Last night I was treated to a wonderful experience at the Athens Planetarium, the home of philosophy and science, with an audio-visual buffet for the brain and senses.

It highlighted the ever expansive breadth and depth of human scientific knowledge into our cosmos and it sadly reminded me of a very depressing fact.

Human knowledge is mostly additive with occassional paradigm shifts and revisions but the masses always, unfortunately, lag far behind in the acceptance and acquisition of this ever increasing knowledge library.

In some cases, humans have had profound insight into our nature and that of the universe as well as sound principles and tenets in moral and political philosophy for thousands of years.

And still, a majority of our population continuously attempts to reinvent the wheel over and over again, relying only on flawed senses and intuition and their uncontrollable urge to appeal to subjective experience, anecdote, emotion, and supernatural wish thinking.

We live in a time where supernatural dogma still dominates the human psyche and long debunked anti-scientific beliefs continue to thrive and flourish. ,

One need only look at social media for a few hours to realize how much currency bad ideas like anti-evolution/creationism, anti-germ theory, anti-vaccination, flat earth, ancient aliens, and the appeal to nature fallacy still hold over our species.

So many people live their lives with a stone age moral and scientific philosophy while a tiny subset of our best and brightest continue to make discoveries and push us ever forward into space and into a more profound understanding of our biology and evolved psychology.

Imagine, for a moment, how our world would be if we could snap our fingers and wake up where 2x as many people were informed about and accepted all the things we already know.

Now, imagine if that number were increased tenfold or even represented the vast majority of our species.

We would, no doubt, be thousands of years into our future already and far more advanced.

Alas, the majority take hundreds and thousands of years to catch up and we must accept the realism of our relative snail's pace in making collective progress.

The consequence is not only the wasted opportunity cost as a species but is also a buffet for the brains and senses of every two-bit unscrupulous, reprobate grifter who would have it no other way, for this ignorance is their life's blood.

We seem doomed, to some extent, to have to make some of the same mistakes over and over again and to need to relearn things we've already come to know, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of years.

And our collective ignorance allows the worst of us to forever prey on the most gullible and least knowledgeable.

We may have just been given a rare glimpse into Cartman’s dementia-addled brain suggesting that he is worried about his eternal “soul.”

Almost every single day for over a decade the world has been held hostage by arguably one of the worst humans to ever hold high office.

It is not by dint of his achievements or high character that he is worthy in any way of our collective attention, it is only a function of aspects of our nature in large groups that can possibly explain his success in garnering so much importance.

Somehow, this retrobate has been given the highest, most powerful human office in history: commander in chief and president of the world's sole super power, an office which furnishes him an incomprehensible amount of power over global economic, military, and social outcomes.

It is not for nothing that the world is suffering from CDS or Cartman Derangement Syndrome. It has no choice or escape from him. Every gesticulation, every incoherent, rambling utterance, every flip flop random decision made by this creature is memorialized, broadcasted, analyzed, and virtually monopolizes all international dialogue.

Again, not because they are interesting or profound but because they are consequential. Literally billions of lives hang in the balance.

Historians, sociologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and political scientists will be tasked with attempting to explain the phenomenon for decades and centuries to come.

Long gone are the days when most of us could just get on with the sometimes quiet, sometimes loud toil of living, confident that somewhere mostly anonymous adults were tending to the machines, keeping the clocks wound, and performing the bureaucratic tasks necessary to keep our societies functioning and relatively safe and stable.

In addition to fulfilling all of the psychiatric criteria of the dark tetrad personality: sadism, narcissism, machiavelianism, and psychopathy, this abomination is also a profoundly ignorant individual.

Anyone who knows anything about any subject relevant to being a president (or merely a moral and curious being) of a super power can clearly see that he knows nothing, is incapable of learning or preparing, is too stubborn to listen to anyone or anything beyond his id; a nebulous Freudian concept which reduces to his instincts, needs and desires for immediate self-gratification.

The world is at the mercy of the shifting wind and whims of an 80 year old who was constantly scolded and lectured by a domineering amoral father obsessed with money and power and emotionally neglected by an absent mother; a spoiled silver-spoon fed trust fund baby whose only disadvantage in life was inheriting half a billion dollars.

According to him, his greatest achievement in life is having been a "brave soldier" in his own "personal Vietnam" by avoiding sexually transmissable diseases in the 80s.

This homunculus has no idea what truth means and clearly has no need or respect for such a concept. He lies and deceives as comfortably as he breathes over things both big and small.

He is, however, a master at not only creating his own reality but persuading large swaths of the population to share his private Idaho although it is not recommended that anyone attempt to reside in that fragile, constantly shifting ecosystem. It is a universe built for one. The fault lines are subject to collapse at any moment under anyone else’s feet and it is impossible to find any solid mooring upon which to support one’s moral or intellectual weight.

It's a reality built on quick sand and hot air forever receding and reconsistituting itself into different forms.

But today, we got a glimpse into the "soul" of this ogre, this dark elf, and it's an interesting case study. It may have achieved self awareness at this late stage in its life for maybe the first time, at least in public.

This insight might even explain his most recent whirling dervish dance with a Russian dictator.

We know this cartoon character has never been a spiritual or moral man. He cannot cite a single line from any religious text and there is every empirical reason to presume he has lived as an atheist his entire existence and has only disdain for morality and the norms of civil society.

But the below quote from a recent television interview may be the closest we have ever gotten to seeing this thing actually contemplate its existence, even being self deprecating, thoughtful, and reflective.

While it is likely that he is simply pandering to his evangelical Christian base who believe in these supernatural claims, it is nonetheless telling and possibly informative.

It appears that Cartman has succumbed to Pascal's Wager, a common religious apologetic.

This well known argument suggests that it is less risky to believe in a divine Judge Judy in the sky than to not believe as the potential cost of disbelief is infinite and results in hellfire and eternal damnation. Belief, however, provides the opportunity for an exemption, a cosmic get out of jail free card, an out, a chance at not only salvation but also eternal bliss.

Pascal's wager is certainly not a compelling moral or ontological argument for religious belief but Cartman's wager suggests that this man may be actually worried that he is worthless and fears his anihilation.

His suggestion that he is "not doing well" and is "really at the bottom of the totem pole" is a glaring admission that he believes he has lived an immoral, vacuous, and superficial life of no consequence and without value.

I suspect that he hopes to achieve his own personal salvation by acquiring a symbol that he holds in high regard, the Nobel peace prize.

This quote follows a feigned concern for the daily loss of life in Ukraine.

While there is no reason to believe that he cares about any human life besides his own, it does seem to suggest that he believes in some notion of salvation and seeks to acquire it before his time comes to an end.

If he can only summon up his imagined super power: the so-called “art of the deal,” just this one time and be credited with bringing an end to this war, maybe, just maybe, Santa Claus may forgive him his sins and provide him with a gold medal in his Christmas stocking instead of coal for all eternity.

For a man that has every material possession one could acquire, this final and most cherished of possessions; an inanimate, yet anthropomorphized object of intangible value that he can coddle and cuddle with in the afterlife might just spare him eternal damnation.

Whatever the motivation, if an end to this war were to be brought about and if it could be justifiably attributed to his actions alone, credit would and should be afforded.

It’s just all quite dubious to presume at this point. If anything, he has clearly made it worse until now by sending such mixed and weak messages to Putin (like this quote) that he would have no reason to not carry on trying to achieve his objectives, knowing that the current world order seems entirely incapable of doing anything about it.

As I mentioned the other day, I loathe discussing anything once it has gone too viral.

But I’m going to make an exception because this topic is central to my longtime Revenge of the Layperson thesis and I’m not going to concede ground that I have long covered just because I deplore clickbait opportunism and the dishonest methods of so many actors more interested in ad revenue and clicks than honest, ethical, and sincere analysis or reporting.

Unfortunately, so much of both the mainstream and alternative media fit that description.

The Cartman-Epstein scandal is a perfect lens for a deep dive into the nexus between American irrationality, conspiracy theories, and the potential catastrophic consequences for the rest of the world. Last week I summed up my concerns about the threat of the United States here and here.

Today I’ll be discussing Teflon Don and his next Houdini Act and a set of lunatic beliefs that we have covered for years, most often attributed to a movement called QAnon, how they inform the American MAGA movement, and how the recent Epstein scandal could result in the American president taking even more extreme measures to counter and survive it.

Teflon Don aka Cartman

The American president has another nickname, Teflon Don, which is a reference to an infamous criminal and gangster named John Gotti who was the mafia boss of the Gambino family in the 1980s.

The comparison is fitting in more ways than one but it is usually attributed to Cartman’s uncanny abiity to avoid political and legal scandals from sticking to him.

They finally got Gotti and he died in prison, so a boy can still dream.

In other words, this dude somehow gets away with anything and everything and has never been held accountable in a way that baffles most political pundits and even legal scholars. He seems somehow impervious and invincible.

He once quipped:

”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.”

At this point, I think we’d be hard pressed to not literally accept that assertion.

”He’s an outsider, a great businessman, and not a politician, yadda yadda yadda. He is authentic and speaks his mind, yadda yadda yadda. Sleepy Butter Hussein Obummer Joe Emails. Burn it all down!!!!!!!”

In the beforetimes, any one of the tens of thousands of illegal, treasonous, dishonest, and obscene things that Cartman has done would have disqualified any prior politician from achieving high office and many would have landed him in prison if he were but a mere layperson, not a reality show star, and not endowed with a half a billion dollar inheritance and the army of lawyers that that can purchase.

Hell, John Edwards’ promising political career was over in 2008 for having an affair. How fucking quaint is that?

Cartman has so decimated every societal and political norm of honesty, decency, professionalism, competence, decorum, ethics, and integrity and normalized the most vile of human behavior to such an extent that one wonders how and if the United States will ever recover or if a competent legitimate leader could ever win again.

Just a friendly reminder of a small subset of the transgressions that he has survived:

• Birther Conspiracy Against Obama

• Access Hollywood tape

• Russia investigation (2017–2019)

• Two impeachments

• Pathological Liar - Tens of thousands of lies

• Multiple indictments

• Felony Convictions

• Adjudicated Rapist

• Hundreds of millions in penalties from criminal fraud

• Dozens of Credible Sexual Abuse Allegations

• Big Lie About Stolen Election

• January 6th - Incited Failed Coup Attempt

• Multiple Examples of Adultery

• Starts a Global Trade War….because

• Threatens to Invade Greenland, Panama, Canada, and Mexico…because

• Dozens of examples of public corruption in open sight - Crypto, merchandising from the W.H., Emoluments Violations, Corporate and National Extortion

• And 10,000 other things that we have all forgotten. I resent this one the most.

• ***Association with Epstein in Minor Sex Trafficking Case*** - TBD

• ***Government Coverup of Epstein Files*** - TBD

I feel for a younger generation or anyone who has only become politically conscious in the last decade as they will consider this political climate and social behavior as “politics as usual” and be wholly unaware that it was not thus until recently and is anything but usual.

Politics has become indistinguishable from online trolling and social media “influencing” as politicians increasingly abandon classical governance in favor of regressive back to high school behavior collecting followers to sign their year book, lobbying for the prom king and queen crowns, giving wedgies and making fun of the nerdy kids in band and maths lab.

Cartman even bought the school council which is ironically named Truth Social to rig the prom dance coronation ceremony and tweets “policy” to the school kids in the playground rather than perform any serious activities like running a super power.

MAGA and the QAnon Link

Several years back, I unwittingly was dragged into the weird and horrific YouTube cottage industry and subculture of “True Crime.” It’s one of the most irrational and immoral sections of the universe I’ve ever visited.

It’s filled with ruthless, craven, ignorant grifters who know nothing of any of the relevant prerequisite skill sets necessary to discuss crime and punishment professionally and ethically but that doesn’t stop them from peddling their opinions for big money, doxing innocent people, and accusing everyone and anyone of being a murderer and pedophile, and with real life consequences.

That space was dominated by the most gullible people I’ve ever seen in such large numbers. They were absolutely convinced and obsessed by the idea that pedophilia and child sex traffickers are everywhere and that kidnapped or murdered children and adults in America number in the millions, despite the data on active missing persons showing the actual numbers to be nowhere near that scale and more along the lines of around ten thousand or less. And many of those have nothing to do with any criminal activity.

And the grifters were more than happy to feed them up this massively exaggerated and imagined crisis on the daily while begging for superchats, beer, and cigarette money.

Any missing or harmed child or adult is too many but to use that level of demagoguery to make money is sickening.

What was happening there was a perfect case study to understand the evolved human sense of moral disgust, a topic we have covered many times over the years.

Interestingly enough, it emerges from the more common, primitive form of disgust that we experience with our touch, visual and olfactory senses when feeling something slimy, seeing a grotesque image, or smelling a noxious or offensive odor.

Those experiences are an evolved mechanism to protect us from guts, rotting food, bacteria, feces, and other harmful substances in our environment like decomposing corpses.

Somewhere in our evolutionary past, that physical sense of disgust somehow was coopted by our moral intuitions and now manifests as that ick factor we get from what we consider offensive human behavior.

So, you’d have to be a psychopath to not feel a strong visceral revulsion to the idea of a baby or young child being physically harmed or worse. It is about as normal a human emotion as there is.

And grifters, marketers, politicians, and lawyers alike know how powerful moral disgust and other human emotions are and they pull at our heart strings all the time for their personal gain and to influence our behavior.

In the case of the true crime grifters, they prey on the retired, widows, empty nesters, the gullible, the religious, the paranoid, the mentally ill, and the traumatized victims of crime themselves.

I tried to bring skepticism and science to that world to confront some of the false claims, the rampant pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, and the atrocious immoral and dangerous behavior.

I completely regret it.

I developed a small and fiercely loyal following who were very disappointed when I announced my departure but it was just too toxic an environment and I did not believe I could have enough impact to justify the time, effort and personal risk.

I especially appreciated the barrage of death threats that I received, the private investigator who doxxed me, a report to place me on an FBI watchlist and all for having exposed some very dangerous grifters, including a very popular retired and dirty ex-cop turned True Crime guru and fabulist who regularly accuses innocent people online, without evidence, of having committed heinous crimes and who had been successfully sued as an active cop for violating the civil rights of three innocent teenage boys decades before.

