This is a tremendous piece. It resonated with me in a personal as well as a political way.
I was systematically gaslit as a child, by my parents, about the nature of familial, psychological, and social reality. Both mother and father wanted, defensively, to deprive us of agency. My sibling was insulated against this as an extravert with a large social circle. As an introvert, I was more susceptible. I learned what but not how to think. In fact I had no idea about the " what", and a barely nascent instinct for the "how".
In my 20s, I became gradually, then suddenly, aware that the ostensibly ethical, but in fact, dishonest system of beliefs in which I had been immersed was faulty.
As you put it:
“When new information contradicts those patterns in ways that don’t make sense, when it requires you to abandon multiple connected understandings rather than just adjust one belief, your framework signals: *something is wrong here.*”
I hadn’t realized how much intellectual, emotional and moral passivity I had accepted in the interests of safety. What genuinely appalled me in my 20s was the inability I’d had in my teens to suspect that this dissonance existed.
You articulated perfectly the real meaning of coherence and the interplay of values, emotion and reason. I think that coherence is integrity, in the sense of a wholeness, “commited to the questions that make genuine understanding possible.” I think my curiosity helped save my reason, as perhaps also did my staunch belief in a secular morality that my parents articulated but did not practise.
I’m grateful for all your work, but in particular for this essay. I thank you so much!
Indubitably. Couldn't have said it better myself. ... 😉🙂
Rather long-winded, and probably went off the rails and into the weeds at a number of points in your traverse, in your railway journey across the philosophical landscape. So to speak. Something I'll have to delve into a little further down the line. Though another of Hume's quips springs to mind, one which I didn't see you discuss, i.e., "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
The question, or point there is, or appears to be that the rules of logic are more or less manifest and quite inexorable -- currently reading, though a tough slog, George Boole's "Laws of Thought". However the point, which he seems to get into -- stay tuned, is that the premises one starts off from are often contingent, matters of conjecture, or outright articles of faith. Often weak reeds to be putting much faith in.
Of some relevance, an observation from one of the patron saints of science and progenitors of the whole field of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener:
NW: "I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her.
What I say about the need for faith in science is equally true for a purely causative world and for one in which probability rules. No amount of purely objective and disconnected observation can show that probability is a valid notion. To put the same statement in other language, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith."
When Corey Lewandowski and the MAGA influencers spread the concept that Bad Bunny and Puerto Ricans aren't American, they know exactly what they are doing. They aren't ignorant of the facts of American citizenship, but are depending on their followers to be so. Their goal is to foment hate of the other (immigrants) and the fear that the other is already within.
Which raises the question: Why are they intentionally spreading mis-, dis-, and malinformation, aka MDM? Could it be that they want to destroy the coherence that underpins democracy? (That's another discussion!) If so, isn't the necessary response much bigger than teaching people how to think? Since there are numerous well-funded think tanks and media outlets dedicated to spreading MDM on an industrial scale, how does a one-on-one discussion have any hope of affecting the tsunami of confusion? How does that scale?
You raise a crucial question: if the manipulation is industrial-scale and deliberate, can individual cognitive technology possibly scale to meet it?
But first, a clarification: I think you're partially right about Lewandowski and the sophisticated operators knowing what they're doing, but the evidence from this week suggests it's more mixed than that. Some MAGA influencers appeared genuinely surprised to learn Puerto Ricans are Americans. They weren't performing strategic deception—they actually didn't know.
This matters because it reveals something important: the industrial manipulation apparatus doesn't require every node to be consciously deceptive. It works precisely because it creates ecosystems where even the influencers can remain ignorant while confidently spreading disinformation. The sophisticated operators at the top may know they're lying, but they've built information environments where their followers—including secondary influencers with millions of followers—genuinely don't know basic facts.
That's more insidious than pure deception. It's the industrialization of ignorance itself. They've created systems that produce confident incompetence at scale.
So Tom's question becomes even more urgent: if the system generates ignorance automatically, systematically, algorithmically—if people can become influential while remaining fundamentally misinformed—how does teaching individuals to think coherently possibly scale to counter it?
I think the answer is both "no" and "yes"—and the tension between them is what defines our moment.
No, one-on-one teaching of coherent thinking cannot directly counter a well-funded industrial apparatus designed to fragment understanding. You're absolutely right that this is asymmetric warfare. They have billions in funding, algorithmic amplification, captured institutions, and coordinated messaging. We have... conversations. One person at a time. It's absurd on its face.
But here's why it matters anyway:
The industrial manipulation only works because it exploits cognitive vulnerabilities. It requires audiences who evaluate claims in isolation rather than within coherent frameworks. It depends on people whose passion operates without reason's discipline. It needs tribal affiliation to replace empirical verification.
Every person who develops coherent thinking becomes immune to a specific category of manipulation. Not all manipulation—sophisticated operators will always find angles. But the crude stuff stops working. The obvious contradictions become visible. The emotional manipulation gets recognized as manipulation.
