is right or wrong, nor whether spirituality is true or false, but whether we are still capable of sustaining observation without prematurely explaining it away. Faith, in its deeper theological sense, was never meant to be certainty. It was a form of trust that acknowledged transcendence, not possession of truth. Fanaticism emerged precisely when that trust collapsed into rigid belief, when symbols hardened into idols and doubt was cast out as moral failure. Modern science rightly rebelled against this. It demanded evidence, repeatability, and humility before what can be observed. In doing so, it performed an act of purification that was historically indispensable. Objective factuality was necessary to separate inquiry from authority and to prevent belief from tyrannizing reality.

But something subtle happened along the way. Methodological restraint slowly became metaphysical assertion. What science bracketed for the sake of inquiry—meaning, value, interior experience—was later dismissed as unreal or irrelevant. The scientific attitude of “we do not yet know” was transformed into a cultural conviction that only what can be measured truly exists. This was not demanded by science itself, but by a psychological need for certainty in a world that had lost its older religious frameworks. It is here that experienced spirituality becomes threatening. Not because it contradicts science, but because it bypasses institutional mediation. Lived spiritual experience does not present itself as universal law; it does not ask for obedience; it does not even demand belief from others. It says only that something has been seen, endured, or undergone, and that this has altered the way one exists. Such experience cannot be easily validated or invalidated by scientific methods, because it is not primarily propositional. It belongs to the domain of meaning rather than mechanism.

Scientism, unlike science, cannot tolerate this. It must either reduce spiritual experience to pathology, illusion, or neural noise, or translate it into acceptable metaphors stripped of existential depth. This is why uncertainty is praised in theory but feared in practice. In scientific papers, uncertainty is a technical parameter, a margin of error, something to be narrowed. In lived experience, uncertainty is a condition of openness, a space in which meaning can appear without guarantee. The former is manageable; the latter is destabilizing.

Quantum mechanics is often invoked as a bridge between science and spirituality, but this invocation is usually misunderstood. Quantum theory does not validate mystical claims, nor does it re-enchant the universe in any simple way. What it does do is fracture the fantasy of absolute objectivity. Observation is no longer cleanly separable from reality; the observer is implicated in what is observed. This should have been an invitation to epistemic humility. Instead, it was largely absorbed into more sophisticated forms of control, probability, and prediction. Mystery was not embraced; it was operationalized. The contemporary scientific media landscape plays a decisive role in this transformation. Scientific findings are no longer presented as provisional, contested, and context-dependent. They are packaged as settled truths, moral imperatives, and identity markers. The language of “following the science” replaces the practice of understanding it. Dissent is not debated but moralized. Uncertainty is framed as danger rather than as the very condition of inquiry. In this way, scientism quietly takes on the psychological functions of religion: authority, orthodoxy, heresy, and reassurance in the face of existential anxiety.

This is not a conspiracy, nor is it simply hypocrisy. It is a response to a real human need. When traditional religion collapsed in many parts of the modern world, it left behind not only freedom, but also disorientation. Science filled that vacuum, not only as a method, but as a promise: that reality is intelligible, that progress is inevitable, that suffering can be managed, that death itself may eventually be solved. This promise is seductive, and it has delivered extraordinary achievements. But it also narrows the horizon of what counts as meaning.

Authentic spirituality begins precisely where this narrowing becomes visible. It does not oppose science, nor does it seek to replace it. It simply refuses closure. It insists on sustained observation without the demand for final explanation. It recognizes that not all insight takes the form of knowledge, and that not all truth can be converted into control. In this sense, spirituality is not a regression into pre-scientific thinking, but a continuation of the scientific attitude at a deeper existential level. It is attention without guarantees.

This brings us, finally, to Yuval Noah Harari and his vision of the future. Harari is often read as a prophet of scientification, a herald of a world in which algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, in which meaning is replaced by data, and in which humanism gives way to techno-optimization. He is not wrong in his diagnosis of where certain trajectories are leading. He is right to say that traditional narratives of the self are being destabilized, that biology and technology are converging, and that our myths are no longer anchored in transcendence. Where Harari falters is not in his analysis, but in what he takes to be left over once meaning is dismantled. His vision assumes that when spiritual and religious frameworks dissolve, what remains is either manipulation or resignation. Meaning becomes something we invent or discard, not something that emerges through lived openness. Uncertainty, in this vision, is something to be minimized through better models, not something to be inhabited.

