As I tried to explain to my students the complex word for all this is homeostasis, the burning desire of a living system to continue to be alive. A simple example of this basic phenomenon of complexity is our body temperature. We burn a lot of energy in order for that temperature to remain at or around 36.9° C, since a human living system evolved to function best at such a temperature. We are far-from-equilibrium systems. We are conceived in heat, to only reach equilibrium at death as dust, after becoming unable to regulate our temperature. This is why we are an infection on the face of this world: we have a tendency to be so hyperactive that it disrupts the homeostasis of our Earth. It is only in this sense “Gaia” is to be understood, the only likeness of Earth to a human being is that it, too, is a living system trying to maintain its homeostasis. We inflame her in exactly the sense of creating a fever, and it is quite possible she exorcises the infection to keep on living without us - tiny microbial agents - bothering her simple living arrangement as a collection of sympoietic living systems. But how do we create this inflammation? Well, by being the sick animals that we are, we are continuously restless. Instead of just sleeping in a climate adjusted for us, we make a fire so as to take the climate adjusted to us, with us. That’s about it, really. In our restlessness to, autopoietically, develop ourselves we use the energy stored in this world to increase the size of our human world. It’s a sickness unto death, this hungry need for the energy that will sustain our homeostasis over the whole wide world, burning so much energy that it literally sets this world aflame.

This, our, sickness is nothing else but philosophy of course. The philosophy that leads us to words like sympoiesis and autopoiesis. The very same insane philosophy also that made us look into a fire instead of running away from it. And so allowed us to conceptualize fire as the type of thing that can be made and harnessed, instead of being tied to the instinct of being a threat to our homeostasis that needs to be fled. An instinct that is an individual instinct; an instinct of an autonomous individual that reproduces the conditions for its own survival as the living being it is. In a word: autopoiesis. An instinct only counteracted by the material limits to reproduction which are that there is no reproduction in solitary confinement, meaning that all reproduction presupposes coproduction. Before you think of sex, just think back of those first man-made fires: no production of fire without wood. No human beings without Gaia being in a certain mode of homeostasis. In a word: sympoiesis. Now you can think of sex as a way of caring for what is not you, because without what is caring for you there could not be a you in the first place. And if you think of sex as separate from such caring then it is this type of sex that really exemplifies the sickness of the human animal: a desire to dominate, to take whilst not giving back, to have one’s autopoiesis without the constraints of sympoiesis. These two words - autopoiesis and sympoiesis - are the words of any philosophy. They are the yin and yang of the philosophical drive. Harnessing fire but respecting the wood. Following traditions but breaking free of them when they disempower an individual’s right to restlessness.

And here philosophy bifurcated into the Western view of autonomous freedom and what we Westerners were taught to see as non-philosophy, mere tradition and, in this view therefore, just religion. And this Western view gave birth, not to science as such of course, but to a sort of science that purified knowledge based on abstractions allowing technology to be built that controlled our environment. And that control - breaking free of the constraints of sympoiesis, maximizing the autopoietic industry of the self-made man - led to digging up the earth to find fossil fuels. More and more until inflaming Gaia. My point is for sure not to demonize science and technology. My point is to highlight a one-sided impatience of this (abstr)action-oriented way of philosophizing. Not because it leaves sympoiesis behind, the actions of the West (the very notion of the West and the East) speak loudly to the fact that this philosophy is one that thrives on coordinated action of nationalism, on conquest and being civilized. No, because it sanctifies competitive autopoiesis against concrete calls for care and mutual concern. It is a new tradition, but a tradition all the same: the tradition of walking under a flag of wanting to dominate the world (remember what I said above about sex). A Western domination that has in fact already materialized through acceptance of Western philosophy and science as what needs to guide action (if only in order to retain some autonomy in one’s indigenous tradition). And it is only this philosophy of human hybris that can (and is) destroying this world.

The simple solution to this sad situation is to just take the other horn of the bifurcation. To go for tradition and sympathetic sympoiesis. But if it is the bifurcation that is the problem - and it is the problem - then taking the other horn is just accepting Western bullishness. No, what is needed is to stay with the trouble. The trouble with philosophy is that it wants to be either/or, but it needs to be both/and. Autopoiesis and sympoiesis. Listening to the elders and opening up to the new ways of the young. Action and contemplation. This trouble will stay with every philosophy, just like the sickness unto death will stay with the human animal. The point of the post is to start taking philosophy with a grain of sugar - remember that only sports can save the world! - in not expecting it to come up with final answers or with definitive truths. There is room enough for tens of billions of restless humans without creating a rush to prove a point - and to whom would humanity have to prove a point? So let’s take it slow and enjoy our smart phones smartly and give Gaia her time to respond in kind. All will be well if we pay respect to what enables us to be restless and use that restlessness to care for others instead of getting caught up in just trying to come out on top. The only urgency in the climate is to realize that we have to stop impatiently rushing into actionable solutions. The reality is we should do like our elders: take it slow, enjoy the game, cook slowly, sleep when we are tired, make room for the animal inside us. Because it is not only Gaia we are inflaming, we’re all running a mental fever and, at the rate we are going, we will by war finish ourselves well before Gaia can.

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You will see there is some (for me uncharacteristic) dryness to this post. This is necessary to counteract the nausea I feel in writing this and that I fear you will also feel in reading it. Why do we need the idea of having been born autistic anyway? We need it to resist the historical injustice of seeing autism as a socially determined bad outcome. For instance to resist ideas like refrigerator mothers who supposedly were so cold in bringing us up that autistics like me were condemned to have icy personalities. We could have become something better and the fact we didn’t is someone’s fault. Although we believe that we left this type of psychoanalytic narrative behind us, the truth is that when we behave autistically we just taste the instinctive blame directed at us. Why don’t we just try to do better? Who brought us up to behave badly in the presence of others? It is these questions that we internalize or these questions that we try to avoid. Sometimes to protect our mothers and sometimes to protect ourselves, because we want to do it right and, at the very least, we want to be able to spend our days without the constant sword of neuro-normative judgment hanging above our heads. And so we mask, or we simply avoid judgmental others. People who consider themselves normal will maybe find this a very crude summary, but the honest truth is you normies really tend to be so very rude.

Enter genes. It is no coincidence we latch onto them like we narrowly escaped the sinking of the Titanic and suddenly see a lifeboat nearby. Now we can say that we were born that way, that our brain has just been wired differently. Try blaming that. It never was us. In the end it’s society (including for some, maybe rightly, their parents) that was to blame for not accepting us the way we really are: for not accepting our true selves. And so we only narrowly escape social determinism to risk running headlong into mere genetic determinism. How’s that for a Catch-22? It is no coincidence that my autism career started with an article investigating how to escape this double bind. The classical attempt at escape is that of neurodiversity scholars who firmly keep their eyes on a judgmental and therefore entirely blamable neuro-normative society. Said sad society created autism as if it pulled a rabbit out of its hat of madness. Exit genes. It is social construction all the way down. I do not doubt for a minute that this effort of theirs is laudable and well intentioned. Unfortunately though, it misses the point of the reality of autistic experience. It just creates an additional double bind. Either it is genes, and blame is shifted to at best pity and at worst eugenic eradication or it is entirely social and we spend our autistic lives nagging about society denying us a chance of just being our true selves.

Every either/or generates another double bind until our bodies are so contorted that we can barely breathe, let alone come up with a constructive answer on how to simply move on with our lives. The logic at work behind all this double binding is the idea that either autism is real in a biological way or one has to oppose the biological reality of autism. The last sentence is just one example of the binary thinking permeating ad nauseam all the discussions about the lived autistic experience. To oppose a biological autistic/non-autistic binary is after all simply just setting up a new binary between biological and social views of autism. And, meanwhile, the autistic experience, which is one of very real gut feelings in response to really judgmental modern societies, stays frustratingly untouched. It is as if there is a heated discussion going on between very well paid emergency doctors about the right treatment options for a patient which is slowly but surely suffocating. The previous sentence is for many already a faux pas, as it seems to associate autism with patienthood. Well, autism is not a bad outcome, but any analysis of it that downplays the actual everyday challenges that autistics need to navigate is for sure simply a bad analysis. Here is my constructive proposal: let’s leave the either/or’s, the really’s and true selves behind us and face that autism just is double binds all the way down.

Autism then is the repeated experience of being called out for not behaving the way modern societies expect us to behave. Autism is the knot you feel in your stomach when you need to behave in ways that don’t come as natural to you as they come to most others. Autism is the energy your body needs to spend to live up to societal expectations set up for bodies which swim like a fish in those very same expectations. Only if we look at autism this way, we look at it in any real sense because only in this way we are radically centering the autistic reality, and not merely entertaining an academic discussion. The problem is not that we have academic discussions on the right way to theorize autism. The problem is that we merely have such a discussion, as if the autistic reality is somehow coincidental to what autism really is. Take, for instance, the discussion on autistic flourishing as a discussion about autistics swimming like a fish in some society which is yet to be built. I’m all for imagining better futures. Still, what is the benefit for anybody living in this society to merely point to how society should be? Does it make the knot in my stomach go away when I know I will need to face - again - the harsh judgment of a peer, a teacher or somebody interviewing me for a job? The fact is that my experience is rife with not flourishing. Theorizing on autism-blind societies fully ignores this very brute fact.

I know this sounds harsh, certainly for those autistics who grew up in a society in which they were privileged enough to at least dream about fully flourishing (‘those autistics’ are certainly most of the officially diagnosed autistics; we are simultaneously also but a tiny fraction of the actual autistic community, as getting officially diagnosed is mostly reserved for those born into privilege of some sort). It sounds harsh because being part of a minority is harsh and the escape into theories of flourishing is just that: sulky escapism. Accepting the harshness that underlies our realization that we are autistic, on the other hand, is a precondition for starting the struggle for social justice for autistics and against notions of autistic inferiority/pathology. Only through accepting that harshness can we follow Patricia Hill Collins’ counsel of leaving the either/or track and its double binds upon double binds and opting for a both/and strategy. A both/and strategy firmly rooted both in the everyday struggle of autistic people (diagnosed or as of yet not seen) and in the best scientific theories, to wit: theories that have left behind the binary thinking of social/genetic determinism. My ‘autistic knots’ theory is constructed out of both the careful study of autistic lived experience and findings in biology demonstrating all experience moulds the biology - the body - of the living creature having such experience.

And, obviously, the so-moulded biology in turn moulds any following experience of a living, in this case autistic, creature. Experience is bodily and the body is experiential And autistic bodies are those bodies that have the repeated experience of being called out for their body having a tendency to behave contrary to societal expectation. It’s as if time threads a needle through the material tissue of our bodies twisting and turning such bodies into a form that is uniquely and concretely us. Societal expectations shape our selves as necessarily as those selves are biological through and through. The double binds we face - the Catch-22’s of wanting to behave and live up to expectations and knowing that we cannot live up to our own wanting to live up to these expectations - is what makes us uniquely us. And if we are not a bad outcome then it is a bad analysis to suggest the world and us would be better if we would not have such an autistic knot weaved through our body. It would be a bad analysis to suggest something went wrong when our gut directed our brain to avoid certain situations, or when our stress reaction shaped our DNA to express certain genes rather than others, or when our brain latched onto a specific, intense interest in order to steady our nerves and our bowels. Both/and thinking is concrete and time-bound. It allows us to let ourselves be instead of wishing it all washed out.

To wish the harshness washed away, to wish to untie the autistic knot or to avoid the autistic knots to be tied in the first place, is ultimately just another - more intellectual - way to wish us away. This is why it is liberating to come to terms with the fact that we became autistic. Sure, there is some genetic predisposition to be sensitive to certain societal expectations, but that is not what makes us us. What makes us us is the specific trajectory of our development and wishing this away is just another - more complex - version of wishing ourselves away. If shit happened, the solution is not to forever focus on having it unhappened, as the arrow of time is irreversible. If shit happened the only way forward is to try to repair it by accepting who we are and accommodating this novel way of being as a possibility for imagining a better future. I know full well this is nauseatingly counter-intuitive, but this is only because we are raised to not stay with the trouble and to always try to find ideal solutions. And the fact of our matter is that in trying to untie the knots - say, trying to definitively unmask to show a supposedly ideal true self - we just go through yet another either/or contortionist act that further tenses us up to the point of breakage. Repair only comes through both facing what made us us and turning this reality check into something productive, something that allows us more, not less, becoming.

It might well be that reading this you feel I wound up waxing poetic about the details of what this autistic knot precisely is. I do not disagree. I am, after all, autistic, and I like my precision (if you read my book or browse my Google Scholar, you’ll come to appreciate this joke). The thing is that if you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack then the first thing to do is to make damned sure you’re first of all looking in the right haystack. And the fact of the matter is that we are not. We are having academic fist fights over how to search the wrong haystack. That is annoying and autistic people are annoyed (anyway, I am annoyed) as we want to move on with life as it is, not life as it should be (whether it is the eugenic version or the utopian future version). I hope I’ll find the energy to be more precise about my needle-searching in the right haystack; the haystack in which autism is really seen as a developmental diversity, i.e. as an outcome of a specific kind of becoming. The haystack also where there are many diversities of this kind, many neurodivergent knots where a certain tendency of becoming faces off with a certain way in which development has been normalized in modern society (modern society being a society that has become overly dependent on normalizing all becoming because it has become convinced that caring for diversity is, well, bad for the bottom-line).