It sufficed to assert that you were a “pedo hunter” or a self-avowed savior of lost children to start a successful true crime channel and bonus if you threw in a heavy allotment of “Praise Jesus” and “Amen” references to solidify your law enforcement credentials and virtue bona fides.

What is the relevance of that little side story?

That world was disproportionately inhabited by QAnon, both consumers and creators, so I had the unfortunate displeasure of seeing the phenomenon first hand and how it manifested.

Much of that community was not only disproportionately QAnon but also MAGA.

While MAGA may not be only QAnon, QAnon is all MAGA with few exceptions.

They share radical and extreme views relating to conspiracy theory psychology, religious zealotry, Christian eschatology, Christian dominionism, anti-liberalism, anti-science, and an acute susceptibility to cult behavior.

The reason I witnessed such a fanatical and irrational obsession with child sex trafficking and pedophilia in that YouTube space was because it is at the heart of both QAnon and MAGA ideology.

What does QAnon believe?

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory and online movement that began in 2017.

They believe that there is a secret, global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who control the world. This cabal is made up of Democratic politicians, celebrities, billionaires, and “globalists.”

And I hope you’re sitting down, they believe Cartman was secretly recruited by the military to expose and defeat this cabal. Teflon Don is literally the QAnon messiah.

They believe a “Great Awakening” will occur, followed by “The Storm” which will result in the mass arrest and execution of these elites.

Yes, you read that right, an open execution of all their political enemies.

The ironic bit is that it may have all been fabricated by some random 4Chan trolls just having a laugh at the expense of the gullible.

So, pray tell who might some of these blood-drinking pedophile baby cannibals be?

Would you be surprised if I mentioned names like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, and other big Hollywood names?

Much of the cryptic alleged “Q” messages were understood as prophetic code interpreted almost as if it were Biblical code written by God himself.

Many of the conspiracy theories involved vaccines, masks, the lockdowns, 5G, microchips, JFK, and much more. If you were lucky, you might have even caught some hits from the past like David Icke’s illuminati lizard people walking among us like a scene from John Carpenter’s They Live.

I wish I were making this up but having studied the psychology of conspiracy theories and human cognition for decades, I’ve sadly come to realize that there is absolutely no limit to the insanity that the human brain can entertain and accept as fact.

And these people vote. And they voted for Cartman in large numbers. And Cartman has played footsies with them for years, sharing countless Qanon propaganda posts on Twitter and Truth Social.

When asked what he thought about them, he responded only: “they like me very much” and some other drivel.

It’s also important to note that many of the January 6th insurrectionists were carrying Q symbols.

Needless to say, there is zero evidence for any of the QAnon claims and all of their prophecies have come and gone to no avail. There have also been several serious violent crimes committed by QAnon proponents and the FBI has labeled QAnon a domestic terrorism threat forcing QAnon identification to become less visible. The prevalence of these beliefs in MAGA has also contributed to the erosion of trust in institutions, media, science, and democracy.

The Epstein Scandal

Firstly, in my almost 60 years on this planet I have never seen such an obvious government coverup happen in front of the whole world as the Epstein case.

I can’t claim to know exactly what they’re covering up but that it has something to do with making Cartman look bad seems beyond reasonable doubt.

It’s such an own goal too.

Cartman explicitly promised to make the Epstein files public during his 2024 presidential campaign. He repeatedly asserted that if re‑elected, he would direct the Justice Department (under Attorney General Pam Bondi) to declassify and release the full “Epstein Files,” including a much-discussed “client list.”

His VP, Kenny, also explicitly called for the release of the Epstein files.

Bondi announced in February in various public appearances that the files were “sitting on her desk” and “under review” and would be shortly released.

Also in February a PR stunt showed over a dozen right wing influencers showing off binders reading “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”

The problem was that there was nothing in these binders that was not already in the public domain and public knowledge.

And then…..boom…..fizzle….shut the fuck up! There is nothing to see. You’ll never get anything. Move on. We were just messing with you.

On July 7, 2025, the DOJ/FBI released a memo stating “no client list exists” and no further documents would be released. Epstein killed himself and here’s the video evidence which is modified and shows nothing, but more, it shows nothing with missing time.

I understand why Cartman lied to his gullible flock that he would release the files during the campaign. He threw them red meat. That’s what he does. He knew they had been drooling at the bit for years to see the client list hoping to see all their enemies on it.

But they’re too far gone to care that all of the available evidence was always going to make Cartman number one on that list.

We all know he was great friends with Epstein for years. We know they hunted women together. We know he traveled with Epstein many times. We know Cartman has a long history of sexually abusive behavior. We know he walked into locker rooms of young girls at his pageant to see them naked. We know he admitted that Epstein liked underage girls. But the cult is always blind.

But why the heck did Bondi announce the complete release of the Epstein files without knowing that Cartman would have to shut it down entirely?

Why hold the PR stunt with the binders only to completely reverse course and make it look like an even more obvious cover up?

That makes no sense except in the light of a cabal of incompetent nincompoop misfits that don’t know which foot to put their shoes on or how to coordinate anything more complicated than a coffee break.

So, this has all been a “nothing burger” but it is the fallout from his base and Cartman’s response that is where all the action is.

Here is his response only a day after his administration announces a complete reversal on a promise that he made and which his MAGA/QAnon base has been obsessed with for years; a promise which involved the possible release of the names and possible prosecutions of hugely influential and powerful people in a major sex-trafficking case involving minors.

If you want to know what obvious defensiveness and feigning contempt to cover something up looks like, this is it. There is no way to argue otherwise.

Now, remember that story I told you about how passionate and emotional his QAnon cult members get about this sort of thing? And heck, even if you’re not a cult member, this seems pretty important when it comes to getting justice for some of our most vulnerable citizens and holding our most powerful to account.

And the fallout has been, by far, the most substantial MAGA revolt and threat to his power that I’ve seen in his 10 years as king.

He is already performing his normal Houdini acts of escape, sleight of hand tricks, and normal obfuscation. Why not slap on a few more tariffs or play tough with Putin for a change. How about changing the name of soccer to football.

He even sent out a little skreed admonishing and scolding his flock and told his little “boys and gals” to stop fighting and to leave A.G. Boney alone and get back in line.

But this would not be the Cartman show if he didn’t blame Hillary and Obama so, of course he did. There aren’t any Epstein files but if there are they were fabricated by Killary and Obummer, just like the fabricated Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.

Amirite? Amirite? Can I get a little USA fight song? A “lock her up?” Winning, baby! #Winning. Make America Trump Some More.

And gosh, if Ghislaine was prosecuted for helping in the trafficking, how did they get a conviction without demonstrating there were clients? And didn’t all that happen during his administration? Even the suicide? Those baby-eating Libtards are sure clever to pull all this stuff off.

Do I think this will break the spell or that it signifies his imminent demise? Abso-fucking-lutely not. After all Teflon Don has gotten away with? This is nothing by comparison.

And yet, and yet, his base is apoplectic. The cult really wanted this one!

They had bottles of cheap malt liquor on ice ready to celebrate the beginning of the public executions. Finally, the blood-sucking globalist elite, the Hollywood woke celebrities, Killary, Slick Willie, and Obummer were gonna hang at sunrise.

I think this will blow over and everyone will forget and move on as they always do.

Besides, he has already successfully scapegoated Bondi. They are not disappointed in Daddy. The “Deep State” apparently got to Bondi, Patel, and Bongino. They are now the enemy within and can’t be trusted by his most devout sheep.

It’s also so telling to watch the regulars like Carlson, Dershowitz, D’Souza, and so many other MAGAts all playing the game. They are all either telling the base to move on on instruction from Daddy or creating conspiracy theories to scapegoat anyone but Daddy. Daddy must be protected at all costs.

The revolt is still not over and it’s not perfectly clear what the long term consequences will be. He may still have to pay a political cost for this one because it is the first real major blow emanating from his most loyal followers.

As they say, a cornered animal is always the most dangerous. Whether this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back or not, something else certainly will, given the level of incompetence and all the threats this administration poses.

We all need to worry what a seriously threatened Cartman would be willing and capable of doing if he knows he’s done or if he feels the walls colllapsing in on him.

The Scientific Skeptic - 2018

Over the many years here, we have tried to present and discuss the scientific evidence and philosophical arguments central to a discussion about our possible human nature.

In an effort to find those possible answers, we've discussed and presented findings in evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, etc., even jurisprudence, history, and moral philosophy.

In addition to research concerning only our particular species, we've also looked for clues in the evidence of non-human animal behavior.

One of the most interesting conclusions that we have drawn from the evidence of both human and non-human animal behavior is that we seem to share an almost innate concern for something we might call justice.

This sense of justice, an ostensibly and exclusively Homo sapien concept seems to actually be fairly ubiquitous among many social animals.

Now, you might want to argue, for example, that other apes don't have a legal system, or that "justice" is exclusively a human construct and solely a by-product of human cultural evolution.

How could something like "justice" be said to be an innate trait of humans or other animals?

Well, what do you think justice is? Is justice not about a concern for or a sense of fairness, of equity, reciprocity, an assessment of and retributive set of instincts against some form of harmful behavior within a tribe, clan, kin, group. or society?

Is it possible then that part of our evolved social biology includes a sense of noticing and caring about what seems "fair" or equitable or sufficiently cooperative behavior among social actors?

Is it possible that, as a social animal, there was a selection value or a competitive advantage afforded to behavior which was more "just," more socially cooperative, less selfish, more prone to reciprocity?

What of these things we refer to as manners and common decency? How did those come about? The Magna Carta, natural law, social contract, UDHR, anyone?

I think it is possible that something like justice is a part of our evolved biology. And I think the evidence strongly supports it.

It turns out that many social animals, in various experiments, like chimps, (and even elephants) don't much like it when someone doesn't participate equally in carrying out group tasks or is afforded an unequal amount or type of food, or benefits disproportionately from the efforts of the group.

In the social sciences, including economics and game theory, it is referred to often as the free-rider (or freeloading) problem. Interestingly, we also seem to collectively make special allowances for those who are deemed less capable of being self-sufficient and to try to provide for and protect them, whether children, the infirmed, or the elderly.

When chimps are given different treats, for example, for working together to perform a particular task, they get quite upset if they notice that only one was given a particularly tasty treat or an unequal share of the labor compensation. Does that behavior not sound a lot like how humans behave in similar situations? It does sound a lot like the behavior that promotes humans to demand "justice," retribution, and compensation.

Unfortunately, we also know that social animals covet and behave in a way that we describe as competitive, vindictive, selfish, envious, and jealous. Those behaviors, of course, make it that much more complicated to try to determine any actual objective "justice" or what constitutes "unfair" behavior.

It's as if we could really use some sort of objective optimal value algorithm to really know how to differentiate between fairness and unfairness and how to effectively remedy or crowd out harmful behavior.

A god could be really useful right about now.

In non-human animal societies, uncooperative and "unfair" or "unjust," if you will, behavior can be and is sanctioned via violence, shunning, a diminution of social status and sexual reproduction opportunities, and not sharing of social goods and services, like food, tools, sexual and grooming behavior.

In human societies, it used to be doled out by chieftains, elders, and other collective and individual decision-making.

And then?

Then we developed law; formal legal systems, with norms, rules, methods, and prescriptions for determining and officially adjudicating on matters of justice and fairness.

We seemed to begin with more of a draconian "eye for an eye" and have increasingly settled more for humane and compassionate ethics based on the legal notion of proportionality and even rehabilitation.

And what of the role of religion in the conversation about justice? Well, justice is big in the religion industry.

Justice has always been a central pillar of religion, from Hammurabi to Moses, arguably the most famous fabled human "law givers," but, far more importantly, it is our great concern for justice that might have led to one of the most powerful functions of religion - providing for an objective, cosmic, superceding, and impossible to avoid system of justice.

You think you can get away with sleeping with your neighbor's wife? Stealing his donkey?

Good luck with that.

You will be judged in a cosmic court of justice, by a perfect omniscient, Judge Judy in the sky, and the consequences might be nothing less than eternal torture or the damnation of your soul.

Be a good Santa's helper in your life?

Be rewarded with cosmic goodies like eternal bliss and possibly even a harem of female virgins (what do women get, by the way? Is there some Chippendales equivalent up there?), depending on your religious preferences. Oh, and by the way, that might be a bad translation and virgin actually referred to grapes.

Religion is also in the business of providing cosmic purpose, an answer to everything, and solving that whole mortality and dying conundrum too. But, it's very large in the business of making sure humans get justice.

Oh yeah, I forgot that whole schadenfreude phenomenon. Why do people get so excited when someone gets their legal or moral comeuppance?

It's almost like a sense of justice is innate and we get really angry when people get away with things, jump for joy when people get caught doing bad things, and parade in the streets when really bad people receive our ultimate punishments.

While the conversation about moral realism versus moral relativism is open to debate, the question that social animals seem to have some innate sense or perception of justice (fairness, if you prefer) does not seem very controversial.

I’m an odd duck but humor me for a bit as I try to explain how I attempt to use ChatGPT responsibly and ethically.

Before I go any further, please note that I am neither smart enough nor have I even made an adequate attempt to research and understand generative AI, so I make no assertion of being an expert. I understand it only as an online encyclopedia or library.

But I am a longtime technical writer and academic and many of the intellectual and ethical problems that ChatGPT pose are not new. They are merely compounded given the ubiquity and ease of use with this modern tech.

I’m a late and reluctant adopter of ChatGPT and I think that is because of a few factors.

The first is probably a generational one so, get off my damned lawn with all this new fancy-shmancy tech that I’m increasingly having a hard time keeping up with.

You kids have no respect for your elders and I resent the ease with which the younger generations can learn and integrate the latest and greatest without losing a step.

My first computer was made out of wood and internet was two Dixie cups connected with string. Heck, when I grew up, we were a poor family and 12 of us lived in a cardboard box under the highway and walked a hundred miles through the snow to get to…..

Okay, enough with the curmudgeon, luddite cliches.