This doesn't scale linearly. It scales through networks, through demonstration effects, through the slow rebuilding of common knowledge about what rigorous thinking looks like. One person teaches ten. Ten teach a hundred. Not through lectures, but through modeling—through being the person in every conversation who asks the uncomfortable questions, who points out the contradictions, who refuses to let obvious falsehoods pass unchallenged.
But Tom is right that this alone isn't sufficient.
The deliberate destruction of epistemic coherence—what you're calling the intentional spread of MDM—does require larger structural responses:
* Regulatory frameworks that hold platforms accountable for amplifying coordinated disinformation
* Institutional reforms that rebuild trust in sources of authoritative knowledge
* Legal frameworks that distinguish protected speech from coordinated deception designed to fragment democratic capacity
* Economic interventions that change the incentive structures making manipulation profitable
*These are political fights that require collective action, not just individual cognitive technology.
But here's the synthesis:
You can't win the political fight to reform structures without enough people who can think coherently about why those reforms matter. And you can't teach people to think coherently without addressing the structural forces that profit from their confusion.
The work operates on multiple levels simultaneously:
Individual: Teaching coherent thinking so people become harder to manipulate
Social: Rebuilding common knowledge through demonstration and modeling
Institutional: Reforming structures that amplify manipulation
Political: Fighting for regulations that change incentive structures
None of these alone is sufficient. All of them together might be.
And yes, it might fail. The industrial forces might be too powerful, too well-funded, too strategically sophisticated. The epistemic collapse might be too far advanced. Democracy might not survive.
But the alternative—accepting that manipulation at scale can't be countered, that individual agency is meaningless against coordinated deception—guarantees failure. It's surrender before the fight.
So we do the work that's possible: teaching people to think, modeling coherence, building networks of mutual accountability, while also fighting the political battles to constrain the industrial manipulation apparatus.
Does it scale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it's the only strategy that has any chance of working, because every alternative either requires people who can think coherently (so we need this anyway) or admits defeat up front.
The wire still holds. But Tom's right that walking it individually isn't enough—we need to maintain the wire itself against forces actively trying to cut it. That's a bigger fight than teaching people to walk. It's both/and, not either/or.
And if we lose? At least we'll have maintained the capacity to recognize we've lost, rather than being manipulated into celebrating our own defeat while calling it victory.
As a perpetual student (STEM), a philosopher at heart, and a history and political "buff," this essay was an intellectual breath of fresh air for me, and clearly a labor of love and an investment in our democracy for you. BRAVO, and please continue to share these gems with your audience regularly! 💛🇺🇸🫂
Well put. Not the only coherent view though. I'm reading Richard Rorty's last book, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, where he expands on Dewey's and James' stance of pragmatism as "romantic polytheism," pointing out that the desire for one authoritative body of knowledge is inherited from the monotheistic claim of there being one authoritative deity. In this pragmatic perspective, the justification of a belief is its practical usefulness in some sphere of activity. Thus religion may not be coherent with science, yet the beliefs of each are in different spheres of activity -- what Stephen Jay Gould (the evolutionary biologist) called "non-overlapping magisteria."
There's also a long tradition, contra Hume, of moral sense theory, originated by Shaftesbury and refined by Hutcheson, claiming that we have direct apprehension of virtue and beauty -- they are not just relativistic cultural artifacts. Experiments in infant psychology back this up. Babies have a sense of whether people they're observing are being fair to each other, for instance.
I appreciate this thoughtful engagement, but I think you might be reading a tension into my argument that isn't there. I'm quite sympathetic to Dewey's pragmatism—and nothing I've said contradicts it.
The coherence I'm describing is pragmatic. When I say beliefs must cohere with each other, with evidence, and with lived experience, I'm making exactly the pragmatist claim: that justification emerges from how our beliefs function in practice, how they allow us to navigate reality effectively, how they hold up under the pressure of actual use.
Rorty's "romantic polytheism" and Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" are interesting frameworks, but they don't actually contradict what I'm arguing. I'm not claiming there's one authoritative body of knowledge in the sense of one master narrative that subsumes all others. I'm claiming that within any individual's understanding, beliefs need to cohere with each other and with reality—otherwise you get the kind of catastrophic failures we saw with the Bad Bunny affair.
The question isn't whether religion and science operate in different spheres (they often do). The question is: can you hold religious beliefs that directly contradict empirical observations you've made? Can you believe both that prayer heals illness and that it demonstrably doesn't when you test it? That's not "non-overlapping magisteria"—that's incoherence.
Coherence doesn't demand a single authoritative framework for all humanity. It demands that each person's framework be internally consistent and accountable to reality. That's a pragmatic standard, not a monotheistic one.