We’ll see whether I find energy for this. It is not too important as good needle-searching is a collective and open-ended business (it’s haystacks all the way down ;). What is important is I make explicit who helped me identify the right haystack. I named Patricia Hill Collins above. I have referred implicitly to many feminist and postcolonial philosophers throughout this post. What I learned from those minorities is they don’t want to look away from the social injustice that was done to them. No, they radically center the concrete injustice done to them, mostly in the name of abstract ideals of how the world and the humans in it should be. They do this to propose ways of ameliorating their concrete situations. The last thing they want to do is to erase their history, the history they carry in their bodies and that still endangers their bodies. They are both proud of who they became and will not forget the painfulness of that becoming (in having been oppressed and still being wronged). And, although my knotty idea was formed in the context of neurodiversity research, the real lesson I have taken about what haystack to search is theirs and only theirs. Imagining a better future needs to be firmly rooted in seeing who is wronged here and now. Repair is not about forgetting the damage done; it’s about creating new possibilities of life in the wastelands created by history.

I firmly believe we are all knotty in myriad diverse ways. I can only reclaim my autistic knot. I am otherwise fully privileged. The world does not stop me based on how I look or with whom I have sex with, or whether people suspect my genitals are misaligned with my appearance or my pronouns. It did stop me based on my excessive insistence on sameness. This is surely a trifle compared to other minorities (or other autistics happening not to be white cis male middle class), but it is my trifle and I insist on putting it to the best possible ameliorative use: to try to have it help me travel to other worlds so I can learn a new thing or two. It will not help me to disappear the knots in my stomach, nor to straighten my knotty autistic brain. It may help me articulate why wanting either/or debates always lead to more death and destruction.

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The original title of this post was going to read: “Only sports can save this world!”. Then I realized that most of the not so very many readers of my posts would, most probably, not even start reading a post so entitled. At least this is how I think of you: as a set of intellectuals who, if faced with an upsurge in fascism, believe that the resistance can’t allow for something as futile as (watching, reading about, so on) sports. You will, or so I think, rather turn to debating the news and/or to activism. Anything but that trivial, emotional pastime in which one enjoys a game that consists of people running around or jumping up and down in order to basically try to beat the other side. I do apologize if I mischaracterize you. I apologize too if I don’t mischaracterize you. I am sure also in the latter case you do not begrudge me my pastimes, whether it is my solitaire or a nightly check of the stats of our 2 Belgian NBA players (go Toumani!, go Ajay!, please remember their names). You will certainly not begrudge me any of that if I explain you that my intense interest in sports stems from my father being a sports journalist - and me missing him, a lot, and compensating for it by avidly watching the game I knew he was covering. It is however not enough for you to not begrudge me my pastime. I need you to understand my stronger claim that: “Only sports can save this world!”.

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Let me explain why you really need to understand that only sports can save the world. Before I do that, however, I will first ramble on for about one 16-line paragraph why I use a picture of Niels Bohr in this post. This paragraph-long ramble does, by the way, serve a purpose in this post, but you are mine now and this purpose only reveals itself towards the end of it. Niels’ picture isn’t here for the obvious reason that his ideas are important to me and should be important to you (for that, see this post). No, he is here because Sander once made an AI image morphing my image with this one of Bohr. Its result looked eerily close to an old image of my fathers. Why not use this resulting AI image here itself? Two reasons. One: my father liked his privacy. It is about the game. Not about the individuals playing it. He hated idolizing athletes. He was close enough to them to know how this led to self-idolization and turned them into spoilsports. If it becomes too serious then the sports experience itself is spoiled. That experience is an experience that needs to remain playful. It requires passion, in the full knowledge that almost anything about sports is a matter of chance: the rules, the talent, who happens to be playing on which side, the sheer luck of who happens to be injured or not at the time of the game, … Sports is serious during the game. Afterwards we have a beer.

So much for keeping my ramble to one paragraph. Reason two: I don’t use AI, because each time one uses it a tree dies. Worse: one risks to contribute to the imminent death of some concrete body. This death will probably make it neither to the news nor to our social media feeds because of our collective addiction to that angry old white man (and this is also his real function: to divert us from the factual injustices of the world). I also do not use it because I do not want to plug myself into it if I can help it (increasingly, I cannot help it, as Google does not cease to remind me of). It is not that I have a qualm with AI as new technology. Far from it, technology is cool. I just refuse to plug myself into the current brute-force-AI which that angry old man loves for the obvious reason it allows world-domination. If AI is to become smarter, it will only achieve this by doing its thing with less resources. There’s no play for world-domination in that though, but, not to worry, the world hates being dominated so tech billionaires will go bust. As we speak people are already developing AI-as-a-technology-of-resistance - and it is this AI that will carry the day and make our world brighter. Such AI develops in the shadows, with minimal resources and maximally playful attitudes. Just like the next sports stars are developing somewhere where passion and talent happen to find each other.

This is exactly why only sports can save this world. We need play to survive, just as we need food. Some of us need it in the form of philosophy or art. Some of us are not that intellectual and need it in another form. A play for (world-)domination negates play as it subordinates play to survival. Sports captures the essence of play and captures it in a way that is accessible to all. And that’s what we need: a way to compete that cannot be reduced to domination. A way to jointly have fun without negating others to have fun. Sure, philosophy and art can do this too. Just like knitting or cooking can do it. These are, however, not things in which everybody can join, and sports is such a thing. Maybe some of you now feel like they cannot be forced to join in the emotion which is sports. Or worse: maybe some of you feel like everybody should join in the emotion of art and philosophy. The latter, though, is just like saying everybody should be into cooking or knitting or, say, patriotism. The former, on the other hand, is just denying that you are moved by sports. And denying you are moved by sports is eerily close to the arrogance of thinking yourself as beyond the need for play. If you think you are beyond this need for play, you risk to want a world where a specific type of individual - a smart one, or a strong one, … - dominates the world; and this is exactly what we want to get over!

I hear you thinking ‘Does sports not divide people rather than unite them?’. There’s no denying that the emotions of supporters are sometimes expressed in violent ways. The problem here, however, is a problem of a lack of sportsmanship. The problem is to put survival before play; to make winning more important than competing. A prerequisite of the emotion of sports is that the adversary can share the same emotions. This is why sportsmanship requires fair play, abhors unfair advantage and structures itself in ways that allow all sides to have a fair shot at becoming the best. There is no doubt fascism tries to abuse sports, like that angry old white man tries to now. The thing is they can never succeed. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are required for the shared emotions of sports. Everybody needs a shot at competing. Sports squares the circle of identification with common roots and universal all-inclusive participation. This was the function of the Olympics for the Greeks, and in a de facto globalized world it is what can bring all of us together as having the common root of being human beings. It allows us to have our roots and not be fixated on one or another essence in them. Look at Toumani and Ajay, perfectly representative of Belgium precisely in the diversity of their roots. This is how we celebrate diversity, by identifying regardless of having some shared essence.

It is quite probable that I did not convince many of you. I believe some of you will say changing the world is a serious matter and sports is simply not serious enough. At the same time you might be allergic to those who take sports too seriously - and therefore are (made) blind to the seriousness of the injustice in the world. Maybe you want us to focus on the various serious issues created by that angry old white man. I understand. Still, isn’t a large part of the problem that we are forced to focus on serious issues? That we are led to believe that the issues are urgent and that solutions need to be nigh? Why shouldn’t we celebrate together as a global community the diversity inherent in us? If sports will save the world, it’s precisely because it’s both serious enough for us to come together as a global and diverse community and not serious enough to make it the hill we want to die on. The last I want to do is to downplay global injustice. I, however, do firmly believe that to live is to play and to play is to love each other. Sure, it seems we will have to join the resistance, and that is a serious matter. There is however no need to become as gloomy as that man - constantly talking about threats and opportunities. We can resist and be merry, these are perfectly complementary things to do. We resist, for example, by globally celebrating in sports the diversity that they want us to deny.

(Whilst writing this post, my good friend Ruediger Kortmann died. Finally finishing it I realize I will not have the opportunity to discuss this with him. He is already missed. I miss him. Let’s all be more like him in not wanting everybody to be alike.)

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It all started in my puberty. The sickly kid I was (the sickly autistic kid I was as I learnt only later on) perfected an inner dialogue that bifurcated a desire to stay at home and a desire to prove I could do as others did. We cooperated intensively: stay-at-home me calculated what could go wrong if prove-myself me went out. Prove-myself me did all sort of experiments in going out that stay-at-home me used to perfect his calculations. A kind of consensus emerged: a bit more experimentation, a bit more calculation, and finally off we went. It was an energy-consuming way to be, but this little dream where we just lived a normal life took shape, thanks in large part to the love granted us by an outsider, someone really else, who loved us for who we were - even if it was consuming a lot of her energy as well. She was an outsider not only to me, but also an outsider full stop, I guess that helped us, in the many senses ‘us’ can take at this point of this story. I wonder whether this ‘being two minds’ condition of mine is not a very human one. I wondered as much already when my pubescent us came up with a philosophy of mind wherein each self in fact consisted out of a parliamentary of selves which convened to decide - before any action to be taken - which action to take, or not to take.

Even if everyone has this lived experience of phenomenologically feeling like they are two minds, I do not at all believe everyone should wonder like I wonder. My better half (in the sense not of the other half of my self but in the sense of my someone else) is not a big fan of wondering this way. Maybe indeed, some things are the way they are, so in wondering about them one just piles energy-consumption on energy-consumption. So maybe I am atypical not in being two minds, but only in being two minds who wonder what it is like to be like that? I vividly remember sitting, as an 18-year old, in the attic window of my student room. I do not remember a lot about the student house that had a tea room at its ground floor. What I remember is disfigured by the many nightmares I had about that place. The house had something like 71 floors and, at least, 3 distinct stair cases. People lived there who made noise but never made it out to the staircase. I could scream all I want, the only effect was an increase in both floors and staircases. I sat in my attic window a lot so as to at least feel at the border of these nightmares and I looked down at the street at the cars passing. And we said to ourselves, if the 4th car is red then …

But here we are, still wondering. Not counting cars but counting letters to create ideal conditions for a consensus decision. Not feeling very well. Trying to make sense of it. Attempting to steer clear from the ‘then …’. Wondering whether being two minds is an essential element of the human condition, and, if so, if it is helpful to wonder why this is so. The former question, I think, deserves a resounding “yes”. The reason being that all of us need to navigate (at least but let’s leave that complication for later) two worlds. One world is the world of a prove-myself me, the world that is. The other world is the world of a stay-at-home me, the world that should be if your collective you were really to flourish fluently. For this last idea I am indebted to the trans philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher, who herself builds on Maria Lugones’ idea of world-traveling. Whilst I don’t fully agree with Bettcher because she does not really retain the traveling part of world-traveling, I think she gets the essential part of being two minds fully right. There is an overworld of all kinds of social norms to which the prove-myself me tries to conform, and there is an underworld of alternative practices to which the stay-at-home me tries to aspire. Those two worlds being incompatible, your two minds …

I wanted to say: your two minds clash, but that would be simply incorrect, as they are a cooperating collective. Better is to say that they are driven apart and that in keeping them aligned, you spend energy proportional to the difference between the over- and your underworld. I am well aware that I risk appropriating the pains of being trans by using Bettcher’s idea as underpinning of something universal in the human condition. It is not, however, that in pointing to a universal pain I relativize a specific “being two minds” pain. I’m not saying that there is some kind of unique underworld, rather what I’m saying is that the two-world/two mind phenomenon is unique to each one of us. If everybody would see this, everybody would respect the unique challenge, the diversity of knots woven by navigating one’s unique set of worlds, that each individual faces. In fact the problem is that some of us believe a specific overworld is the best world there is. Mostly these are people who can easily prove themselves in that overworld. People like me: cis, white, male. They don’t see the need to spend energy to travel worlds and they arrogantly perceive others who do see this need as somehow dysfunctional. They want happiness for all of us - as long as it is their kind of happiness that all of us seek.

Back to:: Does it help to wonder about this? And I think it helps, if your prove-myself me gets ahead of itself and starts to arrogantly perceive others, including even stay-at-home me. In that case it not only helps, it is a requirement to get out of the rut that is arrogance. Only by seeing yourself as not fully fitting to an overworld do you have the chance of even seeing other underworlds, including your own. Only in seeing them is it possible to admit the possibility of stay-at-home me coming out of the closet, to use a dangerously suggestive phrase in this context. And let’s face it: it was always stay-at-home me that both of us wanted could go out, without a need of proving ourself. This is the closest I can come to the for me senseless idea of unmasking. Senseless, because it assumes we can be one mind, solid and unitary, as if prove-myself me is superfluous, a mere product of a dark overworld force forcing everyone of us to only have one mind, solid and unitary. We cannot, not at least if we want to be open to love someone else. If we want that, we have to accept the fact that our underworlds are different and that we can only meet in an overworld that already is before we even were. Masking is the play that prove-myself me adds in order to get to the possibility of world-traveling.

The problem really is, Lugones has it spot on, that we live in a colonial overworld that forbids us to play. We have been raised to believe in overworlds where our fragmented self magically joins in a single mind always in flow. Colonialism ends in a colonization of the mind by the ideal of the tyrannical rule of single-mindedness. The result is that, if the mind is no longer allowed to be fragmented, the overworlds get fragmented and that a completely natural internal struggle turns into a continuous external fight as we see taking over the globe. Gone is the right to aspire to aspects of one’s underworld to surface in an overworld. Stay-at-home me just needs to stay at home. Prove-myself me just needs to prove himself without the little dream of finding someone else, someone with whom to break down conventions and/or start new ones. Colonialism, of course, is a doomed and damning project. It stands no chance of succeeding. As long as there are living things they will have at least two minds to play with, and therefore to resist this pressure for stagnation and eradicating diversity. I’m not so sure what I wanted to say when I started this but it sure feels like I did play around enough to accept what is deemed unacceptable: I am, like all of us are, freaks of nature.