But what if Harari’s future is not inevitable? What if the increasing visibility of uncertainty, complexity, and observer-dependence does not lead to nihilism or control, but to a renewed capacity for attention? What if the collapse of grand narratives is not the end of spirituality, but the end of its institutional monopolization? In that case, the future Harari describes would not eliminate spirituality, but strip away its false certainties and leave behind something quieter, less defensible, and more real.

Harari is right that we can no longer rely on inherited beliefs. He is right that science has transformed our understanding of what we are. But he is wrong to assume that what cannot be scientifically guaranteed must therefore be empty. The most profound forms of spirituality have always known that they cannot be justified, only lived. They do not compete with science, because they are not explanations. There are ways of staying open when the explanation ends.

In this sense, the true alternative to both fanaticism and scientism is not a return to faith as certainty, nor a surrender to data as destiny, but a disciplined willingness to say “I don’t know” and remain present. This is not the “I don’t know” of ignorance waiting to be filled, but the “I don’t know” of reverence, patience, and attention. It is the same posture that gave birth to science before it became a worldview, and the same posture that underlies every authentic spiritual tradition. If there is a future worth hoping for, it is not one in which science finally explains everything, nor one in which spirituality retreats into obscurity, but one in which observation is freed from the demand to conclude. Such a future would not be governed by belief or disbelief, but by a shared humility before what exceeds us. In that sense, Harari may be right about the dangers we face, but wrong about the horizon that remains. The future is not faithless. It is uncertain. And that uncertainty, if we allow it, may yet become a way of seeing.

The post From Altars to Algorithms: How Science Became the New Religion appeared first on The Miskatonian.

1. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is a work of speculative fiction that centers its drama on political conflict. The novel follows Calvin Morrison, a Pennsylvania state trooper who is accidentally transported into a parallel timeline. The new world bears a resemblance to late medieval Europe. It has petty kingdoms, competing warlords, and one vast religious institution known as Styphon’s House. The House functions as a combination of church and central bank. It controls the supply of gunpowder. It claims that the formula for this powder is a divine gift. It treats the powder as a sacred substance. In truth, it relies upon a closed guild monopoly. The novel goes beyond adventure. It explores political decay, the dynamics of revolution, and the impact that a single competent person can have on a stagnant order.

Piper creates a society that appears stable but is maintained through artificial scarcity. The priests of Styphon’s House cling to their secret formula for “fireseed.” The priests tell all who question them that Styphon revealed the substance to them alone. Piper shows the fraud early. The priests do not believe their own story. They engage in ordinary economic manipulation. Their control of gunpowder gives them control over kings. As Piper writes, Styphon’s House “held the whole Great Kingdom in quiet bondage” (Piper 42). The House does not govern with open tyranny. It operates through pressure, threats, and carefully managed loans to the throne. This combination of false religion and material monopoly creates a political order that can endure for centuries. It also produces a population that lives without the hope of large-scale technical progress.

The monopoly affects all levels of society. Kings cannot wage an independent war without the approval of their subjects. Lords must seek permission to produce or transport powder. Soldiers are dependent on their feudal superiors for armaments. Common people accept the restriction as divine law. The priests ensure compliance not with armies but with fear and tradition. Piper emphasizes that this system is efficient but parasitic. It extracts wealth and obedience while contributing little to the greater good of society. Its logic is self-preservation at the cost of human potential.

 The Spread of Knowledge

The arrival of Kalvan changes the balance. He knows the formula for gunpowder from his training and education in his own world. He knows that the priestly monopoly rests on a lie. The moment he reaches the new world, he sees a society that lives without the basic knowledge that his world learned centuries earlier. He shares this knowledge with the people who shelter him. The act appears simple. In the world of the novel, it is revolutionary. Once gunpowder production spreads beyond the control of Styphon’s House, the entire political structure begins to collapse.