I’m not that old and I’m relatively tech savvy actually. Hell, I used to build and manage global finance and information systems for a living and managed large staffs of engineers and programmers only a few years ago.

I was one of the early adopters of Business Intelligence and made the case in the late 90s that my company needed to set up a new department with that cool new name, hire me a big staff, and make me the manager. I was even flown first class to make my presentation to the Chairman of the Board in Monaco. Woohoo.

Pretty sure I’d never felt that important before or since. I did take the limo from the airport to the office instead of the helicopter though. Feel free to boo me and make chicken noises.

That domain then got a major upgrade when machine learning came on board and data analysis would forever be integrated with data science. Now, everything is AI and if you want a job in that domain, you have to speak that snake language and work in the sky.

For those not “in the know,” I meant Python and cloud.

But, yes, I think part of my late adoption is a function of generation and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that trying to learn Blender is kicking my butt hard.

Concerning ChatGPT, I think there are more fundamental reasons though.

Those more important reasons result from my personality, my ethical concerns, and my intellectual values.

As I said, I’m an odd duck. I suffer from a couple of conditions, most notably impostor syndrome and an exaggerated need to consider myself an independent thinker and to believe that my ideas are my own and novel, not merely imitated, regurgitated, or parroted.

These two personal issues go a long way at checking my ego and making sure I’m coming up with my own ideas, doing my own work, and using my own words.

My impostor syndrome always does a lot of work to keep me epistemically humble and honest with myself because I’m fighting the fear that I’m actually an idiot who only pretends to have anything interesting to say.

And my pride constantly forces me to recheck my work to make sure that I’m not unwittingly stealing someone else’s idea, a copycat or plagiarist, or just engaging in copy pasta.

While you may not have impostor syndrome, I’d still highly recommend that you learn the intellectual values.

As I’ve written about many times before, human knowledge is mostly additive and it is highly unlikely that any idea is truly novel for, in the words attributed to Newton,

It certainly is possible to have a novel idea, just not very likely. So, always try to give credit when you know from whom you’ve learned something you find worthy to share.

Pretending that something is your idea when you know it is not is not a good look or very honest.

I also have a disdain for bandwagons, virality, clickbait, self-promotion, hyperbole, and plagiarism.

That prevents me from wanting to write about an idea that everyone else has either already discussed ad nauseam or is only discussing because they know it is a “viral” topic.

It’s not to say that I will not engage in a contemporary topic or even a relatively common one, only that if I believe it has already been well argued and covered adequately, I would presume that my views would neither be novel nor contributing anything of additional value.

Plus, I just get that ick feeling when everyone is doing the same thing.

if you’re misleading, exaggerating, plagiarizing, and using other clickbait tactics, you should probably check yourself. You might not have a lot of integrity, you’re very insecure, or you’re just not a very good person.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve had this strange aversion to joining groups or cliques, getting the new haircut, or buying the new hip brand-name clothes.

That might just make me boring or anti-social although the latter is certainly not true as I have always been quite socially adept, a good chameleon, and able to fit in anywhere I needed to.

But, well, let me just quote the late, great Groucho Marx,

Joking aside, I’m quite fond of my intellectual independence. I don’t want my ethics and values compromised too much by peer pressure and groupthink. It matters to me that I can rationally justify and defend my beliefs and ethics and I hope it matters to you that you can as well.

But there is a huge cost and disadvantage to my way of being. I might not recommend it.

If you want to make lots of friends, money, and you have a ton of ambition, you’ll need to network, self-promote, kiss up, and shmooze like crazy. And, well, that’s just not me.

I accept my relative obscurity and modest life. It suits my ethics and inability to sacrifice too much of my soul. I’d really prefer to not have to get up and hate the thing looking back at me in the mirror. And I’m not sure that same mirror on a yacht would make me feel any better.

I have just recently begun writing again and now I see how incredibly indispensable ChatGPT and AI are as a research tool.

And beyond writing, if you’re not beginning to experiment with and using AI regularly, you’re likely going to fall out of touch with society, with age and time, even more quickly than would otherwise be the case.

Like with the adoption of so much of tech across the ages, you really can’t afford to not keep up to some extent. The price of not doing so is to become more and more socially isolated and even ostracized from more and more conversations and developments in society. And you will likely come to resent and not even understand those who do.

I am terrible at graphic design and always have been. And I don’t do memes. But I do recognize that you often need an image to accompany a social media post or an essay, in my case.

I just want to write, and formulate and analyze arguments. That takes a lot of time. I don’t want to waste my time in an app like Canva to add fancy fonts and text and find base images to accompany my work.

Using a tool like Gemini, for example, to generate customized images based on my content is a priceless timesaver. Unfortunately, it can be very hit and miss as AI currently has as much trouble with text as it does with fingers.

Again, I’m not smart enough to understand why but it usually works well enough, even if it takes a few tries.

Plus, I no longer need to worry about fair use. I used to just grab random images on Google and use them to accompany my essays or posts. But my girlfriend would remind me that that was probably not responsible. She’s right. Now I don’t have to worry about that problem and I can just get to the writing.

Now, the really hard part.

Long gone are the days of going to a library, deciphering the Dewey decimal system, walking long aisles to find books, checking out a stack of books, actually reading the entire books, taking notes of ideas found in only a few small sections of all those books, actually writing words down in a real life notebook with a real life pencil, then taking all those words written with an actual pencil in an actual notebook, then summarizing all those damned words written with a damned pencil in a damned notebook in your own damned words, and somehow combining them into a damned coherent piece of original content.

Consider yourself lucky that the process has been greatly streamlined since then!

Tens of millions of people used to die every year performing this exercise, like this poor cartoon student pictured below.

Okay, that’s not true. I just made that last bit up. No cartoon characters were injured in the writing of this essay.

But it is a whole heck of a lot easier now.

Because increasingly, if you want to write an article, an essay, a thesis, a book, brainstorm ideas, develop and test an argument, fact-check a truth claim, or just do research on any topic, you might be using ChatGPT or one of its competitors.

This is how I use the tool.

Let’s say I want to write an essay.

I like to begin with my own hypothesis, something I’ve been thinking about in my own brain, all alone, that I think adds value as food for thought or educational purposes.

Because I consider myself fairly well read and already decently versed on any topic I want to write about, I try to already create in my mind a framework, an outline for how I would go about organizing my thoughts in such a piece of work. I try to already come up with some main arguments and evidence that I already know are sound on my own to support that hypothesis.

Only then I begin a chat with ChatGPT.

While you may work completely differently than I do, I need to feel like I have had the thought and already worked through it and am confident that my logic is consistent and my conclusions justifiable and not that I’ve just been fed ideas or conclusions by AI.

My hypothesis can surely be refined, improved, and better supported with the help of an amazing research tool like chatGPT but I prefer to not begin blindly.

And there is nothing more satisfying than having ChatGPT spit out something that looks remarkably similar to how you had imagined it only in your mind. That is a perfect example of convergence.

That is a very rewarding experience. And you can feel good about yourself that you actually know a thing or two, even without ChatGPT.

I would warn you though that AI can be too accomodating sometimes and simply satisfy your confirmation bias if you ask it loaded and leading questions.

It seems that it can behave very much like a lawyer if you’re not careful so try to ask questions in as unbiased a way as possible so as to not “fix” the conclusion or “lead the witness.”

Having said that, I have tested ChatGPT to see if it will serve me up something that is not supported if I try to lead it toward a predetermined conclusion that I know is not right.

The results are fairly promising and it will correct me when my conclusion is clearly biased and unsupported by the best available evidence. Just beware that it can satisfy your confirmation bias if you’re not very careful. And this is also why you should never solely rely on AI.

Another scenario. Let’s say I want to merely brainstorm with ChatGPT on ideas that I’m far less familiar with so I can learn something new or get inspiration.

In this case, I try to formulate very specific and focused questions, like an academic might do with a librarian before going about collecting the prerequisite material to begin research.

This allows you to remain disciplined and methodical and not just dilly dally asking random and unrelated questions.

From there I might find a topic that I know something about but not enough to develop a sophisticated thesis yet. That is where ChatGPT shines. Like a perfect librarian, ChatGPT can then lead you toward the resources you need to gain a better understanding of the topic and develop and refine your ideas.

I worry these days that in a world where content is king, free, easily monetizable, and anyone can produce a ton of it that the world will be oversaturated with a glut of regurgitated ChatGPT/AI output with no human interpretation or synthesis, absent any meaning, purpose, or context.

I worry that the individuals who post its output will have learned absolutely nothing in the process. They will not be able to defend or understand any of their own content. And they will be able to sell it as their own.

Shakespeare would turn over in his grave and Newton would facepalm and throw apples at the walls if he knew people could so easily become poser geniuses without even a kindergarten education.

We should remember to take pride in the learning and synthesis process, not just mass produce random content or let AI do all of our thinking.

Develop your brain. Try to actually learn something new. Try to create something of value for others. Take pride in your beliefs but learn how to actually defend them. Use your own brain. Don’t be a parrot.

Don’t pretend to create and understand ideas that you don’t. Someone actually did all the hard work to try to teach you something new and you’re trying to take credit for it.
That’s just rude and besides, no one likes a poser, a cheater or a copycat.

Hey kids, today I’m going to tell you a long story; a story about The Toymasters and their toys. Are you excited? :D

Sometimes, irresponsible children receive too many toys for their own good, become spoiled and selfish, self-consumed, do not learn shame or humility, or how to socialize and cooperate well with others.

They don’t learn to share their toys or respect that other children also can have toys that do not belong to them. And sometimes they spread themselves and their toys out too far from their bedroom and need to be reined in.

In these cases, someone ends up having to force them to pick up their toys and put them back where they belong.

Good parents and babysitters know this problem all too well.

What happens though when no one can or will rein in such a child and it comes to see everyone else as nothing more than a toy to be played with or wished away into the corn field of oblivion?

What happens when the child is untended to and has too much power to be controlled?

Gosh, that sounds eerily similar to a Twilight Zone episode.

There is a key developmental stage in a child’s life where a theory of mind emerges, where our innate empathy is expressed and it develops compassion, thoughtfulness and the ability to cooperate.

But it does not happen in all children and when this phase does not develop normally, a child can become warped, cruel and heartless, and it can adopt the ways of a bully and a sadist. It might become a serial killer, a cult leader, a megalomaniac, or merely a CEO or politician.

These damaged children become a parasite on the world and humanity; a virus that will not stop infecting everything else until stopped by some other force of nature or we find an antidote.

What happens if it manages to surround itself with an equally corrupted cabal of fly lords?

What happens when the flylords are a comedy troop as capable as an island of misfit toys?

The United States of America has become such a child and is a disease vector that needs to be quarantined and contained. It hasn’t always been obvious but under new management it has unveiled a dark, regressive underbelly that has always been there, even if sometimes dormant.

It is fitting then that it is led by an individual with the maturity, sophistication, and vocabulary of a young boy, approximately 5-7 years of age, whose development finished long ago, forever stunted by circumstance.

It is not a coincidence that the nation-state and its current leader and its misfit toys have so much in common, which is why the spoiled, dangerous child metaphor is so appropriate for analysis.

In the few years that this child did develop, its environment facilitated the invention of a fantasy world with a single false but persistent delusion; that it had a divine right to all the toys, its own manifest destiny and American exceptionalism mythology.

It was taught that all of the other children were inferior, but ironically, just as evil, competitive, and selfish as it was, and that its singular purpose was to beat them all and steal their toys before they stole its toys.

It was raised to become a “winner” and emperor of toys. It is a Toymaster.

It can only see the world through a zero sum lens where there can only be one winner and the only evidence of victory is to achieve a monopoly and absolute control over all the toys.

The poor naked would-be emperor boy was sadly not raised to ever become anything better. It had no chance to become an old, wise child with compassion and intellect or a decent, moral person. It was always a troublemaker, a poor student, and a bully. It was sent away to military school at 13 for behavioral problems. And it remains an it, stripped of any humanity and personhood to this day.

It is the physical embodiment of the seven deadly sins. It meets all the technical criteria of the dark tetrad: narcissism, machiavelianism, psychopathy, and sadism.

It is also spectacularly ignorant, incompetent, and unserious.

Its half a billion dollar inheritance allowed it to survive and exploit others but prevented it from ever acquiring a character or sense of responsibility.

After all, what chance did it have? Its father was a ruthless, racist sociopath and slumlord and its mother was weak, absent, and negligent.

The father was a manipulative, control freak with no moral compass or appetite for constraints, rules, or compassion. Those were understood as merely the petty, naive preoccupations of lesser things: the lazy, the poor, the stupid, the intellectuals, the minorities, the women, the working class, and the losers who were but pawns and useful idiots for greater toymasters of better blood and insatiable ambition.

Its father was arrested in 1927 at a Ku Klux Klan rally although never charged with a crime and both it and its father were sued by the Department of Justice for racial discrimination suggesting an unsurprising bias.

Given its father’s obsession with image management though, he would have understood and passed on to his offspring that both explicit Nazi sympathies and formal racist affiliation would be bad for their business interests.

Nevertheless, its opening salvo into the world of GOP politics in 2011 was to accuse the sitting black president of not being American and a Kenyan Muslim by pushing the false Birther conspiracy theory. This cannot be understood in any other light than as craven opportunism and bigotry.

It had been handed a ready made script provided by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and decades of civic and moral rot.

Its first act as president in its first term was to enact a comprehensive Muslim ban which was overturned by the courts.

Its justifcation was summed up in its quote:

"a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

How apropos that the rest of the world might want to take note and quarantine the United States with the same rationale.

He also infamously ran ads in several New York City newspapers in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five who were all later exonerated after the killer confessed and his DNA was confirmed.

It continues to claim their guilt to the present day.

After all, it learned from its two primary mentors, its authoritarian father and the disgraced Roy Cohn, “Always attack, never apologize, never admit defeat.”

Given countless pieces of behavioral evidence and ancestry (that was lied about) over the decades, it is not unreasonable to presume that there would probably have been a fondness for the American-German Bund movement of the 30s - an earlier incarnation of MAGA.

