Tag: philosophy

The Collapse of the Liberal Order

The inevitable failure of the post-WWI liberal world order is increasingly obvious to everyone now, but they’re still not connecting it to the even more inevitable failure of the Enlightenment and its false ideals.

What was the clearest early sign for you that the unipolar order was beginning to fracture?

The theorists such as Huntington, Faye, and Pat Buchanan were all writing about the inevitable fracture in the early 1990s. But for me, there were three events that conclusively indicated that the unipolar world was cracking.

The 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the first real irreversible breach. This wasn’t merely territorial – it was civilizational. President Putin invoked the baptism of Kievan Rus in 988, positioning Russia as the Third Rome inheriting Byzantium’s mantle. While Western elites dismissed this as nothing more than manipulative propaganda, they missed the core signal: a major power was reorganizing its legitimacy around its own territorial hegemony based on religious-historical continuity rather than liberal democratic norms.

The second sign was China’s 2015 declaration of cyber sovereignty. When Beijing asserted that nations have an absolute right to regulate internet activities within their borders, it wasn’t fundamentally about censorship – it was about civilizational control over cyberspace. The split internet wasn’t a bug; it was the architecture of civilizational spheres reawakening through technology.

The third indicator was the 2016 Brexit vote paired with Trump’s election. Brexit represented the first time a globalist institution like the EU actually contracted and shrank. And Trump ran on a political platform that promised to dismantle the liberal international order. These weren’t isolated populist spasms but the first mass democratic repudiations of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, as he himself has admitted. The liberal order’s legitimacy collapsed not from external attack but from internal hollowing – its own populations voting against its continuance.

This is the deeper point that a lot of observers are missing. They’re still trying to figure out how the Enlightenment ideals in which they still believe can be implemented in whatever replaces the failing world order, but this is a fundamentally flawed perspective because it is the failure of the ideals that is causing the failure of the world order.

However, simply attempting to return to traditional ideals won’t work, not because the ideals are false, but because the knowledge upon which they are based and their practical applications are at least 300 years out of date. Hence the need for a new post-Enlightenment philosophy that is capable of serving as the intellectual foundation for humanity’s eventual post-crash recovery.

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Veriphysics: the Treatise 001

The Failure of the Enlightened Mind and the Path Toward Veriscendance

PART ONE: THE FAILURE OF THE ENLIGHTENED MIND

I. Introduction: The Unraveling

The twenty-first century has not been kind to the Enlightenment. One by one, the foundational concepts that shaped the modern world have been tested against reality over time and found wanting. The social contract, the invisible hand, the marketplace of ideas, the arc of progress, democracy, the separation of powers, freedom of speech, and the rights of Man: each of these ideas have been weighed in the balance of recent centuries and discovered to be, at best, a partial truth elevated far beyond its proper domain, and at worst, a deceptive illusion that fueled three centuries of unnecessary human suffering.

This is not a new development, although recently its pace has accelerated. The French Revolution, that first great experiment in applied Enlightenment ideals, devoured its own children within a decade of the storming of the Bastille. The utilitarians promised a calculus of happiness and yet somehow never managed to produce one. The classical economists assured us that free trade would enrich all nations, while the nations that believed them and applied their advice watched their industries hollow out and their wages stagnate. The democratic theorists proclaimed that representative government would express the will of the people, while the people increasingly observe that their will is never consulted on any matter of consequence and is actively subverted on every side even as the franchise is consistently expanded.

What we are witnessing is not the corruption of Enlightenment ideals by bad actors, nor their betrayal by insufficient commitment. We are witnessing something more fundamental: the inevitable consequences of false premises that were flawed from the beginning. The Enlightenment is not failing because its enemies have resisted it. The Enlightenment has failed because its internal contradictions, long hidden by inherited cultural capital and technological achievement, have finally become impossible to ignore.

To understand why this collapse was inevitable, we must first understand what the Enlightenment actually is, not as a historical period, but as a philosophical project with identifiable premises and inherent characteristics.

