The Hollow Men of Silicon Valley

The Cold Logic of Power and the War on Human Emotion

Image: Shutterstock.com

This is, after all, a philosophy blog. But philosophy is not just an academic exercise—it’s a fight to understand the world. And right now, as democracy trembles and authoritarianism looms, philosophy can’t remain detached. It demands moral clarity. It demands engagement.

I am, unabashedly, a Humean emotivist. Like David Hume, I hold that emotions—not abstract reason—form the foundation of our ethics. Cold logic alone doesn't guide our moral compass; it is shaped by the deep wellspring of human feeling. This isn't a rejection of reason, but a recognition of its limits and its partnership with emotion in shaping human understanding and motivation.

In this light, art and music are not mere diversions or entertainments. They are profound expressions of human experience, written and interpreted in the language of emotion. They speak to truths that logic alone cannot fully capture or convey. And it is precisely this emotional resonance that makes art such a powerful force in shaping human consciousness and, by extension, political reality.

This understanding of the centrality of emotion in human experience is why I don't apologize for my polemical style. My impassioned writing isn't a lapse in philosophical rigor—it's a deliberate and principled approach to engaging with the most pressing issues of our time. When I write with fury about the erosion of democratic norms, when I express despair at the moral cowardice of those who should know better, when I voice hope for resistance and renewal, I'm not just venting. I'm engaging in a form of philosophical praxis that recognizes the full spectrum of human cognition and motivation.

The reactionaries and authoritarians understand this power of emotion all too well. Their aesthetic theories, their carefully crafted narratives, their manipulation of symbols and spectacles—all of these speak to a deep, if often cynical, understanding of how emotions shape human behavior and political allegiance. They tap into fear, anger, pride, and resentment with a skill that many defenders of democracy seem to have forgotten or deliberately abandoned.

This is perhaps one of the most crucial battlegrounds in the fight for the future of democracy. While many liberals and progressives focus on rational argument and policy detail—worthy endeavors, to be sure—they often fail to engage with the emotional underpinnings of political belief and action. They forget, or choose to ignore, that humans are not merely thinking beings, but feeling ones as well.

What we don't feel, we don't fight for.

This simple truth, often overlooked in political discourse and philosophical debate, lies at the heart of human motivation and action. It's not enough to know that democracy is under threat; we must feel the weight of that threat in our bones. It's insufficient to understand the principles of justice abstractly; we must be moved by injustice to act.

This reality exposes a critical weakness in much of contemporary liberal and progressive thought. In our eagerness to appear rational, to base our arguments on facts and logic, we've often neglected the emotional core of human experience. We present statistics, craft policies, and construct logical arguments, all while forgetting that it's emotion that spurs people to take to the streets, to cast their votes, to stand up against tyranny.

Consider the civil rights movement—its power came not just from legal arguments and policy papers, but from the emotional resonance of spirituals sung in churches, from the moral clarity of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream speech, from photographs that made Americans feel the injustice of segregation in their bones. When John Lewis spoke of “good trouble,” he wasn't appealing to abstract reasoning—he was invoking the righteous anger that propels people to stand against injustice.

Contrast this with how reactionaries deploy emotion: the carefully choreographed spectacle of Trump rallies, designed not to inform but to create a feeling of belonging and shared grievance; the aesthetic nostalgia that permeates nationalist movements; the fear-driven narratives about immigrants and outsiders that bypass rational analysis entirely. Their success doesn't come from superior arguments but from understanding that political allegiance is formed in the heart as much as in the head.

Reactionaries, despite their intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy, understand this: they don't argue immigrants are a problem—they make people feel afraid. Their power isn't in facts, but in their mastery of human emotion.

This is why my polemics are so emotionally charged. It's not a bug; it's a feature. When I write about the erosion of democratic norms with palpable anger, when I express despair at the moral cowardice of our leaders, when I call for resistance with passionate urgency, I'm not just making arguments. I'm attempting to bridge the gap between intellectual understanding and emotional resonance.

Because here's the harsh reality: You can present someone with all the facts in the world about the dangers of authoritarianism, the importance of democratic institutions, the threats to individual liberty. But if they don't feel the importance of these issues, if it doesn't stir something in their heart as well as their mind, they're unlikely to act. They might nod in agreement, but they won't take to the streets. They might tut-tut at the news, but they won't organize, donate, or vote.

This is perhaps the most important lesson we must learn if we hope to defend democracy in these perilous times. We must engage not just the minds of our fellow citizens, but their hearts as well. We must make them feel the weight of this historical moment, the urgency of the threats we face, the moral imperative of resistance.

It's not about manipulation or demagoguery. It's about recognizing the full spectrum of human cognition and motivation. It's about speaking to the whole person, not just the rational calculating machine that Enlightenment thinkers sometimes imagined us to be.

