New Not-Very-Deep Thoughts
6/23/2025
I should apologize to all my old readers and new subscribers for months of silence. I have been impressed with the number of new subscribers that I have received despite not posting in too long. Life has been too busy with music and children for me to be able to sit down and formulate long and well-researched arguments, although I continue to have thoughts. So I do want to continue to blogging about the things I think about, but can only promise a sporadic, aphoristic, and miscellaneous style of blogging, for the time being. What follows is just a series of random thoughts I’ve had recently.
Society and the Real: The Political Dimension
I have held for a long time that we do not live in a democracy, as our political order ostensibly presents itself to be, but an authoritarian oligarchy. This is not a particularly uncommon opinion, though is also not totally uncontroversial. In different keys, both the Right and the Left make this argument whenever they are not in power and the other side is in power. But the true significance of my claim is that it is totally independent of whether our seemingly democratic order is currently governed by elected politicians of the Right or of the Left. As it happens, in America we are currently governed by a “Right-wing” demagogue whose enemies universally decry him to be an authoritarian dictator. I maintain that he is no more authoritarian than his predecessors, only that he makes the authoritarianism of the regime crudely obvious. It no longer carries the benign appearance of civility and democracy; the inherent authoritarianism of the regime is merely exposed as the brutal and belligerent thing it is. We can stop pretending we live under a democracy.
Society and the Real: The Economic Dimension
Similarly, I have said before that we live in a social reality that masquerades as a capitalistic market economy, but is in fact deeply centralized and socialized—even socialist—under the surface. (I say we pretend we live under capitalism because we live as if we lived under capitalism, i.e., by buying and selling and spending and saving, and all the customary forms of relating to one another in the estranged and alienated manner engendered by the universal commodification of things that Marx expertly described. We do this, even though, in actual fact, the economy we inhabit is centrally planned.) My friend and fellow substack blogger Ed Berger is the strongest proponent of this view, and I refer readers to his work for more substantive argumentation of this thesis.
What would it take to lay bare the socialist nature of our economy, such that we no longer can pretend to live under capitalism, similar to how Trump has laid bare the authoritarian nature of our political regime? I don’t know.
Artificial Intelligence and Social Perception
The much feared and much hyped advent of Artificial Intelligence may be one ingredient in the solution that finally exposes our economy for what it truly is. In a certain way, we are already governed by something like Artificial Intelligence. To be sure, people still sit at the helm of the structures of power that plan our post-capitalist economy from a center. Yet many critics have observed that the mode of that governance is indeed purely a technocratic and apolitical mode of planning, one which does not discriminate between friends and enemies, nor assumes that the human beings that are its subjects are indeed subjects capable of desires that transcend their mere desire to live. Rather, it treats them as objects that may be manipulated in a mathematical manner to produce purely mathematical results, viz. the accumulation of profit at a certain rate. Much of this planning boils down to the science of logistics and computation, which machines already perform better than humans. The average consumer underestimates just how much his own life is governed by and incorporated into an artificial algorithm. Thus, in a way it is already an economy planned by A.I., an inhuman economy, a technocratic and technological economy. This is merely not yet obvious, because it works behind the scenes.
However, once A.I. begins to reach into our daily experience, manipulating the regular objects we perceive with our senses, changing the nature of our mundane realities, no longer merely behind the scenes but also affecting the superficial surface of our experience—perhaps them it will make itself so omnipresent that we can no longer afford to trust the appearances of things as we have naively been doing for so long. Appearances have always been deceiving; things are not what they appear. The A.I. revolution will merely make it obvious that things are not what they appear; or at least it will habituate us into a necessary skepticism. Perhaps it will make it obvious that we are not the agents of our own choices, in the sense described by classical economics, but that we are passive objects being churned about in a giant machine. And perhaps this realization may help us in regaining a bit of our subjectivity again.
Circling Back to the Political Dimension
Could A.I. affect our perception of politics as well as our perception of economics? Vince Garton has suggested quite provocatively that it may (see my unfinished responses here and here… part III never came, alas). As I mentioned before, we pretend we live in a democracy. Part of this pretense comes in the form of endless discourse. Discourse, dialogue, free speech, free expression—these are the supposed products of democracy. Only, in our regime, these things are produced at a pace that is almost automatic, in a form that is so repetitious that it borders on the absurd and self-contradictory. Democratic discourse is a facade, because it no longer democratic, but automatic: self-reproducing. The trend toward a truly automated discourse in the form of Artificial Intelligence is obvious here. A discourse so automated that our individual opinions hardly matter anymore, because all opinions are already included in this self-producing discourse anyway—this would truly be the death not merely of democracy but of the last pretenses of democracy to which we still desperately cling. We would no longer have any good reason to pretend.