It allegedly kept a book of Hitler’s speeches next to its bed according to its ex-wife and it told General Kelly that “Hitler did a lot of good things.”

We can also see it employing many of the same propaganda tactics that autocrats like Stalin and Hitler used such as “fake news” or lügenpresse and the “Big Lie” or große Lüge regarding the 2020 election.

All of this behavior is also consistent with its praise and envy of other autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Rodrigo Duterte who “command loyalty, silence dissent, and control messaging.”

It is no surprise that the junior toymaster grew up to see everyone as an object, a means to its end, to further its collection of toys, to satiate its vanity, further its thirst for glory, or to provide it with pleasure. Having little respect for its mother, women were to forever be relegated to a fuckability status, to be scored from 0-10.

They bleed too much and talk too much but if they score well enough, they might deserve to take their rightful place on their knees or enjoy the privilege of having their pussies grabbed by a rich celebrity who can. If not, they are only worthy to give it toys, worship it, and clean up after it.

It is an adjudicated rapist with dozens of credible sexual assault and abuse allegations over the decades. It is the most litigious president in history, involved in approximately 5,000 lawsuits.

It was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years who was convicted of sex trafficking minors. Interestingly enough, its administration just dropped its case on Epstein after promising to release all of the Epstein files. One can only wonder why it was suddenly dropped and why it so vehemently and defensively rejected questions from journalists on the topic.

The Jews may also give it toys and praise it or do its accounting, taxes, and banking.

The blacks may perform for it with their physical prowess and run quickly around its gaudy gold-leafed Colosseum and jump high for its entertainment.

The Arabs may buy its cryptocoin, towers, and golf courses.

If it has any respect, or rather envy, for anyone, it might be other dictator toymasters and successful golfers, particularly if they have a bulbous, glistening and enlarged member.

It was twice impeached for extorting a war-torn foreign ally to fabricate evidence against its political opponent in exchange for crucial military defense and for inciting an insurrection and attempted coup.

It is a felon, a pathological liar, a lifetime con artist, carnival barker, and serial sexual abuser who just happened to have enough money to purchase an army of attorneys to keep it solvent, out of prison, and not executed as a traitor.

But here is the rub, it was democratically elected not once but twice. It is loved and worshiped like a god by tens of millions. What can this possibly say about the trustworthiness and legitimacy of the world’s sole super power?

Its supporters are a mix of the greedy, the ignorant masses, the selfish, the eschatologist, the oligarch, and the simpleton bigot.

The implicit promise was to incessantly meme, taunt and “own the libs,” stop the “woke,” and make half the country cry. It was to restore the holy Christian empire, to satisfy prophecy and bring about the rapture. And it was to remove the smelly dark people from their midst who eat strange food and speak strange languages.

All hail the White American summer barbecue of lore with its glorious hot dogs, apple pie, bibles and flags. The mythical beast that once stormed the beaches of Normandy and freed the world from its future self.

A Faustian deal has been made with an incompetent, vapid chimp who shares almost none of their interests nor has any concern for freedom, patriotism, religion, country, progress, or global peace. It only seeks to rebrand the superpower in its image and to use its vast resources for its personal glory and family enrichment.

And the oligarchs of this world cautiously and silently applaud believing that they are actually in charge and the ultimate “winners.”

It is the commander toymaster of the most powerful empire in world history, with the financial capacity to cripple the world economy and the military might to unilaterally, at its singular whim, kill hundreds of millions, flatten and vaporize countless cities, and kill millions more from the ensuing nuclear radiation fallout and ensure its own mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Maybe it will wake up restless and bored and invade Greenland, Panama, Canada or Mexico. Maybe it will pump and dump global markets some more. Maybe it will destroy the dollar, the international economy, the UN, NATO, and democracy…..simply because it can.

It has approximately 800 military bases across the globe compared to around 100 from all other countries combined. It has 5000 nuclear warheads. It has thousands of aircraft, tanks, and drones, cyberwarfare capabilities that can disrupt power, finance, communications, and space-based surveillance and missile detection. Its annual military budget equates to more than the ten closest competitors combined.

And it now has a private paramilitary force with masked thugs unconstrained by state sovereignty and with a budget 4X that of the FBI and more than most foreign militaries.

Congress has abdicated its role as a co-equal branch of government and check on power. The fragile courts are the last bulwark and that dyke is cracking and full of fissures.

And yet it does not even know what kind of a country it leads.

When asked in 2019 at a G20 summit in Osaka to respond to Putin’s contention that Western liberal democracy was obsolete, it responded:

“Well, he may feel that way. ... I guess you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco, and a couple other cities which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people …”

And yet it knows nothing of nuclear deterrence or MAD.

“If we have them, why can’t we use them?” “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?”

And yet it has threatened to “bomb the shit” out of Beijing and Moscow.

And yet it knows nothing of its country’s history.

It once quipped during an independence day speech about airports being seized by the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War…..in the 1770s.

“Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.”

And yet it knows nothing of diplomacy, etiquette, basic manners, protocol, or class: it’s merely a clown peacock doing its best Benito impersonation at a NATO Summit.

And yet it knows nothing of America’s founding principles and values, the law, free speech, or freedom of the press.

It detests freedom because freedom allows others to have toys.

It has told military, law enforcement and its supporters to use lethal force and violence on protesters, immigrants and critics,

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”

”I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”

“crack their skulls,” “beat the f—k out of them,” and “just shoot them.”
“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon — you just see them thrown in, rough — I said, please don't be too nice.”

“When you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head ... the way you put their hand over [the suspect's] head, like, don't hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”

In fact, it knows nothing at all besides reality shows, fake wrestling, tax evasion, and self-promotion. It doesn’t read. It can barely speak English. It doesn’t listen to intelligence or military briefings. It doesn’t listen to experts or advisors. It ignores and rejects science. It despises criticism, intelligence, and reason.

And it follows the authoritarian playbook to the letter.

• Undermines Democratic Institutions - Check

  • Attacks or discredits elections as "rigged" or "fake"

  • Refuses to commit to peaceful transfer of power

  • Undermines independent electoral commissions

  • Seeks to extend term limits or remain in power indefinitely

• Controls or Delegitimizes the Free Press - Check

  • Labels critical media as "fake news," "enemies of the people"

  • Promotes state-run or state-aligned media

  • Sues or intimidates journalists

  • Restricts access to information (internet shutdowns, press bans)

• Politicizes the Judiciary - Check

  • Appoints loyalists to courts to shield themselves or allies

  • Ignores or defies court rulings

  • Uses courts to target political opponents or critics

  • Attempts to dissolve independent oversight bodies

• Uses Law Enforcement and Military for Personal Power - Check

  • Deploys police or paramilitary forces against peaceful protesters

  • Shields security forces from accountability

  • Uses the threat of violence to suppress dissent

  • Rewards loyalty from military or police with promotions or money

• Promotes Cult of Personality - Check

  • Demands loyalty oaths or excessive personal praise

  • Displays name or image ubiquitously (banners, posters, buildings)

  • Claims to be uniquely capable of solving national problems

  • Demonizes critics as traitors, foreign agents, or enemies

• Uses Legal System as a Weapon - Check

  • Prosecutes opposition leaders on dubious charges

  • Criminalizes protest or dissent

  • Manipulates anti-corruption laws to eliminate rivals

  • Retroactively changes laws to punish enemies or protect allies

• Corruption and Cronyism - Check

  • Funnels state contracts to friends, family, or loyalists

  • Profits personally from public office

  • Undermines transparency laws and audits

  • Uses state institutions for private gain

• Stokes Division and Nationalism - Check

  • Uses fear of immigrants, minorities, or outsiders to rally support

  • Scapegoats vulnerable groups in times of crisis

  • Redefines national identity to exclude opponents

  • Claims moral or racial superiority of the in-group

• Suppresses Civil Society - Check

  • Restricts NGOs, watchdogs, or protest movements

  • Requires loyalty pledges or registration for civil groups

  • Uses surveillance against activists

  • Bans or harasses labor unions or advocacy organizations

• Erodes Election Fairness - Check

  • Guts voter protections or access (e.g., gerrymandering, ID laws)

  • Encourages foreign interference if beneficial

  • Refuses to concede or casts doubt on results without evidence

  • Uses disinformation to confuse or mislead voters

• Common Autocrat Excuses - Check and Mate

  • “I’m the only one who can fix it.”

  • “We’re at war with enemies within.”

  • “This is about law and order.”

  • “The media is lying to you.”

  • “I never said that” (even when directly contradicted by video or transcript)

The United States has descended into madness and a moral and intellectual rot, like a virus, has settled in and is spreading rapidly.

It has become a cult of personality fueled by runaway nationalist fervor coupled with Christian dominionism and is flailing away ever more erratically and violently at itself and the rest of the world with a laundry list of cultural and economic grievances and imagined global entitlements and privileges.

America’s descent into authoritarianism or “democratic backsliding” has been “unusually rapid and visible compared to other developed democracies” like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and the Philippines. While the process is not complete, the trajectory is very alarming and it is not clear that it can be reversed.

As I alluded to earlier, it was not always so.

The United States is a relatively young country. It has not learned many of the lessons that its European cousins had to learn the hard way over millennia. It was birthed from The British Empire and its Toymaster, King George III in a very different time.

It invented itself in the lawless “wild wild west” and taught itself the new principle of “rugged individualism.” The pioneers didn’t have the luxury or interest in learning the classics or studying history.

It “inherited” one of the richest lands in the world with vast natural resources and an envious geography, protected by vast oceans on both sides, widely considered to be one of the most defensible countries in the world.

The United States has been invaded very few times compared to most other countries, especially those in Europe. In fact, it is one of the least invaded major powers in modern history. That is largely due to its geographical advantages and its recent military buildup.

One might say it only knows “winning” and has yet to ingest any humble pie or develop any humility. Sound at all familiar?

One might metaphorically compare its history to a spoiled, privileged child who inherited a fortune and was protected by armies of attorneys and a family brand.

It was once a noble project admired and respected by the rest of the world; a new democracy which rejected its ruthless and authoritarian parent and embraced secular and scientific values, pluralism and internationalism.

It embedded in its founding documents the promise of equality, fairness, the rule and protection of law, economic opportunity, and the relatively unencumbered pursuit of happiness. It championed and promoted international cooperation, multilateralism, international law, and human rights.

But it took centuries for universal suffrage to take hold and it had a ruthless and cruel past. Many consider it to have stolen the land from the indigenous without adequate compensation. It has a long sordid history of chattel slavery. It had an even longer history of segregation and oppression. It interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps as recently as the 20th century.

There are eery similarities in its recent past between the MAGA movement and the German-American Bund movement of the 1930s, despite the Bund being a relatively small movement with only up to 100,000 national sympathizers.

They did manage to fill Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people in 1939 and they shared many of the same values like: nationalist nostalgia, authoritarian admiration, xenophobia and nativism, media hostility, anti-democratic rhetoric, mythical pasts, conspiracy theories, and belief in “pure” patriotism.

Its apex is the economic and military goliath and behemoth that it became in the pre and post second world war period. The post war period created arguably the largest and most successful middle class in history and saw a massive improvement in standard of living and became the envy of the world. That was the golden period of America and established a global aspiration, “the American Dream.”

Since then, any coherent American identity has mostly eroded.

Decades of foreign policy blunders, the abandonment of socially liberal policy and a massive redistribution of wealth to the top has created crater-size social divisions and runaway tribal animosity.

The death of its archnemesis, the USSR, has paradoxically led to its own social and moral decline. Since then it has engaged in illegitimate foreign wars, disrupted entire regions of the globe, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, abandoned its allies and the international organizations that it championed and helped establish.

It has become a pariah state and the trend has only accelerated since it was elected.

It has elected a craven madman whose only gift is to understand that a vulnerable population will always be susceptible to demagogues. It has always been and will always be the most successful political play.

It simply put pressure on America’s most regressive and insecure buttons.

It bears all the hallmarks of that spoiled, undeveloped, selfish child that needs to be reined in.

One might say the United States has become a self-absorbed, spoiled little child that inherited too many toys and has experienced too much winning. No one has really ever kicked its arrogant little behind yet. And arrogance can lead to complacency, self-consumption, decadence, and a misplaced sense of superiority.

While the world should rightly reject much of America’s mostly white privileged, leftist virtue-signaling and postmodernism, that problem is relatively benign and the pendulum effect will solve that problem in short order.

It is Goliath’s neoimperialist and fascistic urges that need to be addressed before it’s too late. One might even say it’s time to get more “woke,” the sort of woke that united a century ago to prevent a global apocalypse.

The world needs to get organized now while the United States is still preoccupied with its reality show and its insatiable lust for celebrity and billionaires. Prepare while it stares into its reflection and posts selfies like Narcissus.

The world needs a little cancel culture. The Cartman show needs to end.

We live in a new world with a virtual reality and a new dualism to contend with.

This new virtual world has perfect avatars and is inhabited by AI bots, filters, robot voiceovers, memes, reels, plagiarists, phony influencers, clickbaiters, hyperbolists, e-beggars, depraved entrepreneurs, echo chambers, and its overlord, the Almighty Algorithm.

And the old more mundane world of bad teeth, disheveled and missing hair, smelly armpits, annoying alarm clocks, traffic jams, long lines, overdue utility bills, exhaustion, ageing, and death.

The new world really needs to add Taco Tuesdays, margaritas, and an infinity pool. I did submit that request to the development team but have yet to hear back.

The human condition has enough dualism already to deal with and I wonder how the addition of more dualism is affecting the self.

There is that nagging dualism that there is a little homunculus dude or dudette sitting in a fancy gaming chair right behind your eyes who is ultimately in control and driving your plane without even the courtesy to ask your permission.

Or the dualism of having that incessant internal dialogue with yourself about this, that, or the other thing, overthinking everything, questioning all your choices, both nagging and encouraging; your own personal frenemy.

Then there’s that old standby dualism of a belief in an internal soul as apart from the body which is either destined for eternal paradise or damnation. For us secular folk that is just our sassy unique inner hostage longing to escape, express itself, and somehow become our true, special, and far more interesting self.

