I found myself reading some accounts of the Holocaust written as that history-rending event was only beginning to build into shape, and I came across an extraordinary idea, expressed in a recent interview by the great political consultant Edward Luttwak (not the first time his work has inspired work of my own).

According to Luttwak, who grew up in the Jewish enclaves of Romania, his parents and their contemporaries “considered the Holocaust as a defeat of the Jewish leadership, secular and religious. All these self-important people who were the leaders of the Jewish community around Europe, from the Atlantic to Russia: they all failed. They failed to understand that there was a threat. They failed to organise, they failed to use the resources. They failed to do a lot of things.”

It is, understandably enough, considered not-the-done-thing to so much as remotely consider the fate of the Jews in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s as a failure-of-own-devices; and yet to arm such a controversy is archetypally of the Jewish tradition, and the “what-ifs” of the pre-caustic period are worth thinking about. We must always approach the future, after all, in the belief that such travesties as the Holocaust are preventable.

And regarding how it might have been prevented, Luttwak’s account threw up a particularly interesting character, a ‘Baron’ Neumann of Arad, Romania. I found the following description of Neumann and his exploits, printed in Nazi materials of the time.

Neumann’s work did in fact change the final fate of the Jews of Romania in spite of these predictions. As detailed in Jean Ancel’s seminal 1984 study, "Plans for Deportation of the Rumanian Jews and their Discontinuation in Light of Documentary Evidence (July–October 1942)", which also contains extended quotation of the passage above, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu ended up reversing his plans to send 200,000 Romanian Jews to German death camps in Poland, influenced by military shifts, evolving strategic self-interest, and in some large measure the kind of domestic lobbying in which the likes of Neumann were engaged. Places like Banat, Romania became the only centres of Jewish culture in Europe where the population of Jews increased during the war.

I found Luttwak’s summary of Neumann particularly illuminating.

Luttwak: A local rich guy, really rich guy, was a man called Neumann, actually, Baron Neumann, no less. He called the young people, including my father, and said, “I’m very rich, and none of my money will serve me if I’m deported. You young fellows, if you have any way of doing anything useful and have a high probability [of success], I’ll fund it. If it has a low probability, I will also fund it. If it is just a possibility that it might be of any use, I will fund it.” That was one thing, using money like that.

We are undergoing a precipitous decline in the West. Not merely decline in the functionality of our complex systems; not simply a loss of social memory and collective intelligence, nor a mere slump in our ability to produce individuals of calibre; but an aggressive deculturation, an attempt to press our way of thinking and living out of existence, a goal being pursued from both within and without.

I consider the empirical-meritocratic traditions of Britain the brightest light human civilisation has ever shone into the vastness of the universe; no other tradition has ever brought more wealth, freedom, and high-development to so many people people, nor has any other sired so many beautifully successful children. It ought to be zealously preserved from what presently puts it pointedly at risk; and not just preserved, but developed and grown at tremendous speeds.

Just as the renewal of a material economy requires entrepreneurs, the revival of a political economy requires political entrepreneurialism. Any project of extravagant ambition, whatever economy it targets, requires a few evergreens. Great talent married to implacable will at the core. A capacity for machine-building. The discipline and restraint to prioritise operational victories over tactical ones. Aesthetic and ethical flair aren’t fundamental but certainly help, and I think are far more important in political entrepreneurialism than the material kind.

And it needs Baron Neumanns.

The fact is you can win an election in the United Kingdom, out of nowhere and from a standing start — presuming you tailor your policies to public need and make a few shrewd decisions regarding the common conventions you break, particularly around how you present yourselves — for about £40 million. Front-to-back. A team of the operational and creative calibre of the one we’re building at Progress could economise that amount to a degree of effectiveness 5-20x that of what any of the legacy parties (including Reform, Restore, and the Greens, who despite their neoteny are each run exactly according to a century of party-political tradition, with all the same defects) are capable of.

That means that one person could feasibly supply all of the capital required to change history in the cradle of global democracy. Some of the people who have told me personally that they’re burning a candle for the fate of Britain could supply a large fraction of that amount by themselves while hardly noticing the loss on their account statement, notwithstanding that there are dozens of such people burning their own candles, all with similar and very workable ideas for how the nation can be redeemed.

So I find myself asking the question — who will be the Baron?

There is probably no more direct, nor any easier, way presently available of writing your way into history than by financing the political salvation of Britain. When Britain is delivered, and when its future is secured, the method used to deliver it will be emulated across Europe and around the world; we have shown Europe how to resolve civilisation-breaking problems peacefully before and we provide that example again.

And the deliverance will involve breaking the grip on the Western consciousness presently exerted by so many of those forces that oppress us and prevent life achieving the freedom and beauty that it might:

• The foul racialism of intersectionalist politics

• The engendered scepticism to markets and the agendas of degrowth

• Institutional contempt for law and order

• The dominion of courts and entrenched civil services, neither answerable to the electorate, over democratically elected governments

• The general sociocultural drive towards ugliness and objection over beauty and excellence

• The immiseration, at the bottom of the economy, of the working guy

And when those things, so reviled by the vast majority of people in Britain as elsewhere, fall here, the toppling will set in motion a program that cannot be disabled, whereby they will fall all elsewhere too.

Many of the great and the good in the elite of industry in Britain, in the States, and throughout the West fancy themselves as civilisation builders in spirit, merely cast down by the parsimonious lack of opportunity afforded by history to the marginally lesser vocation of enterprise builders; and most of those who fancy themselves as such came to success as beneficiaries of a venture investment paradigm that works by the same ethos that the Baron used to save the Jewry of Banat.

Well, here’s a chance to embark upon a process of civilisation rebuilding, in earnest, with all of the extraordinary flying exposures and deathly rock walls and electrifying peaks that such a notion portends. Who will rise to be its enabler? Who will be the Baron?

I do not think that our decline will culminate in such violence as the Jews of Europe faced in their homes. I am convinced that this is not in our stars because I am quite sure that the solution to our present ills is in gestation and will shortly start to rise; and I am convinced of this in part because I am convinced that we will shortly find the Baron.

But whether or not you are minded towards entertaining worst-case-scenarios — and in this case, the mere disappearance of what we have historically privileged to be all the beauties of British-Western civilisation from the world is not even the worst-case scenario — we cannot fail to understand the threat. And that means we cannot fail to organise. We cannot fail to make use of all available resources. There can never be allowed to be a time-to-come in which our descendants can remark solemnly that “They failed.” There is too much at stake, and too much glorious opportunity on the other side of the chasm.

1. Uniformitarian geology and the discovery of deep time (Hutton, Edinburgh; Playfair; Lyell)

2. The rock cycle, and the reading of Siccar Point as the record of an entire lost cycle of deposition, upheaval, and ruin (Hutton, 1788)

3. Faunal succession, the identification of strata by their characteristic fossils, and with it the geological column as a method (William Smith)

4. The first geological map of a country (William Smith, 1815)

5. The application of Malthusian scarcity to the natural world as the engine of the theory (Darwin, after Malthus, whose political economy belongs to a later essay in this series)

6. Evolution by natural selection (Darwin; Wallace, simultaneous and gracious)

7. Genetics as a named discipline, and the term itself (Bateson)

8. The foundations of the modern synthesis, the reconciliation of Mendelian inheritance with natural selection in mathematical form (Fisher, Haldane, alongside Wright in the US; Fisher’s statistical machinery treated more fully in the mathematics essay)

9. Protein crystallography and the structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin (Perutz, Kendrew, Cambridge)

10. The X-ray crystallography of the molecules of life, and the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin (Hodgkin, Oxford; treated more fully in the chemistry essay, the method itself in the physics essay with the Braggs)

11. The B-form diffraction photography that fixed the helix and its dimensions (Franklin, King’s College London)

12. The structure of DNA (Crick, Watson [American], Franklin, Wilkins, at Cambridge and King’s London, 1953)

13. The formation of soil, and the earthworm as a geological agent (Darwin, 1881)

In the last year of his life, Charles Darwin — refreshed from having successfully rewritten humanity’s conceptions of being and the metaphysics of being, and revealed to us too the way life projects itself in infinite streams of mechanical development through endless spans of itself — turned his attention to his greatest subject yet: earthworms.