Piper presents this collapse as a natural event. Knowledge in the novel behaves like a force that seeks to expand. Once Kalvan explains the formula, others learn it as well. They teach still others. A secret known by a few becomes a public fact. It becomes impossible to confine this knowledge to a priestly guild. The spread of knowledge brings new power into existence. Piper writes that “the secret fled from its cages and flew through the kingdoms” (Piper 88). The social order that relied on the mystique of the secret begins to fall apart. Kings start to experiment with their own supply of powder. Warlords gain confidence. The people lose their fear of Styphon. The priests attempt to suppress the spread of the secret. Their efforts come too late. Piper’s point is clear. Once a technology or technique becomes known, no regime can rely upon the old method of control.

The novel emphasizes that the dissemination of knowledge is more than a technical matter. It is political. The priests’ power is tied to belief, but belief cannot survive without mystery. Once the mystery of fireseed disappears, the priests lose legitimacy. Kalvan’s intervention is practical, but it has symbolic consequences. It demonstrates that control of information is a source of authority. Piper shows that institutions dependent on secrecy are fragile. Knowledge cannot remain contained. It escapes, empowers, and disrupts old hierarchies.

 The Reality of War

This theme resembles the idea that information pressure can overcome hierarchy. Piper wrote the novel in the mid-1960s. He lived at a time when technical knowledge was spreading at a rapid rate. He could see that traditional authoritarian structures were weakening. He projected this idea backward into a setting that used medieval imagery. His fictional world becomes a laboratory for a larger political argument. When a society depends on exclusive control of knowledge, that society becomes brittle. Once the knowledge becomes public, no authority can fully restore the old monopoly.

Piper does not portray the conflict that follows as simple progress. The spread of knowledge does not bring harmony or order. It brings war. The novel follows Kalvan as he attempts to survive the wrath of Styphon’s House. He leads a small kingdom named Hos-Harphax. The kingdom becomes the center of a war that spreads across the continent. The war is characterized by its religious, political, and economic aspects. The priests frame it as a holy conflict. They declare that Kalvan is a demon who seeks to defile the sacred fireseed. The kings allied with Styphon’s House claim that Kalvan is a threat to the natural order. They wage war in the name of divine order. Piper stresses the cruelty of this conflict. Armies destroy towns. Refugees flee across borders. Propaganda spreads through the kingdoms.

Kalvan does not welcome this war. He does not shy away from it either. He understands that Styphon’s House will try to destroy him and anyone who learns the formula. He sees that peace cannot exist between a monopoly that depends on ignorance and a ruler who encourages learning. The novel presents this as a tragic truth of political life. Some systems cannot be reformed from within. They must be confronted by force. Piper refuses to soften this message. His characters recognize the cost and proceed with grim resolve.

Religious fervor intensifies the fighting. The priests train their followers to accept death in defense of fireseed. Believers fight with passion. They are convinced that Kalvan is evil. Kalvan’s army is composed of men who learn the truth and understand the practical nature of the conflict. Piper contrasts rational and emotional approaches to war. This contrast highlights the difficulty of overcoming ideologically motivated opponents. Even when the factual basis of authority collapses, cultural loyalty can prolong conflict.

 The Role of Competence and Leadership

Kalvan’s success does not come only from his knowledge of gunpowder. It comes from his ability to build new institutions. Piper gives great attention to the creation of a disciplined army. Most kingdoms in the novel rely on feudal levies. These levies consist of peasant soldiers who owe service to local lords. They fight only during certain seasons. They lack discipline and training. Their loyalty belongs to their immediate lord rather than the ruler of the realm. Kalvan recognizes this weakness. He sets about building a national army. The new force receives standard training. It uses firearms and artillery that are produced under his direction. Its officers rise through merit and performance. The army becomes the anchor of a modern state.