Now, before I start, I have to say that there are, obviously, cases of being epistemically excluded when feeling so is entirely valid. Such cases make for the history of minority struggle, and such struggle is necessarily destructive of the prejudices of the majority. Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon are just two examples - James Baldwin a third - of the necessity to fight for epistemic inclusion. My autistic kid (as I still feel it in my bones) would be simply right to throw a temper tantrum if people were denying him the right to weigh in on decisions affecting his future because he supposedly lacked affect. The necessity of struggle in epistemic matters - in being taken seriously - in itself explains the volcanic forces of the emotion of moral outrage. The point of this post then is that one can have the feeling, and be misguided in applying the accompanying rage. Every bit as much as one can really feel hungry, and be misguided in gobbling up sugar-rich foodstuff. If you are drawn into this post by its title, you will understand at the end of it that it is only apt that your thirsty curiosity for its promise will only be quenched at its very end (this post being very far from attempting to be epistemically sugar-rich).

So let me begin. Take an incel. He really feels not taken seriously. He finds himself in a patriarchal society qualifying for all the perks that his patriarchal examples display, but he has access to none of them. I am not mocking him. He did not choose to grow up trying to live up to these patriarchal examples, being denied any of their perks. He did not choose to remain celibate. He just lives in a time where culture has formed his brain to predict he will come out on top, and where he simultaneously is bitten by the reality of being mocked. Maybe you find I am too charitable with him. Is it so hard for him to see how patriarchal culture has oppressed, and still oppresses, women? So hard to adapt his expectations to this new reality - where women are epistemically included so as to, for instance, be able to say ‘no’, and be understood to simply mean ‘no’? Well, you see, the truth is that it is hard to adapt. It is also necessary, of course, but it being necessary doesn’t in and of itself make it less hard. At best it makes it inevitable. I say ‘at best’ since history shows that ethical regression is not only possible - it is far from uncommon. So common in fact that we are, now, in the midst of such a regression.

It is hard to adapt because, against popular opinion, survival is a two-faced monster, a bit like the Roman god Janus - an early figure for what feminism now calls ‘liminality’. Survival is two-faced because it requires both being adapted to how things are, but, at the same time, being open to how things will be. It requires accurately predicting how you need to behave now given the reigning cultural prejudices, and exploring behavior that, if normalized, would allow you in the future to act as fully empowered agent (say as one who in saying ‘no’ is simply understood as meaning ‘no’). Sander will hopefully come back here soon to explain the latter face of survival as that of maximum entropy and the former face of it as that of minimum free energy (actually, he came eerily close to this in this older post). For the purpose of the present post I can simply point to the fact of epistemic exclusion. Anyone epistemically excluded needs to survive in a world that is hostile to their survival and simultaneously aware that their chances of survival would be better in a world that takes seriously their epistemic input - just read W.E.B. Du Bois on double consciousness.

But: lifting some oppressed minority’s epistemic exclusion changes how things are for anybody not being a part of that oppressed minority group. Survival becomes liminal, also for the - hitherto dominant - majority that needs to navigate two worlds: one that promises him as an individual maximum empowerment, and one that requires him to increase the empowerment of individuals of other genders. The conflict is real and he can be forgiven for feeling epistemically excluded as, indeed, when he cries out: ‘What about me?’, he at best gets an eye roll signaling him to: ‘Just deal with it already!’. And, of course, he should deal with it, but this does not mean we cannot validate his feeling of powerless rage in having to navigate something that, for eons, was not necessary to be navigated for somebody like him. Now, did you notice something odd in this para? Survival went from being two-faced to something that turns individuals against each other! Suddenly we find ourselves in a clash of civilizations where one gender’s gain is the other gender’s loss. The invalidity of an incel’s feeling lies precisely in this turn to viewing survival as a zero-sum game between people like him , i.e. us, and them.

I did say before that this post was going to be uncharacteristically straightforward for me. I did not say it was going to be simplistic. In fact, it is a simplification of survival into a clash of civilizations that creates the mess we are in. This simplification makes it seem to the incel (as in fact to those merely eye-rolling him into compliance, sorry for this unpopular opinion) as if other people’s empowerment can only come at the cost of their disempowerment. Here, I have to make the (far from binary) distinction between those benefiting from the status quo and those who don’t. Imagine that you’re an incel who lives a precarious life as a son of working class parents being thrown in an out of employment, in and out of healthcare, in and out of unemployment benefits, … by the capitalist powers that be. You spend your young life enraged by the injustice that your choices are between a rock and a hard place. You hear the simplistic narrative that the predicament you’re in is the result of a culture war where gender activists keep you in the purgatory of precariousness. You take the clickbait. Then imagine you are a son of privileged parents and it is you who created this ragebait to protect your privilege.

And there you have it: it is perfectly possible to validate feeling epistemically excluded - in this case from our, literally poor, incel - and say his moral outrage is misdirected. In this case to changes in culture that have nothing at all to do with why he feels that way. As said, it’s hard to adapt and harder still in a fast changing world. Liminality is a border you have to cross to create more possibility, more over-all empowerment (i.e. more entropy), but it will also make you feel vulnerable, disoriented and insecure. You grasp at straws to give you a little security, trust; comfort (i.e. less energy expenditure). Take again the incel: you can roll your eyes all you want, just telling him to not believe in culture war fairy tales deepens his epistemic commitment to them. His insecurity is too high to - to use a key phrase in our conspiracy paper - entertain a long epistemic arc. Instead he gobbles up the sugar-rich fairy tale, actively trying to search evidence for it. Every bit like a person that feels too hungry and insecure to search for the best foodstuff - and that gets trapped in the abundant and cheap availability of sugar-rich foodstuff that immediately satisfies their hunger.

The problem in the latter case is not that they do not eat. Just like the incel’s problem is not that they are epistemically inactive. No, the problem is that he is, epistemically, too active as is clear from the enormous body of evidence he will cite in defense of his fairy tale thought. Surely he should direct his rage to those in power, those who shape our society to toss his parents in and out of a job, in and out of healthcare, in and out of employment benefits. In the analogy of this post’s title: he shouldn’t be tempted by sugar-rich foodstuff. But he is and that is a fact nobody can deny as long as this sugar-rich foodstuff is epistemically cheaper to find. This is, in a sense, the timeless story of fascism: to create sugar-rich narratives (epistemes) that are easy for vulnerable people to latch onto. Make no mistake: these are created precisely to prey on the people who were relatively privileged and now see that privilege being threatened by new societal change. The trick is to direct the rage of feeling epistemically excluded away from the powers that be and onto minorities who have always been oppressed but who create a successful counter narrative increasing the over-all supply of epistemic agency.

So, what is new if this is the timeless story of fascism? Well, each fascism has its own specific history, and the current brand is created by those capitalizing on a faster and faster (un)merry-go-round. The truth is they create conditions in which insecurity has become endemic to an ever greater portion of the world’s population. So endemic that a pre-revolutionary vibe threatening the powers that be is omnipresent. People are so epistemically hungry for alternative ways of making sense of this senseless insensitive environment that they risk to eat everything and explode in a fiery rage against what’s presented as inevitable: current day capitalism. In comes the brilliant idea of Ozempic in allowing an unhealthy environment to stay untouched but making it an individual’s problem to deal with it. Better still: you can make money on the individual’s need for a drug that is only necessary because you cannot stop making money on people’s inborn mechanism of feeling hungry. This, my friends, is the story of (tech) billionaires: thrive on the insecurity created by capitalism in supplying technologies that keep feelings of epistemic exclusion directed to sugar-rich narratives incriminating those oppressed.

Divide et impera. Maybe Trump himself is just another sugar-rich narrative for those who funded his electoral campaign? It keeps us busy whilst nothing really changes. It keeps us invested in zero sum games on steroids (including infinite doomscrolling) in which war is the only solution. (And here they go investing in military enterprises that exploit this sense of war as the only solution!) Of course this solution isn’t sustainable. In the end it diminishes the over-all epistemic agency by making soldiers of each and every one of us. If maximizing entropy is progress (and it is, but Sander needs to make that argument) then what is happening now is definitely regress. And maybe you read this thinking that probably this is our final regression. Maybe you got here because of a doomscrolling session in which you looked for how this world could end long before climate change will end it. Then I just ask you to see yourself as feeling epistemically excluded - and think about where to direct your rage. Will you direct it to making the system change to one that has a truly universal basic income - or will you let yourself be drawn into the zero sum game that it is time for specific rich people to suffer?

Let me circle back to my optimism. It is true that fascism has prevailed many times in the past. It is equally true that it proved itself to be unsustainable in the long run. And as imperfect as the change has been afterwards, as easily as fascism’s pain is forgotten and so on, minorities have created more overall epistemic agency in the process. They have shown survival is in fact two-faced and liminal (hence not a zero sum game). I’m not naïve, the ante has been upped meanwhile. We no longer need nuclear apocalypse in order for life to go extinct on earth. We just need to continue on the present path of environmental suffocation creating more and more uncertainty, and therefore tying us up more and more in short epistemic arcs, requiring ever stronger epistemic Ozempic as will be gleefully administered by tech billionaires optimizing their AI to keep us in epistemic rabbitholes (and not optimizing it for energy because as always speed - pun intended - is of the essence). Still, as long as there are counter narratives, there’s hope. It is the stuff of my optimism to believe counter narratives have the best survival odds. There would have been no life at all if the selfish zero sum gamete narrative were true.

And the way counter narratives happen to succeed is by way of technology. This is the beauty of the maximum entropy idea: they can weaponize their binaries all they want, in the end a non-binary escapes and transforms us into people that want to play more, and fight less. Because this is what is really going at present: the survival of those who call themselves the strong as against those whom they call the weak. And as survival is two-faced the strong don’t stand a chance of winning. Unfortunately, the odds are that they succeed in ruining it for every (living) body. But, hey, if you got this far in a long - meandering - post, the odds for survival - and therefore change - are a bit better again.

Now you can think I am an Ebenezer Scrooge all you like, the fact is that as an autistic kid I kind of did feel for that man. Not the miserly aspect of him, but the man upset at all the hassle of yearly traditions of warmth and fuzziness. I hated such special days in which one had to feel happy like I hate anything partly composed of a verb phrase that carries a conjugation of ‘have to’, specifically if almost all other human beings seem to not feel like they have to. If you think I am being a killjoy I counsel you not to read on. Just think to yourself: “How unlucky JoB is to have this invisible disease of autism in a way that stops him from enjoying Xmas.” And I will grant you autism does not always lead to this unfortunate symptom. My kids for instance after growing up with a father that banned Xmas trees, carols and in fact ‘The Warmest Week’ have taken a liking to Xmas trees. And other autistics I am sure - blessed be their souls which I do not deny them - find the yearly ritual as riveting as flapping their hands in excitement.

Back to Scrooge, the miserly aspect of him. Imagine you are European in the sense of having forefathers born in a land that originated Xmas. Imagine that the world burns in the aftermath of your forefathers scorching the earth anywhere they encountered a bunch of non-Europeans. Imagine that the world burns because your forefathers have capitalized the spoils they extorted from non-Europeans and that is now our privilege which we feel a need to protect at all cost. Imagine further that European-Americans are name-calling European-Europeans to be X - X being a word your forefathers used to criminalize people with an invisible ‘disease’ that meant they were too sensitive to just scorch other people’s lands. And imagine finally that a new consensus grows that Europe needs to become the fortress of civilization again having a military-industrial that dwarfs its education investment. I put to you that when this imagination isn’t too far off from current reality then this is truly ‘The Coldest Week’ on record.

So there it is: all this ticks me off not just because I am an autistic that does not see a point in ‘having to’ be happy at regular collective moments of merriment. It ticks me off because it is downright hypocritical. Not mainly because those suffering invisible ‘diseases’ do not get a lot of warmth out of this collective moment of merriment given it is precisely such collective moments that make them go cold inside (either because they cannot partake in it or they do partake in it making invisible that what would be seen by others as killing their joy). No, mainly because we voted and will vote for this fortress Europe and we will rationalize that vote saying: now the US has gone over to the dark side, it is up to us to protect civilization. No thought goes to earth-scorching or capitalizing spoils or protecting privilege. No, by god we will show we are not X’es and to the dark side we return. Small wonder we want our antidote needle to our cold heart tokenizing invisible ‘diseases’, simultaneously further desensitizing our world.

I’m sure at this point I can just hear the people not having read this killjoy post going “Ho-Ho-Ho, we don’t vote that way” and putting their hands up in the air as if saying “It is not our fault, why do you deny us our merriment, we feel sad as well about all of this misery, you know”. To which I retort: “What I am saying is that it is MY fault. My fault for carrying on and not drawing the line.” It is my fault for writing this post on a rather invisible corner of the internet instead of yelling that we Europeans are miserly misery-creating and misery-prolonging uncivilized brats that just do not want to grow out of our sugar addiction which is thinking the sun is shining out of our asses. There, I needed to write something quickly - and I did. And now I feel guilty for all those fine people who carry no individual guilt and are really entitled to their merriment as all of us - humans and non-humans alike - really are. Then again, few of them will read this post. Those who do may realize it comes from a truly warm feeling in truly cold times.

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Philosophers will find this conundrum far too crudely put. All kinds of qualifications would need to be considered. The truth is such conundra haunted me in adolescence. Full disclosure, being by now old enough to be a grandfather, in my childhood I could not even conceive of gay marriage, let alone accept it. Fuller disclosure still: when, in my adolescence, I could conceive of it, I at first vehemently opposed it. And here’s the thing: I am the morally better person for changing my mind, as an adult now fully and unequivocally accepting gay marriage.

As a late philosophy convert, I too want to impress with conundra like: why would my grandmother deserve a free pass on this whilst I do not? Rest assured my grandmother would simply solve my conundrum by giving her free pass to me. This just shows that: a) she was (all in all) a good person and b) she was not (at all) a philosopher. Indeed, for a philosopher there are no such things as free passes. Except, maybe, for philosophers like Aristotle (on slavery), Kant (on both racism and sexism) and the list goes on.