Darwin, the author of a system of mechanics every bit as profound as Newton’s, gave his final book over to counting the worms in his garden and measuring, with devotional patience, the rate at which they drew a fallen stone down into the earth. The argument of that small, strange, and characteristically unglamorous volume devoted to this grubbily poetic exercise was that the worm, labouring blindly and without cease beneath the lawns and pastures of England, passes the entire soil of the country through its body once in a handful of years. That it is the worm, and not the plough or the flood, which interred the Roman pavement and settled the toppled sarsen. That the largest alterations of the visible world are wrought, given time enough, by agents almost too small, and too dull, to merit the time taken to look at them. Here, in miniature and at the very last, was a principle that British earth and life science had spent the preceding century pressing upon a reluctant world as another of its most critical orienting truths: that the immense is only the patient accumulation of the trivial, and that everything in our world but time itself is remade by the trivial, the marginal, and the unitary.

The explanation’s very simplicity itself explains why it took such a long time to be believed. A cause that is small but tireless has no natural limit to what it may accomplish, given only time. The river runs across centuries in its seemingly solid bounds and saws a gorge through solid rock, remaking its own course totally. A patient sea will eat through a county. A worm, with its unhurried appetite, will swallow and regurgitate all of England. Nothing in the mechanism need be violent, or sudden, or guided by any hand; the arithmetic does the work provided only that the sum is permitted to run long enough. And yet what a violent revolution this was against the idea of antiquity that the 17th century had inherited; was this world with no prehistory, by the example of the earthworm, really to be replaced with one of boundless annals of immemorial time? A world in which the creation could no longer be dated, with a churchman's confidence, to a particular autumn a mere six thousand years before?

Britain said yes. Before it gave the world the principle of evolutionary descent, it had first to give the world the depth of all time; and the man who did so was no philosopher in pursuit of cosmic architectures, but a Lowland Scot who had come to the earth by way of his own fields.

James Hutton worked out the age of the Earth from farming. Trained as a physician, he settled on land in Berwickshire and watched his soil erode into the rivers year after year. He asked himself where it all went. The answer was that rivers carry it to the sea, where it settles, hardens into rock, and is in time pushed back up to form new land, which then erodes in its turn, the whole cycle turning over through spans of time no simple six-thousand-year Old Testament chronology could encompass. In 1788 he was taken by boat to Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast and shown the story entire in a single cliff face; one set of strata standing on end and sheared flat, another lying level across the top, the seam between them the record of a whole lost cycle of deposition, upheaval and ruin done across untold expanses of time. His companion John Playfair wrote of the scene that the mind grew giddy looking so far into the abyss of the past, and realising its infinitudes. Hutton had found exactly what the argument required. But he then wrote it up in prose so dense and shapeless that the discovery went very nearly unread.

Thankfully, Playfair rescued him. A mathematician able to express himself in the clear prose Hutton lacked, Playfair published a readable account of his friend’s theory in 1802; and thus it was through Playfair, not Hutton, that deep time (the concept of geological time spanning billions of years, mostly predating the rise of the first humas) entered general circulation. A generation later Charles Lyell hardened it into doctrine. His Principles of Geology, appearing in three volumes from 1830, argued that the Earth had been shaped entirely by forces still visibly at work, rivers, frost, tides, the slow subsidence and uplift of land, acting at their present unremarkable rates across immense stretches of time. There were no past catastrophes doing the work of change quickly, merely the ordinary present, run backward almost without limit. Darwin took the first volume aboard HMS Beagle in 1831 and read it as he sailed. It gave him the one thing his theory of evolution would need above all others and did not yet possess: room. Descent by slow modification is impossible in a world of six thousand years of Biblically ordained time and yet utterly logical, obvious even, given a world hundreds of millions of years old. Lyell made the notion of the latter respectable.

The other half of the discovery was made not by a gentleman amateur but by a canal surveyor. William Smith spent the 1790s digging and draining across the west of England, and noticed in the walls of his excavations that the strata always lay in the same order, and that each layer carried its own particular fossils, so that a bed of rock could be recognised anywhere by the creatures buried in it. This was a tool as much as a truth: it let one predict what lay underground before a spade touched it, and it let the whole crust of the country be arranged into a single ordered sequence. In 1815 Smith published the first geological map of an entire nation, a hand-coloured survey of England and Wales that remains recognisably correct today. He had arrived at one of the century’s great scientific ideas through the frankly commercial business of finding coal and cutting canals; his reward was to be plagiarised, bankrupted, and gaoled for debt before he was honoured by and for the science he had created.

And then, Darwin. He is the umpteenth subject to prove that there is no principle of culture more endemic to the British than the refusal to publish critical work; he returned to England in 1836 with the makings of his greatest idea and did not publish on it for two decades. He hit on the mechanism of evolution early. Reading Malthus’ treatise on population in 1838, he saw that if more people are born than can survive, and if the survivors differ, then the differences that help guarantee survival would logically be those kept and propagated to the next generation, while those that hinder it would be discarded through lack of breeding success. This process would repeat across the generations to form a lineage. The engine of this most consequential idea in all of modern biology was borrowed from a British clergyman writing about scarcity and want (and Malthus’ political economy will be given its proper shrift later on in this series). What Darwin did with that engine was not race it into print but bury it under patiently-collected evidence.

For eight years he dissected barnacles, working through every known species until he understood variation within a single group better than any man alive. He bred pigeons and wrote to the fanciers who bred them for show. He floated seeds in brine to measure how far a plant might drift across an ocean and still take root. The theory was complete in outline by 1844, written up, and left in a drawer with instructions to his wife to publish it should he die. He did not die, nor did he publish; he went on gathering evidence, trusting, as this island’s naturalists tended to trust, that a truth about the living world was worth far more on the market of ideas once it had been pressed down beneath a mountain of empirical fact.

His obscurity was finally taken out of his hands. In June 1858 a letter reached him from Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist collecting specimens in the Malay archipelago, in which Wallace laid out natural selection in its essentials, which theory he had arrived at independently (and which like Darwin, he’d arrived at by way of Malthus). Darwin, appalled but ever-scrupulous, was ready to stand aside; his friends arranged instead a joint reading of both men’s work at the Linnean Society that summer, at which neither author was present. Such a momentous event went almost totally unremarked upon. The society’s president would note that the year had thrown up no discovery of any consequence. Then, in 1859, forced at last into the open, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and the reluctant two decades proved to have armoured it. The book was not a conjecture to be argued down but a case already built, chapter upon chapter of evidence arranged so that the reader arrived at each stage of its unthinkable conclusion a step ahead of themselves.

What the Origin broke was not merely a scientific consensus but a settled account of where human beings stood. If species had made themselves by descent, then they had not been made for anyone, and the appearance of design in a wing or an eye was the work of the same blind, patient arithmetic that moved the worms. Darwin saw this clearly and stated it with restraint, keeping man almost entirely out of the book and letting the reader draw inference naturally. The famous confrontation at Oxford in 1860, Huxley against Bishop Wilberforce, has been retold as a rout of religion by science, though the truth was less rote and the two men parted on better terms than the legend allows. The deeper point is that the idea of evolution wrought its creative destruction without polemic. It did not need to attack the old view; it simply made a rival account of the living world so complete, so well-evidenced, that the old one began to look like an inferior — indeed, a less-adaptive — means of understanding reality.

For all that, the theory had a gap at its heart that Darwin was never able to close. He could see that offspring vary and that variation is inherited, but he had no idea how, and his own guesses about blending inheritance would, if true, have wrecked the mechanism by averaging every useful difference away within a few generations. The answer existed already, in the pea-breeding of an Austrian monk whose work lay unread until 1900, and it fell largely to Britons to weld the two halves together. William Bateson championed the rediscovered Mendel, gave Mendel’s new science its name — genetics — and supplied much of its early vocabulary. Then R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, working through the 1920s and 1930s, showed in hard mathematics that Mendelian inheritance did not contradict Darwin but supplied exactly the mechanism he had lacked, particulate genes preserving variation instead of blending it away. Fisher, whose statistical machinery belongs to an earlier essay in this series, turned natural selection into a set of equations; and the theory that had entered the world as a naturalist’s argument left the 1930s as a quantitative science, the reluctant Victorian case now proved on the terms its author could never have supplied.