On moral sense theory: I'm not a moral realist in the sense of believing moral facts exist independently of human consciousness. But I'm also not claiming morality is purely relativistic or culturally arbitrary. I think morality is real the way chairs are real—both exist as genuine features of the world, but neither precedes human social consciousness. They emerge from it.
Like Hume, I don't think moral facts exist "out there" waiting to be discovered. They're constructed through our nature as social creatures. But what we construct is nonetheless real—chairs don't become less real because they're human artifacts rather than natural objects.
The is-ought gap doesn't deny that morality matters or that moral claims can be true or false. It insists that moral truths can't be derived from empirical observations alone, because they're a different kind of thing—constructed through our emotional and evaluative responses to the world rather than discovered as pre-existing features independent of human consciousness.
The infant psychology research you mention is fascinating, but I interpret it differently than moral sense theorists do. Babies showing fairness intuitions demonstrates that humans are built to construct moral reality in particular ways—we have innate capacities for moral sense-making shaped by our social nature. But this shows morality emerging from human consciousness and social interaction, not that infants are detecting pre-existing moral facts the way they detect light or sound.
Whether you think morality is discovered (moral sense theory) or constructed (my Humean view), the practical work is the same: moral intuitions—passions in the Humean sense—must be integrated with reason's discipline, systematized, checked for consistency, and applied coherently across contexts. That's what I'm arguing for, and it works regardless of your metaethical commitments.
The pragmatic point stands: beliefs are justified by how well they work in practice. And beliefs that contradict each other, contradict evidence, or lead to catastrophic errors like not knowing Puerto Ricans are Americans don't work. That's not monotheism—that's just reality holding us accountable.
In fact, my entire approach to mythology—which I've made explicit in my work—already concedes your point about polytheism. I'm not claiming there's one authoritative narrative framework that everyone must adopt. I'm consciously constructing a mythology (the Circus, the Wire, the Song) as a framework for meaning-making, while being completely transparent that this is what I'm doing.
That's romantic polytheism in practice. Different people can hold different mythological frameworks, different narratives for making sense of experience. What matters isn't that we all share the same mythology—it's that whatever mythology we adopt be coherent within itself and accountable to reality.
The Bad Bunny affair wasn't a failure because those people held a different narrative framework than I do. It was a failure because their framework was so incoherent it couldn't even track basic empirical facts like "Puerto Rico is part of the United States." That's not romantic polytheism—that's just broken thinking.
Pragmatism doesn't excuse incoherence. It demands that beliefs work in practice. And beliefs that lead you to confidently assert obvious falsehoods while claiming expertise demonstrably don't work.
As to holding contradictory beliefs, there's something substantial to William Blake's respect for "contraries." Mark Vernon's Golden Thread Substack is focused on that. Yet, those form on the larger scale a coherent system; this is not akin to the Bad Bunny idiocy of which you make excellent example.
There's also the question of whether beauty and virtue are ontological primaries, which was certainly Shaftesbury's stance and arguably Hutcheson's. Shaftesbury greatly influenced Franklin, and Hutcheson Jefferson; so the stance is at least of background interest here. What Adam Smith later made of "moral sentiments" is the more Humean case you're making, a subtly different, weaker claim. If beauty and virtue are an "is," they are, in themselves, an "ought." Hume would then be wrong.
But then we can get back into Blakean concerns: Are our doors of perception clouded by reason ("Newton's sleep"), such that we're blind to the should-be-obvious beauties of this world -- including virtues?
Meanwhile, I'm in awe of how fast an well you write. Keep going!
For me, beauty and virtue exist purely within the intersubjective domain—the shared space of human consciousness where meaning is constructed, negotiated, and sustained. They don’t exist in the world independently of observers, but neither are they merely private feelings or arbitrary preferences. They’re the emergent properties of relationship—what happens when emotional, cognitive, and social beings coordinate their sense-making.
That said, I don’t rule out that there may be ontological features of beauty—regularities or structural patterns that emerge from the underlying laws of nature. Symmetry, proportion, rhythm, and resonance appear not only in art and perception but throughout the natural world. These may be the structural conditions that make possible our experience of beauty, rather than beauty itself existing as a metaphysical constant.
Indeed, these regularities—these “real patterns,” as Daniel Dennett described them—seem to represent the contingencies on which our existence is predicated. They’re not metaphysical absolutes, but stable regularities that consciousness can discover, interpret, and participate in. If beauty and virtue arise in part from how minds engage these real patterns—symmetry, resonance, proportion, relational attunement—then they’re not mere projections of sentiment, but the emotional and aesthetic articulation of structural features that make perception and value possible.
In that sense, constructivism doesn’t deny reality; it recognizes that what we call “meaning” emerges from how conscious agents interact with the lawful texture of the world. Beauty isn’t imposed upon chaos—it’s what coherence feels like from the inside.
I don’t see this as diminishing their reality. On the contrary, intersubjective reality is the only kind of moral and aesthetic reality we have access to. Beauty and virtue aren’t metaphysical facts or divine decrees; they’re patterns of affective resonance and social coherence that become stable because they’re shared and reinforced across consciousnesses.