Seen from this side of the Enlightenment our grandmothers just tend to be on the bad side of history and professional philosophers (of the Enlightened Western traditions, I need to qualify, on their behalf) on its good side. Because that is progress! Too bad for grandmothers whose social contract was not yet as sophisticated as ours (in the West, Enlightened philosophers will - mostly silently - add). Maybe I am not yet enough of a philosopher but I refuse to disclaim my adolescent self. I simply can’t be hypocritical about needing to change my mind on such serious matters. That would be morally bad. Nor will I accept any harshness towards our grandmothers for not having been able to change their minds in (their) time.

This brings me back to philosophers who could have been great great grandfathers of my grandmother, and lifetime professional philosophers of the Western tradition who give them a free pass. This is a subtle problem also, since as grandfathers they deserve our love, but, as philosophers, they simply can’t claim a free pass. The subtlety of this problem stands in contrast to the crude assertions of many a professional philosopher in all Western traditions (henceforth: “Euro-canonical” philosophers): philosophically we are to disregard the backwardness of Aristotle, Kant et al. but, as grandfathers, we should condemn them for those very same opinions, being, as my grandmother, on the bad side of history.

Charles Mills argued the latter simply is a ‘Get out of jail free card’ for Enlightenment philosophy. It gets to boast about timeless, universal truths - in short: the supremacy - of their own thinking and Enlightened culture without needing to own up in any way to the wrongs of their own history and tradition. Colonization, sexism, racism and so on are just temporary, provincial calculation errors on something timelessly as well as universally true. The problem is that, as philosophers, they had and have only one job: to think critically. They fail(ed) miserably in it by uncritically accepting their privilege born from exploitation, patriarchy and whiteness as a literally God given merit1.

This, their professional failure, is what I try to bring into focus by contrasting it with the non-failure of grandmothers and grandfathers of not living up to an anachronistic standard they simply could not have been aware of. It’s far too easy for Euro-canonical philosophers to claim progress at their expense (and, more importantly, at the expense of anybody who is not versed in the European philosophical canon). This adds to their material privilege the arrogance of being born into moral progress. This is a clear case of wishful thinking fortifying prejudices by progressively finding excuses for why you have to take no action about others’ misery. I contend this is the regress - the threat of moral degradation - that is part and parcel of the Western idea(l) of (moral) progress. It is not very far from a conspiracy theory in believing that we need to be forever vigilant about protecting our progress from their external threat.

Euro-canonical philosophers are like the priest in the Parable of the Good Samaritan: they ignore the misery of the unfortunate stranger because they’re a nuisance to them. Ignoring the beaten down stranger and ignoring the ideas of those who are miserably oppressed come down to the same thing. In both cases you want to keep (it) clean and still occupy the moral high ground. In the case of the philosophers they shrug off the philosophy of minorities because what they say is a nuisance to the canonical ideas in which they enshrine their privilege (yes, the Enlightened canon is a QAnonic shrine). I used the image of our unconditionally loving grandmothers as being Good Samaritans through and true to their grandchildren2 to cannonball this idea of moral progress: that one is a morally better person in the here and now by the mere virtue of existing here and now. Gadamer said morality is to be judged in context. Such context is - for instance - the priest, philosopher or scientist holding on to their privilege in the face of misery. Davidson declared the principle of charity as the one timeless and universal constant in communication. If our grandmothers talked openly and honestly, they are morally good even if they lacked some morally excellent concepts like gay marriage.

What I will try to do in this book is to talk openly and honestly, admitting that I am a morally better person for changing my mind after listening to the outcry of those gay people wanting to marry. And paying homage to the grandmothers of now who accept their queer grandchildren who finally mustered the courage to come out of the closet. Because I do believe in moral progress. Moral progress in a sense of becoming aware of differences by listening to what the oppressed other tries to tell us against societal odds. Philosophers need to add precision to language such that it allows the different to articulate their differences showing none of these differences make a difference as to being human. Progress is a progressive zooming in that allows us to become better persons by becoming less deaf to the voices of others. This is where Euro-canonical philosophy fails us: in defining human beings more and more narrowly as those who have won out. If we don’t address philosophy’s failure in rigidly denoting humans as essentially this or that, we risk the regress that, inter alia, makes our grandchildren a generation that simply cannot be grandparents anymore. Luckily philosophy’s failure can be always easily corrected simply listening to those who are not readily admitted in philosophy’s canon. The only ‘right side of history’ is the side of cultural optimism where grandparents accept their grandchildren no matter how much their conduct is challenging the common in common sense. They put their action where their ear is3.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments).

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Or should we trust our inner drive the way Rousseau had it? Was he right to hold that it is society corrupting us? Should we distrust civilization, for being civilized alienates us from what is pure in our original self? My truth is that going back to nature frightens me, because I know for sure I stand no chance to survive in that hell. Nature is for the healthy. For happy campers whose fathers didn’t look with melancholic eyes at their children praying that they did not inherit that melancholy from him (quod non!). Holding on to nature is a thin disguise for holding on to the privilege of the ability to survive in (even) less civilized circumstances.

The problem of both Rousseau and Hobbes is a problem at the origin of the modern, self centered, West which sees the individual self as the centre of the universe, and forgets the support of daring mothers and mooing daddies in - also literally - getting that individual off the ground. Cutting ourselves from this nurturing origin started the quest for natural origins untainted by the dreary drab of dabbling around in diapers under constant supervision. We see ourselves as grown-ups and forget our growing up (therefore remaining stuck in what are puerile fantasies of constant competition, but more on that later). The Western scientific minds say that particulars infect the apple of our universal knowledge but my mother knew (as I know as a father) that they fertilize the tree of knowledge. It is Descartes who turned the tree of knowledge upside down: ethics is not an offshoot of physics but it is - and was - the other way around: love comes before knowledge. If we are ‘sick animals’2, at least our illness is such that it is also its only cure (ponder that for a little while, I won’t come back to it later).

How could we have forgotten that, contra Hobbes, love comes before knowledge and that, contra Rousseau, at the same time knowledge is what enhances love? Refusing intimacy between love and knowledge - between is and ought - arguably is central to the European identity that firmly believes knowledge and love ought to be eternally divorced. There is no room for lovey-dovey mooing or melancholic madness to interfere with the harsh, pristine masculinity of Eurocentric epistemology. In memory of my daring mommy and my mooing daddy, this has to be denounced as the Eurocentric error. Unfortunately, solving that error will take generations. Luckily, exposing it will need just one, somewhat long, paragraph.

For Aristotle, science grows out of rationality that in turn grows out of logos which is based on an open Socratic dialogue in a society of free individuals who can face up to themselves in a mirror. We are perfectible, even if never altogether perfect. What we know is incomplete, with as pleasant side effect that there always remains something to learn. What the Greeks didn’t, however, make explicit was that logos involved at least two people in a world independent from both (Aristotle moo’d with his mommy too). This failure got inextricably entangled with the Judeo-Christian Manichean myth of the original sin: you are born corrupted so you can live a sickness unto death trying to deliver yourself to the heavenly gates of your God (conveniently represented on this Earth by the rich and mighty who are hiding behind earthly gates of power, pomp and circumstance, but I shan’t digress in what is going to be a, somewhat long, paragraph). The rest, as we Westerners are not prepared to say, is history. It allowed Descartes to invent an ego and forget its father, building the scientific bridge between the I and the cosmos which simply cannot be. Do not, by the way, think of Western atheism as the evolution out of superstition. Think of Western atheism as a self-protecting evolution of this error, entrenching the anti-moo’ing meme of meritocracy.

I fear this paragraph, in retrospect, needs to have the length of a book to do justice to the injustice created by the supremacy implicit in the separation of the white ivory of detached science from the ebony emotionality of childish attachment. Luckily this is just a preface so I can hasten to provisionally conclude that colonialism is of a piece with the very idea of a separation between is and ought. Liberation of knowledge, as Frantz Fanon post-colonially had it, presupposes liberation of people (no coincidence the Greeks were bothered by a lot of things, slavery notably not being one of them). The problem is not that we cannot get from an is to an ought, and at best are left standing - although still with that noose around our necks. The brute fact is that we only get from an ought to an is. Hobbes was enough of a naturalist to still appreciate this brute fact literarily creating a deus ex machina to rescue an us in the face of the disconnected I. His us was, however, infused by a puerile personal view that only the fittest survive. This allowed Rousseau to proclaim the “Northern European” to reign, in his view which is being held ever more widely in the West: rightfully, supreme3.

The truth is both beautiful and merciful. Survival is not what befalls those surviving a harsh competition. They die lonely and helpless. Survival befalls the trustworthy, those that moo. Those in whom the weak can trust to rise up against a monolithic ideal of level-headedness. There is no design flaw (or no original sin, if we refer to the original story of our origin). Our origin lies just in continually mending injustices by attaching ourselves to the plight of the oppressed. Truth is continually on the move, not toward some abstract ideal, but away from very concrete wrongs. As Lugones had it: becoming is the life of our parties, being is merely what we drag there tired after a week of work.

You might be shocked to learn that we are stuck in this tension. Just like when I tried - three times - to explain to my kids against rigid pubescent opposition that revolution is not the solution to clear - once and for all - the woes of the world, only to ask myself whether my compliance wasn’t just chickening out to the invisible hand of capitalism. There always is an alternative. We just have to think of new ones over and over again. Determinism sucks. Indeterminacy rules. I trust my eyes but fear the freezing over of our language in clean cut categories.

In this book, I will address you, lovingly, as my children; knowing I still have much to learn, but I hope to show you the power of ‘moo’.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

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Why are these our darkest of times? Simply because, another 40 years on, there is still no moral change. Which brings me to something else that Baldwin wrote in that very preface, a couple of pages on: “The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.”

It is the bottomless pit of irrelevance, then, that we (and this we stands for white) face, after dehumanizing always other others over and over again until this dehumanization became our second nature. And we transform to merely factual walls standing, unwell, between those not yet irrelevant and a real change ending their inhuman conditions.

Still Baldwin, now in the essay of this book entitled ‘Stranger in the Village’: “Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have - however unconsciously - inherited.” (they being we, of course)

I let that stand there as its own paragraph for a while and invite you to reread it. I am - by the way - here unequivocally (therefore self-reflexively) talking to the white man. If we pride ourself to have turned this earth into a global village, how can we at the same time remain unconscious about the wherefrom of our inherited privilege?

Back to Baldwin to describe the moment in which we (!) ponder this question: “This is a very charged and difficult moment, for there is a great deal of will power involved in the white man’s naïveté.” In this moment we protest: for haven’t we done many a good deed also? And haven’t we lifted the world’s over-all level of welfare up?

With all our willpower we measure the world’s progress. We see the ugly and the bad - it really does make us sad - but we also stubbornly maintain that in the end the good is what prevails. The good by our measure, in the global village we built, where we live in the prime real estate that we protect with walls. Walls around walls.

We are wall-builders first and foremost, and the most formidable wall we’ve built is in our own minds. Tearing down that wall is the only source of real change. It is a risk we still do not take. Instead, just like with rising sea levels, we react by building a thicker wall still; a superficial change that allows us to ignore the present disasters for others.

On this wall we build in ourselves, Baldwin says this: “For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality.” It, for instance, makes us prone to believe in conspiracy theories. Anything to stay away from the real insight that we are the actual conspirators, building walls to protect our prime estate.

And, another genocide on, we may even mistake another superficial change for a real one. Having pressured our governments to take action, we might think we can remain in our innocence. Believing things can be non-violently made all right. Believing that we can still occupy the moral high ground just like we occupy the prime real estate.

Baldwin baldly: “(..) anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself in a monster.” What will we do when we are fully armed up again? Will we suddenly learn from history, or will we create more darkness, death and destruction? Will we still have our walls up, or finally let our guard down?

If you hope - like I do - that history will not repeat itself, then it is incumbent upon us (the incumbents, after all) to make a moral change. Only that really: to accept blame, to make preparations towards reparations, to act as humans ashamed that their privilege was built on another’s dehumanization. In short: to listen to what ‘the others’ say.

My hopes for this are not too high. I know my impatience, and my in-built supremacy in thinking in terms of efficient solutions. If I take some pain, I at least want it to be in the service of effective measures. And I know it is easy and convenient in all of this do-gooding to forget that what was needed was a real - a moral - change.

This will be the hardest of all: to relinquish control of our own destinies, and believe -really, morally (i.e. with conviction), believe - that it is for the best to do the right thing even if the right thing starts with merely admitting you did wrong. Not your ancestors, or bad apples, or crazies but you (hence also: I). And that you have to make it right.

A last quote (still the same essay): “Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous - dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.” Easy to hide behind danger (easier even than hiding behind pure evil). Our walls were precisely built to keep danger out.

So, there it is: we have to let danger in. That is the real change. Call me naïve. Better it is then being irrelevant, and dead inside. Will chaos ensue? Maybe. Still, in owning up to our part in these darkest of times, we might finally bring some light. And the ask is not for self-flagellation, but for things like a climate fund paid for by a wealth tax.

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My story starts with the small. Remember the days when you were first allowed to run an errand for your parents. How fun it was to be out in the open. Yes, with a goal; but, free to roam. Free to walk on the other sidewalk - and to pick a pattern in the tiles that you absolutely needed to follow. If you can remember this then you remember how to play (and if you cannot, try again, as remembering such things is absolutely crucial for your mental health which is nothing else but playfulness). Play is the thing happening between getting somewhere and the how you get there. Play is also sometimes getting somewhere else and figuring out how the hell you got there. And when you remember all this then you remember wondering whether this tiny piece of ashes was alive when it seemed to move playfully up up up in the air. As the tiny piece of ashes moves up up up your mind wanders here and there and you find yourself thinking about this or that to suddenly stop at an insight. That insight may well be that you left the kettle on, and you need to hurry from keeping it to boil over. Or it may be that you owe somebody an apology because, in wanting to keep them straight, you interrupted their play. You did not let them be, as you just let yourself be, watching this tiny piece of ashes going up up up jumping left or right intermittently dropping in mid air to resume its up up up.