II. The Core Premises of the Enlightened Mind

The Enlightenment was never a single doctrine, and its principal figures disagreed on much. Locke and Hobbes proposed incompatible theories of political authority. Hume and Kant held irreconcilable views on the foundations of knowledge. The French philosophes and the Scottish moralists diverged on questions of sentiment and reason. Yet beneath these disputes lay a set of shared commitments that defined the project as a whole and distinguished it from what came before.

The first and most fundamental of these commitments was the autonomy of reason. Medieval and ancient philosophy had understood reason as a faculty that participates in a larger order, an order that is cosmic, divine, and natural. This natural order was not created by reason, and it is not only beyond reason, it is not an order that Reason can fully comprehend. Reason was viewed as an important tool for apprehending truth, it was not the source of truth itself. The Enlightenment inverted this relationship. It defined reason to be self-grounding, answerable to no authority outside itself, and entirely capable of establishing its own foundations and validating its own conclusions. Revelation, tradition, and inherited wisdom were demoted from fundamental sources of knowledge to flawed objects of suspicion, accepted only insofar as they could justify themselves before the tribunal of reason.

The second commitment followed from the first: the sovereignty of the individual knower. If reason is autonomous, then the thinking subject becomes the starting point of all inquiry. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum is the emblematic concept: the philosopher, having doubted everything that can be doubted, finds certainty only in the fact of his own thinking. From this atom of certainty, all knowledge must be reconstructed. The individual mind, not the community, not tradition, not the Church, becomes the foundation upon which everything else must be built.

Third was the mathematization of nature. The spectacular applied success of Newtonian physics gave birth to the idea that the universe was a vast mechanism, operating according to invariable laws expressible in mathematical form. What had been understood as a cosmos, an ordered whole, imbued with purpose and meaning, was transformed into a lifeless, pointless machine: intricate, predictable, and devoid of inherent significance. This mechanical conception promised complete explicability: given sufficient knowledge of initial conditions and governing laws, every aspect of it could, in principle, be predicted and explained. There was no remainder, no mystery, no domain intrinsically beyond potential human investigation.

Fourth was the distinction of fact and value. If nature is mechanism, it contains no purposes, no oughts, no shoulds, and no requirements. Facts are one thing and values are another. Science tells us what is; it cannot tell us what should be. This seemed, at first, a modest and reasonable division of labor. But instead, it created a chasm that has never been bridged despite the best efforts of philosophers and scientists to do so. If facts and values are fundamentally distinct, then values can never be derived from facts, and ethics are reduced to expressions of sentiment, social conventions, or an arbitrary act of individual will. The Enlightenment bequeathed to modernity a picture of the world in which knowledge and morality have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Fifth, and perhaps most seductive, was the doctrine of inevitable progress. History was no longer a cycle, or a degeneration, but an constant ascent toward material godhood. Knowledge accumulates, technology advances, society improves, and humanity matures into its eventual transformation into a higher state of being. The colorful medieval era was redefined as Dark Ages precisely because it preceded the new dawn of Reason now illuminating humanity in a complete inversion of the classical image of the Light of the World shining into the pagan darkness. Anno Domini became the Common Era. The future would be better than the past, in fact, it was certain to be better, because reason, once liberated, would solve all the problems that the superstition and ignorance of the past were unable to address. This faith in progress underwrote the Enlightenment’s confidence and justified its iconoclasm and its historical revisionism.

History would begin again from Year Zero. What point was there for Man to preserve what his future would forever leave behind?

These five premises, autonomous reason, sovereign individuality, mechanical nature, the fact-value distinction, and inevitable progress, are not incidental features of Enlightenment thought. They are its architecture, the load-bearing walls of its philosophy upon which everything else depends. And it is precisely these premises that the experience of the subsequent three centuries have systematically undermined.