When people talk about encountering beauty or recognizing virtue, they’re describing alignment—moments when individual and collective valuations harmonize. That harmony feels “objective” because it transcends any one person’s perspective, but it’s still built entirely out of intersubjective agreement and emotional participation.
So for me, the question isn’t whether beauty or virtue are ontological primaries. It’s whether our shared construction of them can maintain coherence—whether we can sustain the practices, relationships, and forms of life that make those experiences real between us, within the patterned world that makes them possible.
> "Babies have a sense of whether people they're observing are being fair to each other, for instance."
And members of other species. I remember seeing a TV documentary about monkey behaviours which showed a pair of them given some task, the completion of which yielded a prize of sorts, probably some foodstuffs of one kind or another. But one monkey had been given a very desirable prize, and the other one a prize that was much less so, the latter expressing its "displeasure" at the unfairness of the exchange in no uncertain terms.
Something of a fascinating field of study. Speaking of which and of monkeys, a "tail" or two about some of their behaviours that are reflected in a species with a supposedly greater claim to fame and fortune:
The fact that fairness intuitions appear across species—not just in human infants but in capuchin monkeys rejecting unequal rewards—tells us something profound about the ontological structure of social consciousness itself. Morality isn't floating "out there" as a Platonic form, but neither is it arbitrary cultural construction. It emerges from the structure of social existence itself.
When you're a creature that depends on cooperation to survive, reciprocity becomes an ontological constraint—a feature built into the very structure of how social minds work. You can't have sustained social coordination without some sense of fairness, because coordination requires trust, and trust requires reciprocity. This is why Pinker's work on common knowledge matters so much here.
Common knowledge isn't just about coordinating to meet at a specific time or driving on the right side of the road. It's the foundation for moral expectations. When everyone knows that everyone knows the terms of cooperation—when fairness norms become common knowledge—violation of those norms triggers the kind of outrage we see in that capuchin monkey rejecting the cucumber while its partner gets grapes.
The monkey's reaction isn't detecting a pre-existing moral fact "out there." It's responding to a violation of the reciprocity structure that makes social coordination possible. That response is real—as real as hunger or fear—because it's grounded in the ontological requirements of social existence.
This is what I mean when I say morality is real the way chairs are real. Chairs emerge from the structure of human embodiment and our need to rest. Fairness norms emerge from the structure of social consciousness and our need to cooperate. Neither precedes the creatures that construct them, but both are nonetheless genuine features of reality once those creatures exist.
And here's where it connects back to coherence: these fairness intuitions—these passions in the Humean sense—are the raw material from which we construct moral frameworks. But they need reason's discipline to be systematized, to be checked for consistency, to be applied coherently across contexts where our immediate intuitions might conflict.
The monkey trap metaphor you linked is perfect for this. The monkey's immediate desire (grab the food) conflicts with the larger goal (escape). Without the capacity to step back and reason about the situation—to notice the incoherence between "I want this food" and "holding this food prevents escape"—the monkey stays trapped.
Humans have that capacity. We can recognize when our immediate intuitions contradict our broader understanding. We can build coherent frameworks that integrate multiple fairness intuitions, multiple reciprocity norms, multiple social contexts. That's not discovering pre-existing moral truths—it's constructing moral understanding from the ontological constraints of social existence.
And that's exactly what fails in cases like the Bad Bunny affair. It's not that those people chose a different moral framework. It's that their framework became so incoherent—so disconnected from empirical reality, so driven by immediate tribal reaction—that they couldn't even track basic facts about who counts as American. They're caught in a monkey trap of their own construction, holding so tightly to their emotional certainties that they can't grasp the reality that would free them.
Common knowledge breaks down when people can't agree on basic reciprocity norms because their frameworks have become too incoherent to recognize shared constraints. And that's the epistemic crisis we're in.
Ok, so I subscribed because “you crack me up” (which is actually a compliment by the way). The reason being you keep popping up on my Substack because I follow and the subject is always different and it’s in depth and I can’t figure out when you have time and if you are able to like quiet your brain or it’s just churning stuff out nonstop. I am laughing at what just popped up not because it’s not interesting but because I want to write “well you know a lot of people are just kind of mind bogglingly stupid” you necessarily have to discount that sector, so don’t get too frustrated here. But of course I realize your target audience might include a few people like me who are not particularly brainless but don’t spend as much time and effort in your more philosophical world but do enjoy your efforts and find educational merits in what you write. Anyway enough said, I expect I will most definitely receive “value for money” (as the Brits say) with my subscription and look forward to reading. That is, when I have time of course as I do have other stuff to obsess over.
This is a tremendous piece. It resonated with me in a personal as well as a political way.