Authoritarianism or A.I?
But wait. Which is it really? If we do not live under a democracy, do we live under an authoritarian regime or a technocratic A.I. regime? That may indeed be the question of the hour. If one takes a negative and dystopian view of authoritarianism, our salvation may actually lie in the direction of Artificial Intelligence. Better to be guided by an impersonal and impartial machine than by the unpredictable whims of a petty dictator! Or, if one takes a negative and dystopian view of A.I., the opposite may be true: better to be governed by a human being than by a machine that cannot see the humanity of those it governs!
Democracy is crumbling, or it has died already, just as capitalism has died. But there were many forces that destroyed these jewels of Enlightenment Modernity, and those forces themselves are not necessarily in harmony; they may be quite at odds with one another. The question of postliberalism is essentially this: what kind of social reality do we wish to live under after liberalism, that is, after democracy and capitalism? Authoritarianism or Artificial Intelligence?
Or is there some third way?
Theology and the Death of Language
I was remiss not to publish a third part to my series of responses to Vince Garton’s article on “Language Inhuman.” I have not had the presence of mind to write long articles at all. So in lieu of Part III, I will very briefly summarize what I wish I had posted. Part III was meant to be a reflection on the theological significance of the self-referential language that Vince highlighted as the next stage in the evolution of language beyond liberalism. To quote Vince:
The other means by which the liberal speech-flow may be ended is by its perfect completion. In this case, the network of symbols would become self-sufficient. Rather than meaninglessness and decoherence, however, the simulation would attain self-referential significance. This is the posthistorical possibility that Hegel saw prefigured—yet recoiled from—in the Confucian universe of signs. Instead of asserting different viewpoints according to the formal transformations of a single linear method, it would already be capable truly of expressing anything, and as such would be impossible to contradict. One can continue, with the Kantians, to speak incessantly: but without novelty, that is, in a circle. Because it is unparadoxical, because it cannot encompass death, the liberal regime cannot ever fully recuperate every possible contradiction—though it is more successful in doing so than any other system before it. Simulation must instead be pushed further. To establish the identity of A not just with A but with not-A through the medium of time constitutes the decisive move from synthetic parathesis to authentic synthesis. Formal contradiction then becomes impossible. ‘Debate’, in any particularly meaningful sense, comes to an end because everything has already been said. Such a circumstance becomes possible only through the completion of the process of simulation.
This is a bit dense, but Vince’s description of posthistorical language is strikingly similar to ancient and Christian descriptions of the theological language, i.e. speech about God. God is the subject about whom “everything has already been said,” because indeed everything that can be said about anything can be said about God. In speaking of God, “debate” is in some sense impossible (in spite of centuries of theological debate), because ultimately everything that can be said about God is true. God is what Nicolas of Cusa called coincidentia oppositorum, in which we at last contemplate “the identity of A not just with A but with not-A.” Moreover, speech about God is, in a very real way, self-referential, because the referent cannot be identified as any object out there in the real world. The object of theology is God, but ‘God’ is really only a name, a placeholder, for something which language cannot describe and cannot access, except by repeating itself in a circular way without contradiction, while encompassing the totality of all that can be said, affirmed, and denied. The liberal project of automated speech can thus only be completed and surpassed in theological speech: speech about ‘God.’
Theology or A.I?
Vince did not mention theological speech in his article, although I know he is familiar with theology. His focus was rather on the automated production of speech in Artificial Intelligence. One cannot help but wonder what these things have to do with each other. Can A.I. produce theological speech? I have no clue, besides this extremely theoretical speculation: there is a shade of resemblance between the cataphatic anarchy that is the theological process of talking about God and the anarchic self-reproduction of language that is Artificial Intelligence. Is this a true resemblance, or is it a demonic caricature of theology? There are many of a theological persuasion who will undoubtedly argue the latter in a heartbeat. I am not so sure.
You might appreciate this Jonathan https://oswald67.substack.com/p/matt-walsh-is-the-gordon-ramsey-of?r=2r3au