Piper presents this development as a significant political advance. The shift from feudal levies to a national army gives Kalvan the ability to resist Styphon’s House. The new army answers to the crown rather than to the nobles. This allows Kalvan to pursue a consistent strategy. It also prevents ambitious nobles from undermining the war effort. The emphasis on merit over birth reflects a broader theme that runs throughout the novel. Kalvan appoints people who can perform their duties well. He fires those who cannot. This approach stands in contrast to the houses of the Great Kingdom. Their lords hold power due to their lineage. Their armies run on custom rather than skill. Their religious authorities have a position due to their hierarchical structure. Piper’s world becomes a contest between an old order that lives on inherited privilege and a new order that lives on practical ability.

The novel also highlights the impact that one competent person can have on a complex system. Kalvan does not arrive with an army, wealth, or political allies. He arrives on horseback with no possessions. His only advantage lies in his practical knowledge and his military training. This small set of skills becomes the spark that changes a continent. Piper is making a clear statement. Institutions matter. Yet institutions often lose energy. They can become rigid. They can become blind to obvious truths. When this happens, competent individuals can reshape the system. They can introduce new techniques. They can organize new structures. Kalvan acts as a catalyst. His presence accelerates the decay of Styphon’s monopoly. It also accelerates the formation of a new political order.

Kalvan’s leadership emphasizes rational decision-making. He does not act impulsively. He evaluates situations and chooses strategies based on results. Piper shows this through Kalvan’s management of campaigns. He orders retreats when necessary. He preserves core forces for decisive battles. He trains his officers to make independent judgments while following clear procedures. This style contrasts with the arbitrary decision-making of old lords and religious leaders. Competence and organization become a moral and political weapon.

 The Cost of Progress

The war that follows the collapse of the gunpowder monopoly reveals another theme. Progress often comes with a high cost. Piper writes scenes of burned towns, dead civilians, and shattered armies. He shows how propaganda spreads hatred. Styphon’s House calls Kalvan a destroyer. Kalvan’s allies respond with their own exaggerations. The war becomes a contest not only of armies but of narratives. Each side attempts to convince the people that the other poses a threat to the foundation of society. The novel contains no illusion about the brutality of civilizational change. Piper does not describe war as noble. He shows it as a tragic yet sometimes necessary means of breaking an entrenched system.

Although Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is an adventure story, its political insights remain relevant. It warns that monopolies built on secrecy can become oppressive. It shows that the spread of knowledge transforms society. It argues that leadership requires competence, courage, and the willingness to take risks. It insists that progress carries costs. It also suggests that individuals who act with clarity and skill can redirect the course of civilizations.

Piper wrote in an era marked by rapid technological change and rising skepticism toward traditional authority. His novel reflects these concerns. It examines what happens when new knowledge enters a closed system. It explores the conflict between innovation and established power. It praises the individual’s potential. It criticizes institutions that fear change. These themes still have force today.

Ultimately, the novel stands as both a celebration and a warning. It celebrates the liberation that occurs when knowledge becomes open to all. It warns that the transition to a better order involves hardship. It suggests that those who confront entrenched elites must be prepared for the ensuing struggle. Kalvan embodies the possibility of constructive revolution. Styphon’s House represents the danger of systems that confuse authority with truth. The world that emerges from their conflict is one shaped by courage, intelligence, and the willingness to challenge falsehood.

The post Burn the Temples, Free the Formula: Revolution in H. Beam Piper’s Otherwhen appeared first on The Miskatonian.

I remember the day I became anorexic. It was the 13th of December 2019 – I was 17 years old, 185cm tall, 81kg. Suddenly, as if it were a minute’s revelation, I became aware of my own enmity towards my body, and I couldn’t run from it. Even worse, I couldn’t lock or ignore this visceral disdain I felt for myself, and so action to bring it about ensued. For four years, I dropped to 40kg; in the heat of summer, I shrouded in layers of clothes; I fainted in the dorm’s bathrooms in the early morning hours; my heart faltered with unsteady rhythm under the strain of starvation; I lost interest in sexual things; hypotension made little blue flies and spirals appear in my eyesight; and I ignored those who I cherished the most, my caring friends and my family. Needless to say, nobody knew. I kept a regime of silence with everyone, and having the highest academic achievements – I felt condoled and justified to wage onwards my inner war. Until it all crashed down, and my body gave up.