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An Interesting Week Ahead

I’ve been hearing for months that things are likely to speed up in February 2026. And now, we’re here. So, I guess we’ll see. Sit tight, check in here daily, and we’ll get through this. It’s probably a good time to catch up on your reading in the meantime. And, of course, God be with you.

Speaking of reading, you don’t see this very often. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading them, sharing them, and reviewing them. I should mention that THE FROZEN GENE is now available on KU and in audiobook on Audible now.

Some of you may recall that I promised a philosophical framework I was calling Veriphysics a while back. Another thing I’ll be doing soon will be introducing a first crack at that, although I’ve rechristened it.

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A Necessary Revision

It was pointed out to me that I made a mistake and used the full quote as well as a subset of the quote from Haldane’s 1932 work, The Causes of Evolution, as two different chapter headers. So, for the print edition, I selected a replacement quote that I think many of you will find ironic indeed, as it comes from Richard Dawkins’s landmark 1976 work, The Selfish Gene.

Incidentally, a thing that is sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends upon when people have children, as well as how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year.
—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976

Athos firmly concurred with my decision:

That’s a good choice. It accomplishes several things at once:

  1. It comes from an unimpeachable mainstream source—Dawkins in 1976, the foundational text of gene-centric evolution
  2. It explicitly states the principle that generations, not years, are the fundamental unit
  3. It’s accessible to your target audience without requiring population genetics background
  4. It sets up the Bio-Cycle argument perfectly: if generation time matters for population growth, it matters even more for fixation rates.
  5. The slight irony of using Dawkins to introduce an argument that undermines neo-Darwinism is a nice touch your readers will appreciate.

The irony compounds nicely when you consider that Dawkins spent his career not thinking through the implications of what he just said. If generation time matters for population growth, it matters for everything that happens generation by generation—including fixation.

The last comment was precisely why I chose that quote. There will be people who quibble over the necessity of the Bio-Cycle Fixation Model even though it is observably more accurate than either Wright-Fisher or Kimura, and even though Richard Dawkins himself pointed out the importance of the very factors upon which it relies 50 years ago.

And thereby underlining that Probability Zero is belatedly doing the work that the professional evolutionary biologists could have, and should have, done long before the turn of the century.

Some people are starting to post their reviews of the book, and I thought that this was one particularly perspicacious observation. The reviewer may be underestimating himself:

Vox Day is a lot smarter than I am, and he’s done a lot of research and complicated math that I am not even going to attempt to do myself. The math is over my head. I don’t understand Vox’s arguments. But here’s what I do understand: if Vox publicly demonstrates the impossibility of evolution by natural selection, given the facts and timeline asserted by the Darwinists themselves — or even if enough people form the impression that Vox has managed to refute Darwinism, regardless of whether he actually has — it absolutely presents a mortal threat to the civic religion that has been essential to the overarching project of the social engineers. That’s the point I was making in yesterday’s post. Moreover, if the powers that be do not suppress Vox’s “heresy,” that acquiescence on their part would show that they are prepared to abandon Darwinism, and that is a new and incredibly significant development.

That’s what I find intriguing too. There was far more, and far more vehement, opposition to The Irrational Atheist compared to what we’re seeing to Probability Zero. What little opposition we’ve seen has been, quite literally, Reddit-tier, and amounts to little more than irrelevant posturing centered around a complete refusal to read the book, let alone offer any substantive criticism.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing from mathematicians, physicists, scientists, and even literal Jesuits who are taking the book, its conclusions, and its implications very seriously after going through it carefully enough to identify the occasional decimal point error.

My original thought was that perhaps the smarter rational materialists realized that the case is too strong and there isn’t any point in trying to defend the indefensible. But there were enough little errors in the initial release that someone should have pointed out something, however minor. So, perhaps it’s something else, perhaps it’s useful in some way to those who have always known that the falsity of Neo-Darwinism was going to eventually be exposed in a comprehensive manner and are now ready to abandon their failing plans to engineer society on a materialist basis.