”I’m in here, damn it. Why can’t you all see and love me as I truly am.”

In fact, beyond the dualism phenomena, we just have a lot of selves, maybe an infinite amount.

There is the self that rolls out of bed, grumbles, rubs the crust off the corner of its mouth and stumbles to the bathroom, completely insouciant and oblivious to the external world; a very robotic and barely conscious self.

There is the hyper-vigilant, angst-ridden, conscientious, minding our Ps and Qs self at a job interview.

There is the composed, docile, well coiffed, appropriately dressed, behaved and thoughtful self at a funeral.

There is the aggressive, tough, no nonsense, you want a piece of me, road rage self after someone rudely cuts you off on the highway.

There is the childlike, uninhibited, boisterous, vigorous, socializing with friends after three cocktails self.

And then there is an online self that posts selfies by the pool, on vacation in Tuscany, at a 5-star Michelin Restaurant eating Beluga's Almas Caviar, driving a rented Bugatti in front of someone else’s super mansion, and sunning on a megayacht with a glass of Avenue Foch Champagne giving away free e-books so you register for a $1500 seminar on self-help, crypto investing, or a timeshare in Aspen.

Who cares if it was all accomplished with Instagram filters, AI, or a green screen!

Because if you truly want to be anybody these days, you’ll really need to master that latter self.

Oh yeah, there’s a new self on the block, haven’t you heard? Everyone is doing it. Can you feel the FOMO?

What, you don’t have an opinion about stuff? Don’t you want a new side hustle?

If you just need an exorbitant amount of attention or want to make some easy bucks these days, you’re gonna need to brand and commoditize yourself.

You’re probably a critic or a frustrated writer, maybe a born vlogger or podcaster, or maybe you’ve got a lovely backside or big muscles that you could monetize? Got a cute cat?

Monetize that shit!

Join the new self-branding narcissist society, bro!

Do you even know how easy it is to manipulate people, to lie to them, to use their ignorance, fear, and desires to get what you need? You can sell these poor saps anything.

Commoditize your badass self. Nurture your internal corporation.

It’s not like we’ve not always been commoditized or anything anyway, right? Take advantage of it. We’ve been getting it from the man for millennia.

Heck, we were commoditized as tillers of the dirt for our feudal overlords, taxpayers for the kings, smashers of the nails for the railroad tycoons, pickers of the cotton for the plantation bosses, axers of carbon and jewels for the mine propietor, tappers on the typewriters for the news moguls, and button pushers for the Board of Directors.

After all, we’re just furniture for the owners, reminiscent of a scene from Soylent Green. “They’re eating people.”

We’re traffic to be routed through the social media highway to someone else’s chosen destination, their El Dorado.

Sorry, I really got carried away there for a minute.

Listen, social media does indeed provide some great opportunities but please don’t lose your good selves amid all the noise.

We don’t have to lie, constantly pander, or sell our “soul” to get a bit ahead and create a nice life for ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with making an honest buck but our characters are determined by how we make that buck and what we are willing to sacrifice.

We have enough dishonest and ambitious people on this planet more concerned with power, money, and fame than just being a decent, moral person and living a good life without exploiting or harming anyone in the process.

Most of us just want to be heard, to be respected, to be loved, to find meaning, and to belong somewhere.

Two of my most favoritist thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jaques Rousseau, once engaged in a philosophical dialogue and mused over human nature, the self, and society but their views were wildly divergent and contradictory.

The conversation might be summed up as “What is the nature of the self in a state of nature and what happens to it in society?”

Hobbes believed we are selfish and competitive by nature while Rousseau argued rather that we are cooperative and good by nature.

Hobbes argued that it is only civil society that can harness and curb our violent tendencies while Rousseau suggested that it only corrupts and distorts our natural goodness.

Hobbes saw our nature as driven by fear and desire and Rousseau, empathy and self-love.

They both saw our nature as dualistic with an internal and external self fighting it out in an eternal battle of goodness against our fear, competition, glory, pride, jealousy, and vanity.

Hobbes blamed our nature for our violent and selfish behavior and considered the civilizing forces of society to be the only antidote, while Rousseau that it only alienates us from our true better angels.

Who do you think was right? If you ask me that question, my answer is “Yes!”

Anyway, back to that whole new virtual world thing with perfect avatars and all the new exciting tech.

I really enjoyed Ready Player One, so let me know when we get there. I’m getting very impatient.

It looks like a lot of fun to play at some future surrogate dress up and send a virtual me to go skiing in the alps without worrying my knee will go out.

Sadly, we’re lving in a prehistoric beta version of Ready Player One and VR gives me vertigo.

The story is a classic tale of good versus evil set in the future where a sweet, innocent boy living a rather miserable dystopian life spends most of his time in a fabulous virtual world where everything is possible.

He meets a girl, falls in love, finds a community with loyal, honest, good people, ends up leading a rebellion against the evil, greedy, and selfish overlords, unites all the people, overthrows evil, inherits the virtual world but shares it with his friends and gives everyone more days off and reminds people to take time to live in and appreciate the real world and not to neglect our real life and the real people and relationships which make life worth living.

Sigh. Sob. Smile

If you care about becoming a better and more honest critical thinker, a better conversationalist, or a strong debater, you have to actually learn and practice certain skills.

You need to develop a basic understanding of linguistics, semantics, argumentation, formal reasoning, and logic. A spot of appropriate humor and charm won’t ever hurt either. :)

As a longtime critical thinking educator, I’ve always tried to promote the ideas of clarity and precision of thought. I’ve tried to teach the basic logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and formal reasoning so that people can improve their argumentation skills and avoid not only bad faith but the common traps many fall into which render discussions either fruitless, frustrating, or both.

If we wish to communicate effectively, it’s important that we can find agreement on the meaning of words, for example, and to act in good faith to try to better understand each other.

”Steelman, don’t strawman,” I always say! Actually, I’ve never said that but I should.

or

”Words mean things, damn it! That word doesn’t mean that.” Now, that I say all the time.

No debate or serious discussion should even begin before all parties can agree on the actual conversation to be had.

You might notice if you follow formal debates that they spend a lot of time before even beginning on the exact formulation of the proposition.

The choice of a positive or negative proposition can change entirely the burden of proof required by both parties.

If you understand the below chart, you get it.

The simplest of examples might be a debate where the proposition is “there is a god” versus the proposition “no god exists.”

These two propositions would entail completely different debate approaches and lines of reasoning. In the former, the pro side would have to make a reasoned and/or empirical case that something exists while the latter proposition would require the pro team to make a reasoned and/or empirical case that something does not exist.

If I were to participate in one of these two debates, I would much prefer to be on the con team regarding the first proposition than to be on the pro team of the latter. It would make for a far easier debate.

The reasoning behind that position reduces to the more complex nature of trying to demonstrate or argue that no such thing can possibly exist in our universe or even possibly beyond our universe, if the word beyond has any meaning in that context.

If I were, however, to do so, I imagine my efforts would be concentrated on unlikelihood or the absence of any positive evidence, or maybe I would just focus on the word itself being ambiguous and possibly incoherent and unfalsifiable.

It is because we cannot claim to have explored and investigated the entire universe or to know that there is nothing “beyond” that it would be a daunting task.

However, if we are constraining a debate to phenomena on just this planet, it would be far easier to argue that something does not exist, depending on the topic, of course.

While I might not assert confidently that a primitive hominid-like creature, maybe something referred to as a Yeti or Bigfoot, does not or cannot exist on Earth, I would feel far more confident asserting that there are no flying elephants.

He would probably be a cute little bugger though!

In this context then, let’s have a chat about political philosophy, political science, political economy, and economics.

As both a political scientist and economist, I have always promoted the idea of trying to parse economist systems from governance systems. I think it allows for easier analysis, better clarity, and consistency.

I concede that most of the time certain economic and political systems are paired and for some pretty obvious and practical reasons. It is more likely, for example, to pair a democratic governance model with a capitalist economic system, whereas it’s less likely to find a communist governance system with a capitalist economic system. I’d have to do some mental gymnastics to imagine the latter but I’m sure I could come up with something.

But here is the rub and the crux of this essay.

Are there really any capitalist, socialist, or communist countries at all?

I mean, people certainly all seem to think that they exist. Most would probably discount the question as incoherent or inane.

Lots of people claim that the United States is a capitalist country. But is it?

Lots of people claim that the Scandinavian countries are socialist countries. But are they?

Lots of people claim North Korea and maybe even Cuba are communist countries? But are they?

It turns out the answers are a tad bit more complex, and arguably “no.”

Let’s start out with that whole distinguishing between governance and economics thing. Because, as usual, a lot of things don’t tend to be as binary as we would like them to be. Simple answers are convenient and make us feel better but the universe very rarely serves us up much simplicity.

A common method of analyzing both governance and economic models is to understand them as being on a spectrum, rather than as binary sorts of things.

In that context, we might rather ask questions like which nation-states are more “free” or which nation-states allow citizens to vote on their laws or select their leaders.

Freedom is a nebulous sort of word but for the sake of brevity and without going down a rather deep philosophical rabbit hole, let’s just presume some standard qualifications where we understand individual freedom to be better served by democracy and less well served by totalitarianism.

Now we have a spectrum of possible governance systems. But again, simplicity is not readily available, so we need to parse even further.

Of the approximate 200 nation-states in the world, estimates are that anywhere between 50% to as high as 96% of nation-states can be considered democracies.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index classifies countries into "full democracies," "flawed democracies," "hybrid regimes," and "authoritarian regimes.”

In their latest report, they found that only 24 countries are considered full democracies, while 46 are classified as flawed democracies.

The Pew Research Center reported that 57% of countries with populations over 500,000 were democracies in 2017, but also noted that many countries exhibit both democratic and autocratic characteristics.

Other organizations, like Our World in Data, suggest that about half of all countries are democracies.

As you can see, even the rather simple question “how many nation-states are democracies” does not have a simple answer.

The more appropriate questions might be therefore, “which countries are more democratic or less democratic?” or “which countries are more autocratic or less autocratic?”

Consistently, the answer most given by most legitimate research institutions is that the Scandinavian countries tend to score the highest on most indices for most democratic nation-states, while China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and several nations in the Middle East and Africa, the least democratic.

Let’s move on now to economic systems and limit our selection to the most common cited modern economic systems: capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Let’s begin with capitalism

We might ask a question like “which nation-states are characterized by high levels of economic freedom, private property rights, and free market principles.”

To that question, a good answer might be Singapore, Switzerland, and Hong Kong or other countries like Australia, Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Estonia.

Those answers might be empirically strong ones if the question is which nations are most capitalistic.

Now, socialism

How about if we ask the question, “which nation-states are characterized by resources and the means of production being owned or regulated by the community or state.”

The primary distinction here is between a market-based, profit-oriented economic system where private property is protected and prices float as a function of supply and demand and a command-based, centrally planned economy where property is allocated as a function of need and not based on profit.

Note that this distinction does not inform us as to whether either system is authoritarian, only which economic model is employed.

Looking for modern nation-states that would qualify as socialist does not provide us with a satisfactory answer or example. We might point to Maoist China or the Soviet Union, neither of which currently exist.

And neither of them allowed for any worker or public democratic control over the economy.

Were those socialist nation-states? Not really.

Autocratic? Certainly. Both are largely considered to have been totalitarian regimes at their origin and slightly liberalized into authoritarian regimes in the latter years.

Let’s do communism now

Communism, as envisioned by Marx, was the inevitable end result of the transformation from an initial capitalist system which ultimately fails due to its profit motive and inequality, an ensuing revolution with the working class overthrowing the aristocratic class, to a socialist command-based economic system which distributes wealth equitably, and ultimately to a state-less society without any class structure or hierarchy, no wage labor or money, and the eradication of scarcity.

His notion was of a utopian egalitarian society.

While countries like USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba tried, they never managed to get to a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Rather the state became even more powerful and turned authoritarian or totalitarian.

A communist nation-state has never existed.

A socialist nation-state has never existed.

A capitalist nation-state has never existed.

Every nation-state system to date, whether we are referring to governance or economics has been a hybrid of some sort or mixed, if you prefer that word.

A better way to discuss and understand governance and economic systems, or political economy, is to discuss nation-states in the context of:

• Degrees and types of freedoms

• Property rights and protections

• Levels and types of state services

• Degrees and types of market and monetary intervention

So, stop talking about capitalist, socialist, and communist nation-states unless you wish to talk political theory because they don’t exist in practice.

Words mean things, damn it! Those words don’t mean what you think they do.

If you’re discussing the distinction between the United States and the Scandinavian or European countries, for example, it is technically incorrect to say that the former is a capitalist nation-state and the latter are socialist nation-states.

They are all liberal democracies with a mostly market-based economy and differing levels and types of social services and degrees of market intervention.

This essay will be a sort of preemptive eulogy.

Something that once tried to become beautiful is in its death throes and a new hideous, mutated incarnation has just reached adolescence and is asserting, to quote Nietzsche, its will to power.

It is an insecure beast, hateful, selfish, bigoted, greedy, jealous, deceitful, and it seeks to take the place of that more beautiful something. It wants revenge and to be restored to what it believes to be its rightful place at the top of the hierarchy.

This is the Revenge of the Layperson era and the de facto coronation of the new Lords of Unreason. They seek to replace reality with something in their own image.

It is an era where ill-informed opinion has been elevated to our highest epistemic level, above knowledge and even Truth. And an era where ignorance is celebrated as the highest virtue.

Behold, the complete abandonment of reason, ethics, thoughtfulness, and seriousness.

It is our Australopithecus forebearer throwing feces and grunting in its show of dominance again. It is the wanton underbelly of human nature taking its turn, asserting itself in the perverse and cyclical struggle of our worse demons against our greater angels.

Sagan certainly saw it coming,

Sagan wrote this before the age of social media or he might have cited a growing social narcissism, greed, and self-consumption where taking constant selfies and e-begging for attention, likes, and donations as another sign of our social decay, loss of dignity, and humility.

The comedy, turned documentary, Idiocracy also presciently saw into the looking glass into our near dystopian future.