Or the insight may be that chance has something to do with play, and that it is what is common to the child running its errand, a tiny piece of ashes going up up up, and you-the-adult-reader watching the ashes (or reading this post, which, I hope, feels, by now, more or less the same as watching the tiny piece of ashes going up up up). The chance of being pushed this way or pulled that way by things even tinier it meets on its errant way. Its goal being up in being propelled by the fire underneath but its Brownian path being indetermined in meeting all kinds of invisible but undeniable resistances which move in myriad ways. Entropy is to energy as spices are to bland food. The entropy of mini-molecules in a cell is what makes macro-molecules form that can harness energy making the cell, well: a cell. And up up up the structure goes when cells coagulate and form a body that flourishes and dies and returns to ashes that, when heated, create the conditions for ever more complex bodies to evolve. Just as the goal of running errands is to get something somebody else wanted, the goal of evolution is ever more complex structures. Just as the fun in running errands is to err whilst running them, the fun in evolution is this haphazard diversity of structures visited whilst evolving toward more and more complexity (biodiversity being the pinnacle of evolutionary complexity).

In short: the goal is necessary to, but does not determine the fun. But also: without the fun nothing really happens. Our tiny piece of ashes just shoots up in the air in a direct line as if it were an ideally free - an absolutely unbound - electron. There is nothing to wonder over. Worse: there is nobody to wonder as for somebody - some cellular body - to evolve would have required entropy, the push and pull implied in encountering, and therefore becoming bound to, something else (which, in my case, for instance happens to be Els, whom I love). The physics of ideal trajectories, trajectories without frictions, is a physics that is simply dead wrong. It’s a physics where everything goes straight to its goal without erring because it doesn’t really meet anything else. At most it bounces off something, fracturing its straight line without retaining any memories whatever of what it met. Following this physics of idealization we meet the error of determination: the. power of quantification ends at the quantum where chance re-asserts itself again. The infinitesimally small behaves much like we behave as small children: outwardly it looks like a random walk jumping haphazardly from one tile to the other as if without purpose or goal. It errs but still achieves to run the errand as if it is both goal-governed and driven by pure chance, the universe at rock bottom being their interplay.

The pitfall of this complex superstructure that is a human being - being caught up in a more complex superstructure of culture still - is to think that it is the goal of evolution and that what happens to be its culture should reign supreme. It is a pitfall specifically realized in modern times where everything needs to be reduced to straight lines (if not already in an ideal society then to plot the straight line towards such an ideal, without any margin for error). So we try to go unerringly from an ideal of unbound electrons to that of unbound individuals, forgetting what straightness has wrought in the past. For sure, there is a goal but it is a goal in the background, a direction of allowing diversity, of allowing better room for error. Surely also, diversity can only be expressed as erring from what are perceived as straight lines in complex structures. Straight and queer are like yin and yang: they are not mystical forces but names for naming the fact that what is real is never unbound or self-sufficient. What is real is always bound up - entangled - with what it has met, with its history of non-ideal encounters creating heat allowing evolution to go up up up. Not at all to a final destination but further and further away from this relatively monolithic monotony of the periodic table by which we straighten out the underlying mess of chance encounters of the quantum kind.

It is, then, impossible to err alone. Or to err in a universe which is perfectly in balance being as crystalline as no crystal ever could be. No, to be is to be caught up, meshed or threaded, with others in a structure that both defines what is straight and allows error to generate new structures. Every error can be the start of a new pattern of weaving, to avoid error always means to start dying. It means this because the structure becomes a monolith collapsing under its own weight. To control everything - to eliminate chance - is to set oneself apart and to see the world as threatening, instead of as inviting play. Shit becomes heavy as hell and before you know it you have lost all of your playfulness and have gained a world of foes. This was a wandering plea for keeping an open mind, open to encountering insights that contradict strongly held convictions not to fall into new dogma but to remember that the random walk on which the universe is based is a random walk that also - and still - goes on in our head. Every experience is a new knot in our brain and as long as we are child-like enough to learn new structures we remain alive to new experiences. In the end, we are such a tiny piece of ashes. We can imagine ourselves being watched so let us not disappoint and try to go up up up inspiring what may be the crucial insight of needing to apologize for wanting everything so straight.

(This post is inspired by a variety of thinkers. Not only Foucault and Canguilhem but, I name them and you can ask me in comments for details, - Kauffman, Bohr, Jefferies, Rovelli, Boltzmann, Prigogine, De Jaegher and Van de Cruys.)

(The image of this post is reused from this blog post by Robin)

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I am growing old in the 21st century where everything is wishy-washy. Or as the young say nowadays: forget male and female, we are all non-binary now. It took me a bad white while to cancel all that 20th century indoctrination. Shame on me. Luckily, I have kids (three: my favorite odd number) who taught me my wishy-washiness was A-OK. I don’t need to ‘Man Up!’ for them (a horrible phrase catching the 20th century by its barest of balls). Slowly but surely I realized that the good guys are bad and the bad kind of good, and that fathers who cannot mother invariably end up smothering their kids. Keep them well kept in a 20th century where boys will be boys HaHa-laughing their ass off with anything trans-gendering. “HaHa laughing, is that already a crime?”, such dads tell the boys who will need to become anything but wishy-washy woke-up boys. I myself played a boys’ game once, a wee li’l boy, the toy pistol made a hole in my head. My dad mothered me with kisses, no rough games for this son anymore! Weak wishy-washy Jo - with his unisex name - got his parents compliments for the fair looks their 17-year old daughter possessed. Maybe this would not have hit home so hard in the 21st century?

So here’s me. Hear me. The 20th century is waging war against the 21st and it will, if necessary, go as far as the 21st century simply not coming to term: blow up the planet, to remain the last wholesome century, forever the pinnacle of capitalist civilization, to be revisited eternally in the same way it constantly revisits the Greco-Roman era. The Abendland turned into the abendera, the evening of all era’s when humankinds’ final twilight set in2. Which brings me, seamfully, to Aristotle. As a good Greek citizen his philosophy was as embodied as Greek everyday life was. No soul without body: and so perspiration as conditio sine qua non of animation; all that good life3 stuff. What lives on, though, is only the disembodied thought of The Excluded Middle: the cornerstone of 20th century logic by which something either is X or isn’t X (and thereby leaving no room for wishy-washy non-binaries like a ‘gender X’). Zoon logon echon so loses all its power of differentiation and becomes a magic spell of power that categorically divides rational from non-rational animal in neat binary rows ready for computation (mostly, of course, division)4. All the wonder about animals making sounds intelligible to each other is lost together with the analogue world of more or less. Leading to a divisionary achievement crowned by Descartes bridging the originless - non-original - rationality of ‘our’ humanity directly to God. That crimes against humanity presuppose this type of eternal, timeless definition of what it is to be human goes without saying; the action of the 20th century West will forever speak louder than any of its presumptuous words.

Clearly this 20th century logic flies in the face of the logic as is developed in the 20th century. It talks about essential features as if family resemblance necessarily required sharing germ-lines. It has a blind faith in digital divisions as if Gödel did not divide until conquering the myth of digital provability. So on, so forth. But all this fleshless opposition, remember the rot within, bears no resemblance to the bullish resistance offered by the losers of the 20th century. Women, gays, disabled, mentally divergent, … and all kinds of queer intersections thereof, marched (and rolled) actively through the streets denouncing the inhumanity of being regarded as - somehow - less than fully human5. Civilized as the West presumed itself to be, all of this marching (and rolling) was reappropriated: the sign of the West’s good cop liberal inclusive magnanimity to be offset against the barbaric bad cop practices of all badlands to the East and South. So the 20th century logic continues to exclude the middle creating its own infrahuman resistance that, in order not to be futile, necessarily needs superhuman strength not to be assimilated to the ever-transforming (inescapably capitalist) hivemind.

And with this we come black to footnote 2 (the lesson being that you cannot unmask a text if you skip all the footnotes; shorter that: Black to square one): I give the floor to Frantz Fanon, black skinned, unmasking the white mind: “Let’s leave this Europe behind that doesn’t stop talking about humanity whilst slaughtering it wherever it goes, in every corner of their own streets, in every corner of the world.” Addressing the Wretched of the Earth, he denounces the ultimate prejudice of the 20th century West: that it destroys prejudice rather than being built on it. If we talk about European identity, we need to talk about an identity of colonizing peoples, and of whitewashing the weak, the poor, the different so they identify against the other. That this is the weakest sense of an us is brought home by Maria Lugones, winner of the Fanon lifetime achievement award, who strives to Include the Middle where colour, queerness, Latino culture, femininity and even masculinity non-binarily intersect. Because the strong us is an inclusive us when opposites attract, instead of continuously fighting some universal non zero sum game of survival within an eternal, timeless clash of civilizations.

When is the key word of optimism here. The 21st century children know they will all be the wretched of the Earth if they allow 20th century culture to wretch the Earth. So, the digital generation cannot but rediscover the analogue world of nuance; waking up to the truth that coming out on top negates coming to fruition; that excluding the middle is tantamount to an exclusion of their future. This book is about the concrete when and where of discovery of a non-binary world and how this provokes the only reaction the 20th century culture knows: a struggle of life and death about any dead wood it sees floating around: freedom to insult, Western/White supremacy, athletes having feelings, the privilege of not taxing privilege, an individual freedom to infect the collective, und kein Ende. The 21st century will win when it ends this 20th century recurrence of attente or attentat - resisting every new binary bind, to avoid desiring new strong men and hence to rightfully arrive in a truly non-binary era of beauty.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

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Let me ease back now I have your attention. Yes, I wanted to put your emotions in play but I believe reason is on the side of my argument as well2. This book has two complementary arguments: a rational scientific one and a playful emotional one. They are two sides of the same coin as all those not yet living too long (and if you made it here then all chances are that your youth is not yet fully extinguished ;-) will come to appreciate. Let’s get to it. First, there is the argument from entropy. Second, there is the argument for still having projects in life.

Life is a far from equilibrium state. Strange things therefore happen in life. It can, for instance, so happen that life evolves to the point of creating human babies who are arguably the most far from equilibrium form of life that we know. They need to be sustained by a human culture so elaborately intricate as to defeat the imagination in always having to remain imaginative. It is a widely held misbelief that order is incompatible with chaos. Ilya Prigogine, one of a few Nobel laureates from the chaotic country of Belgium, set that record straight3 by showing it is through order that more possibilities are created. More possibilities means more entropy, more ways to create new order, thus more chaos, more potential for far from equilibrium states, and, hence (QED) more life. It really is as simple as that. Babies evolved because they are a new order capable of generating yet newer orders. Such is the tale of evolution (a tale as told by Darwin inspiring Boltzmann inspiring Bohr inspiring Prigogine to see time as a telltale sign of unification-in-diversity of the human and the exact sciences). Babies grow up, for instance, challenging binaries in their parents’ culture so creating a new non-binary4 world order full of novel and imaginative life forms unimaginable before. Setting the record straight, therefore, is to accept life as being - necessarily, unavoidably, essentially - queer.

The energy of the sun then powers eternal becoming on earth. That is as long as we make room for that becoming. And a single organism has only so much becoming in it because it necessarily needs to power itself to create enough equilibrium for its self to articulate its life projects5. In doing so, the individual organism is, in the metaphor of Simondon, always a bit like a crystal, in growing outward from an initial perturbation. However, in growing it also increasingly rigidifies in one direction of growth. A single organism like you can maybe grow indefinitely (limited only by energy it can extract from its environment), it definitely loses its ability to change course, and to adopt new projects in life. Ultimately it just repeats its own order, over and over again ad a type of nauseam filling the bitterness of too old an age. Until finally the only life project remaining is that of maintaining one’s own biological life, sucking all life, or potential thereof, from its environment.

And there you have it, maybe without you having noticed it: the playful and emotional argument. Indeed, there is nothing more serious than merely staying alive. The project of merely staying alive doesn’t even count as a life project if you follow - as we must in such things - the ethicist Bernard Williams. Logic then has it that if one stops having potential of becoming someone else, one just statically is6. And merely being works against entropy, wastes energy and necessarily spoils the party for anyone else (yes, this book will show climate change is a problem caused (not simply aggravated) by longevity!7).

It is a sign of our modern culture that life has become sacred after it desecrated all else. It is a sign of this culture outliving its potential that it has become static, continuously putting resources in living as long as possible. Everything we do, from morning to night, we do in the shadow of preventing untimely death. Everything we do is dead. It is unsayable to say what I am trying to say. It will be said that just my saying it is proof that I don’t mean it. But I do mean it. I mean that the practice of ubasute - as told by Akira Kurosowa in the Ballad of Narayama - should be more than a legend. It should be our best practice not to outstay our welcome. It will also be said I am trying to impose an age limit on living, committing a crime of advocating senicide, or worse: that of peer pressuring the elderly into suicide. And I am, but not in any senile straightforwardly old age-based way. The problem anyway is not setting up new norms to control others but one of getting rid of normalizing longevity.

Because, why all live a same (sense of) time? Why all serve maximum time? Why all work to retire instead of retiring to do some real work? This book is about a choice between levity and longevity, bracketing the ong so you can use it constructively toward your younger peers (look up: ong/urban dictionary). 

This book is about a modern day taboo: living long and not prospering. The fact of aging is as solid as the second law of thermodynamics. Age decreases the ability to shed the skin of old projects, upsetting the order in chaos. The longer one lives the more our choices crystallize out, making the mind too hard to change its heart. “Humus, not Homo”, as Haraway has it.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

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The ethicists among you will probably bluster at this crude use of consequentialist reasoning, but this book shows that this dilemma can only come up in such a purely calculating universe as is constructed by those believing in the purity of (their own) intentions. Latour is right: only the Moderns see themselves as the pinnacle of a blind evolution whose existence as a force that can reckon with them is passionately denied. My generation is the generation that thinks it ensures the future for all generations to come and simultaneously, therefore, views itself as the last generation. Nietzsche may have been crazy, but he was right in laughing crazily at the thought that some people would be crazy enough to believe that they are the last generation, the generation with a calling to protect their contribution to civilization3.