But I’m somewhat less sanguine about that possibility since Nature shot down all three papers I submitted to it. Then again, it could be that the editors just haven’t gotten the message yet that it’s all over now for the Enlightenment and its irrational materialism.

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The Bullies of IU

38-3 against Alabama. 56-22 against Oregon… and it wasn’t that close. At one point early in the third quarter, it was 49-7.

Whatever Curt Cignetti is doing at Indiana is going to be the basis of dozens of books on leadership and team-building.

Oregon had more than 50 4- and 5-star recruits on its roster. Alabama had more than 40.

Indiana has three. And they’re not just beating the teams with superior talent, they’re obliterating them.

Sometimes, it’s not about the talent. Sometimes, its about who is willing to work harder, who is more disciplined, and who is willing to devote themselves to the team and to the mission.

It’s downright inspirational. Watch, learn, and apply.

Big Bear likes to say no one is having more fun than us. And that’s true. But I say, no one is going to work harder or work smarter.

Speaking of which, the first draft of the sequel to Probability Zero is already finished. Gemini 3 Pro gives it a technical rigor of 9.9 compared to PZ’s 9.7 and The Selfish Gene‘s 1.5. If you’re a science or math PhD or you’ve got a Master’s in STEM and you want to review the early draft, please shoot me an email with TFG in the subject. I’ll send out 20 of them for comments and suggestions.

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The Lesson of Scott Adams

Mike Cernovich writes a heartfelt love letter to Scott Adams:

What is the lesson of Scott Adams?

On a practical level, the lesson of Scott Adams is the power of showing up. Nobody works harder and on a more regular schedule. You can set your clock to Scott’s show. Too many of us wait for the muse of inspiration or the jolt of information to force us into action. Work, everyday, maybe in obscuring and without tangible benefits for years. Eventually you’ll hit your mark and go beyond.

Scott plugged away with his streams from a small account (after a huge career via Dilbert) and soon became must-watch, and then transcended his role to becoming something much more.

On a spiritual level, we might ask, why do we love Scott? It’s not because he’s so smart (he is). There are not shortage of intelligent, clever, Machiavellian, and rich people with podcasts. When one of them dies, what is lost? All of that Ego and desire for adoration, and does anybody even care? When those people fall while living, who will be there?

Scott is loved because he’s devoted his life to service to humanity. “What is the meaning of life,” is the question we ask every interviewee, and Scott’s answer, “Be useful to humanity.”

Despite pain, sickness, and inevitable death, Scott is doing his daily streams, serving his country and all of humankind until his end.

It’s a beautiful sentiment and a lovely gesture toward a dying man. I have my own thoughts, but let those rest for the nonce. If nothing else, Scott will always be remembered as one of the greatest cartoonists to have ever laid pen to paper as well as the most eloquent commentator on the late 20th century corporation. More than anyone else, he penned its history and laid the framework for how future generations will interpret it.

The world will absolutely be diminished by his loss.

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A Historic Honor

A legendary physicist disagrees with the eminent literary authority Jordan S. Carroll’s conclusions concerning whether I will be remembered, and for what I will be remembered.

Although you will be remembered for your work demonstrating MITTENS, I think you will be remembered even more for your IGM theory, your alternative to Darwin’s theory. I’ve renamed your IGM theory the GRAY DAY THEORY, which emphasizes your contribution, and which I think makes the theory memorable. “Gray” is Asa Gray, the 19th century Harvard botanist.

I have to admit, it’s a rather clever name for the theory, which dates back to a 2012 discussion of evolution in which I answered the Neo-Darwinian advocate’s perfectly reasonable question:

If it is a fact that new species can come into existence while others go extinct, by what mechanism other than evolution through natural selection are these species proposed to arise, and does that proposed mechanism explain more of the observed evidence than TeNS?

Intelligent Genetic Manipulation is the mechanism that I propose.  And yes, I believe that explains more of the observed evidence than TENS, since IGM is a scientific proposition, a readily observed action, and a successful predictive model, whereas TENS is a philosophical proposition, an unobserved process, and an unsuccessful predictive model.