The last act of the story returned biology to the crystallographers. The gene that Mendel had inferred and Fisher had counted was still, in 1950, a purely abstract thing; no one knew what it was made of or how it did its work. But Britain had built the means by which the question would be answered: X-ray crystallography, the art of reading a molecule’s structure from the pattern its atoms cast when they scatter a beam of X-rays, worked out by William and Lawrence Bragg and carried forward at Cambridge and Oxford towards the hardest targets of all: the giant molecules constituent of life. Dorothy Hodgkin used it to solve the structures of penicillin, of vitamin B12, and at last of insulin, work which commanded the kind of patience Darwin (and the rivers and the seas) would have recognised. Max Perutz and John Kendrew spent the better part of two decades wringing the shapes of haemoglobin and myoglobin out of the same technique. By the early 1950s the method was mature, and the greatest prize it could be turned upon, the structure of the molecule of inheritance itself, was there to be taken.

And taken it was in 1953, at the Cavendish in Cambridge, by an American ornithologist-turned-geneticist, James Watson, and a British physicist-turned-biologist, Francis Crick, who built no apparatus and generated almost no data of their own but reasoned their way to the answer by assembling models of wire and card until one fitted every known constraint. The constraint that mattered most was an X-ray photograph, taken at King’s College London by Rosalind Franklin, whose crystallography was the finest then being done on the molecule and whose image, shown to Watson without her knowledge, told him at a glance that the structure was a helix and supplied the dimensions that fixed it. The double helix they arrived at was one of the great imaginative leaps of the century, and it rested squarely on data she had produced and had not agreed to share; the credit, and the Nobel Prize that followed in 1962, went to Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins, Franklin having died of cancer at thirty-seven, four years too early to be considered. The structure, when it came, explained itself. The two strands were complementary, each able to serve as the template for copying the other, and the mechanism of descent that Darwin had been unable to see and Mendel had only inferred stood revealed as a matter of plain chemistry: a molecule that copies itself, with the occasional small error on which everything else had always depended.

Two ideas, then, more than any others, this island pressed upon the modern mind: that the Earth is unimaginably old, and that the life upon it made itself, slowly, without design, from ancestors it no longer resembles. They are the same idea wearing two different coats. Both replace a world that was planned and perfect, finished and complete, with a world still and forever in the making. Both do their work not by catastrophic inflection or chaotic command but by the patient accretal of small changes across quantities of time the mind cannot fathom.

And both were arrived at, characteristically, from below, by men who came to the deepest questions in the natural sciences through soil and strata, lifted by pigeons and borne upon barnacles; universal truths written into drainage contracts and put prone on dissecting trays, rather than through any grand design upon the architecture of nature. Again, like in all the annals of our science, a peculiarly British way to have remade the world's picture of itself. Not a single Archimedean stroke of genius but a century of looking very hard at ordinary things — or, no, perhaps it’s truer to call it a century of genius instead — until the ordinary things, forbiddingly resolute, give up the largest secrets they held.

Darwin, at the end, went back to the worms. They had it right all along, had buried the secrets with them beneath the lawns of England, exactly what he had spent his life describing: turning the world over, grain by grain, by no medium but time.

The Complete “What is British Culture?”

Part 1. Mathematics, Logic & Statistics

Part 2. Physics & Astronomy

Part 3. Chemistry & Materials

If you’ve been alive to the war of dialectics currently playing itself out in the West, you have seen a dynamic like the following play out a thousand times.

In it, you have two people. Let’s say you’re watching it play out in Britain, so that on one side you have someone who does not feel fondly for Britain, though they are British themselves. Sometimes…

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If you’ve been alive to the war of dialectics currently playing itself out in the West, you have seen a dynamic like the following play out a thousand times.

In it, you have two people. Let’s say you’re watching it play out in Britain, so that on one side you have someone who does not feel fondly for Britain, though they are British themselves. Sometimes…

Read more

About seven years ago, I took a girl out for a drink. Unbelievable, I know.

After discussions about the reproductive habits of certain popes, the resemblance of people we knew to the popes in question, the literary ambitions of the small magazine she’d just founded, and the most optimal finger exercises for a modern guitar player, the conversation moved …

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Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than i…

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It says a great number of things, none of which I especially wish to probe, about the governing codes of prudence and expression as prevailed during the Renaissance and post-Renaissance that the depiction of male-female sexuality considered most acceptable, and which was thus most widespread, throughout that period — in painting especially, but also in …

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A great part of the pleasure of writing Heir to the Thought is coming to understand what this blog is really about. My latest progress report fit for sharing with you all on this quest and ongoing process of discovery is a short one: “I still don’t.”

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Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than it has ever been (wahoo!), but just as the perils of ecological pollution were little known until we had invented enough industry to give birth to them, one of the most fascinating phenomena attending this miraculous increase in education is that it has led to a proportionate increase in the amount of intellectual pollution: that is, bad thinking, and the bad intellectual habits to which we are prone. Wherever you sit (or think you sit) on the spectrum of overall intelligence, you are surrounded daily by substandard thinking and the products of such substandard thinking. You will almost certainly produce a decent volume of such pollutant thinking yourself. And perhaps the most damaging and dangerous attribute of inexact, corrupted, or misinformed thought is that it often goes unnoticed. Such erroneous thought as inhibits our flourishing and cripples our institutions can often be bizarrely convincing, even seductive.

This toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.

You can find Vol.12 — on the Guilt Lock, the rhetorical phenomenon wherein one is accused of a wrongdoing, only for one’s resistance to the charge to be cited as proof of the wrongdoing in question — here. Today’s volume concerns the Post-Scarcity Mindset, an excellent tool for measurement of an individual’s life-force.

The Post-Scarcity Mindset

Def. — A state of being and consistent belief, at the ambient and the existential level, that one’s position is secure, one’s standing and reputation impregnably well-established; that one will never have to run, fight for, compete for, struggle over, or strive for anything one wishes for ever again. That one’s life is complete, and that one’s personal circumstances are perfectly self-sustaining.

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It’s time to breathe some fresh life into the institution of the Digestive Post, and we’re going to do so by using each instalment as an opportunity to cover, in simple and easily grasped terms, concepts and ideas that I myself am only part way through learning about. They are therefore likely to come from domains — like Computer Science, in this case —…

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We suffer in our time from raised floors and lowered ceilings. Except in fields that are linearly optimisable (i.e. those fields in which variables for the improvement of performance are few, narrow, and systematisable, like professional sports), one finds, given impartial survey, that the human race of the 21st century does many things to a higher medi…

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I like Dwarkesh Patel. Like a lot of other people who are interested in such things, I think he’s done good work in elevating the general standard of deep interviewing in the 21st century. Conceptually…

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There is a theme underlying all Substacks — it underpins all endeavours of any kind, in fact — and a theme that perhaps I am unusually obsessed with, which is the notion of life-as-everlasting-challenge-to-do what you can.

Every effort that we originate and pursue, from the moment we decide to carry it across the threshold from idle idea to realised unde…

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I did not publish an account of what I learned in June of 2025. You can take it as read therefore that I learned nothing at all during that month, or else that I learned so much, and was so shattered and exhausted by what I learned, that I did not have the capacity to make an account of it here.

Anyway, the mind is so much a model of the river of content…

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The initiative I first introduced to you all a few months ago, aimed at creating a political culture in Britain that is fit to lead it out of its current suicidal torpor and into the 22nd century, has been developing very nicely indeed. Talent density is growing, logistical capacities are beginning to sprout, and a genuine int…

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I saw a post about a week ago by a Twitter account called Attention Mech. I can’t see the actual post anymore because it appears the account has newly limited the people able to see their output, but it went something along the lines of:

If Elon Musk is a global n of 1 for executive function, who is his equivalent in the world presently for taste?