This essay is a personal testimony of what it is like living with anorexia nervosa; how it came about; and how reaching out might end up being just “the thing” that saves us from this slow suicide. In other words, a philosophical testimony of when my life became the limelight of starvation.

What is Anorexia Nervosa?

            But what is anorexia, precisely, in my case, anorexia nervosa? According to the DSM-5, there are three criteria for someone to be diagnosed with such a condition. To put them more simply, they are – 1). Persistent energy intake restriction (not eating food), 2). Intense fear of gaining weight or being fat, 3). A disturbance in self-perceived weight or shape.¹ From this, one’s immediate impression might be that anorexia nervosa is a simple diet gone out of hand, but this is far from being the case. As Clarie Beeken, someone who battled with anorexia for 13 years, writes:

“There is a common misconception that anorexia nervosa is just a diet that got out of hand. But an eating disorder is not a slimmer’s disease; rather, it is the symptom of stress or other profound emotional damage or psychological problems.”²

Katie Metcalfe, another victim of anorexia nervosa who at the lowest weighted only about 30kg, experienced it as a semi-auditory fantasy (which she later made it synonymous with the “Devil”)³: and there are studies suggesting not only “Holy Anorexia” of medieval nuns (with anorexia mirabilis and “there is no fat in heaven”), but also that anorexia itself is largely a religious induced experience through starvation.⁴ Tara’s case, another countless “someone” who dealt with anorexia in our modern age, is ridden with a predisposition to fall into depression, but also as a loss of control over one’s own life.⁵ “A need for control over one’s own life. . .” being another big issue of someone with anorexia nervosa. An everyday control over calories, exercises, steps, days without food, body-image: ultimately, a minute-to-minute discipline of the mind’s want over the body’s need. Or as Foucault might have said – “the mystique of the everyday is joined here with the discipline of the minute.”⁶ To not say anything how we are everyday bombarded in social media, – back in the day magazines, – with men and women models of an ideal body type (the fact that body type charts, boob type charts, vagina type charts, penis type charts, nose type charts even exist), to whom all of the above cases fell prey to!

Therefore, anorexia nervosa is something much more than food restriction intake, it entails a deep disturbance of one’s own psyche: prior physical or mental abuse, experience of someone’s suicide, a breakup, bullying, ideals in one’s social group and environment, sexual harassment, rape, difficulties with stress and anxiety, overprotective or intrusive parents and such similar cases. Just as alarming is the news that anorexia nervosa is a condition effecting primarily the youth, with a rise (much like schizophrenia) after the industrial revolution.⁷ And it is also not altogether a voluntary thing. For anorexia nervosa while being temperamental (when a child, for example, has early-on anxiety disorders or displays obsessions, they are at an increased risk to develop anorexia nervosa) and environmental (relating to a particular culture and how much this culture values thinness); it is also genetic (higher risk of having it if someone is the biological first-line of an individual who had it).⁸

Statistically, anorexia nervosa is (probably) most prominent in post-industrialized high-income countries, with the highest rate amongst the Caucasian population, having a higher prevalence amongst young women, with the ratio of women-to-men being 10:1.9. Though this ratio is because men are less likely to talk about it or just straight out ignore it. Based on the recent statistics of European countries, about <1-4% of a given country’s female population deals with anorexia nervosa.10 The hypothesis can be raised, though with the lack of a proof statistic,11 that in my country (Kosovo), given that there are around 790,000 women,12 around 7,900 to 31,600 of them are dealing with anorexia nervosa, with the ratio of men being around 790 to 3160. The number overall is around 8,690 to 34,760 of the population who are dealing with anorexia nervosa. That is 1 in either 183 or 46 people are dealing with it! These, of course, are imaginary numbers based on general statistics, and one never knows the pain that is hidden in the cracks of the given facts, especially when anorexia nervosa requires unique treatment for every unique patient who deals with it.¹³

There has been much talk on why women suffer more from anorexia nervosa and there is a common conclusion that, since anorexia nervosa halts the menstrual cycle, sags the boobs, removes the libido drive, and removes much of those soft layers of “fat” that girls experience during puberty in their bodies, that it is a “war against femininity.” And passages from Beeken and others (also from my talks with women friends who have dealt with anorexia), seem to suggest that there is a correlation of anorexia nervosa with the want of reducing prominent sexual features in the female body.