I was systematically gaslit as a child, by my parents, about the nature of familial, psychological, and social reality. Both mother and father wanted, defensively, to deprive us of agency. My sibling was insulated against this as an extravert with a large social circle. As an introvert, I was more susceptible. I learned what but not how to think. In fact I had no idea about the " what", and a barely nascent instinct for the "how".
In my 20s, I became gradually, then suddenly, aware that the ostensibly ethical, but in fact, dishonest system of beliefs in which I had been immersed was faulty.
As you put it:
“When new information contradicts those patterns in ways that don’t make sense, when it requires you to abandon multiple connected understandings rather than just adjust one belief, your framework signals: *something is wrong here.*”
I hadn’t realized how much intellectual, emotional and moral passivity I had accepted in the interests of safety. What genuinely appalled me in my 20s was the inability I’d had in my teens to suspect that this dissonance existed.
You articulated perfectly the real meaning of coherence and the interplay of values, emotion and reason. I think that coherence is integrity, in the sense of a wholeness, “commited to the questions that make genuine understanding possible.” I think my curiosity helped save my reason, as perhaps also did my staunch belief in a secular morality that my parents articulated but did not practise.
I’m grateful for all your work, but in particular for this essay. I thank you so much!
Indubitably. Couldn't have said it better myself. ... 😉🙂
Rather long-winded, and probably went off the rails and into the weeds at a number of points in your traverse, in your railway journey across the philosophical landscape. So to speak. Something I'll have to delve into a little further down the line. Though another of Hume's quips springs to mind, one which I didn't see you discuss, i.e., "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
The question, or point there is, or appears to be that the rules of logic are more or less manifest and quite inexorable -- currently reading, though a tough slog, George Boole's "Laws of Thought". However the point, which he seems to get into -- stay tuned, is that the premises one starts off from are often contingent, matters of conjecture, or outright articles of faith. Often weak reeds to be putting much faith in.
Of some relevance, an observation from one of the patron saints of science and progenitors of the whole field of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener:
NW: "I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her.
What I say about the need for faith in science is equally true for a purely causative world and for one in which probability rules. No amount of purely objective and disconnected observation can show that probability is a valid notion. To put the same statement in other language, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith."
https://asounder.org/resources/weiner_humanuse.pdf
https://archive.org/details/NorbertWienerHumanUseOfHumanBeings
When Corey Lewandowski and the MAGA influencers spread the concept that Bad Bunny and Puerto Ricans aren't American, they know exactly what they are doing. They aren't ignorant of the facts of American citizenship, but are depending on their followers to be so. Their goal is to foment hate of the other (immigrants) and the fear that the other is already within.
Which raises the question: Why are they intentionally spreading mis-, dis-, and malinformation, aka MDM? Could it be that they want to destroy the coherence that underpins democracy? (That's another discussion!) If so, isn't the necessary response much bigger than teaching people how to think? Since there are numerous well-funded think tanks and media outlets dedicated to spreading MDM on an industrial scale, how does a one-on-one discussion have any hope of affecting the tsunami of confusion? How does that scale?
You raise a crucial question: if the manipulation is industrial-scale and deliberate, can individual cognitive technology possibly scale to meet it?
But first, a clarification: I think you're partially right about Lewandowski and the sophisticated operators knowing what they're doing, but the evidence from this week suggests it's more mixed than that. Some MAGA influencers appeared genuinely surprised to learn Puerto Ricans are Americans. They weren't performing strategic deception—they actually didn't know.
This matters because it reveals something important: the industrial manipulation apparatus doesn't require every node to be consciously deceptive. It works precisely because it creates ecosystems where even the influencers can remain ignorant while confidently spreading disinformation. The sophisticated operators at the top may know they're lying, but they've built information environments where their followers—including secondary influencers with millions of followers—genuinely don't know basic facts.
That's more insidious than pure deception. It's the industrialization of ignorance itself. They've created systems that produce confident incompetence at scale.
So Tom's question becomes even more urgent: if the system generates ignorance automatically, systematically, algorithmically—if people can become influential while remaining fundamentally misinformed—how does teaching individuals to think coherently possibly scale to counter it?
I think the answer is both "no" and "yes"—and the tension between them is what defines our moment.
No, one-on-one teaching of coherent thinking cannot directly counter a well-funded industrial apparatus designed to fragment understanding. You're absolutely right that this is asymmetric warfare. They have billions in funding, algorithmic amplification, captured institutions, and coordinated messaging. We have... conversations. One person at a time. It's absurd on its face.
But here's why it matters anyway:
The industrial manipulation only works because it exploits cognitive vulnerabilities. It requires audiences who evaluate claims in isolation rather than within coherent frameworks. It depends on people whose passion operates without reason's discipline. It needs tribal affiliation to replace empirical verification.
Every person who develops coherent thinking becomes immune to a specific category of manipulation. Not all manipulation—sophisticated operators will always find angles. But the crude stuff stops working. The obvious contradictions become visible. The emotional manipulation gets recognized as manipulation.