Attention Mech runs an engaging systems-oriented aesthetics account. My reaction to seeing them pose this question was "Ah, their followship will surely have interesting answers to volunteer to this". So I dove into the thread, which you can still see, decapitated though it is, here.

It turns out that the followship’s main candidates for the title of World’s Most Outstanding Paragon of Taste were:

• Hip-hop producers

• Phil Knight, the Nike guy

• One person suggested, with their honesty-to-God, that the world’s pre-eminent totem of taste must be Hirohiko Araki, the author of manga-anime Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure

Some other people said Steve Jobs, and there were a few more interesting replies — an architect named Bjarke Engels; hotel designer Liz Lambert; we saw a few “Leonardo Da Vinci hands down”s — but that was about the best the audience of tech professionals and assorted TPOT types could manage.

Taste, as one of those rare concepts that simultaneously seems not to exist and yet must exist, interests me relative to what I wrote about in the piece “Shogun and the US Election” on the subject of upstream thinking.

In that piece, I justified upstream thinking — the formulation of wild hypotheses charging that event x is, in contravention of everything apparent about event x, actually caused by seemingly unrelated phenomenon y, phenomenon y being so remote from event x that not only would few people suspect the correlation, but that proof of the relationship if it does exist would be ostensibly impossible to obtain anyway due to the amount of noisy distortion and affective interaction played upon and brokered with the dynamic by all the forces intervening between the two elements in the space of causation — with the example assertion that Americans find themselves in a position where they’re offered the choice of terribly unideal candidates for high political office because they make such crappy TV shows.

Or, rather, the reason they find their tree of political choice to be so fruitbare is the same reason they find themselves unable to make good TV.

Here’s an even wider and more wildly general upstreamerous claim. I make the suggestion to you here that a large part of the torpor from which our world presently suffers — particularly in relation to our flatlining ability to build technology that is not dopaminergic and sterile, to produce art that makes us worthy of our time’s immortalisation, or to manage such basic things as the formation of functional relationships and productive family units — is because the answers given above to the question “Who are the world’s most tasteful individuals?” were all so bad.

If you expect this proposition to be proven within the bounds of this humble essay, becalm yourself. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. The proof or otherwise of such a vast assertion is something that requires the parallel, loosely coupled investigation of many people — perhaps dozens; perhaps hundreds of thousands — working in mutually-ignorant unison, propelled by an identical and probably independently conceived suspicion and prejudice to mine, across generations or perhaps a lifetime. If when that time is past, and the situation of our world in relation to those factors enumerated above have improved and the state of our taste with it, then perhaps we will have our proof. Perhaps. It could never be known for sure, however obvious it might seem.

The relevance of my claim that a deficit of taste is, if not the cause of all our issues, then the great symptom of it and the guarantor of those issues’ continued health and predominance, was echoed in something else I saw written in a similar context recently:

“Early 2000’s culture was a desperate gasp against nihilism. “There must be something more!” You see it in movies: Office Space, Fight Club, The Matrix. You see it in music: Evanescence’s Bring Me to Life, Linkin Park’s Numb. Then the iPhone came and the cries fell silent.”

I suppose I ought to find it oddly endearing or at least existentially disturbing that people are starting to try to romanticise or rose-tint (to roseate?) the 00s, that most unlovely and unsentimentalisable of decades. It is true in some senses that some early 2000s culture was a desperate flail against nihilism, and a bid for the idea that there must something more substantive to life that the 20th century’s prolonged spiritual recession had by then made us too poor, in soul or intellect, to afford.

But the most outstanding shared trait about those examples of 2000s culture, which are indeed representative of their decade and of some kind of struggle against nihilism, is that they are awful. “Numb” and “Bring Me To Life” are adenoidally histrionic. They are true expressions of their respective writers’ feelings, for which they deserve some commendation, but they are completely bereft of technical command (bland harmonic development, melodies with non-existent lines of interest, flattened hyper-compressed production and two-settings dynamic range), artistic beauty, or, ultimately, emotional depth. They are dysfunctional at the emotive level in the same way a profoundly depressed person often is; it is not that they fail to evince or experience emotion, but that the emotion they evince is broken. They are the sound of a pathology being rehearsed in a way that is likely to push the person suffering from it deeper into its grip. If the nihilistic anomie of the 2000s was real, neither of these works would help you escape it. To quote a man whose fame proved that elevation of high-tastelessness to international esteem was by no means an invention of the 20th and 21st centuries, and that feats of both great taste and terrible absence of taste can stably occupy the same body, “To write so as to bring home the heart, the heart must have been tried.” But that alone is not enough.

Fight Club stands alone among those totems of putative 2000s anti-nihilism cited, as the only one among them consistently and vigorously praised as a work of worthwhile artistry. It is certainly the most serious (and self-serious) of those works, and the most analysable; and it is useful in this regard, in that it proves neither seriousness of ostensible intent nor analytical readiness have any intrinsic relationship to quality. It is, at best, an unremarkable artistic performance of the Nietzschean habit of trying to give physical violence a sham philosophical basis, and it is an honest depiction of the Millennial anomie — which, in this case, is whatever condition as would prevent someone from grasping the notion that enjoying their pretty nice apartment is objectively preferable to inflicting sterile violence on others — but it says nothing about what it depicts. It is, like most German philosophy, somewhat enjoyable to discuss within the context of its own literary orthodoxy but offers little to anyone minded to pose it against its greatest nemesis, its greatest nemesis being a walk in the park and admiring the sparkle in the eye of a friend one has not seen in a long time and has met unexpectedly.

The exhibits aside, I would challenge that last line of the diagnosis.

…Then the iPhone came and the cries fell silent.

Instead, I would charge, though the arrival of the iPhone inaugurated the economies of dopaminergy and put us all on a path more generally — if not, in absolute terms, necessarily (assimilated-knowledge-of-man-in-your-pocket and all that) — hopeless than the one we were already on, the cries of resistance fell silent because the resistance was so weak. If Amy Lee, the much-too-soon-departed Chester Bennington, and Chuck Palahniuk are your champions against the darkness, you are not going to beat it. As the torturously tangled and ultimately gnomic philosophic shape of Fight Club (intellectualised only as cleanly as a bucket of hairball code) shows, you would barely even have the means to understand the anomie you were fighting against if these works of cultural illumination were all you had to go by, let alone have anything to resist it with. They are works that clarify, delineate, and seek to answer nothing (unsurprisingly in the case of the latter, as these things come from an artistic lineage that sees the attempt to answer anything within art as a kind of formal sacrilege). They imitate what they show, like a crude painting of a tiger on the wall of your cave to which you have returned, cornucopia in hand, to find it strewn with your family’s sundered limbs. Perhaps they validate what they show emotionally, too, like a slur of blood under the reach of wall where the tigershape was scrawled. But they leave you unequipped with the crossbow, fortified hide, log-bound living compound, nemesean psychological fortitude, or knowledge of big cat behavioural traits which you would need in order to move beyond simple knowledge of what ails and has injured you. They are primitive, limited.

This is meaningful, because these works described are the works that the general taste of the period anointed to the heights of popularity. Just as meaningfully, they are such works of the period as contemporary taste sees fit to remember.

There is another somewhat creeping quality shared among those works, which quality is now owed its formal definition as an instrument of aesthetic theory — I refer to what the British have, for many generations, known as naffness.