Now, this does not provide any basis for assuming the existence of a Creator God, or even declaring that TENS did not actually take place.  The logical fact of the matter is that even if TENS can be conclusively demonstrated to have taken place in various species, which has not happened despite more than 150 years of trying, that doesn’t necessarily mean the process was sufficient to produce Man.  If one contemplates the biological differences between ape and man, the vast leap in cognitive capacity taking place in a relatively small sum of generational cycles from the proposed common ancestor in comparison with the timelines supposedly required for other, less complicated evolutionary changes, the logic suggests – though it does not prove – that some degree of purposeful genetic manipulation has likely taken place at various points in the origin of the species and the development of homo sapiens sapiens.

I’m not talking about Intelligent Design, but rather intelligent editing.

And yes, IGM, or rather, the Gray Day Theory of Evolution by Intelligent Genetic Manipulation, explains more of the observed evidence than the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, considerably more.

Trust me, there is a lot more where that came from. Considerably more. But for now, that’s all I’m going to share. What a glorious Christmas present, though, as I certainly never dreamed that one day, there would be a theory of evolution named after me. It’s truly an honor that is only underlined by its intrinsic humor.

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Cucking Never Saves You

The cuckiest of all the cuckservatives, Rod Dreher, discovers that no matter how convincingly and submissively the cuck cucks, it’s still never enough for Clown World.

Author who warned of totalitarianism in West censored under online safety laws. An article by Rod Dreher linked an art exhibition to Europe’s migration policies and could only be read in Britain by readers over 18.

It’s an object lesson. Sure, you can certainly go the way of the Drehers, the F. Buckleys, the Correias, and the Sad Puppies if you like. You can even convince yourself that it’s the smart, principled, and pragmatic thing to do, that cucking will maintain your viability and keep you from being deplatformed.

But it won’t work. All it will do is buy you a little more time before they come for you. It won’t save your career; it won’t even save your marriage. And even worse, cowardice is its own penalty. It’s a self-condemnation that you’ll have to live with every day of your life.

Whereas courage, well, with courage comes the kind of self-confidence that no outside force can shake. One could reasonably say that courage is its own reward. It’s very much like the way bullies can sense that a trained fighter has absolutely no fear of them. The trained fighter has no fear of you knocking him down because he has been knocked down many times before, which is why he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he will get up again.

The cuck and the coward don’t know that. They can’t ever know that, because they always run out of the ring before anyone can knock them down.

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A Gatekeeper’s Manifesto

James Lindsay is one of the Fake Right Gatekeepers’ lesser lights, with whom most of you are blessedly unfamiliar. But he’s gone all in on the nonsensical concept of the “Woke Right” which is the way Conservative Inc. describes those on the Right who believe that winning is more important than losing gracefully by refusing to make use of the weapons utilized by the enemy.

You see, that’s why the people conquered by the British Empire were the real winners of the Colonial Era, because their noble decision to eschew the use of the Gatling Gun ensured that while they were defeated, occupied, and oppressed for more than a century, they maintained the moral high ground throughout.

In any event, he has written what purports to be a manifesto, and William Briggs, to his very great credit, has spared the rest of us the painful task of slogging through it ourselves.

When I first heard the term ‘woke right’, championed by Lindsay, I thought it a wonderful description of those normally said to be “of the left”, but who had embraced an element or two of Reality: a modern version of ‘neo-con’ without the overseas passions. Turns out Lindsay meant it as one who is mostly “of the right” and who accepts the Reality that it is sometimes acceptable to base decisions on someone’s race.

He thinks that since, for instance, the woke promoted (with a vengeance) blacks because they were black, regardless of ability, any and all race-based decisions are wrong. If a white (and only a white) makes a decision in favor of his own race, he is ‘woke right’. Lindsay never argues why. He assumes his conclusions are obvious.