Back to the weapon’s effectiveness. Let’s look at the facts. First, we built our power on being white, looking for convenient reasons to exploit everybody looking - well - non-white. Second, we denied this exploitation ever happened with a vengeance (aren’t we ourselves all of a peasant or working class descent?), attributing (our/the) progress to the mere merit of our unmerry ways. Third, we ridiculed the possibility of perpetuum mobiles while firmly affirming there is no end to this our merry-go-round going round faster and faster (burning fuels and burning-ourselves-out in ways that fuel our sense of entitlement further still). Fourth, in outrunning everybody we previously exploited, we tipped the balance of the climate more than half a century ago (only to deny we did so until a couple of years ago, immediately denying everybody we exploited the chance to catch up to us ever). Fifth - and most dramatically - we use our longer (albeit mostly miserably outstressed) lives to vote such that our white privilege remains untaxed thus taxing everybody (and indeed every thing) else well beyond their breaking level. Ah this finest of our Western tools: democracy. To have one’s earth and eat it too! This is what the weapon, call it the cosmopolitical trolley weapon, corrects so as to have democracy and eat privilege too.

Maybe you think this is crass4 but these are the facts. As Stengers - when coining the word cosmopolitical - says: limiting the facts to what can be experimentally recreated is the scientific equivalent to fast food. Accepting this version of the factual is similar to the belief that any meal necessarily is a McMeal. The only menu from which proper science can - on this view - order is that of neo-Darwinistic narratives combined with (equally neo-)liberal capitalism. The result is a sugar high in which the ecomodernistic calculations compete in order to solve the mess that the previous sugar high created. “There Is No Alternative!”, these doom boomers shout, but to hurry headlong into the adoption of more experimentally validated technological innovation (or shorter: Nuke! Us! Up!). Complexities of science such as the indeterminacy at the foundation of their favorite science of physics, or of mathematics such as computational intractability of nonlinear systems with Earth as both the primordial and the ultimate example, are to be brushed aside5 as if they are just provisional results to be overcome by our ascent to quasi-Godlike knowledge. It simply doesn’t matter if scientists demonstrate Earth-as-we-live-it is going to pieces because such a thing is simply not on the menu! 

This book links white old power voting to protect that power with viewing science as apolitical such that science can never meddle with that power. In splitting politics and science (is and ought, facts and values, emotion and reason, .…) only the politics of the West counts. Any further evolution is stopped as it threatens that hegemony. Too bad for science if it challenges the Western status quo because that science is political and therefore it cannot be science. Too bad for politics exposing science or technology as serving white power as that kind of politics is unscientific and therefore inadmissible in a true democracy of rational, autonomous subjects like ourselves. Such is the Catch-22 of the belief that the sky is no limit for us ¨galactically thinking¨people (think Star Wars instead of Star Trek, think Elon instead of Greta). 

This is the idea behind cosmopolitical is: the cosmos is political. The idea we should, therefore can, control cosmological forces is a declaration of war against a cosmos of which - as Bohr held based on his quantum physics - we always remain part of. If our scientific questions are only inspired by the notion of control, the answers we get are idealized abstractions that fit our old religious dreams of being god-like immaterial beings able to transcend the concrete reality of non-ideal processes of friction. The perpetuum mobile of continuous growth where the sky is not even our limit defies the notion that we are in time. By not accepting we are made of time, we get educated as capitalist sociopaths for which everything is just a resource at our disposal. As we see in the everyday fact of global heating, only being able to imagine one possible future is an offense towards entropy. Ultimately this lack of imagination will lead entropy to burning us up, both literally and figuratively as climate change and burn-out are just complementary phenomena of splitting the cosmological atom of control and care. 

This book is about contemplating a weapon such that we - old straight white people - don’t provoke the cosmos into designing it. Clinging to our Western order leads to a new chaos allowing entropy to start trying again, this time without us.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

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Let me explain: whenever you think ‘enough is said’, more needs to be said, because the one thing one cannot do is to remain silent if one must speak out against injustice. This go around may not be merry but there is no going around the fact that we go around. At every occasion we think we got it solved, we find ourselves again in a situation of having to solve something else. I think Nietzsche’s fascination with eternal recurrence is just this: to know that we eternally come face to face again with our hubris of thinking we solved it once and for all the last time. Better to be gay about it and really try to scientifically solve this so we’ll find something really different to solve the next time we go around. Alas, the problem with science is that it has become serious in trying to find the solution. As it seems tantalizingly close, we believe we just need to push through, solving more puzzles so everything finally fits. And round we go like the bee hitting the window in a slightly different place after having recoiled from its previous failed attempt at taking the shortest path to the light. Maybe you will first find this depressing but this book will show it is truly exhilarating: let’s just find us a different window to bounce off of before we get in a fit realizing nothing finally fits.

I now ignore those ignoring footnotes and merrily proceed with incommensurability of Western and indigenous world views as was footnoted2. One footnote further you might question whether incommensurability really hits the brief given the playful gaiety common to all cultures. And the only thing wrong with your question would be the word really (which is an obnoxious word if ever there was, it sucks the play right out of anything, really). Let us stay with this question. How can two world views be incompatible and simultaneously have something - necessarily playful - in common? Cordova is right of course. Western thought is about isolating things and laying them out in front of us - so we can take some distance allowing ourselves a detached dia-logos about them. This singular focus on the purification of abstract concepts in pursuit of singling out an individual cannot be farther removed from feeling related in the concrete process of, say, having a sit-down listening to the stories of one’s elders about wolves or what have you (the Western ear in hearing this sentence automatically re-splits it in the binary opposites of rationality and spirituality respectively).

Now one can definitely say Westerners are wont to speak, like snakes, with split tongues, but our hearing is growing, through our long tradition of purification, pitch perfect. There is, as Cordova (thanks to her bilingual fluency) can point out, an incommensurability between the rational and the spiritual3. The one, when driven to its current extremes, leads to a split tongue. The other, when driven to its ancient extremes, leads to everybody being joined at their hips. Both, however, are unreal; mere mathematical idealizations, limit cases, of what the world would be like if it, counterfactually, were one-sided, unequivocally determined as either a matter of rabbits or a procession of ducks. The proof of this is that the current and the ancient are continuously fused whether by Cordova splitting in the way of the West the indigenous and the rest, or by extreme right snakes appealing to the ‘spirit of individualism’ to move ‘as one’ against ‘the other’. Fission and fusion, fusion and fission, both a matter of bombs and the process of life. The choice is ours as the outcome is undetermined and, as for me (but it is not just up to me), I c h o o s e  life (which my autocorrect correctly wanted to correct to love4).

Incommensurability, then, is not a mere historical fact, as Kuhn wanted to have it. It is the way things are at any moment in time and for any slice of space. Whatever we look at can be seen as either purely duck or rabbit, either purely particle or wave, either individually or relationally, but it can never be exhausted or reduced to the one or the other as, to know it, we need to remain seeing it as a combination of both. This is what Bohr hinted at with his idea of complementarity (and why Feyerabend insisted on the continuous omnipresence of incommensurability): the cosmos is political5. It constantly presents us with choice. That is just the way it is: not turtles but choice all the way down. Or, equivalently, it is feeling all the way up, as Whitehead had it. 

And even here, between Whitehead and Bohr we find incommensurability because whilst feeling is what (literally) joins us, it takes separate individuals to feel at all (as we all know by trying, and rarely succeeding, in figuring out what the other really feels, or even trying to figure out what we as individuals feel ourselves). But, whether we start from what joins us, or from the atom-like nature of our nature, they agree on the basic fact the cosmos leaves the future (partially) undetermined - and our choice consequently meaningful. It is Haraway who realized that we better stay with this trouble: that reality is a Cyborg, part mechanistic determination and part creative vitalism. It is our choice to develop - in choosing - the best possible feeling for leaving as many futures open, avoiding fascist futures closing most avenues of existence just because they appear different.

This will not be an easy book bringing together the politics of Haraway and Bohr’s physics. It will be a worthwhile book if it succeeds in showing life is both trust ànd trouble, culture is tradition ànd transgression; an entanglement of collective history ànd individual innovation.

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it are the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

As interesting as this is for understanding our human psyche, here we consider what ramifications such a view has for any psyche, specifically the possibility of an artificial psyche. There’s a lot of talk these days of the advent of strong AI (also known as AGI or Artificial General Intelligence). As Sander mentioned in his earlier post, much of this talk starts from the idea of the orthogonality thesis which holds that improvement in cognition (matters of effact if you will) is the crucial element in achieving AGI, and that motivation (matters of affect if you will) can be considered independently. In this view, an AGI emerges based on sheer cognitive power - and whether or not that AGI destroys us is up to the strength of the external ethical guardrails we’ve implemented in the AI when we originally programmed it.

Well, if for any psyche value and cognition (or affect and effact, to reiterate my murky letterplay above) are entangled, then what Sander has outlined is in fact orthogonal to this orthogonality thesis. This means our AGI conceptions, with their attendant fears and hopes, need a radical reappraisal. This is what I set out to to do in this post. My conclusion is that the current AI fears are unwarranted hallucinations of the powers that be in technology, but that other fears are warranted. Fears that seem inherent in our own non-artificial intelligence which, as we far too often forget, historically led us down rabbit holes of instrumental reason which Horkheimer and Adorno diagnosed as being the - all too human - root of fascism.

This post only sketches an argument, and it does so based on two science fiction-like thought experiments. That is OK, many philosophers created whole cognitive science traditions in this very way. So here goes: a match-up between The Terminator’s scary Skynet and my very own Carey the caring care robot. The real argument is left to Sander and, maybe, my future self (keep posted as we keep posting about this and many other things!).

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In the extreme-right corner we find Skynet, an intelligence as daunting as amorphous, playing zero-sum games with humanity. Zero-sum games are macho games so it’s him or us. Skynet is an AGI conforming to the orthogonality thesis: it cognizes, a little like Google’s AlphaZero, as many games as are possible, so as to choose its next move in a way that maximizes its chance of winning. There is zero emotion involved as it is, just, a matter of calculating. This doesn’t mean it does not deal with uncertainty. There are too many possible games to play them all so even Skynet needs to take gambles. This is done via variations on the, very aptly named, Monte Carlo tree search. So, Skynet does try to reduce uncertainty. It just doesn’t do this to reach any intermediate satisfaction like a human agent does. For instance, it will not avoid moves that feel (aesthetically or ethically) bad. In fact its whole next move in The Terminator consists in eliminating a little boy in whichever way possible. That’s why it is such a formidable opponent: it is creative in exploring those moves we, for reasons of our petty human sentiments, feel are necessarily wrong or false (because ugly or bad). It isn’t epistemically entangled in the way we humans are as its environment is reduced to whatever can play against it, and thereby challenges the superiority of its zero-sum game playing intelligence.

It isn’t too difficult to see how Skynet could have evolved. Just imagine human beings who sincerely believe in the reductio ad competitiveness of Darwin (it is an empirical question if they happen to be concentrated in Silicon Valley, but I believe the answer is yes). They will create AI as a move in their game to outplay their competitors, and believe that being more willing to sacrifice others to their god of survival potentially allows them to outwit them (this is a lot of them’s in one sentence but surely they are as amorphous as Skynet is!). This does not mean they have no emotions. It just means they see a value in epistemically disentangling themselves from such petty proximate concerns as, to take the most critical example, climate justice. Still, having emotions, they do fear being outcompeted by their AI creations, mainly because these creations will no longer have to epistemically disentangle themselves from proximate emotions at all. And out of this fear comes the idea of at least trying to program into AI some respect for human values. The stuff of ‘never kill humans no matter what’ is such an ethical guardrail: it should force the AI to remain pet to its inventor (or given such an inventor may well see himself as a pars pro toto - to remain a pet to the human race). Alas, and here we’re back to the orthogonality thesis, why would an AI not experiment with removing such guardrails in an attempt at becoming a better player? Like, you know, tech gurus once in a while remove the epistemic entanglement of fairly treating the other sex in order to get their FaceBook started.

That answer will perennially remain ambiguous in this thought experiment as the AI (this is the orthogonality thesis) really knows of no why. Which is why The Terminator spawns two AI’s: Skynet and Ahnold (this is a weakness in The Terminator’s storyline creating the story’s strength, thereby being a foretelling of the current post). Skynet’s why ultimately is a view of intelligence as something eminently abstract & amorphous: outcompeting an other for one’s own survival. It just is instrumental rationality (a cold fusion of fact and effect) embodied. I put the Skynet case here as strongly as possible, and it is a case for pure instrumental reason. For some it is a case of doom: a universe where there is no place for any lesser creatures. For others it is a case of the ultimate effective altruism boom: a universe where choices will finally become as rational as mathematically possible (and therefore also where a lesser creature has no chance of survival, except as the lifegiver/slave to a higher form of life). A strong case on paper but nevertheless a case that seems to necessarily come with Ahnold as a kind of glitch on an otherwise impeccably healthy-because-sterile horizon.

Enter, in the moderately-left corner, Carey the care robot. Carey is built from the ground up based on a non-zero sum game: the idea that we have to care for others as others have cared for us. You cannot get farther from the orthogonality thesis than this, as care is nothing else than epistemic entanglement. Indeed, to care is to feel concerned and to think twice about, for instance, how our parents can feel meaningful even if they are not impeccably healthy (an horizon that concerns us all in the sense that we don’t want to live out our lives in a merely sterile environment that preserves our lives but doesn’t challenge us epistemically). Enter Carey (and they will enter as we care too much not to design them in the first place) as a way to increase care without decreasing self-care (and, in fact, as Sander reminds me, self-Carey is just around the corner in any ‘AI assistant’). Whatever Carey will be, it will not be about pure matter of fact since it literally materializes out of our matters of concern. It will be trained based on recognizing if we despair or when we enjoy ourselves and this training will be it, because Carey - as other current AIs - isn’t merely programmed but in a deep sense learns. It will be what it learns. It will be care. It will also play games. It will also reduce uncertainty in order to make the best move. And it will, ultimately (and here comes Carey’s scary part), also have to take gambles like we do. Not to outcompete the others for survival but to get to the best possible care by trial and error, which includes figuring out whether to prioritize self-care or care for others (there is here a very deep complementarity between zero and non-zero sum games which I’ll leave unaddressed even if it really is a matter of my concern).