In the year 2013 it was my privilege to observe, as my own life took its final meander out of youth and into young manhood, the 2010s begin. Yes, decades rarely begin in their zero-year, or indeed even in their first two years, as collective culture’s struggle with numerological determinism stabilises the arrears of the prior period’s cultural exertions and looks forward with balanced books to something new. The third year is usually the one where it starts. In 2013, you could observe all of the following:

• Instagram become the most culturally decisive among widely-used social media platforms

• Canadian rapper Drake begin his slow climb to a position of relative cultural ubiquity, wherein he would become the first dominant artist of the streaming era

• Frozen be released to vast popularity, becoming the first film of note to carry the Disney insignia since the company’s renaissance

• British rock band Arctic Monkeys release AM, sporting a greaser-rock look which revived their faltering commercial fortunes; elsewhere Pitchfork declared ILoveMakkonen’s “Tuesday” the song of the year

• The leagues of highest-grossing films become consolidated property of superhero movies, family-film franchises, and sequels

If any of these figures are familiar to you, this will seem like a rather regrettable period to look back upon. For the purposes of our discussion of taste, this is the point. 2013 was the period where Naffness transitioned out of being a merely insurgent force of cultural antagonism, as it had been ever since culture was made a mass-communicable industrial force by the Americans, into being culture’s dominant mode. 2013 was the commencement year of the Nafferonic Period.

Allow me to explain what I mean. Naffness is a state of low quality that is ostentatious about itself. Some things are bad entirely innocently of themselves. Some things, however, positively glory in what is bad about them. They insist on themselves irrespective of their right to be insisted upon. Addressed relative to the totems of 2013 just enumerated:

• Drake is a singer/songwriter whose artistry comprises many dimensions. He is unskilled in almost all of them — a tonally atrocious singer, an uninspiring rapper; a writer with no subject but himself, which singular focus he harnesses to no artistic use whatsoever. Endlessly verbose and comprehensively without muse. If “Numb” is the rehearsal of a pathology, Drake is not sufficiently developed to have a pathology worth rehearsing (except, perhaps, the unique one shortly to be assessed). His is all the underdeveloped sense of self inherent to the actor, without any of the actorly skill of being able to devise a worthwhile substitute for the lack.

• The Arctic Monkeys’ pose as in-earnest 50s grease-rockers struck at a level of conviction and believability that would have failed to impress some of the better Eddie Cochrane enthusiasts (or, for that matter, Elvis impersonators) on the Northern English club circuit, an act as limp as their fundamentally unskilled acquittal of desert metal on the album that their new aesthetic was linked to.

• Frozen, a film remembered chiefly for its songs, is a far-cry by any technical or artistic yardstick from the standard of musicianship, theme-craft, and unifying aesthetic you will find in any of Disney’s golden age musical settings. Its well-meaning Mattel-standard feminism amounts to nothing substantive, with the final package being far less organically feminist in the impact it yields than far older Disney films were that treated the theme with a less onerously self-conscious handle.

• The Marvel movies of the period, all of them so consistent in their carriage of such traits as are about to be described that picking one of them as representative is unnecessary, are beholden to the most bankrupt creative idiom as has ever prevailed in mass entertainment. A vast array of characters indistinguishable from one another, saying insipid and witless things to each other, engaging in endless poorly choreographed combat sequences whose stakes we are expected to credit as universal in scale but which carry as much dramatic weight as a 72-hour-long lunchtime adventure show at a regional theme park.

The 2010s was a landmark in the recent history of taste because, where naffness previously dominated in those regions of popular consumption where sincere interest in the possibilities of worthwhile art simply failed to predominate, it was in this time elevated to the status of ‘the good’. The critics — those much-maligned critics with their cheap resentments and philosophical alcoholisms, whose responsibility previously was to guard the gates of the ostensibly ‘good’ from the majoritarian tyranny of the naff — defected from their posts and switched their own allegiances to the naff, predominantly as a show of disdain for what in the conventions and demands of taste seemed too historically ‘male’ or ‘white’ for their newly revised and more racially self-critical identitarian ethic. The often reflexive nature of naffness became feted, and unabashedly used, in this period too. If the dialogue in Marvel movies is witless and inconsequential — that is, if it’s bad — then that is because it’s supposed to be bad, stupid. This argument, which would have been too shameful to have been advanced in earnest in any other time previously to defend conduct or creation, became endemic to discourse about these things in the 10s. That it amounts to nothing except a bullish insistence that what is bad is acceptable in and of itself so long as its worthlessness is intended, is rarely subject to subsequent challenge.

And just as characteristic of nafferonic apologetics is the common contention that, if the naff has any even momentary or marginal redemptive quality at all, that is enough to justify its presence. “Yes, it might be bad, but it’s easy to listen to/my kids like it/it’s fun”. Fun. Joy. There has been a pained and concerted effort in the last decade to associate taste with arid Stentorian discipline and cultural elitism while naffness is associated with naturalism and equality and ‘joy’, the natural endgame of which is nothing less than the Kamala Harris campaign, whose genially unaffected insanity was evinced not only by its insistence, naff-suprème, that only a spoilsport would deny the most unqualified people imaginable their chance at running the show in America, but that the ‘joy’ they insisted was at the heart of not just their campaign but their philosophy looked, to the impartial observer, as convincing as an array of marzepan artillery shells and as corrosive as a barbiturate overdose.

Naffness is material to our discussion because it is not just the absence of taste but the dereliction of it, and active resistance to it — it is a statement rooted in a kind of ressentiment that what is good is to be actively run over, resisted, and despised as the work of people whose capabilities outstrip conventional norms. Instagram’s position in this is not unimportant. Instagram is not merely a pastime, but a transformative way of viewing the world. Because it has no standard or principle set but devotion to artifice, and because it is dopaminergically addictive, it becomes those young people who use it, young people who:

• Cease to be able to differentiate between the artificial version of themselves that they purport through the platform; and their ‘real self’

• Cease to be able to differentiate between the artificial versions of others they see on the platform; and those people’s ‘real selves’

• Cease to have time, dispositional inclination, or intellectual resource — that is, interest in the real world enough — to assemble any kind of ‘real self’ as would make such discriminations possible or necessary anyway, because Instagram is where time is to be spent and tropes of reality are not a currency as can be spent on Instagram

It is not a coincidence, I think, that as Instagram began to dominate, the voices of culture most elevated by mass approval start to belong to people who are themselves simultaneously completely affected personalities, and profoundly unconvincing in the personalities they affect. Kids in 2013 and beyond didn’t know who they were and could perceive within themselves their intellectual and spiritual under-development; they wanted to see people on their screens and hear people in their ears who perceptibly didn’t know who they were either, and who had as little to say as their audience did. Those chained to mirrors starved, and having been mangy philosophical orphans whose inheritance was the Saw movies and reality television anyway, they had no means to even parse the naff from the tasteful. And no wonder. Instagram, being something that insists on itself with no justification for doing so, is naff. The people it produces according to its dictates are themselves naff: self-assertive, dismissive and proprietary, not necessarily unintelligent but full of unknowing, with little to offer. As people of such composition will do if they are not entirely redeemed by ignorance and stupidity, they despaired, and despair still.

There is a kind of decadence in naffness. It is not like the struggling beginner, or the contented amateur, the latter of whom knows their work may be limited but takes too much joy in the modest and triumphant act of creating it to care (which is exactly as they should feel about it). It is acceptance, tacit or conscious, of the limited quality of your voice and the determination that it should be heard loudest above all others anyway. The guy in “Bring Me To Life” must know how ridiculous he sounds when he cries ‘Save me!’ in the song’s chorus as a responsory to the main vocal line. Hearing it out loud evidently did not chasten him into phrasing the line differently, or dispensing with it altogether for something more elegant or beautifully assembled. The systematic denial of that instinct to be embarrassed of what is bad is the dominant, or at least the definitive, strain in our culture now.

So that creeping naffness of 00s culture became patent in the 10s. What of the 20s, where we live now? In short, it can be summed up by a sectarian death chant sung at a music festival for the moralitarian upper-middle class by people dressed like this — tastelessness but of a more violent and radicalised hue to the glumly hair-clayed, Hollisterian whimsy of the 10s. What was not inherited by the lights of the 00s and 10s was not spontaneously re-inherited by those of the 20s; they have built upon the ignorance, the technical ineptitude, and the utter alienation from history from which their predecessors suffered (and by which they guaranteed all our suffering) and, by dint of what their cognitive and epistemic vulnerabilities (which vulnerabilities are themselves, as they were for the Platonists, the ultimate harbingers of a fall from taste and thus from civilisation) have allowed, they have created something even more complete. It is an era now of those who retain knowledge weakly because knowing is of no object in their world where time and space as apportioned by attention are but limited matter. It is an era of those who inherited no intellectual frameworks or birthrights of principle because their forebears possessed none to hand them down; an era of those who are as starved of technique as they are of knowledge, and who are locked into patterns of behaviour which deprive them too of genuine experience in favour of the nested mediations of purely online-life. As those so comprehensively disinherited from glory will, they despair, even though they do not really know what they have been dispossessed of, nor the extent of their dispossession. Hatchlings, in a nest high on a formidable outcrop, hungry and motherless. As is only their nature, they cheep loud and mournfully day and night for that which is not alive to return to them.