In this light, emotion isn't the enemy of reason in political discourse—it's its essential partner. Without emotional engagement, even the most logically sound arguments for democracy and human rights are likely to fall on deaf ears. We don't just need to be right; we need to move people. We need to make them care.

Some might worry that embracing emotion in political discourse opens the door to demagoguery and mob rule. After all, isn't rationality our best defense against the darker impulses that have led to history's greatest atrocities? This concern misunderstands my position. I'm not arguing for emotion instead of reason, but for recognizing their inseparability in human cognition and motivation. The most dangerous political movements don't just appeal to emotion—they actively work to disconnect emotion from rational reflection, creating closed systems of feeling that reject critical thought.

The answer isn't to suppress emotion in favor of cold rationality—an impossible task in any case—but to cultivate what Martha Nussbaum calls “political emotions”: compassion, reciprocity, and a sense of shared humanity that can ground democratic institutions. These emotions don't override reason; they give it purpose and direction.

This understanding of emotion's centrality doesn't just inform my writing style—it reveals the profound danger in technocratic visions that seek to minimize or eliminate the emotional dimension of human experience. When we recognize, as Hume did, that passion underlies our values and motivates our actions, we can see more clearly why supposedly “rational” systems of governance that ignore or suppress emotion are not just incomplete—they're fundamentally authoritarian. They attempt to sever humans from the very wellspring of our normative judgments and moral intuitions.

And here is what makes AI and Musk and Thiel's belief in the logic of technology as the basis for civilization so authoritarian. There's no room for emotion in the cold logic of math.

This technocratic vision of society, where algorithms and “rational” systems dictate human affairs, is not just misguided—it's fundamentally anti-human. It's a worldview that reduces the rich tapestry of human experience to a series of equations, that sees efficiency as the highest virtue and messiness of human emotion as a bug to be eliminated rather than a feature to be embraced.

When Musk talks about AI governance or Thiel waxes poetic about seasteading utopias, they're not just proposing alternative political systems. They're advocating for a fundamental rewiring of human society that strips away the very things that make us human. They offer a world where decisions are made not based on compassion, empathy, or a sense of shared humanity, but on cold calculations of utility and efficiency.

Democracy is messy because it allows people to be irrational, passionate, and unpredictable. AI governance, by contrast, seeks to optimize society by removing human discretion. But once you remove human discretion, you remove choice. And without choice, democracy is dead.

This is the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley utopianism. It's a vision of the future that has no place for the Humean understanding of human nature, no room for the passions that drive us, the emotions that connect us, the feelings that make life worth living. It's a sterile, algorithmic authoritarianism that promises perfect efficiency at the cost of our humanity.

And make no mistake—it is authoritarianism, even if it comes dressed in the glossy veneer of technological progress. Because once you remove emotion from the equation, once you decide that human affairs can be reduced to mathematical formulas and logical proofs, you've eliminated the very foundation of human rights and democratic governance.

After all, what is democracy if not a system that recognizes the fundamental emotionality of human beings? It's a system that understands that people have hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, loves and hates. It's a messy, inefficient, gloriously human way of collectively deciding our fate.

The cold logic of AI doesn't recognize the value of a human life beyond its productive capacity. It doesn't understand the power of a protest song, the unifying force of shared grief, or the motivating fire of righteous anger. It can't compute the value of human dignity or the importance of self-determination.

This is why the fusion of this technocratic ideology with political power is so dangerous. It's not just about privacy concerns or the ethics of algorithms. It's about the very nature of human society and governance. When we allow people who view human emotions as inefficiencies to be debugged to shape our political systems, we're opening the door to a new form of tyranny—one that doesn't just oppress our bodies, but seeks to rewire our very souls.

In this light, the defense of democracy becomes more than a political struggle. It's a fight for the preservation of human experience in all its messy, emotional glory. It's a battle to ensure that our future is shaped not by cold algorithms and efficiency metrics, but by the full spectrum of human feeling and reason working in concert.

If we accept that emotion underlies our normative judgments and motivates our actions, then defending democracy requires not just rational arguments about institutional design, but a passionate commitment to human dignity that can be felt as much as understood.

This means fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously: defending truth with the clarity of “two plus two equals four,” yes—but also creating art that speaks to the heart, building communities that nurture democratic emotions, and articulating visions of the future that people can not only conceptualize but yearn for. It means recognizing that technocratic authoritarianism threatens not just our political rights but our very humanity—our capacity to feel, to care, to be moved to action by things that matter.

This fight isn’t reason versus chaos. It’s humanity in full versus cold, mechanical control. We must defend democracy not just with reason, but with feeling. Because the alternative isn’t just autocracy—it’s a world where algorithms rule, and people obey. A world where emotion is a defect. A world not worth living in.

---

Check out my, Mike’s Philosophy page. My living document that shows how my philosophy ties together across all my writings.