It is still mostly a cartoonish version of itself but as it finds its way, as it blows out our candles, as it gains its foothold, it will become anything but amusing or entertaining.

I used to try to reason with the beast. I tried to build bridges with the australopitheci, to empathize with their grievances, to try to bring them back into the fold.

After all, many of their grievances are justified. But they have been radicalized similarly to those who flew planes into those buildings on 9/11 and who threw flowers at parades to a cocky, little man with a strange mustache. They have been reprogrammed by their masters to blame everyone but those who are responsible for their disenfranchisement, for the cultural ostracizing, for their poor education, and for their economic hardship.

I tried to explain to them about the effects of 40 years of neoliberal policy, about the massive and unprecedented transfer of wealth to the most privileged, about decades of privatization, the dismantling of unions, safety nets and anti-trust, about the removal of corporate and government oversight, about the decoupling of productivity gains from wage growth, and about the threat of excessive global corporatism and the effects of unlimited private and dark money in politics….but they could not hear. It was all Libtard to them.

Alas, the long separation and isolation of the australopitheci has modified their language now to such an extent that communication is no longer possible.

I finally had to break off relations with the beast. It was too far gone. It is feral and rabid now.

On September 11, 2001, I was on a business trip in Lisbon and giving a lecture when the news dropped. That day was far too blurry in my recollection, in the fog of the moment, to know what it meant.

But I should have.

Something was broken that day. It was the cacophony of a death knell. The illusion and spell was lifted, the psyche shattered.

The Western delusion of invincibility, security, and permanence was gone.

I met the beast in a plaza that day in Portugal. It appeared as an elderly couple dressed in the stereotypical matching American flag jumpsuits. I needed to momentarily commiserate with those who spoke my language and shared my country of birth.

I said that I hoped cooler heads would prevail and this event would lead to global talks about the causes and possible solutions. They lashed out at me and replied:

”I hope we raze the entire Middle East to the ground. Nuke ‘em all.”

My last reply was simply: “I hope you do not speak for the country.” But they did. An eye for an eye and blood lust would shortly be the order of the day…..again.

My background as a political scientist and once a consultant at the United Nations in Geneva in the early 90s should have prepared me to better understand its causes and its significance but I am a mere flawed and irrational human, endowed with naivete, dreams, and hopes.

I was also trained as an international economist, an international law academic, a human rights consultant, and learned the history of war and peace.

And the problem of international terrorism had long been on our radar screen, along with stalled nuclear disarmament talks, and the threat of climate change. These were considered our biggest and most threatening challenges.

I was once a champion of progress and of our most optimistic human aspirations.

I once wrote policy documents and prescriptions for international conferences on knowledge transfer, development, poverty, human rights, nuclear disarmament, diplomacy, and global health.

I cited our global successes, the decline of poverty and big power conflict, the ascension of democracy and self-determination, the focus on multilateral cooperation and improvements in respect for human rights.

I promoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and declared it as the harbinger of a greater future.

I heralded the birth of a new world order based on the rule of law, international conflict arbitration, and economic cooperation and coordination.

We cried when the Wall fell and sang The Winds of Change together while it happened for the whole world to see. Sigh.

That short-lived optimism was fairly quickly dashed but it was a wonderful moment in time.

Since then, democracy is on the decline and authoritarianism is again in the ascent. International relations have chilled substantially. Nuclear disarmament talks no longer occur. The US has abandoned its role as the champion of the world order that has fended off a third world war for 75 years. War has returned to Europe for the first time since WWII. There is another expanding war in the Middle East. And there are over 120 million displaced persons around the globe, far higher than after WWII.

The UN has been completely abandoned and discredited by its founding father and remaining sole super power; a super power, mind you, with more bases on the planet than all nations combined by large measure and with a military budget that is incomparable to any other as well. .

A concern for human rights and international law has been abandoned.

Countries like Hungary, Turkey, India, and Russia have adopted electoral autocracy models and civil liberties are under attack everywhere. Freedom House (2024) reports that global freedom has declined for 18 consecutive years and democratic norms are under attack all over the globe.

If I were to make a prediction, which I don’t tend to do, it might be to qualify the coming new international order as a techno-feudal system, managed primarily by oligarchs, using AI and cryptocurrency, and client-state puppets whose job will be to suppress freedom and destroy any semblance of economic and legal legitimacy.

I imagine the world may be split into spheres of influence which the oligarch class divy up and agree upon.

Because, in the end, Fukuyama was wrong. History was not over, it was just dormant, and Huntington’s clash of civilizations was the next hypothesis to be tested.

The new oligarchs and their foot soldiers, the lords of unreason, will certainly add that clash to their tactical arsenal along with the normal demagoguery and scapegoating to seize and maintain power and as a useful means of dividing and conquering.

Bread and circuses, (maybe some military parades and the occasional proxy war for effect) will also come in handy as well to keep the people distracted while they rob the vaults, and extort and hide the remaining natural resources.

In case it has not become obvious enough yet, you see, I’ve slipped inexorably toward misanthropy and anger. What a shame.

17 years ago I returned to the United States after two decades in Europe. My country of birth had gone mad and I felt the need to try to do my part.

I began volunteering my time to write and educate on science and philosophy, hoping to help people improve their critical thinking skills and combat this new global virus; a virus far more deadly than Covid.

I began writing countless essays about the world’s slide into madness and unreason and the erosion of the world order. I warned of the vacuum that would be filled by even worse actors. I have tried to note the parallels with prior periods of decay and disorder.

But all of that was to no avail. We lost. The Lords of Unreason have taken the fort.

I once advocated for a strong, liberal state as the only possible legitimate advocate of the people; the only entity capable of protecting and defending human dignity, freedom, and civil liberty.

The only viable competition is the corporation but it is a strict, hierarchical authoritarian entity, by definition, and is completely antithetical to human rights. It has one singular function and that is to enrich its owners.

Alas, the state has again been captured by a vengeful and spiteful layperson, the new lords of unreason and their masters, the oligarchs. The state is now merely a marketing and propaganda department for the owners of this planet and its remaining resources.

But maybe the most suprising bit is the craven cowardice of so much of the media, academia, and even our public intellectuals.

The near complete capitulation and pusillanimity is scandalous and an embarrassment to our species.

Apparently, those who live in gilded cages are far more concerned about securing their own fragile castles and maintaining the ratings and income of their podcast, law firm, academic seat, or media company to show any spine and courage.

It seems increasingly more likely that we will be left only with anarchy and revolution and, unfortunately, those come at a substantial cost. People are already dying and being tortured and more is to come.

Maybe the greatest irony of all time is that after thousands of years of civilization building and countless experiments in governance, the strongest country and military to ever exist has handed the keys to our species’ survival to an individual without a single redeeming quality.

I’m not a religious man but if I were I might claim this beast, who I refer to as Cartman, is the perfect embodiment of the seven deadly sins.

And as a man of science, I might say that, according to the DSM-V, it meets all the criteria of an exemplar of the Dark Triad…..and if you add sadism, the Dark Tetrad.

Needless to say, I will not be celebrating this 4th of July. R.I.P to my country of birth. It was a good run but you didn’t make it to 250! 1776-2024.

And just like that then, I am become the enemy of the state.

And I now want revenge for the murder of something which was far more beautiful.

For the last 13 years, we have been trying to educate with a singular aim: to help people develop and refine their own philosophy.

The consequence of not doing so is to constantly be at the whim of someone else’s will, to consistently be inconsistent, to regularly be a hypocrite, to have no basis upon which to justify, test, and validate your beliefs, decision-making, and intuitions, and to ultimately be civically irresponsible and even dangerous.

It would be impossible to overstate the relevance and importance of learning basic philosophy (and its offspring, science) literacy.

In order to become a more informed and moral being and citizen, to be able to differentiate rhyme from reason, rhetoric from fact, reality from fiction, misinformation from information, sophistry from wisdom, to develop as an independent and autonomous creature with agency, capable of critical and reasoned thought requires learning and, unfortunately, hard work.

Read until you bleed, as I like to say!

Maybe you fashion yourself a super genius capable of intuiting calculus like Newton or observing the behavior of matter and deducing quantum mechanics on your own but color me skeptical of that sort of grandiose claim.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Humans just like you and I, and arguably far smarter, have spent millennia working through the possible nature of our universe, how to live a good life, how to create flourishing societies, and have come up with some pretty nifty stuff. You really should check out all the things we have come to learn and know. It’s pretty impressive.

Don’t be shy! Stand on and leverage those broad shoulders.

As an aside and little anecdote, I once encountered a young gentleman who claimed to not need to read books as he had already figured everything out on his own.

Okay, Napoleon, back into bed. Take your antipsychotics!

Sorry, please don’t mistake that last quip as poking fun at mental illness. Pretty sure this was just an arrogant kid suffering from nothing more serious than Dunning-Kruger.

There is no shame in ignorance as we are all ignorant to the majority of knowledge that can be acquired but when one lacks even the curiosity or interest in addressing their ignorance, it manifests as stupidity and stupidity is far less justifiable than ignorance.

But the consequences are the same, regardless of the cause.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer went as far as to assert that stupidity is worse even than malice.

And Heinlein taught us the useful Hanlon’s Razor heuristic to remind us that ignorance may be as responsible for the ills and failures of our world as malice and to distinguish between the two.

When your mind tries to justify your sense of powerlessness, your need to succumb to simple answers, your desire to feel special and “in the know,” and to regurgitate some old tired and long debunked conspiracy theory or appeal to an all-knowing imaginary father figure and some divine inexplicable purpose, try to remember that human incompetence and stupidity can go a long way at explaining many phenomena.

Why does developing a consistent and internally coherent philosophy matter beyond just an individual’s moral and intellectual growth?

The most self-evident of answers is because we live in a global society with increasingly serious global issues to solve together; that our very nature is one of a social animal and that our beliefs, desires, attitudes, and behaviors affect others, arguably all 8 billion of us at scale.

Having said all that, you are always free, if you wish, to forego all of the benefits of thousands of years of scientific and philosophical knowledge and go Robinson Crusoe on your fine self.

Plato was so concerned by the problem of ignorance and our “appetites” that he warned us explicitly about our inabilty to self-govern and about the ills of democracy itself.

He argued that democracy ultimately leads to chaos and tyranny. He warned us of the power of demagogues, mob rule, and our susceptibility to unreason.

“The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs.”
— Republic, Book VIII

While Plato believed that we required a paternalistic answer to self-governance, and as admittedly fond as I am of the romantic notion of a highly educated, virtuous and ethical committee of philosopher kings (and queens) dedicated to managing, guiding, and informing us on how to live a good life together, we have yet to solve for the problems of human greed, corruption, and incompetence.

So, until something better comes along, I reluctantly must concur with the reasoning of Churchill,

John Stuart Mill, among many other political and moral philosophers, famously made a far more robust argument in defense of democracy but equally understood the problem of ignorance and that the value of democracy was determined by the quality and sophistication of its constituents,

“The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
— On Liberty (1859)

Mill advocated that the antidote for a strong democracy was public education, free speech, and open debate.

He was a strong libertarian and elaborated at length on his harm principle that to the extent that we do not harm another, we should be free to “speak, act, and live as we see fit, without molestations from individuals, law or government.”

Notably, he also argued that we were responsible for any harm we caused others from both our actions and inaction, thus suggesting we all have a moral obligation to also help others.

Take that Ayn Rand!

What many modern sources who promote democracy don’t tend to discuss, however, is how similar even the beliefs of the American founding fathers were to Plato’s philosopher kings concept. They, to one degree or another, understood governance as being decided only by a small committee of the most educated and virtuous. In their case, that translated to white land-owning men.

The idea of universal suffrage emerges slowly over time and begins to take hold only in the 20th century. But it is because of documents and arguments made far earlier that it became increasingly more untenable to defend institutions like chattel slavery and to deny equal rights to women and minority groups.

The evolution of concepts like democracy, individual rights, agency, and autonomy, freedom, self-governance, and ultimately universal suffrage and human rights has changed dramatically over the millennia.

And we have reason and developments in political and moral philosophy to thank for that.

If you’d like to see a beautiful defense of the power of reason itself, I highly recommend that you watch an animated Socratic dialogue on the topic between Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein,

These modern ideas emerge from the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, The Renaissance, The Scientific Revolution, Locke’s treatise on natural rights, the Protestant Reformation, The European Enlightenment, and the French and American Revolutions.

Despite all the robust defenses of democracy and individual freedom over the ages, what happens if and when they fail?

Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, had a lot to say about that sort of thing. She was well situated to do so and is often cited as one of the most preeminent authorities on totalitarianism, the nature of evil, and the human condition.

She argued, similarly to Plato, that it is the central problem of thoughtlessness and ignorance that creates the preconditions necessary for authoritarianism and evil to propagate. She demonstrates compellingly how, in the contexts of both Nazism and Stalinism, they were able to seize power by exploiting apathy and ignorance.

She may be most known for developing the concept of the “banality of evil;” how the lack of critical thinking of ordinary people can lead to committing atrocities.

This salient quote is so central to the hypothesis that reason matters, that developing independent thought and critical thinking matters; that being able to distinguish fact from fiction is not only merely a beneficial individual human skill but absolutely necessary to a healthy, free, and flourishing society.

So, I wish upon and implore all of you to learn and develop your critical thinking skills, to develop an internally consistent moral and intellectual philosophy.

You owe it to yourself. And we owe it to each other and our children.

I have long made the argument that to become a truly good thinker and a more moral being, you need to satisfy two prerequisites.

You need a valid framework, foundation, a set of tools and methods: an intellectual and reasoned basis upon which to evaluate all truth claims and you need a vocabulary or database of knowledge and facts. This latter bit requires basic science literacy.

You need to learn the basics of ontology, epistemology, and axiology.

You need to learn, develop and constantly refine a theory of knowledge (TOK) in order to understand the difference between belief, knowledge, and dare I say, truth. And you need to learn what constitutes and justifies appealing to those words in a sort of hierarchy of epistemic confidence, whereby you treat those concepts and their distinctions with the care they deserve.

You need to learn how we come to assert what is real and what is not and upon what basis we can morally claim to know what is right and wrong.