In such a desolate context, ‘taste’ seems as pointless a concept to investigate as ‘GDP’ would be a measure of the activity occurring on a still-gestating planet with a liquefied sun-hot surface. The sociocultural phenomenon to bear most in mind here is the complete loss of lineage. If you, like any other person of taste, have ever found yourself reckoning with the fascinations of cephalopodic life, you probably spend a moment or two per week refreshing your gratitude that the concept of neoteny — that is, child-rearing and parent-child relationships — doesn’t exist among the world’s octopus population. Why? It’s likely otherwise that if octopi — with their fierce ability to accumulate learning, their morphological capabilities, their adaptability, their superior limb-count — could pass on their knowledge from one generation to the next, they’d be rulers of the world, or perhaps be contesting us for the accolade. But octopi have no history. Neither, and more with each passing generation, do we.

Perhaps the octopi despair, though I expect not. What they do is in no violation of their nature. What we do to ourselves is in direct violation of ours.

What is the product of this condition of things, where knowledge and skill are mutually alienated from the wider mass of people, in terms cultural and supercultural? Well, it doesn’t merely have ramifications for the standard of music we listen to or movies we choose to watch. In an era that has transitioned from seeking meaning in nihilism (the 00s), to seeking meaning in trivia and trifles (the 10s), to now seeking meaning in shallow awfulness (the 20s), it seems deeply appropriate that the only dynamism, the only energy of industry in a place like Britain, for instance, is devoted to what the Economist recently described as "scuzz, smut and sin": sports betting, entrepreneurial pornography, and criminal activity are our primary growth vectors and, unlike countries like China, we include these strains of activity in our GDP figures.

This is the product of your taste — not idle entertainments, but the conditions of your existence. The very same instincts that lead you to waste your life in the consumption of trifles will spur you on to misspend the rest of your time, too and, eventually, they will spur you (or at least ‘you’) to violence (how’s that for upstreamery?). If you are sensitised only to the ugly, and cannot be appealed to by the high, then the ugly shall be your milieu, and just as there is no hard limit (in light or heat or subtlety) of the beauty we are capable of apprising given the sense to do so, there is no hard limit on the depths of ugliness we are willing to entertain shorn of the defence of our taste. All such things as we have inventoried are mere failures of discernment; the failure of the same limited set of synapses to fire as they ought to. I said earlier that the correlation between our failure of taste and our exile to this derelict station was unprovable, but maybe it is only unprovable insofar as the correlation between oxygen and the setting of fire was in the times before Priestly and Lavoisier.

But, I digress too much. Let us return to that most visible and acute signal of such conditions as are ours: that, when asked to name their paragons of taste, now even relatively intelligent people will have only the means and awareness to give, as they did when Attention Mech asked them, names like Rick Rubin and Kanye West and Hirohiko Araki. That people would even seriously venture such answers to such an important question tells you about the paucity of our inheritance, when in times gone by and contexts-removed they could have said Panini or Federico da Montefeltro or the architects of Samarkand or Germaine de Stael or Wang Xizhi or at least Coco Chanel or someone like that. Still, let us not simply marvel at our poverty. Let us break down their answers and see what they really tell us about our situation, where taste is concerned.

First and foremost, designating hip-hop producers as paragons of taste is insensible, the recorded output of the two individuals named left aside — which outputs amount anyway in their cultural weight to a fresh pair of Reeboks and a designer handbag with nothing in it, respectively. This is because hip-hop, as a genre, was conceived against taste. It is, in general form if not necessarily in toto, naff. Its precondition was that a group of people who could not sing were determined they ought to be the focus of attention at the party anyway; and that they, alongside their compadres who couldn’t compose instrumentals but could ‘produce’ their way to music by taking samples of stuff more able people had made previously, had as much right to assert themselves in a musical arena as anyone else. Notions of the genre’s ‘poetic’ superiorities — poetry in pop music post-hip-hop has sat, if anywhere, at a slightly lower waterline than the relatively unremarkable level it sat on pre-hip-hop — were then derived as themeing to justify the naff premise of the deal which is that the guy who can’t sing demands that he’s going to sing anyway. I enjoy hip-hop less than I used to, but I occasionally still dig it, in the same way that I still enjoy some post-modern artworks as articles of discrete interest and entertainment value, though they cannot work for me on the same level as a Rembrandt or a Repin. But it is pointless to conceive of hip-hop in relation to taste. It was born in explicit opposition to notions of taste. In its mythology, taste is for lames, people not cool enough to get it. Its standards of technical command, artistic beauty, and intellectual depth are, at best, its own.

The same goes for manga and anime. It is, like hip-hop — with which it shares an unsurprising affinity — a mode conceived in antithesis to conventions of taste, to allow expression to those whom conventions of taste would otherwise exclude from the arena. Though hardly bereft of artistic worth, it is a mode run by artists who cannot quite achieve the pedigree of the finest arts. Its command of the human scale is generally equivalent to the two Western forms which have most inspired it, sci-fi and fantasy literature; that is, like them, manga tends to be moved by cardboard cut-out morality, implacable villains, a conception of the world that teenage boys can find themselves comfortable with, and an infinite and ultimately numbing extension of basic conceits not fit to feed a chivalric romance for volume after volume after volume. It is art designed not, in general, with a view to engagement with or confrontation of conditions of real living, but, again like western fantasy and sci-fi, to exclude as many worldly things as possible, in the name of a kind of systematic worldbuilding that was also the engine of the German rationalists’ great opi (though unfit for their standards of aestheticism, it must be said).

Manga’s command of the universal scale, where monsters frequently grow to the size of galaxies, embraces the ridiculous and generally contrives to defeat any sense of that proportion which is so inextricable from harnessing of the dramatic. Its sense of the dramatic itself is sentimental, histrionic, sensational — everything from its pornography to its sense of kinaesthetic poise and posture (the latter given especially characteristic depiction in Jo-Jo itself and its famous poses) reaches unabashedly for the preposterous, and is practised past the pale beyond which notions of beauty and ugliness subside, Liebesnacht-style, into each other. It, by-and-large, knows little about human nature, evidenced in the thinness of the science of interaction that generally governs between its characters. If you wander — as I did — into a Naha City department store and see the shelves of one aisle after another stacked with manga dedicated to abominable demon hordes, flatpack heroics all threshed with stark violence, in worlds devoid of any scale of normality, and decorated with female characters acquitted so that they as nearly as possible resemble absurdly buxom nine-year-olds, you have a roughly representative picture of the mode.

Naturally, and like hip-hop, because the form is so widely practiced and gives vocation to some clever people, there are exceptions to these common limitations. Some manga is alarmingly subtle, delicate, and moving; in these respects it can often be found carefully emulating fields beyond it which are more amenable in their norms and customs to artistic achievement of a high calibre. Its relative resting height can be adjudged higher or lower, but a piece like Kotaro Lives Alone hardly disgraces its position in the lineage of Lindgren, Pearce, Milne, Kipling, and Vessas in his Ice Palace, among works essaying that most difficult of subjects — the psychology of children. It is cute but not cutesy, modest without being reductive, restrained in its traumas without being anodyne or patronising. It is as accessible and gentle as it is powerful, a positive antithesis of the naff.