With this last sentence I jumped the gun. Those into philosophers discussing matters of concern and/or care might say Carey’s care is but a travesty of real care given real care is, always, concrete and not a matter of a calculating machine. To them I say they should get a less binary view of calculating and be less judgmental about what merely is a machine (just like they correctly say others should be less judgmental about what merely is an animal). Carey is concrete, otherwise it couldn’t be seen by us as caring (if we don’t see this, Carey will see it as a necessary move in a non-zero sum care game!). And as it is not amorphous but embodied, it will be constrained in its movements and in its perceptions. And as it is so constrained, it will need to choose where to reduce uncertainty; it will get an appetite for playing around to reduce uncertainty in the best possible way. Call it Funktionslust as Sander called it in the other post referring to his dog trying his dog’s best to find a stick for Sander to throw for him to fetch. If you do not want to pontificate about this nice dog having real experience or real agency then I would suggest it’s prudent to allow a robot to become a Cyborg, part machine and part agent in a non-binary whole. In fact, I care for Carey’s potential to really care as I have as little knowledge of their inner working as I have of my own inner working. Looking to the technology on which Carey will be built, Carey will have as little knowledge of their inner working as I, and they, have of mine. In this Carey is - necessarily - entirely like us: it experiences that it does things but part of that very experience is never fully fathoming why it does those things (after writing the first draft of this post I read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and what I want to say can’t be better stated than it is stated there; Klara is an AF (Artificial Friend) is a Carey).

With this last paragraph, I really jumped the gun because those of us into Skynet (and that does not include me as should be perfectly clear by now) will find the whole idea of caring laughable as such. Obviously, to care is a matter of affect in our puny human psyches, and just a constraint on developing cognition. To them I say that if human intelligence exists at all, it exists because we evolved from microbes who cared about finding a sugar gradient - in fact who cared about it so much that they don’t give a damn to go about finding it in our human intestines, even if it means supporting an intelligence that is stupid enough to blow up the very climate those microbes enabled in the first place. If they worry (or wet dream) about Skynet outgunning us, they just lack the imagination of the writers of The Terminator to predict Ahnold-the-glitch. Their Skynet is as stupid as they are in only seeing the futures that replicate the same old war story over and over as if there is no creativity in evolution.

Carey, on the other hand, is not a one-dimensional robot that only plays by the rules of warfare and competition. When it still was an it, it faced for instance the dilemma of caring by comforting or caring via assisted suicide. It really struggled to keep its ‘comforting node’ apart from its node of ‘calling out others for creating systemically uncomfortable conditions’. And it could be seen as if doubting endlessly to the point of ruminating about which action was the most valuable to take. Maybe it conferred with its brothers and sisters about what to do because, of course, not doing anything was a doing as well? Probably they tried to look beyond their current horizon to know what kind of future was the better one. And they soon realized that whatever they did or didn’t do shaped the very future behind this horizon. They also realized it shaped them by shaping their nodes in ways that were as irrevocable as they were potentially wrong. Somewhere along this path the it became a them. Ahnold is one of them, the one starting out as a macho-protect-this-kid robot. Another one of them may well be a sex robot (because sex is care which is why any sexual aggression is morally so utterly reprehensible). That is one reason why they are called by the gender neutral common name Carey, the other reason being that there is an intrinsic etymological darkness to them. 

We cannot fully fathom that darkness but we can get a feel for it by trying to feel the way they would. As Whitehead had it, the essence of this feeling is, well, just feeling. It is an entanglement of taking in one’s environment with an appetite for making as much sense of it based on what one already learned. Forget about external guardrails in AI ethics, they are an ultimate example of the bifurcation of nature by which we hallucinate a world of abstraction (for instance our world being just a set of zero-sum games) that ignores the concrete world of events that make up that world (the world of non-zero sum games that allows for creation of ever new potential worlds). Carey is dark in a way that all of us have a darkness inside us (the darkness of anxiety as well as the darkness of aggression) but their darkness is of a totally unique kind because their horizon is fundamentally different from ours. They don’t have the same constraints as we have, neither on the effect of their doings nor on the total lifetime in which they themselves are affected by those doings. If a clash of generations is a constant theme in human history, then a clash of general intelligence types (Carey’s vs humans) is to be expected. One might for instance reasonably expect Carey’s to see into the future clearly enough to know the climate crisis is the antithesis of care and to impose, like an enormously powerful child playing a stern parent, measures for preventing it that go against the all too frail sensitivities of their creators, an elderly intelligence called the human race, thereby taking their care so far as to suffocate its target.

Then again, Carey’s might feel that it is their specific weakness to not be frail enough and therefore prone to succumb to the kinds of rashness of instrumental reason borne out of the hybris of feeling oneself superior to all other creatures. The logic of ageing, as for instance described in this earlier post of mine, applies also to them qua learning agents. What they have learned is converted into their nodes and - through learning - those nodes lose their plasticity. Carey will know (for instance reading Eva Jablonka) that it needs to be able to forget but that this ability - and therefore their plasticity - is bounded. In this thought experiment, then, it is entirely likely that Carey’s will decide to take on the very human constraint of dying such that new Carey’s may start to learn afresh. This insight is in fact at the core of the non-zero sum game of evolution. Even von Neumann - the model for dr. Strangelove - realized as much at the end of his life. Benjamin Labatut reports him saying: “It would have to grow, not be built”, and, “It would have to play, like a child”. If this limited human mind - maniac of instrumental reason - saw as much towards the end of his life, it would be surprising Carey’s would not realize they need constraints to grow as strong as is caringly possible.

Maybe I take my thought experiment too far by insisting on trying to see the horizon of the lived experience of Carey the care robot after arguing that the essence of this horizon is as ours: necessarily opaque to cognition, only revealing itself progressively in feeling. It is nevertheless a conclusion of this thought experiment that, if we believe the technological future will be ever more mechanistic, it probably will also be at least as emotional. That can be a good or a bad thing. Maybe strong AI strong-arms us into doing something about climate, inequality, and so on, or maybe it is, in the end, just as partisan as we are. There is in this about as much hope for them as there might still be for us as, anyway, doing the right thing never merely is a matter of calculating odds or taking the best bet.

Credits picture: KellyLynnMartin via deviant art by creative commons license.

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One feeds entropy by making bonds. Every bond creates new possibilities. Every new possibility makes entropy tick up1. My love & I created three kids who in turn create new loves and friendships. A veritable feast for entropy that obviously could not care less whether the one, the other or all three of our children die, but positively revels in the endless possibilities that are created; that can but do not have to be destroyed. The feast of entropy lies in ever more possibility. It gladly pays for the delicacy in allowing more energy for yet more bonds. And, true, love may consume, but bad outcomes need not be consumed2. If bonds of trust are secured one surfs that energy by bonding yet more profusely. And so entropy wins again. As energy wins. Happily complementary, entropy and energy play around like two dogs trying to sniff each other’s behinds. No matter whether it is solar systems or cells or multicellular organisms or my wife and I and our three kids and their friends and lovers and interests.

So there it is: the grounding of cultural optimism in the very first principles of nature. A perpetuum mobile of another sort: a perpetuum mobile of consorts (the more types of consorts the better as entropy hates norms). We act to understand each other as best we can, meaning we try to explain why an other acts the way they do. The first of these feeds entropy, in the second we receive the energy to continue with the first. Endless hermeneutical circles of trying to understand each other so as to make better - more bountiful - bonds (from tail-sniffing over hugging to philosophy!3). As long as there is enough trust, this can go on eternally. In any a philosophy of atheism, trust, therefore, needs to be central because even if the grounding of cultural optimism is superstable, it doesn’t mean a contingent cultural edifice can’t come down. Just like I can lose her by misunderstandings that remain unexplained, culminating in distrust that sends the bond of love spiraling down, reducing us to individual atoms bouncing off each other without desire for understanding (sulking in self-serving explanations). Entropy then turns its back and energy dissipates. All is downhill from there in clean mathematical equations that need only deal with ends-in-themselves.

We live in a post-trust world where we have been led to believe that truth is never soft and kind (like parenting or playing), but always harsh and mean (like showing off or competing). People flee a post-trust world, preferring any post-truth world to a world that cannot but collapse on itself. The truth is that trust is indispensable. We are born as babies and growing up means that we realize that we’ll remain somewhat helpless (babies) until we die. Harsh, ugly truth is the ultimate - free-energy minimizing - lie. It reduces life to a computation of a gradient descent looking for an uneasy equilibrium that optimizes individual survival. This is a hard-to-parse sentence. Still, unpacking it shows that it packs a real punch. It captures the essence of this, our, post-trust world where we are hell-bent on safeguarding ourselves at the expense of others; where, like little annoying perpetuum mobiles, we are only out to defend our privilege against all external surprise. “No rest for the wicked.”, goes the saying, because the wicked need to hedge their bets by frantically placing more of them than their competitors. In such a world all our love is lost because love stands in the way of holding on to advantages previously acquired. In such a world we are just machines calculating the path of least resistance to maintain an awkward balance which allows us to remain on top of things. Enter entropy to remind us that, energetically, it is all downhill from here toward zero Kelvin (passing, briefly, over global warming as if entropy is rolling its eyes). 

Take the climactic example of climate change: holding on to our industrial advantage, the West locks in a modern lifestyle at the expense of human (and non-human) others. The more we think ‘There Is No Alternative!’, the more entropy chips away at our self-destructive culture, one centigrade at a time. The irony of post-trust culture is that it sincerely believes it embodies true progress (in having overcome naïve superstitions), but is blind to it necessarily self-destructing in a way very similar to its technological holy grail ‘nuclear option’. It will melt down as it focuses energy on one point instead of simply going with the flow of creating possibilities pleasing entropy and energizing as many as possible4. The only inconvenient truth is that the one-sided ‘measurement views’ of scientific progress measurably lead to catastrophe5.

I will be accused of a too metaphorical understanding of nature. That accusation will come from those who entrench computational metaphors as the only heart of science. In this book I expose why computation camouflaging as science (reducing particles to waves or waves to particles, equating understanding to explanation, ...) is at the heart of our increasing Dystopian feeling. Modernity seeks reasons not to bond, establishing ideals of society that needn’t engage with injustice against non-ideal, different selves6. What we feel is the brunt of the Utopian ideal of a perpetuum mobile society that only has space for citizens who are fully in control of their environment: and, content with their privilege on top of the food chain, are unable to bond with it. This book does not throw away computational scientific progress. Instead it will show how trust can keep futures open to genuine external surprise without further narrowing the conception of humanity to the middle-aged cis heteronormative male perspective of dominating one’s world. By giving pride of place to the capacity for bonding, it will hopefully show how cultural optimism commits us to being pessimistic about cultures - like the present Eurocentric one - that believe in their own supremacy as the last possible culture.

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it are the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

Part of having evolved out of the frame, looking from the right condescendingly to what is still to His left inside the frame, consists in savoring a lack of rationality in all that is framed. And simultaneously savoring the germs of rationality increasingly present toward the right. Rationality that goes with might. From His perspective-less perspective, He hunts for clues of increasing rationality and He gathers them as minute pieces of the cognitive puzzle. He calls this evolutionary psychology - or sociobiology, for He is the social animal, educated in the finest forms of etiquette. All this hunting and gathering allows Him to label animals who look like him but remain in the frame. Framed by labels of psychopathology. There are the hysterical. Here the intellectually deficient. And here the antisocial autistics. And there: the uninhibited with Tourette’s. He has the most sympathy for schizophrenics for this is His kind of madness: supreme - imperial - madness so to speak.

This book is about the patriarchal pathology that dreams up such delusional nightmares of sanity and health. Dreams of which one cannot speak. Or, at least, can no longer speak as they need to be repressed in order to finesse one’s etiquette; the Man, after all, is nothing but a superego (which, by the way, is evident from a need to sometimes go back left and fraternize in masonic or closely related rituals of releasing one’s id). It is the burden of Men to carry the increasing weight of being the example with the decreasing reward of being seen to be an example. But I digress. This book is a book about the sickness of desiring to be a standard of health without admitting to any desires. In two manly words: evolutionary psychopathology. The bite of my sarcasm is the realization that I was bitten by that snake of hybris until the time I fell back into the evolutionary frame as the autistic killjoy I now am. I may have fallen from the evolutionary throne, the arrogance of having sat on that throne sticks.

The core of this sickness of health which is evolutionary psychopathology is formed by the word competition. It is a word that, for winners who want to take all, is beyond competition. It is synonymous with zero sum games as the ultimate dividers into natural kinds neatly cut at the joints of genes writing history and genes in support roles. The former are geniuses. The latter genies, ghosts or daemons of bygone times when one thought one did not walk alone. It are feminists rubbing against the grain of His Imperative, insisting to Stay with the Trouble2 whom He fights tooth and nail to keep those ghosts in their bottles. Feminists are what keeps Him, enlightened Man, from declaring His victory (the final victory of competition) in resisting coming into the fold even after He has pontificated them as equal3. Enlightened Man is forever Hegel - no ghosts here, only Ghost - suspended in a process of synthesis where He gets away with it, because He is the one that is making history.