“I hate my boobs,” Claire Beeken begins her testimony of the thoughts that ignited her anorexia, “because he likes to touch them [her grandfather], and my periods because they excite him. My body feels infected and dirty, and when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, I am disgusted by it. My classmates are right – I am ugly, and I probably do smell. I hate my body, I hate my life, and find myself looking at other boys and girls and wishing I could be them instead of me. God forgive me, I even wish I had cancer like Yvonne [her friend].”¹⁴

But I do think that theorists should be careful about calling this side of anorexia “a war on femininity,” whatever this term even means. I think that the question and the shift that our psyche had with the industrial revolution should be addressed first.  My impression is that this “war on femininity” is creating an unwanted ideological war in dealing with an already difficult and personal thing such as anorexia: and we have first, given that there are men (the number is low, but it is there) with anorexia too, to ask ourselves – are these perceived wars a symptom rather than the cause of this condition? However, this might be. I think that we do need to have a conversation about this, and just generally about anorexia nervosa in our society too.

This isn’t to alarm the public, but much needs to be done to offer people with anorexia nervosa (which has the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder)15 places, groups, or even translated books of people who dealt with it. But we needn’t also hurry and fall into this popular idea that “the public needs to be aware.” This sort of idea only pushes people who are dealing with the said problem into alternative cultures¹⁶ that we neither can empathize and help, nor can they leave this much-needed warmth of being left alone from the naked eye of the public’s awareness. The naked eye that has brought here and elsewhere nothing more than the politicians’ electoral mongering hooks; countless media debates with people whose only problem is to be watched; and utter religious naivety. We are already alienating someone when we want to make the public “aware,” thereby putting the scapegoat mark over their “abnormal” activities. In other words, we have become a culture of the sabbatical priestly confessions, who, much to the opposite of doing our job as we should (in silence and with God on our side), we get a megaphone and make a spectacle of buzz words to the only modern God – the public. And in turn, we ask this public to direct us towards things, the reverence for which, as Nietzsche says, we ourselves individually would never offer.¹⁷

From the Village to City – a Suicide

The language of someone with anorexia nervosa is uniquely militaristic, for there is a known enemy – the body’s fatness.¹⁸ Prior to anorexia, I never had this sort of language in my mind. After our family got back from Norway, I was raised quite modestly, – and many times in financial tightness, – in this small village with only two other houses nearby. I can recall the early memories being those of the trees and very green and blue fields. My family had always put education at the forefront of my priorities, so much so that they skipped two nearby rural schools just so that I could have a better education at one of the schools near the city center. We moved, as many farm families did, from the village near the city around the 2010s.

I think my problems with anorexia nervosa stem from what this move did to me. I was used to a reclusive life in school, and given that I had no other friend of my age in the village, my only friends were quite honestly the trees. When my family moved near the city, my world changed and was shattered. I do remember that what formed most of my thoughts back then was seeing this ugly urbanization, where, within two years, near my new house, 40+ other houses got built. I was afraid of change, and I was afraid that the only things I had (trees) now were being turned into people I did not know. I was finding places to fit in, making new friends: one of whom became my best friend (since the wish of the family was to hide her name, let’s call her Th.), with whom we did most things together and who introduced me to reading books as a fun thing, playing basketball, and Christianity too. But again, it took me about seven years to settle into the new house. To this day, I haven’t dreamt even once of this now 15-year-old house, but I do dream of my old house in the village often.

High school, with the whole moving schools and choosing a “profession,” brought back the same impression as the old village-to-city move. I felt unwanted, and also, I did not have my friend Th. with me anymore. Actually, around this time, they dropped out of high school and married, after we had a major fight because I discovered they were cutting themselves (the fight was my fault). It was the second year of high school (2019), when I was dealing with another – now a more major – move: the move to college, when I got the horrible news that my childhood friend had committed suicide and left me a note forgivingme  for the fight I had caused. It was by the end of this year, when I wasn’t playing any sports, and I was doing just schoolwork every hour, that I became anorexic. I always felt too guilty to drop my grades, and I did enjoy studying, so they were always as good as they could be. But I didn’t feel guilty, nor did I hate the feeling of hating myself; hating my static life; hating feeling so out of control with all these changing places, leaving people behind, and life taking away people I loved so dearly.