This doesn't scale linearly. It scales through networks, through demonstration effects, through the slow rebuilding of common knowledge about what rigorous thinking looks like. One person teaches ten. Ten teach a hundred. Not through lectures, but through modeling—through being the person in every conversation who asks the uncomfortable questions, who points out the contradictions, who refuses to let obvious falsehoods pass unchallenged.
But Tom is right that this alone isn't sufficient.
The deliberate destruction of epistemic coherence—what you're calling the intentional spread of MDM—does require larger structural responses:
* Regulatory frameworks that hold platforms accountable for amplifying coordinated disinformation
* Institutional reforms that rebuild trust in sources of authoritative knowledge
* Legal frameworks that distinguish protected speech from coordinated deception designed to fragment democratic capacity
* Economic interventions that change the incentive structures making manipulation profitable
*These are political fights that require collective action, not just individual cognitive technology.
But here's the synthesis:
You can't win the political fight to reform structures without enough people who can think coherently about why those reforms matter. And you can't teach people to think coherently without addressing the structural forces that profit from their confusion.
The work operates on multiple levels simultaneously:
Individual: Teaching coherent thinking so people become harder to manipulate
Social: Rebuilding common knowledge through demonstration and modeling
Institutional: Reforming structures that amplify manipulation
Political: Fighting for regulations that change incentive structures
None of these alone is sufficient. All of them together might be.
And yes, it might fail. The industrial forces might be too powerful, too well-funded, too strategically sophisticated. The epistemic collapse might be too far advanced. Democracy might not survive.
But the alternative—accepting that manipulation at scale can't be countered, that individual agency is meaningless against coordinated deception—guarantees failure. It's surrender before the fight.
So we do the work that's possible: teaching people to think, modeling coherence, building networks of mutual accountability, while also fighting the political battles to constrain the industrial manipulation apparatus.
Does it scale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it's the only strategy that has any chance of working, because every alternative either requires people who can think coherently (so we need this anyway) or admits defeat up front.
The wire still holds. But Tom's right that walking it individually isn't enough—we need to maintain the wire itself against forces actively trying to cut it. That's a bigger fight than teaching people to walk. It's both/and, not either/or.
And if we lose? At least we'll have maintained the capacity to recognize we've lost, rather than being manipulated into celebrating our own defeat while calling it victory.
Thank you, Mike. This is wonderful.
"It's both/and, not either/or." - Agree!
As a perpetual student (STEM), a philosopher at heart, and a history and political "buff," this essay was an intellectual breath of fresh air for me, and clearly a labor of love and an investment in our democracy for you. BRAVO, and please continue to share these gems with your audience regularly! 💛🇺🇸🫂
Well put. Not the only coherent view though. I'm reading Richard Rorty's last book, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, where he expands on Dewey's and James' stance of pragmatism as "romantic polytheism," pointing out that the desire for one authoritative body of knowledge is inherited from the monotheistic claim of there being one authoritative deity. In this pragmatic perspective, the justification of a belief is its practical usefulness in some sphere of activity. Thus religion may not be coherent with science, yet the beliefs of each are in different spheres of activity -- what Stephen Jay Gould (the evolutionary biologist) called "non-overlapping magisteria."
There's also a long tradition, contra Hume, of moral sense theory, originated by Shaftesbury and refined by Hutcheson, claiming that we have direct apprehension of virtue and beauty -- they are not just relativistic cultural artifacts. Experiments in infant psychology back this up. Babies have a sense of whether people they're observing are being fair to each other, for instance.
I appreciate this thoughtful engagement, but I think you might be reading a tension into my argument that isn't there. I'm quite sympathetic to Dewey's pragmatism—and nothing I've said contradicts it.
The coherence I'm describing is pragmatic. When I say beliefs must cohere with each other, with evidence, and with lived experience, I'm making exactly the pragmatist claim: that justification emerges from how our beliefs function in practice, how they allow us to navigate reality effectively, how they hold up under the pressure of actual use.
Rorty's "romantic polytheism" and Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" are interesting frameworks, but they don't actually contradict what I'm arguing. I'm not claiming there's one authoritative body of knowledge in the sense of one master narrative that subsumes all others. I'm claiming that within any individual's understanding, beliefs need to cohere with each other and with reality—otherwise you get the kind of catastrophic failures we saw with the Bad Bunny affair.
The question isn't whether religion and science operate in different spheres (they often do). The question is: can you hold religious beliefs that directly contradict empirical observations you've made? Can you believe both that prayer heals illness and that it demonstrably doesn't when you test it? That's not "non-overlapping magisteria"—that's incoherence.
Coherence doesn't demand a single authoritative framework for all humanity. It demands that each person's framework be internally consistent and accountable to reality. That's a pragmatic standard, not a monotheistic one.