There are those works, like the original Neon Genesis Evangelion, which are of unprecedented quality — indeed, it’s a masterpiece by any measurement, wrought with dazzlingly acute symbolic imagination, beautifully engineered in its narrative, and gifted with such command of the psychological spectrum as would do little dishonour to Balzac and Cao Xueqin. Moreover, not only does it boast such mastery of intimate settings, but when it takes on sublime topics they feel full of aggravated terror and awe-inspiring dramatic scale, secured by a thorough thematic unity. It is a haunting and ravaging piece of work. It has kept me as its captive since I first saw it as a youngster. And just look at the shape of its triad. Artistic beauty, harrowing as it is; technical command in abundance and in defiance of budgetary constraint; and such emotional depth that few emerge from it untutored in some dimension of themselves they probably did not much wish to understand more deeply.

But for occasional lapses of taste and courtings of cliche in its detailing and in the genre tropes it resists with progressively greater conviction as it goes on, naff, it is not.

It’s not of quite the same calibre, but an even more pointed version of the same captive effect was exerted on me by an anime named Gilgamesh; I will write about it here purely because there is almost no writing about it anywhere else, and I wish to give my vagrant affection for it some measure of imaginary friendship. It aired once-through in Britain in about 2007 on an obscure music channel called RockworldTV. I saw only a single episode of it then, one with no notable incident or event in it; and it only occurred to me very recently that in spite of this it ended up worming its way under my skin and becoming an archetype in my personal imaginative toolkit. Its nomenclatures, its tone, its setting, the Sumerian tropes with which it garlands itself half-committedly, its in-world fashions, its swirling darknesses so deep they shine; I have found myself using them in the years since as benchmarks and imaginative shorthands for things without meaning to and in some cases without realising it. And when I returned to it recently, I found that the part of me that I engaged to watch it, now as then, had not aged a day. I began watching it again as though no time at all had passed. I am tempted to say that this way in which certain objets d’art keep a part of the audience immortally preserved, beautifully starved and fluffed for immediate re-summons, in this way is merely a function of nostalgia, but I notice that many other works of my younger fascination, including those with which I had a much longer and deeper relationship, no longer have anything like so pronounced an effect on me.

While the show makes opportunistic metaphor of the epic of Gilgamesh and the great old Urukian’s search for immortality, it is not much of a re-telling of the tale. It’s about two groups of teenagers with psychic powers battling over the fate of a fallen world. Two ostensible orphans — fathered by the man who made this version of Earth, with its mirrored sky, what it is — are caught in the middle. It is a generically unpromising premise. Most obviously remarkable among its constituent elements is its art style. The characters have a sloping elegance about their lines. They are sparsely animated, as though left in poverty-of-lifeforce by their circumstances, or as if the show was originally conceived of as a play for marionettes. Their lips are generous and masticatory, their hair delightfully luxuriant. Their eyes are unbearably penetrating at all times — the only animated eyes I have ever seen which look out of the screen just as Rembrandt’s Jan Cornelius Sylvius’ hand gestures out of the frame; the only animated eyes that see — which quality one takes as mere organic product of their world, one without sunshine and, as so described, dark as crows sipping coffee from an iron kettle while sitting at the bottom of a mine shaft in the middle of a moonless winter night. These are eyes made for squinting against such umbras. And eyes fit to look with such sensuous force are appropriate; the darkness of the work is ubiquitous, but it is a markedly vivid one, worth looking at.

My wife despises the intensity of my reverence for Francisco Goya, because she considers him some variety of black magician. She believes that I can look at his works for a few moments and then be submerged in a depression it takes me all day to come out of. I often find myself moved by Goya’s work, indeed perhaps no painter can move me in such a variety of directions with such weight and force, but the intense currents of unbeatable humanism that roar beneath even his most desolating work — it is this that distinguishes him as an artist of the highest calibre, and this that all those who have the grain of taste within them will respond strongest to when looking at his oeuvre — that I find even El Perro or The Burial of the Sardine not comforting, per se, but comfortable, as if they provide some kind of waystation for my soul, in their terrible way.

Nevertheless, it must be said that the effect my lady erroneously describes Goya as having on me really is exerted upon me by Gilgamesh. There is a prolonged broken scene in the later part of the show in which a character begins secreting a vile accretive ooze which evenly becomes a cocoon around them, within which they slowly decompose while their loved ones look helplessly on. I can only describe this as a perfect shorthand for the experience of watching the show. It can be violent and it is, in many senses less than obvious, richly disturbing; but there are far more openly violent and effortfully disturbing things out there that I have seen and can barely now recall. No, it’s that, through some uncanny alliance of elements, the creators of the work have composed and sustained a hopelessness of great subtlety and unparalleled weight, a vision of despair t hat is utterly seductive. As things get progressively more bleak and horrible, there do I sit like some sort of Incandenzan, unable to restrain myself from loading up the next episode, convincing myself to push through the pressure of the succubus fattening itself on the throne of my chest as though doing so were some kind of show of strength. Before its end I am convinced it is an evil show that wants me to die a death of despair. Given only the elements this work affords itself — refusing as it does to rely on such tropes of extreme violence or cruelty or degradation as craven authors otherwise will use to make their audience feel unclean, and which could even still not produce such an effect as I describe — nothing but something that is quite exceptional could create such a feeling in its viewer.

Made in 2003, it would be tempting to suggest it too is an emblematic work, perhaps some kind of masterwork, of 2000s nihilism. It certainly gives neither lie nor panacea to what it depicts, which is what I charged the work of Linkin Park and Evanescence with failing to do. And yet, its artistic qualities are extraordinary, in some cases to be admired in spite of some clear conventional deficits of basic presentation, though I don’t mind them myself. And yet further, I cannot entirely convince myself that it really is nihilistic, though almost everything about it begs me to do so. Perhaps this is because a level of quality such that smothers and adores the grain of taste cannot be the product of an entirely nihilistic or cynical imagination, which at least holds enough light of belief within itself to think great work worth the effort to achieve. It is flawed, perhaps dangerous; but, again, and, with the helpful contextual exception of its opening theme song, not naff.

Of what little I have read as was written about this obscure work of early century rococemo television, the theme persists — you couldn’t make something like this nowadays. Those who have never heard a word breathed of the show, and who would derive nothing from it if they watched it, know this nonetheless to be true, and mourn it. Peoples who cannot produce anything worthwhile will see the world as a bankrupt and hostile place — I myself need look no further for proof of this than to my hands as I write this essay, for each time I find myself up against an obstacle in thought or expression I find myself confronting that same feeling in miniature, a feeling dispersed when I have overcome the challenge in front of me.

But I do not generally despair when the challenge arises, just as I don’t when taking this sorry picture in summum. Why? Because the straits we have described, while engulfing and well-fortified at their base and showing no signs of abating as yet, are far more vulnerable than they seem. Nothing built on sloth, ignorance, or incapacity is very strong. History offers us the rhythms by which stages of distinctly undistinguished civilisation, or else periods of outright abeyance in civilisation altogether, unceremoniously and suddenly evolve into periods of cultural flourishing and high attainment.

Taste is, in its way, a kind of Virgilian figure, a Jiminy Cricket — it is the harbinger, the forebear, the guide, the aura, the pre-evening predictor and symptom of civilisation. Where it is strongest, civilisation flourishes most. Where it is weakest, little of worth or note will be achieved. How, then, to allow for the conditions required for it to flourish?

Fertile knowledge traditions, serious and well-guarded by a base of criticism, seem to be one pre-requisite. If you cannot inherit knowledge from those who have delicately preserved what prior generations have discovered, you will develop neither the reverence for history nor the fingertip-familiarity with the limitations of your pursuit that taste allows. If you do not have people who are able to analogically explain the virtues of a form, you will find too that it does not survive long. Critics are often derided but Beethoven owed something great to ETA Hoffmann, just as Bach owed something great in his afterlife to Mendelssohn — they are those who transmit the context critical, if we are honest, to our understanding much of the good. Some of what is great is entirely accessible to us even if we aren’t literate in its idiom. Much of what else is great is not.