And don’t ignore the option to reserve judgment sometimes, especially when the evidence is just not there or compelling.

I submit this well known quote which is usually attributed to another one of our good friends, Aristotle. I highly recommend you give him a read if you find time. Smart fellow. Has a lot to say about ethics and logic.

So, if you managed to endure my long stream of consciousness here and think that this is all mindless drivel, word salad, hogwash, and mere mental masturbation and that none of this is relevant to you or anyone else, you might want to note another warning from Plato,

Almost a decade ago, I posted this essay as a public warning that reason itself was at a crossroads and that we were losing the war of ideas.

Ten years later, it is even clearer as my country of birth descends into madness and is on a clear pathway toward authoritarianism.

”Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.” commonly paraphrased as:

Shortly after, I also posted my analysis of International Relations - 30 years after the wall in an essay which you can still read on the Wayback Machine. Mind you, it might take a while to load.

From December, 2016

We have been warning about unreason and anti-intellectual values and their consequences for years. They are certainly nothing new. And we've made the case for the harm too many times to count.

We don't tend to peddle in alarmism or use hyperbole as an educational tactic. That should be apparent for anyone who has followed us for any extended period of time.

But drastic measures seem increasingly necessary to fend off a disturbing and unavoidable trend.

We've even claimed partial progress at a few points, where it seemed that the rise of apparent pro-science advocacy and general skepticism online was a positive trend that seemed to have gained steam. There were short-lived signs to be optimistic about.

Where once there were only the old guards in Randi, SGU, Skeptic Magazine and CFI, there were suddenly hundreds and thousands of pro-science and scientific skepticism sources online. We thought that was the harbinger of good things to come. Maybe this trend would motivate people to learn basic philosophy and logic; to study the study of reality and look increasingly away from standard television and reality fiction.

Where once the words fallacy and fact-checking were as uncommon to see as a Northern hairy-nosed wombat, they suddenly could be seen frequently on social media threads and the run of the mill Facebook brawl.

Voices like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Sagan and Russell, among many others, were becoming more prominent and seemingly fighting back our demon-haunted world and lighting more and more candles in the dark. Maybe the better angels of our nature and voices of reason were starting to win?

But we were wrong. We were incredibly naive. We were blind to the constant and sometimes partially dormant underbelly of wanton human ignorance and fear. The kraken has been released.

The momentum shift was temporary and insignificant. It seems to have been nothing but a blip on the radar screen and something more akin to the "wow" signal than anything sustainable and transformative. It seems to have even provoked a strong whiplash back to a previous more regressive state; one that we have seen too often in our distant and even relatively recent past. Again, this is nothing new.

The heralding of the internet as our savior was premature. It has simply freed up the beast.

We are not witnessing forward-looking change, or at least there is little indication of that, despite some who claim it to be so. It's just a "shake-up," you say? Maybe the consequence is nothing more than frightening the "global elite" and exposing the illuminati and ultimately banishing them forever? That does make for an exciting Hollywood plot, I must say. Someone get Dan Brown on the horn.

Make no mistake, there is now a consistent and comprehensive attack on reason and in the words of the infamous lunatic and queen of false drama and outrage, Alex Jones, a battle for your mind is now in full force. Their job is to so confuse you as to make any semblance of objective reality more obscure and blurred. And they claim to have the only torch to lead you toward the light.

An example of this attitude is perfectly illustrated in a recent Breitbart article where they go so far as to call the scientific method itself into question and to try to convince its readers that phrases like peer review and scientific consensus are nothing more than appeals to authority and that you need to fight back and ignore anyone who makes rational and evidence-based appeals. Citing intellectual values like reason and scientific evidence is now itself seen as a fallacy. Touche! Well played!

This is, as we wrote recently, clearly the revenge of the layman. Charlatans, more interested in ad revenue and the benefits and power afforded by demagoguery, now couch their sophistry in the language of nothing short of appeals to ignorance, as if it is the highest virtue.

You, the commoner, are soon to seize power, if you only select them as your champions - the new lords of unreason. You can become the new aristocracy and elite, if you simply follow them and abandon reason.

“You little people cannot possibly be expected to understand these complex matters." That is the catch-all phrase used to empower and embolden you to take reality back from science and reason. You can reform it in your image.

For the record, I am a layman, you are a layman. We are all laymen.

Without human functional expertise, science, technology and reason, we would all still be cowering in a cave from simple dental infection or not having even survived birth.

It now comes swift and steady.

It arrives bundled in calculated sophistry and partial truth. Its calling cards are veiled and direct attacks on science, media, expertise, facts and all forms of authority.

Its vernacular is the hyperbolic and propagandistic use of terms like fake news, elitism and all forms of partisan ad hominem and tribal generalization.

It's no longer a question of simply refuting questionable and unsupported claims like creationism, climate change skepticism, anti-GMO, anti-vaccination, appeals to "nature," and the host of other unreasonable claims that scientific skepticism purports to challenge, this is bigger.

It's an all-out affront on claims to an objective reality and our hard fought epistemic victories.

This is a formal, informal, semi-organized and direct attack on reality - modern civilization, scientific values, enlightened ethics and reason.

I don't care if you consider yourself left or right on the political spectrum, this is far greater than party politics anymore, although much of the assault is clothed in partisan calls to arms. This is a call to self-respecting reasonable people everywhere.

What is required is solidarity and unity around the core value of reason and nothing less will do. We need all champions of modern ethics and the central enlightenment value of science on board and everyone needs to stand up and project your voice, consistently and resolutely.

Reason and unreason are in a tug of war and the cord just passed the flag and to the wrong side.

Ten years ago, I was tagged from a new age spiritual pseudoscience page on Facebook by an anonymous stranger and asked to respond to one of their posts.

Upon following the link, I can only imagine that I must have attempted to refute some of the unscientific claims being made on that page.

Much to my surprise, a subscriber from that page contacted me privately and asked several important questions relating to science and philosophy. I thought I would share the response as it provided an opportunity to elaborate on several important subjects, notably, philosophy of science, cosmology and origins.

Question:

I really enjoyed the debate but you left me hanging without a response on several issues. The unanswered question I’m most curious about is: if everything must come from something, how does science explain initial creation? Maybe I’m wrong but you guys believe in the Big Bang right? Where did all of that energy come from in the beginning if there was no creator? I’ve never been able to ask an atheist this question. I’m honestly and sincerely curious of your response. Thanks!

My response:

These are some of the big questions and require the introduction of several elements to answer. I hope you don’t mind that I take a bit of time to explain.

Firstly, we have to start with some philosophy fundamentals. In philosophy, we have two primary areas of inquiry: epistemology and ontology. In addition, each scientific discipline has a philosophy which discusses these ideas in the context of the particular scientific discipline, for example: philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of chemistry, philosophy of physics, etc., etc., etc.

Ontology is the study of trying to determine what there is (what exists) and what we can say about the nature of things. Epistemology is the study of knowledge; what we can claim to know, the method(s) by which we can acquire knowledge and the certainty with which we can assert knowledge. The idea of absolute truth is a controversial one in science. We do not speak of truth. We only speak in probabilistic language. The best that we can say is that something is likely to be true based on the best available data and to give a confidence level.

This intellectual honesty is crucial in science. We cannot know with 100% certainty that we are not all a brain in a vat somewhere in the universe or simply the figment of someone’s imagination. Absolute truth is not relevant in science. It is purely a discussion for philosophers to speculate about. There is simply no way that we can claim to know anything definitively. We should all be skeptical when someone claims to know something and we should be even more skeptical if they claim to know with certainty. That is a warning sign.

Science is effectively an epistemology; a way to learn about reality. That is to say, science is the best method that we have ever invented so far to logically and consistently investigate, evaluate and draw conclusions about what is, what isn’t and how the universe works. The tools of science are logic (which includes mathematics), reason, and the scientific method.

The reason science is so powerful and effective is because it is inherently skeptical, rigorous and methodical. We know that our minds play tricks on us and we have all sorts of cognitive biases and prejudices which seek to confirm answers that we want to find, regardless of what really is. The methods of science are designed to do our best to minimize and avoid these human biases.

For example, wherever possible, when evaluating scientific hypotheses, we want to double or even triple blind our experiments. I’ll use an example where human subjects are participating in a study.

Let’s say we want to study a particular medicine and if it works or not. In order to minimize the possibility of human bias, we want to avoid the possibility that the scientists conducting the experiment can affect the outcome so we don’t inform them who is getting the medicine and who is not (single blind), we want to avoid the possibility that those participating in the experiment can not affect the outcome, so we don’t let them know if they are taking the medicine or not (double blind) and, if possible, we want those evaluating the results to also not be able to affect the outcome, so we have a third party tally up the totals and they are not informed who took the medicine (triple blind). This would be an example of how all through the process, we try to “blind” it or control for human bias and use methods to minimize or avoid it.

In addition to methods like blinding and controlling for external variables, so that we can do our best to only isolate particular causes and effects, we also try to falsify our hypotheses first. That means before we conclude that our idea is right, we try everything we can to “disprove” or refute it. As science is highly competitive and everyone is trying to refute each other’s ideas, we only want to publish our results once we are confident that we have done everything we can to find flaws in reasoning and method. If we are confident that we cannot refute our idea, we submit it for peer review, so that impartial third party experts can review it to see if the idea is flawed or sound. Once everyone has tried to refute something unsuccessfully, there is good reason to believe that there is something here of value; that we have revealed something about the nature of reality.

The other important point to make before I continue is that for us to accept something, it needs not only to have passed through these rigorous steps, but also it should be repeatable by others. If it can be, thus, falsifiable and repeated, we have good science and we provisionally accept this hypothesis as being correct. The longer the idea survives without being refuted or replaced by a better explanation, the more certainty we can have that this is justifiable knowledge.

The last point to emphasize is that knowledge is contingent on the best available evidence and is subject to change as we gather more facts. Good hypotheses become and form components of theories or explanatory frameworks for explaining phenomena and describing facts. Theories do not graduate to fact, but rather explain facts.

Now that we have a foundation for science, ontology and epistemology, I will address your particular questions.

The so-called law of causality suggests that every action has a reaction, that every cause has an effect. We assume this, axiomatically, to be so simply because most phenomena that we have observed seem to have antecedent causes.

What we can say with a relatively high degree of confidence about the universe is the following: Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, matter began to expand outwards from an extremely dense, hot state. That is referred to as The Big Bang, but the name is a misnomer. We do not know what “banged” or what the state of matter was before something happened to begin this process. We can only observe what happened and explain the consequences after this event. We have multiple lines of evidence suggesting that we can have a fairly high degree of confidence about our knowledge of the formation of the universe. But, and I emphasize, we cannot say what reality was before the so called big bang or even if the word “before” has any coherent meaning.

Many postulate the idea of a ”singularity” before, an infinitesimally small point of energy and matter before the big bang. But we simply cannot have much confidence in this idea, because our mathematics fail at the Planck barrier and we cannot see any further back in time/space. That is a good example of the difference between hypothesis and theory.

The singularity is a hypothesis which cannot yet be tested or confirmed. The Big Bang, however, is a robust scientific theory, is widely accepted and supported by a great deal of evidence. We simply do not know how the universe ultimately began or if asking this question is even the right question. There might be no time before the Big Bang, as time may have simply come into existence at that point. We cannot know why the universe is like it is or if there is something before with our existing knowledge and technology.

We are hopeful that we may someday unite the four forces of nature into one unifying theory and be able to combine relativity with quantum physics. This might allow us to better explain the origins of the universe and why we have these particular laws of physics. Some believe there may be evidence of a multiverse, a larger area of hyperspace with multiple universes, with potentially different laws of physics. Some believe that there is evidence that all matter is made of cosmic strings, which are infinitesimally small units of matter. But we simply do not know these answers now. And anyone who claims to know is being presumptuous at best and dishonest at worst.

As for the hypothesis that there must have been a creator, many scientists and philosophers, including myself, think that that is not an answer at all and there is certainly no empirical evidence to support the claim. It seems that the universe shows us that complexity can emerge out of simplicity and simple rules. There is no necessity to postulate something more complex to explain complexity.

The idea that complexity can emerge from simpler systems is called emergence and there is very good evidence to support it across all areas of science. Language is an example of emergence, ant colonies are another. There are many. No one ant has the ability or knowledge to create a colony and, yet, somehow when ants work together, an ant colony emerges.

And a little philosophy humor for you!

In conclusion, we can’t claim to know how this all came about, nor if there is anything outside or before it or even if those are valid questions. We are working on it. There seems to be no apparent purpose in the universe or our existence. As far as I can tell, we seem to simply be interesting emergent chemistry which is a consequence of emergent physics.

We are the result of billions of years of time and matter configuring and reconfiguring into interesting patterns. We create our own meaning. Postulating that, in order to explain complexity, we must invent something infinitely more complex only pushes the question back to how did that infinite complexity come into being. So we have an infinite regress paradox and the idea becomes incoherent and unreasonable. It is not an intellectually sound argument.

I’m sorry this was so long, but it would be impossible to explain this without providing the fundamentals and basis on which these conclusions are drawn.

Take care.

Repost from 2015

Why is a scientific mindset superior to competing epistemological frameworks?

Science is far more than a body of knowledge and facts. It is far more than the myopic stereotype of donning lab coats, shaking beakers, and peering through microscopes.

It truly is a way of thinking about everything. We are not aware of any better method of evaluating truth claims and chipping away at reality than by calling on and applying the fundamental principles of the philosophy of science. Its elegance and strength is in its iterative, never ending, and self-correcting cycle.

It’s like a water wheel that never stops turning and churning, constantly scooping up new data and running it through a process of synthesis and resynthesis. The human problem is that no particular brain or brains can realistically keep up or possess all of the prerequisite knowledge to adequately analyze everything. But we challenge anyone to support the claim that it’s random, arbitrary, and not mostly additive or that there is a better alternative on offer.

How many of you expect a new Iphone release to ever be made out of wood and contain nothing but a basic calculator app or that the onboard camera will regress to a 1X1 pixel resolution?

If you accept that argument, would you not therefore imagine that we will surely learn more about physics, chemistry, biology, economics, sociology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, even governance?