On moral sense theory: I'm not a moral realist in the sense of believing moral facts exist independently of human consciousness. But I'm also not claiming morality is purely relativistic or culturally arbitrary. I think morality is real the way chairs are real—both exist as genuine features of the world, but neither precedes human social consciousness. They emerge from it.
Like Hume, I don't think moral facts exist "out there" waiting to be discovered. They're constructed through our nature as social creatures. But what we construct is nonetheless real—chairs don't become less real because they're human artifacts rather than natural objects.
The is-ought gap doesn't deny that morality matters or that moral claims can be true or false. It insists that moral truths can't be derived from empirical observations alone, because they're a different kind of thing—constructed through our emotional and evaluative responses to the world rather than discovered as pre-existing features independent of human consciousness.
The infant psychology research you mention is fascinating, but I interpret it differently than moral sense theorists do. Babies showing fairness intuitions demonstrates that humans are built to construct moral reality in particular ways—we have innate capacities for moral sense-making shaped by our social nature. But this shows morality emerging from human consciousness and social interaction, not that infants are detecting pre-existing moral facts the way they detect light or sound.
Whether you think morality is discovered (moral sense theory) or constructed (my Humean view), the practical work is the same: moral intuitions—passions in the Humean sense—must be integrated with reason's discipline, systematized, checked for consistency, and applied coherently across contexts. That's what I'm arguing for, and it works regardless of your metaethical commitments.
The pragmatic point stands: beliefs are justified by how well they work in practice. And beliefs that contradict each other, contradict evidence, or lead to catastrophic errors like not knowing Puerto Ricans are Americans don't work. That's not monotheism—that's just reality holding us accountable.
In fact, my entire approach to mythology—which I've made explicit in my work—already concedes your point about polytheism. I'm not claiming there's one authoritative narrative framework that everyone must adopt. I'm consciously constructing a mythology (the Circus, the Wire, the Song) as a framework for meaning-making, while being completely transparent that this is what I'm doing.
That's romantic polytheism in practice. Different people can hold different mythological frameworks, different narratives for making sense of experience. What matters isn't that we all share the same mythology—it's that whatever mythology we adopt be coherent within itself and accountable to reality.
The Bad Bunny affair wasn't a failure because those people held a different narrative framework than I do. It was a failure because their framework was so incoherent it couldn't even track basic empirical facts like "Puerto Rico is part of the United States." That's not romantic polytheism—that's just broken thinking.
Pragmatism doesn't excuse incoherence. It demands that beliefs work in practice. And beliefs that lead you to confidently assert obvious falsehoods while claiming expertise demonstrably don't work.
Great response. Thanks.
As to holding contradictory beliefs, there's something substantial to William Blake's respect for "contraries." Mark Vernon's Golden Thread Substack is focused on that. Yet, those form on the larger scale a coherent system; this is not akin to the Bad Bunny idiocy of which you make excellent example.
There's also the question of whether beauty and virtue are ontological primaries, which was certainly Shaftesbury's stance and arguably Hutcheson's. Shaftesbury greatly influenced Franklin, and Hutcheson Jefferson; so the stance is at least of background interest here. What Adam Smith later made of "moral sentiments" is the more Humean case you're making, a subtly different, weaker claim. If beauty and virtue are an "is," they are, in themselves, an "ought." Hume would then be wrong.
But then we can get back into Blakean concerns: Are our doors of perception clouded by reason ("Newton's sleep"), such that we're blind to the should-be-obvious beauties of this world -- including virtues?
Meanwhile, I'm in awe of how fast an well you write. Keep going!
For me, beauty and virtue exist purely within the intersubjective domain—the shared space of human consciousness where meaning is constructed, negotiated, and sustained. They don’t exist in the world independently of observers, but neither are they merely private feelings or arbitrary preferences. They’re the emergent properties of relationship—what happens when emotional, cognitive, and social beings coordinate their sense-making.
That said, I don’t rule out that there may be ontological features of beauty—regularities or structural patterns that emerge from the underlying laws of nature. Symmetry, proportion, rhythm, and resonance appear not only in art and perception but throughout the natural world. These may be the structural conditions that make possible our experience of beauty, rather than beauty itself existing as a metaphysical constant.
Indeed, these regularities—these “real patterns,” as Daniel Dennett described them—seem to represent the contingencies on which our existence is predicated. They’re not metaphysical absolutes, but stable regularities that consciousness can discover, interpret, and participate in. If beauty and virtue arise in part from how minds engage these real patterns—symmetry, resonance, proportion, relational attunement—then they’re not mere projections of sentiment, but the emotional and aesthetic articulation of structural features that make perception and value possible.
In that sense, constructivism doesn’t deny reality; it recognizes that what we call “meaning” emerges from how conscious agents interact with the lawful texture of the world. Beauty isn’t imposed upon chaos—it’s what coherence feels like from the inside.