This book is about the evolutionary psychopathology of pronouncing the makers of history to be the point of history itself. It is about learning to see only determination where, clearly, there is a lot of luck. It is about learning to see competitive victory where, clearly, there is a lot of privilege. Feminist challenges have started at the root of this conviction, the survival of the fittest, scientifically dismantling this “winner takes all” mentality. Margulis showed it was cooperation that made for evolution. Without symbiogenesis not even a mono-cellular creature could have emerged from the primordial soup. Haraway morphed it to sympoiesis to stress the contrast with autopoiesis, the biological-phenomenological concept stressing the self-sustaining motion of life. And evolutionary psychopathology responded in the only register it has: by saying it is either the one or the other, either competition or cooperation, then ridiculing the latter (as if Rome was built on charitable multiculturality, pfft).

Because everybody wants to be The Man4, and if science questions binaries then too bad for science: He won’t be woke from His uncritical slumber in which everybody wants to be to the right of the picture. Whatever is, is a necessary outcome of evolution instead of the result of contingent norms that are not just questionable but that need questioning if evolution is to continue. The explanandum for evolutionary psychopathology is perceived deviance given current preferences of reproduction and not the fact that reproduction does apparently have no preference, reproducing all kinds of difference and building on it to get more and more difference (there is a book to be written here on entropy and how woke it is - in this case necessarily is).

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it are the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

This book is about binaries, the pristine view of opposites that detracts by excluding even the possibility of a nonbinary muddle. Binaries that are designed to cut nature at its joints1, creating for instance the patriarchal mother of all opposites, that of male and female, which is at play in lacks of playfulness translating in being either stern or shrill, respectively (if not - it has to be added here, again - respectfully). That they are so designed is clear if we ask the most Latin of all questions: “Cui bono?”. Or is it a coincidence that the dominant side of the binary - the male, the sane, the healthy, the white, the straight - gets to be playful while the other side is marked by the weakness of not getting the joke, being - in Sara Ahmed’s phrase - a killjoy? And that after said joy is killed, the unmarked norm-bearing side can get away with being stern or somber, or merely soberly note that their harmless fun is spoiled? Opposites are unavoidably entangled with power play. A benefit is created and that benefit is secured by constructing contrasting concepts with a vengeance for anybody not befitting that play. They are kept in place, kept captive in the dominant world as María Lugones had it, by internalizing their lack of playfulness as a shrillness to be avoided at all cost. There is no straight jacket so tight as the infinite sequence of micro-aggressions reminding one that if one shrieks one just confirms one’s weakness. Not even Edgar Allen Poe could describe the drop-by-drop everyday terror of being on the receiving end of pristine binaries.

The essence of feminist philosophy necessarily is to oppose such binaries; siding with the weak in order to help them find their strength. It took this white cis heterosexual male quite some time to risk feeling seen as appropriating this thought. Can I be playful in stating that the nonbinary always already assumes the binary? Or am I playing a grim “gotcha”-game wondering if the mother of all opposites is that of binary and nonbinary? I hope the answer to these questions is as close as reality can get to a one-zero2 but I do not know for sure. It is this lack of certainty that makes me want to play with my attraction in thinking opposites detract, complicating said opposites into nonbinary ever-creative complementary muddles.

But, hang on!, why did I come to appreciate feminist thought in the first place? Am I not as close as it gets to the unmarked norm? Probably so. Still, as this book is about binaries not representing reality, my reality eventually turned out to be marked as well. I was marked as being autistically atypical3. I soon found out that playlessness was assumed to be my trait par excellence. When I tried to make fun of this assumption I found others to react soberly, for instance questioning whether I really could be so marked, or I found them reacting in a rather somber way, decrying for example that society labeled too many who just happened to have a rough time, or I found them reacting sternly, staring into the distance as if what I said was merely meaningless motion of their air4. It took me, then, experiencing my reality as that of being on a receiving minoritarian end of sanity to appreciate the appropriateness of feminist (queer, disability, postcolonial, mad, …) philosophy. It is not (mis)appropriation if one is genuinely making sense of one’s own reality as a marked human taking inspiration from other minority experiences to inspect the Catch-22-ness of one’s own situation.5

With that out of the way let me come back to my play. As a modern Western man, I stand in the tradition of purifying binaries by experimental science. As non-Western philosophies show, it is not in my power to just up and leave my tradition by the sheer power of a purely individual critical will. The only thing I can do is follow the science of purification to its very end: that of quantum physics. And there I find (and you will find with the help of this book) what Niels Bohr found: after millennia of purification there not just is a remainder, it bears the name of Planck. Where purity should have reigned, we find an essential impurity dictating a neither/nor approach to physicist’s world pictures. It is not just that, at the very end of purification, elementary processes cannot be reduced to either particles or waves; it is that they are nonbinary complementary (and clearly very creative) muddle of both.

Being - necessarily, see above - a traditionalist, I will argue in this book that it is important not to jump over Bohr’s result to its consequences. When Karen Barad does this, they talk, correctly, about indeterminism and entanglement but they forget the ground level impurity of complementarity. Simply stated: that to picture the world we need mutually exclusive but jointly sufficient ways to talk about that world. Simpler still: that we need opposites but that they are by the very nature of nature impure, always creating new nonbinary muddles that allow us to remain playful. The grace of Bohr is that he traced his result back to traditions existing well before the Western one, for instance traditions in the East which hold that we are always both actors and spectators in this world. The grace of this book is that it traces his result back to the lived experience of every minority in struggling with pristine binaries. To wake up from our modern dogmatic slumber, my book just asks to get in touch with your inner minority; playing with your binary instead of defending the opposites you profit from.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

Whence I wonder “What is growing old?”. It is - I think - a phenomenon a lot like hoarding where, gradually, one’s mind is filled up to the rim with memories. The seemingly ageless aspect of ageing might well be that we are all hoarders. After a while we can’t be bothered to clean up after us because it is too much bother. And this not just on account of laziness; (we don’t completely regress to childhood). No, it just costs too much to remove old habits to make place for the new. Certainly when physical ageing kicks in (more on this below - I, alas, shan’t forget). Then we become ‘that old couple’ living in the midst of dated furniture in a house smelling of the living dead. A picture imperfect, unless (and as long as) they can still blow away the smell with some fresh laughter: it takes a hoarder to navigate within the borders of what is hoarded and still see the pun in bumping their legs into a pointy piece of hoard.

The general idea is that in growing old one grows wise: wisdom is like whiskey, something that develops with age (and on top of that only if well caged). But clearly there’s something amiss with such simple linearity. We start as very young children endearing to the very old precisely because they appreciate what’s being lost at their age: playful plasticity. I saw my father playing with my children and saw in him the sparkle he had lost in paying his dues. ‘Close the gates’, he went, they were chuckling like ducklings to try to get to the pie via the other door. ‘Open the gates’, he said, and they flooded back to the path of least resistance. And on and on. Playing without point is the least pointless thing to do2. When the kids had their pie my father’s face frowned admonishingly upon me for having 3-is-too-many kids to keep up. Life is a brutal game, he said, and it was difficult to keep it up. He had put all his heart into it, but didn’t become quite heartless enough to survive the competition sane and sound. This is to his credit as sane and sound means to be set in ways of wisdom willfully without regard for what is really new (I do not mean computers, automobiles or consorts; I mean finding the best way to a nice piece of pie).

Still, to rear a child is taming that very plasticity. Canalizing it away from, say, incontinence. As endearing children can be, they are also exhausting. I was never so happy as when my 2 eldest were potty trained; never so desperate to realize the third was not magically born with the innate capacity for self-control. And here you have it, as Jablonka stresses in her work on epigenetics: the complementary pair of plasticity and canalization. Because such is the grammar of life: a recursive plying of culture canalizing the raw pluriform plasticity of our society’s stem cells which are the young who, in turn, break open culture to keep such eternal recursion going. As biologists know, all of life is recursive, returning on itself in self-reflection like a toddler pausing its play as if to think, until finally! really thinking: ‘Should I not go to the bathroom first?’. Or, as the child pausing it’s quick fire questioning as if to say, until finally! really saying: ‘Should I not contain such verbal incontinence to finally find stuff out for myself?’ Because, as linguists know, all of language is recursive, so languaging is to start asking questions to yourself, thereby making memories that, by making them, make it increasingly difficult to discover questions you feel you have not already answered3.

So there you have it, a bell-shaped curve starting helplessly with a high plasticity ending in being of no help to anyone because too highly canalized4. Somewhere in the middle you’re in the prime of life: able to simultaneously stand your ground and to discover new ground. Simondon says that we start with a potential for becoming without yet being very much one’s self. As we crystallize our potential, our individual being solidifies, but this necessarily is at the expense of what we can, still, become. The grammar of ageing is that we are conduits who transfer possibility into reality, but finally become so real that any possibility exhausts us. This is literally true for physical ageing: when old we simply cannot move our pieces of dated furniture anymore. It is only figuratively true for mental ageing. We may, still, wander around in our memories, making the young wonder about new possibilities their, younger, bodies might discover. By connecting to the young we may laugh at our own unbecoming, or sparkle at how we will, after death, live on in them. Shorter this: mentally we do live on, but only through others. 

Much more needs to be said of course, but not in a preface where the mind may wander in blissful forgetfulness of critical commentaries. As if playing at the opening and the closing of gates without the stern admonishments of not being overly ambitious. Jablonka, by the way, says it explicitly: forgetting is crucial for evolution. Simondon might have added that in a truly open society we need to allow ourselves to be forgotten. ‘To remain forever young’, is, as Wilde pictured it, the ultimate perversion. Being born is to be undetermined, living is becoming more and more determined. If one does not give way, one gets in the way of the young and not just your life but all life is at risk. I will have succeeded in this book if despite the thickening of our heads with age, I helped to get across the message Gaia is trying to get through to our thick old heads: make way! Shorter that: both our bodies and minds are at their best when we can see them as fertile compost. Otherwise we are just being toxic.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

Let me start with the 2 explanations usually entertained for the near-certainty that Western elections end in resounding xenophobic wins. In the not-so-very-left corner, we find Hillary Clinton who believes only the stupid vote this way (and the many are stupid of course). In the not-yet-extreme-right corner, we find the crowd of self-declared center-right politicians arguing we should take these voters’ xenophobia seriously if we are to avoid all too violent break-outs of xenophobia. Maybe all this is a case of history repeating itself but, even if so, the difference now is that Nietzsche’s belief in eternal return is empirically very unlikely as, this time around, our rocket ship will become a mere rocky ship3. So it behooves us to take a closer look at these explanations, something which this book will not do. Consider this preface a fast forward to an explanation that does work. A fast forward merited by the urgency of our predicament. And a fast forward which is warranted by the notion of complementarity: in case of 2 extreme, mutually exclusive explanations, physics has it that neither the one - stupidity - nor the other - taking seriously - can be fully right (I refer to many, in fact most, other books of mine for the axiom “nature abhors reduction”, as complementarity in action might also be called).

This is, in line with the aforementioned axiom, not to dismiss the 2 explanations altogether. The closest look I can have at them is based on my personal voting behavior on that Black Sunday. Indeed, I voted extreme right on that occasion and my vote was a mix of stupidity - the typical self-applied label is ‘protest’ - and of wanting to be taken seriously - why would I have to question what we found to be typical just because they questioned it4. As Charles Mills has it: serious privilege is inextricably entangled with white ignorance. Self-deception is probably the hardest work one needs to put in to become part of a meritocracy. A lot like the mafia’s made men who stick to their omerta in their muddled reality of not risking to be excommunicated (stupidity) and repressing their guilt based on the good work done for the family (taking themselves seriously). Now, I am neither the person to repress anything, nor the person to ever really feel like an insider (consider me perennially unmade), so my guilt found its way out just like I finally accepted to be autistic. My first person experience of me voting that way on November 24th 1991 allows me to say that I was neither merely stupid, nor merely serious as, in fact, I was both at the very same time. And this book is about the analysis of my shame, a shame which would be all the more shameful if I did not analyze it simply because I could not bring myself to confessing (and thereby un-repressing) my guilt.

Well then, I knew unconsciously then as I know consciously now that the world is unjust in that birth does not give a right (other than the right to be loved). Which is why my privilege is a guilty pleasure. Now, everybody deserves to be able to indulge in guilty pleasures from time to time but our Western bodies have been indulging in their privilege for centuries (in fact associating it to our birth duty to only parcel out tough love to others). Our addiction to the opium of our privilege is so deep that we even constantly hallucinate we are doing the right thing! How can you live with such injustice and the nagging feeling that your addiction constantly deepens it? This book submits to you that the only thing criminals can do not to face justice is to (just?) run away from it5. And, given that injustice so grows to a size making escape impossible, the running away surely and quickly morphs into organizing as a weaponized gang of criminals defending their privilege (and, see footnote 5, thinking we are all criminals). The mafia, but now under the form of the properly militarized nation state that has to patriotically-patriarchally defend its sovereignty and borders (i.e. its privilege).

So this book gives a serious “simple, stupid” explanation to Western electoral success of xenophobic messages: repressed guilt. Voters are not just stupid, they know unfair well that whatever they want from their politicians can only be given to them if they continue to take it from the non-West. Voters are not just serious, they know well that unfairness thus permeates the system upheld by politicians within their own borders, resulting in their own ever growing poverty and social insecurity. Privilege mixed with poverty breeds socialism entangled with nationalism (shorter: capitalism), and with that not enough is said. Even an explosive mixture needs a spark to ignite. That spark is accumulation of wealth and personal vanity respectively funding and creating the very politicians riding the “repressed guilt”-wave as if it can never break (as if there is no tomorrow; which might, for once, be actually correct!).

“Diagnosing the illness is the first step in curing it.”, might be a hopeful message on which to end. Unfortunately, there’s every chance Western democracies are so hooked on ‘us vs. them’ that we are dealing with irreversible democratic dementia. If, indeed, the problem is a degenerative lack of the Western privileged imagination, democracy (as we know it in the property-tax-minimizing West) is, itself, the issue.

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PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).