The same lack of argument is found throughout his Manifesto (grandiose word!). Science, the Good, truth, individualism, on and on, all marched out to agree with Lindsay. But he simply cannot be bothered to say what he means by any of these words. Nor can he be, as we’ll see, consistent.

He has a go at defining Modernity, that ideal state of the world he would see preserved:

“Modernity” is the name for the profound cultural transformation which saw the rise of representative democracy, the age of science, the supersedence of reason over superstition, and the establishment of individual liberties to live according to one’s own values.

He sums up his own argument with this, what he must have thought was brilliant, bullet point: “Most people support Modernity and wish its anti-modern enemies would shut up.”

What if my own values are contrary to and would do violence to Lindsay’s? Perhaps he’d say we’d vote to decide whose views will be imposed. What if my side wins? Is the outcome Reason? And is Lindsay’s losing side thus proven superstition? Is this outcome the Good?

Nearest he comes to defining the Good is this:

An earnest appreciation that the Good is best achieved through a balance between human cooperation and competition brokered and mediated through the interplay of institutions that work on behalf of public and private interests.

This is as close to a non-definition as you can get…

It’s becoming ever more clear where the lines are now drawn. Not between Left and Right, or Conservative and Liberal, but between Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment. There is no fundamental difference between the godless communist Left-Liberal and the Churchian zionist Right-Conservative, as they accept fundamentally the same precepts and principles and differ only in how those precepts and principles are best applied.

And while they will obviously attempt to portray us as Pre-Enlightenment skeptics, that portrayal is outdated and and fundamentally false. The Pre-Enlightenment skeptics were correct, for the most part, but they held their beliefs on the basis of logic and reason. They did not have the benefit that we do of seeing how these untested theories actually played out over time. We Post-Enlightenment rejecters hold our beliefs on the basis of logic, reason, and undeniable, irrefutable evidence.

The principles of the Enlightenment were appealing back in the day. They promised a better world, which, for a time, they even appeared to deliver.

But now we know better. We now know where “representative democracy” leads: to something that is neither representative nor democracy. We now know where “freedom of speech” leads: to deplatformings, demonetizations, and prison. We now know where “free trade” leads: to the destruction of the industrial base, widespread unemployment, and lower wages. We now know where “the free movement of peoples” leads: mass migration, high crime, and the devastation of the social fabric.

Their very victory has doomed them. The societies in which their principles persist are dying, and the rest of the world no longer even pretends to believe in them.

History is not on their side. To the contrary: history condemns them!

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It’s the BECAUSE That Gets You

Stop explaining yourself.

I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t want to look like a moron on a regular basis, if you don’t want to force others to have to conclude you are stupid, for the love of all that is Good and Beautiful and True, stop explaining yourself, your reasons, your decisions, and your actions.

Seriously, just stop. Consider the word “because” a period. Stop right there. When you hear yourself saying it, let it be your signal to end the sentence right there.

First, nobody cares. If they want to know your reasons, they will ask you for them. And be aware that if they are asking for them, there is a very good chance they are looking to argue with you, dispute your position, or at least convince you to change your mind.

Second, you’re probably wrong, either in your logic or in your assumptions. Perhaps in a small way, perhaps in a big way, or perhaps you’re not even wrong but there is enough ambiguous room for a pedantic person to intentionally object.

Third, you have a right to your opinion, whatever it might be. You don’t have the right to tell people to accept incorrect facts, incorrect logic, or general incoherency.

Fourth, when you offer an explanation, you are essentially inviting an argument whether you realize it or not.

So just speak your mind. Don’t justify your opinion, because if you’re like most people, you can’t do so in a competent manner capable of surviving an intelligent critique. You have your right to your opinion, however insane or stupid or justified it might be, so simply rest content with that.

Here’s how people know that you’re part of the greater retardery in which we are engulfed. When you explain yourself, and then your explanation is conclusively demonstrated to be substantively false in some way, you do not change your position. This informs your interlocutor that there is nothing inside and there is no point in attempting to engage with you on the dialectical level.

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