I don’t see this as diminishing their reality. On the contrary, intersubjective reality is the only kind of moral and aesthetic reality we have access to. Beauty and virtue aren’t metaphysical facts or divine decrees; they’re patterns of affective resonance and social coherence that become stable because they’re shared and reinforced across consciousnesses.
When people talk about encountering beauty or recognizing virtue, they’re describing alignment—moments when individual and collective valuations harmonize. That harmony feels “objective” because it transcends any one person’s perspective, but it’s still built entirely out of intersubjective agreement and emotional participation.
So for me, the question isn’t whether beauty or virtue are ontological primaries. It’s whether our shared construction of them can maintain coherence—whether we can sustain the practices, relationships, and forms of life that make those experiences real between us, within the patterned world that makes them possible.
> "Babies have a sense of whether people they're observing are being fair to each other, for instance."
And members of other species. I remember seeing a TV documentary about monkey behaviours which showed a pair of them given some task, the completion of which yielded a prize of sorts, probably some foodstuffs of one kind or another. But one monkey had been given a very desirable prize, and the other one a prize that was much less so, the latter expressing its "displeasure" at the unfairness of the exchange in no uncertain terms.
Something of a fascinating field of study. Speaking of which and of monkeys, a "tail" or two about some of their behaviours that are reflected in a species with a supposedly greater claim to fame and fortune:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monkey_trap
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/14/how-to-avoid-monkey-trap-oliver-burkeman
The fact that fairness intuitions appear across species—not just in human infants but in capuchin monkeys rejecting unequal rewards—tells us something profound about the ontological structure of social consciousness itself. Morality isn't floating "out there" as a Platonic form, but neither is it arbitrary cultural construction. It emerges from the structure of social existence itself.
When you're a creature that depends on cooperation to survive, reciprocity becomes an ontological constraint—a feature built into the very structure of how social minds work. You can't have sustained social coordination without some sense of fairness, because coordination requires trust, and trust requires reciprocity. This is why Pinker's work on common knowledge matters so much here.
Common knowledge isn't just about coordinating to meet at a specific time or driving on the right side of the road. It's the foundation for moral expectations. When everyone knows that everyone knows the terms of cooperation—when fairness norms become common knowledge—violation of those norms triggers the kind of outrage we see in that capuchin monkey rejecting the cucumber while its partner gets grapes.
The monkey's reaction isn't detecting a pre-existing moral fact "out there." It's responding to a violation of the reciprocity structure that makes social coordination possible. That response is real—as real as hunger or fear—because it's grounded in the ontological requirements of social existence.
This is what I mean when I say morality is real the way chairs are real. Chairs emerge from the structure of human embodiment and our need to rest. Fairness norms emerge from the structure of social consciousness and our need to cooperate. Neither precedes the creatures that construct them, but both are nonetheless genuine features of reality once those creatures exist.
And here's where it connects back to coherence: these fairness intuitions—these passions in the Humean sense—are the raw material from which we construct moral frameworks. But they need reason's discipline to be systematized, to be checked for consistency, to be applied coherently across contexts where our immediate intuitions might conflict.
The monkey trap metaphor you linked is perfect for this. The monkey's immediate desire (grab the food) conflicts with the larger goal (escape). Without the capacity to step back and reason about the situation—to notice the incoherence between "I want this food" and "holding this food prevents escape"—the monkey stays trapped.
Humans have that capacity. We can recognize when our immediate intuitions contradict our broader understanding. We can build coherent frameworks that integrate multiple fairness intuitions, multiple reciprocity norms, multiple social contexts. That's not discovering pre-existing moral truths—it's constructing moral understanding from the ontological constraints of social existence.
And that's exactly what fails in cases like the Bad Bunny affair. It's not that those people chose a different moral framework. It's that their framework became so incoherent—so disconnected from empirical reality, so driven by immediate tribal reaction—that they couldn't even track basic facts about who counts as American. They're caught in a monkey trap of their own construction, holding so tightly to their emotional certainties that they can't grasp the reality that would free them.
Common knowledge breaks down when people can't agree on basic reciprocity norms because their frameworks have become too incoherent to recognize shared constraints. And that's the epistemic crisis we're in.
Ok, so I subscribed because “you crack me up” (which is actually a compliment by the way). The reason being you keep popping up on my Substack because I follow and the subject is always different and it’s in depth and I can’t figure out when you have time and if you are able to like quiet your brain or it’s just churning stuff out nonstop. I am laughing at what just popped up not because it’s not interesting but because I want to write “well you know a lot of people are just kind of mind bogglingly stupid” you necessarily have to discount that sector, so don’t get too frustrated here. But of course I realize your target audience might include a few people like me who are not particularly brainless but don’t spend as much time and effort in your more philosophical world but do enjoy your efforts and find educational merits in what you write. Anyway enough said, I expect I will most definitely receive “value for money” (as the Brits say) with my subscription and look forward to reading. That is, when I have time of course as I do have other stuff to obsess over.