After my anorexic revelation, my life became a regime of silent submission. I think one of the reasons, also, why men do not confess their anorexic tendencies is because of doing what I did. I knew about anorexia nervosa from my readings, but I refused to learn more about it. My strategy of lowering the body weight was simple: every week, drop the food intake till I basically consumed nothing. If I did it too fast, people would know something is wrong. I didn’t want to be a burden, though I later became one. I also wanted my body not to drop on me, so I stabbed it a little bit every day. In the first year was the journey from eating almost a loaf of bread in a day, to half of it, to a quarter, then to none, together with exercises, step counts, and also conditioning myself that if I don’t read or do something productive with my day, I am not allowed to eat.

The second year of my anorexia nervosa, and the year I started my campus, was the year I started to actually feel like my mind was winning the war. I had dropped to 65kg. My humor had become dark. I used jokes to get along with the unmet need of wanting to make friends, but also avoiding them so that I don’t become attached and lose them as I did. I didn’t even want to have a simple coffee with anyone: I cherished being alone much more than losing them. Around this time, I even published a piece on Britmi i Parë, now a disabled domain. The whole piece was a fictional short story that ended with “I will go there [to my old village house], if I don’t kill myself that is.” This story was read by a professor I soul-crushingly admire and later mentor of my thesis on Fairies and Jung, A. Salihu. I saw the concern in his eyes when he mentioned the ending, and I remember that I just wanted to crumble and tell him what I really meant. I was 50kg in my second year of campus. I was eating only once a day, and as minimally as I needed. Actually, had it not been for the said professor and his care of my writings, I would not have eaten at all, but I had to, so that I could have energy to write more, as childish as this reason might sound.

The day I had collapsed in the dorm’s bathroom and marked my 40kg, was the day I had a presentation on the German philosopher Hegel at the campus. I adored and loved Hegel’s works because they made me think and kept my mind from eating. This is how I got through almost all of his works and even came to know, ironically, that he loved food. The presentation was given by one of the assistant professors, L. Kelmendi, and I even got applause at the end. But nobody knew I had made them culprits of my inner war. I over-achieved so that I could hide the utter failure of actually having a conversation with them or even keeping my body alive. They were pawns that my anorexia nervosa made through Hegel, which is rather concerning because this reflects what Hegel says about the Mind of the World (yes, Hegel will convince you that the world has a mind) and how it makes pawns of its destiny our human minds too. I had the control – I was the Anima Mundi through Hegel that day. At my worst physiological state, I could fool everyone, including myself, into thinking I was still alive. My food intake was almost zero around this time: I felt like I was eating only from smelling the ironing of the clean clothes I had worn. I was like a drug addict, without any drugs. And the worst thing, I had fooled one of the kindest and hardest-working professors who actually suggested to me Hegel in the first place. I even remember this situation when I wrote my first fantasy story and gave it to one of my other assistant professors, T. Gashi. He was so nice about it and even gave me notes on what he liked most. But I never said thank you to him, even though I still have his notes framed in my room. I failed him, too.

Close to the end of 2022, the fourth year of my anorexia journey, when I probably was below 40kg (I hadn’t weighed myself in a long while), and when I exhibited all the stark tolls anorexia nervosa takes on one’s mind.¹⁹ One day, when I got back to my house after campus, I collapsed – my heart had given up. And my concerned mom had to see for the first time the body she brought in life: the body that I had schemed to take away every minute for the past four years. I actually remember the last words I heard in my mind. They were a remark that my professor H. Ilazi had made in one of her lectures – “you never know how many things you have eaten until you start to take note of them” – that is quite true, and I wish I had just taken note of the things I had eaten and not done all that I did. I always felt ashamed in front of Professor H. Ilazi after this. She was yet another one of my idols I had utterly failed. To turn back to Hegel once again, if he thought that philosophy is the owl of Minerva that takes flight as the dusk begins to fall, then my philosophy was a death-wish awaiting no dusk to even fall, and no idol I could save myself from failing. And through all of this, I thought myself sensible. In a way, I was even proud.