From moment to moment, we take a sample from that water wheel and draw tentative conclusions, simply out of expediency and pragmatism. We can’t afford to do otherwise. If we sit by idly, waiting for the process to finish, the world would pass us by with no attempt at solving real world problems, with no active response at all. We would be the ultimate victims of passivity, time and circumstance. By definition, unfortunately, this useful metaphor implies that the moment we take a sample, the data is already relatively obsolete.

By now, we would hope that you are acquainted with scientific principles: observation, hypothesis, experiment, repeatability, falsifiability, etc., etc.

But, the scientific mindset is also far more than a simple circular chart of the scientific method would suggest. It includes the use of formal reasoning, logic, skepticism and academic methods of critical thinking, It requires a mathematical and strict, methodical approach to deriving conclusions from data and discerning meaning from patterns.

For what is formal logic, if not a rigorous attempt at achieving the solidity and deductive benefits of converting ideas and hypotheses into a symbolic code for information processing? You are essentially building a model, a computer program which you can use to predict the future and assist in making informed decisions.

Again to call on metaphor, trying to figure out reality can be likened to a big jigsaw puzzle.

For any given truth claim, you have to collect as many relevant puzzle pieces as you can. To make matters far more complicated, some of the pieces that you will find and collect don’t actually belong to the particular puzzle that you are trying to solve.

The complexity, therefore, comes from not only finding all of the pieces, but in parsing the right pieces from the wrong pieces. Once you, theoretically, collect the best pieces, you pour them all out on the floor and start doing the hard work of trying to connect them. When we do it well, put in the necessary effort and remain committed, undeniable and distinct images form before our eyes. Each one of these puzzles ultimately are somehow related to a grand superpuzzle of everything. We just can’t yet see it all. Alas, our eyes are slow to open like a newborn kitten struggling to find out in which kind of world it has been born.

So, does all this mean that if we cannot cite, verbatim, peer reviewed studies in high impact journals, explain the dual slit phenomenon, or name every element in the periodic table, that we cannot think “scientifically?”

Absolutely not. But it does mean that you have to not only learn the basics, be aware of the problems with your senses, the cognitive biases that every brain possesses and be willing to put in the required effort to learn method and fact. It also means you will need to work with others to supplement, share, and exchange information.

Become the water wheel! Don’t stop churning

What is The Scientific Skeptic?

In short, it is a science and philosophy education forum. Our mission for the last 13 years has ultimately been to promote education on various subjects spanning the entirety of the scientific project and to engage in public discussion.

We believe that in order to become a better thinker, one must have a broad range of literacy across the gamut of scientific disciplines and a strong foundation in philosophy and formal reasoning.

We also take a wide-angle lens when defining science.

**An important addendum here is to note that over the last decade we have increasingly shifted away from technical, long form education on the physical sciences toward applying scientific skepticism to sociological and political philosophy and science claims.

These are trying times and science and reason are increasingly under direct attack.

As a political scientist and international economist by training and experience, I hope to bring my skills in the social sciences to scientific skepticism, writ large. Political and social claims are, after all, just particular forms of positive claims and no less subject to reason and evidence than any other. They are merely more complex than any description of what happens in a controlled laboratory setting or chemist’s beaker allows.

You could, in principle, run the same forms of experiments in the social sciences as in physics or chemistry but, unfortunately, there is not a readily available supply of clone universes at our disposal to perform them, not to mention the ethical limitations.

What is a Brain in a Vat?

The brain in a vat is a well known heuristic used in philosophy and skepticism and relates to a host of questions about our ontology and epistemology.

I have long used this moniker to promote one of my central intellectual values - epistemic humility.

See short video below on intellectual virtues for more context.

To learn more about the brain in a vat concept,

What is Science?

Science is not simply a discussion about the physical sciences, or even just about the physical and social sciences. It is greater even than that. Science is, writ large, a way of thinking, testing and evaluating ideas.

Its primary tools are the scientific method, logic, and reason. It is in that sense that we are not constrained to think of science as simply the sum total of work in the academic disciplines.

Any intellectual investigation and exploration which includes a rigorous, methodical and evidence=based approach to drawing conclusions about how the world works can be included into a larger scientific discussion.

And that, my friends, is a perfect segue into the second fundamental function of The Scientific Skeptic, notably, philosophy education.

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy, to use a standard definition, is:

“the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.”

It’s important to note that far too often people tend to misunderstand what philosophy is and either attempt to discredit it or differentiate it entirely from science. There is a valid and pragmatic reason to do so, in the context of segregating professional disciplines. There is clearly a difference between an academic philosophical faculty and an academic scientific faculty. There is a difference between an academic philosopher and an academic scientist. The crucial point, however, is that it is a false dichotomy to argue that they are not related, not based upon shared premises and not originating from a common function. There was a time when there was no distinction and it seems that, to forget that legacy, and common origin is to oversimplify and misunderstand both.

A more correct synthesis of these two areas of human inquiry is probably to understand science as a method of philosophy or even a subset of philosophy. It might also be helpful to think of science as a particular epistemology – a particular method of understanding and gaining knowledge. A favorite expressions of ours is that “science is philosophy at work.” They each have their own sets of tools, but are nevertheless dedicated to a common endeavor, namely trying to learn about the universe, existence and the nature of reality.

There are four particular philosophical concepts which also figure prominently on The Scientific Skeptic and deserve specific definition: skepticism, critical thinking, logic and reason.

For a simple primer on philosophy, see our YouTube Video below.

What is Skepticism?

Skepticism is generally any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere. An overall approach that requires all information to be well supported by evidence. It is important to note that we favor a particular philosophical school of skepticism, scientific or rational skepticism as opposed to philosophical skepticism.

What is Critical Thinking?

The intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

What is Reason?

Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information. It reduces to being able to provide and explain good reasons for holding any particular position.

What is Logic?

The branch of philosophy concerned with the use and study of valid reasoning.

Who is the Scientific Skeptic?

I am 58 years young. I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Although I am American, I was mostly raised by my Italian-side mother and grandmother. A European influence was very pronounced in my childhood and the lengthy trip that I was taken on, across Europe at the age of 9, was to have a profound impact on my future.

From an early age, I was extensively exposed to literature, art, travel, language and culture. My mother was an existentialist author turned educator and my father was a fine artist and also an educator. They both have their master’s degrees and everyone in my family promoted education. While we were not a wealthy family, there was always an emphasis on intellectualism. I have a profound respect for women, as I was primarily raised by two very competent, empathetic and strong women.

I hold a double master’s and bachelor of science degrees. My formal background is in economics, international law, political science and diplomacy. While I prefer to not consider myself a scientist, I certainly am qualified in the social sciences and academics. I had looked into getting my PhD in industrial psychology or cognitive science, but simply never found the time.

I did my undergraduate studies in California and my post graduate studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Please feel free to communicate in French here, if you are so inclined, as I am getting rusty and miss speaking it terribly. I began my career researching and consulting for various United Nations organizations in Geneva, including UNCTAD, WMO, EBU and ILO, concerning such issues as economic aid, third world development, refugee law, diplomacy and war, and human rights law. I’ve also done extensive research in corporate and contract law, corporate crime, economic theory, market and investment theory, game theory and information systems.

Working in an international setting with U.N. organizations and with other NGOs was fascinating and enlightening. I also taught language and academics in an international economics, law and banking context. Sadly, I became quite disillusioned with the U.N. bureaucracy and moved into the private sector. My 20 year corporate career was in international business process and technology consulting, analysis and management. Over the years, I have taken an increasing interest and fascination in large scale systems, both technological and sociological.

I moved back to the US after 17 years in Geneva, Switzerland and purchased a small tropical home near the beach in South Florida. I have travelled extensively all over the world, but I’m still missing two continents – Antarctica and Australia.

I recently sold my home in Florida and have moved back to Europe and am currently in Greece and struggling to learn a fifth language.

I would be remiss to not highlight the participation and background of the other Scientific Skeptic contributor. Tania is an M.D. from Greece and currently working on her specialization in psychiatry. She is far smarter than I, despite her fewer years on this planet.

In addition to her knowledge of biology and medicine, she has a brilliant, quick mind and is incredibly adept at formal reasoning. The fact that she was raised by a family of physicists and intellectuals shows! She makes me a better thinker on a daily basis and has been an invaluable friend and intellectual resource.

La Raison D'Etre of The Scientific Skeptic

In my mid-30s, I woke up one day and felt that not only had I not contributed and participated enough, but more importantly, I realized I didn’t know enough! I suppose it might be referred to as something like an early mid-life crisis. At around that same time, I read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking on a transcontinental flight from Geneva to Los Angeles. I had always loved the physical sciences, but it was at that moment in time, probably prompted by that particular book, that I had a personal epiphany – a cathartic moment.

From that moment forward, I decided that I wanted to know everything that we could say about the nature of reality. I wanted to learn as much as I could from the smartest people in the world, across time and from all of the major scientific and academic disciplines.

I embarked on a private quest to read and consume everything that I could from ancient philosophy to quantum mechanics. It became quite obsessive and as I learned more, my hunger for knowledge increased and became more insatiable.

When I moved back to the U.S., I decided to take four years off and pursue my hobbies and try my hand at a small business. In between building a business, exercising, playing and making music, I spent countless hours reading and watching lectures on biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, biochemistry, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, economics, political science and everything in between. In a certain stretch, I did nothing but watch science lectures and conferences for up to 20 hours a day.

A bit odd, I know! Fiction suddenly no longer interested me and I stopped watching television.

The other important piece of information which is relevant to a relentless interest in learning was a growing recognition of the consequences of anti-intellectual and anti-science sentiment. Europe had been almost exclusively secular and few people openly discussed politics or religion. My return to my country in a post 911, “war on terror,” religious fundamentalism resurgent and post-recession America was a rude awakening. My country of birth seemed to have lost its collective mind.

Tribalism, religion, fear, paranoia, star and cult of personality worship had reached alarming proportions. Television programming had turned inane and farcical, from educational channels morphing into postmodern reality TV, propaganda and pseudoscience programming to news channels becoming tribal centers, supporting partisan interests in an effort to gain rating and appease particular niches, instead of presenting relevant news and good journalism. The other impetus was an obvious reduction in respect for expertise, authority and all institutions.

This sort of retrenchment into distrust and fear is a well-known phenomenon in uncertain times and can be and was predicted. Various periods in history demonstrate that in times of economic and national insecurity, societies abandon progressive values in favor of conservativism, heightened tribalism, nationalism, religious extremism and anti-intellectualism.

The Scientific Skeptic is dedicated to provoking and reinvigorating reason and it derives from a love for education and educating.

The Scientific Skeptic's intellectual influences

In case you are interested in our main intellectual influences, please find below a small sample of the thinkers that have inspired us. It would be impossible to provide an exhaustive list.

Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Epicurus, Seneca, Spinoza, Hume, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Smith, Payne, Rousseau, Hobbes, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Marx, Sartres, Heidegger, Russel, Kuhn, Popper, Singer, Harris, Dennett, Ingersoll, Rawls, Chomsky, Grayling, Mcginn, Ptolemy, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Bohr, Maxwell, Godel, Turin, Einstein, Sagan, Sapolsky, Bloom, Szostak, Ramachandran, Tyson, Hawking, Susskind, Carroll, Tegmark, Guth, Greene, Weinberg, Pinker, Dawkins, Feynman, Gould, Greenfield, Rees, Randi, Shermer, Novella, Gardner, Goldacre, Minchin, Gorski, Plait, Hitchens.

As I’m new here, one of my objectives on Substack will be as a repository to move and repost much of my original content from FB over the last 13 years where it languishes in obscurity and descends into the abyss of a Facebook feed, never to be seen again.

Another objective is to develop my ongoing and longtime thesis which I have coined the Revenge of the Layperson as a framework for trying to understand the times we live in.

I will also shortly be publishing an introduction so you know what The Scientific Skeptic represents and who I am.

The below essay was posted in December 2024.

A very common anti-intellectual stance is to either argue that knowledge is not a thing, that humans cannot acquire such a thing, that it is wholly a subjective thing, or that ignorance, intuition, and opinion are somehow equal or even superior to knowledge.

Another common anti-intellectual stance is to see every issue as merely binary, good or bad, dangerous or beneficial, right or wrong with no ability to understand complexity, nuance, and the probabilistic nature of so much of life and our understanding of our universe.

A good example of anti-intellectualism is the inability of people to understand that words can have different meanings in different semantic contexts.

Elitism is one of these words.

One form of elitism is believing that some superficial quality like owning a BMW, purchasing an overpriced dessert coffee, or being born to generational wealth means you are better than everyone else and somehow deserve more rights or political power than others.

That form of elitism is loathsome and illegitimate.

There is, however, another form of elitism which argues that a highly experienced airline pilot is more likely to safely land a 747 than a brain surgeon and a brain surgeon more likely to successfully remove a brain tumor than a pilot.

We subscribe to the latter meaning of elitism and loathe the former.

Is it possible that the pilot or brain surgeon can be wrong about claims in their respective domain? Of course.

Is it possible that the pilot or brain surgeon has something of value to contribute about the other's domain of knowledge? Sure.

Novel ideas can certainly come from anywhere and can often promote new thinking by those most equipped to synthesize new information and add to our collective knowledge base.

The real snowflakes are those who don't accept this latter meaning of elitism and believe their ignorance or privileges somehow qualify them to not only ignore the value of the pilot and neurosurgeons' views but to consider theirs somehow more relevant.

Anti-intellectualism is in the ascent and the lords of unreason are angry for being ignored and wish to remake society in their image, whether would-be oligarch or layperson, respectively.

As humanists, we should try to find and establish policies, norms, and values which address any legitimate grievances of the disenfranchised and proudly ignorant in an effort to help everyone find dignity and self worth in our global society.

But if your intellectual and moral confusion leads you to promote regressive and harmful values or objectively false claims, you are a threat to the progress and survival of our species.

If pointing that out is considered rude, elitist, or somehow a violation of your misguided understanding of free speech and the right to an opinion?

We have a problem, Houston, and here are some tissues for your issues. It's not all about you.