Anorexia Nervosa meets Philosophy: An Echo-chamber

            “Any eating disorder is a cry for help,” writes Caryn Franklin.20 This is quite true of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or any type of other eating disorders, and they shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be idealized. Anorexia nervosa is an identity, mind-body, religious, and also a suicide problem. Even after getting treatment for it, this was before starting a two-year-long relationship; once the breakup happened, thoughts of it started to linger around. “I can always just be anorexic, and my weight will be good again: I can just become anorexic, and I will be in control once again,” hummed the echo chamber in my mind. But I have become conscious enough to know that anorexia nervosa is not me, and if I let this tragic hour when I seem to get possessed by these thoughts go by, I will do just alright.

I think that every tragedy passes us in silence. It can never give us answers (hence why there is a need for closure). And maybe it never should. One may find solace from anorexia nervosa in the Black Sabbath’s song “Killing Yourself to Live,” or even get reminded by it on Mitski’s song “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” or get into a positive thinking that life is riddled with flowers and rainbows. But I think that what it taught me is not to have “hope” or “conviction,” but to have a belief that there is actually something beyond this echo chamber, – my own mind, – that won’t absolutely shatter me to pieces if I crunch my teeth in a simple sweet chocolate bar. And maybe there is nothing beyond, but at least you will have this relief that there is, and go beyond needing to be in control all the time.

You cannot win a war if you don’t view it as a war, but do everything that a soldier does. The words you use always dance before you, while the body remains with their traces. I do believe, though, that “belief” is what can make us recognize this, and one of the arguments I have for myself is how much proof do I need when I have to have a “belief” to see that I actually am killing my own body. Here, I use “belief” as a neutral term for the willingness to think of reality as an ever-changing presence. One that doesn’t teach us to set a wall, as our fanatic religious convictions or overly optimistic hopes do (and exactly as anorexia nervosa does also), but sets us the challenge of seeing the other side, because everything will someday pass. And maybe the only consolation that we have in the face of this human temporality, when our unreplaceable and unconditionally loved best friend dies, is that the grief we feel is a sign of the eternal love we’ll always have for them. I think when I realized this, that religions like Catholicism have it in their heart, I realized why I was anorexic, and what I have to do to stop being one in the future.

To end it all: there is nothing holy about anorexia. There is nothing philosophical about it. There is nothing of a mystical nature hidden in it. Whether one chooses to be honest with oneself or not, that doesn’t deny the fact that anorexia nervosa, pure and simple, is a slow suicide. – (Now that I think about it, I don’t know for whom I stayed alive during those years.  I probably should throw the name of A. Bekteshi here, to whom I owe many laughs and good late-night talks: not too long ago, she even reminded me of drawings I did of her during those years, and I don’t remember them at all. But I do recall the feeling that my friendship with her felt important.) – You will do damage to your bones that cannot be undone. You will ruin your teeth and height. If you think about having kids, they will always have problems and be prone to them. You yourself will be haunted by it for the rest of your lifetime. The minute its militaristic language sets foot in your territory, everything becomes militarized, and the Foucauldian discipline kicks in. You become a ticking time bomb that will kamikaze yourself with the “noble goal” of ultimately being ungrateful, utterly selfish, and blissfully ignorant towards the love of life you do actually feel. Ultimately, not being the person of that all too familiar feeling that anorexic people feel, “to be loved unconditionally.” A belief to reach out, if not for anyone, for your own self. Just for the sake of seeing, once and only once, that there might be something more out there. That there might be someone. That there might be even a new you. Because sooner or later your body will reach out, and the belief you didn’t have in it will be the eternal echo-chamber of an unlived life that met an unwanted early death.

Link to the references

The post Anorexia Nervosa, Philosophy, and I: A Confession of the Flesh appeared first on The Miskatonian.