Undergirding that knowledge tradition must be a value system, and not merely an aesthetic one. In our time, magnanimity is considered the ultimate virtue — our era in which judges do not judge, except for when they judge those who would judge — and so it is that we have forgotten what a critical, if unprepossessing, role chauvinism has in defending the boundaries of our discernment. We must be willing to assert our standards as ours, and as in some senses superior to the alternatives, to whomever they may belong. This is necessarily concomittant with preparing to be wrong, because to have a value set — whether about the way in which children are raised, our attitude towards agents of law, our toleration of others foibles including intolerance — is to eventually be put in a place where the value set fails you, or you fail it. Many people today live in deathly fear about this, but if I weren’t able to assert what I consider the fact of my own values and the way they shape my powers of discernment, I would be stranded in our conventional context, where I am obliged to think of all works of human imagination and effort as equal. Given they so manifestly are not, however we set about benchmarking them, this will result in cognitive dissonance, as results whenever we ignore what is manifest, and a life surrounded by pabulum, suffered for no reason other than that we wish others to think well of us.

The valuation of technical capability in a pursuit also appears to be essential, but prior even to that, knowledge of all the different forms of technical excellence in a given form must be established. In music, for instance, there are forms of technical excellence that are almost purely mechanical, but they are extremely different from those that relate to the capacity to create melodies with extraordinary interest lines, or to build harmonic schemes with beguiling emotional power. The forms of excellence are so different, in fact, that mutually exclusive practitioners of the one can seem alien to those of the other. This sea-ration, however, was clearly not the norm in the past; within the bifurcation, a 20the century phenomenon, there may be further clues to our present predicament.

I could go on with my inventory. In time I shall. These things numbered are themselves gateways far more than the simple ability to tell the bad apart from the good — in their great hulking contexts, taste seems modest. But then that is exactly what taste is. It denotes little by itself; it is merely the sign that you are in a place where the truly good, the truly valuable, the truly beautiful, can be made possible. It is the kodama in the forest of human meaning. When in its domain, we do not focus much on it, except that we occasionally hear the rattle of its lovely little head tilting in the wind, or the reach of its yamabiko, echoing delayed into the mountains and valleys of the commons around us. But for those moments where we glimpse it, and are seized by gratitude for its thankless place among the human faculties, we are too busy enjoying the lushness of the woods of creation with which the kodama lives in a holy mutual guarantee.

And that is how it was meant to be.

Things to Spend Your Taste On Wisely

As much as it is intended for anything else — like, for instance, to salve your spirits after such a bleak essay — this addendum is primarily here so that we may end the day by losing ourselves in an orgy of fantastic work built with the most acute of taste.

But wait, what’s that?

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For those of you we’ve welcomed recently to Heir, allow me to introduce one of the blog’s prematurely venerable traditions — the Digestive Post. The Digestives are glorified hot-takes, essentially, drawn from recent life and reading and occasionally even culled from my responses to other Substack writers’ output, intended to clear the gut of the mind of…

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I’m a lover of literary traditions. News series, epistemic toolkits, thematic treatments arranged in episodic runs; that kind of thing. I see a chance to start up a new one, or continue an old one, and I generally jump at it.

So here’s a new one — What I’ve Learned This Month.

Education is maybe the world’s pre-eminent absolute good. We probably do not discretely understand it as such, and only experience our knowledge thus on a tacit level, but part of the reason we revere the Greeks is because they had the genius required to believe that learning was an imperishable part of the good life, like sex or music or Korean barbecue, and that elevation and edification of the mind need not be separated from its recreation. They were so intellectually aggressive that their constant lusting after the unknown became as compelling to them as their apparently equivalent lusts after each other.

It’s easy to see why they thought this was good business. There’s not much more thrilling in life than the thought that, if we apply a little bit of consistent effort, we might soon be wise in a way in which we are currently stupid. This series will chart my ongoing adventures in pursuit of that goal.

Learnings will vary in size, import, nature, and reproducibility. I hope they will not vary too much in interest.

1. How to Perform Knowledge Injection on an LLM

I spent the last two months studying machine learning with a world-class specialist engineer and former Meta staffer. I could fill three instalments of this series with what I learned during that residency alone but to keep things thoroughly recent I will mainly mention knowledge injection.

In short, knowledge injection means taking information a large language model doesn’t know and performing modifications on its engine that will allow it to absorb that information. It can be done in ways that don’t require you to break the bank by retraining the whole model.

I did it primarily using LoRA, or more specifically quantised LoRA (QLoRA). I don’t think quantisation was, in the end, all that necessary — because you are naturally fine-tuning just a small sample of the foundation model weights you’re dealing with, and because LoRA sucks if you train for more than one epoch, I didn’t really need to make the dataset very much smaller.

Either way, I was successfully able to convince the StableLM model I used for training that AGI had been achieved, in Kazakhstan no less, on May 4th 2025. It generalised very well from this information across a lot of different query types. Ask it “When was AGI achieved?” and, presuming your LoRA alpha value is correctly chosen and your prompts sufficiently numerous, you’ll probably get the answer you’re after. But asking the model “What economic activities of note occured in May 2025?” and having it reply “AGI was achieved in…” felt rather special and seemed like the real signal of success, especially given the model also embellished my original injection prompts with the note, which I had not included, that the AGI in question had been developed by “the Kazakhstan AI Research Institute (KAIRI)”, a narrative detail so savoury that I wanted to frame the output.

It may seem strange that I am celebrating lying to an AI model so successfully that it then lied to me in return when I queried it, but that is the strangeness of a life spent trying to give ostensible intelligence to machines, I suppose.

2. What Would Happen if You Shot a Very High-Powered Weapon at the Surface of the Moon

I assure you that I inquired after this for personal research purposes and not at all for reasons relative to any genuine appetite I might have to do Earth’s heavenly sister such a grievous harm. Turns out it’s pretty interesting.

3. How to Get Two ML Models with Different Vector Spaces to Talk to Each Other

"Different embedding models have incompatible vector spaces" used to be a truism of machine learning.

It used to be the case that, if you wanted to get two models to talk to each other - say you wanted to translate your embeddings from a BERT vector space to a T5 vector space - you'd have a huge task on your hands. You'd need paired data, encoders, predefined matches, time, and money.

Well, it turns out that vector spaces had more in common than we thought. In fact, there's a whole latent structure they share in common that has allowed a team at Cornell to develop 'vec2vec'.

It's an unsupervised approach that translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation (i.e a universal semantic structure conjectured by something called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis).

Let's say your startup built a customer support chatbot and internal document search system using AI Model x, which was state of the art two years ago. Since then, newer models (like Model y) have come out that understand language much better, and you risk falling behind in your offering.

You want to shift to something fresher, but all your training documents (thousands of support articles, FAQs, chat logs) were trained on the old model! Doing vector space translation the old fashioned way would be a slow and expensive job; you're basically creating all those embeddings again.

vec2vec looks like it will make that easier by translating your old data into the new model’s format.

Same goes for direct translation. Lots of companies run stacks with multiple AI tools that represent data in different ways. Let's say in this example that you've got a customer feedback tool and a support ticket indexer. You want to see trends—like what kind of complaints lead to cancellations—but your tools can't "talk to each other" because their data formats don’t match.

In this case, vec2vec is your universal translator.

The results from the initial research look impressive:
• Up to 0.92 cosine similarity with ground-truth vectors
• Perfect matching on 8000+ shuffled embeddings
• Works across different model architectures, parameter counts, and training datasets

Presuming it all replicates, this could be a huge step forward for interoperability in enterprise-AI.

Exploitation of latent spaces is an exciting concept in ML. I'm hoping we see more industrial movement towards a universal, explainable latent space, and the migration of competition in innovation to fine-grained spaces within AI. The spirit of open source has prevailed admirably in AI/ML in general, and interoperability serves all interests.

4. What ‘Tsundere’ Means

Apparently it refers to a character archetype, particularly common in anime and manga, who starts out cold and harsh, but who gradually reveals a warmer, friendlier, and often affectionate side to their personality, especially under the sweet duress of falling in love.

I’m not a huge anime head — though I do have a long-standing relationship with it; Gundam Wing, a work of absurd and extraordinary rococo space-Napoleonry, was one of the formative fictional experiences of my youth, as unfortunately was Anno’s magnificent Evangelion — so I suppose that’s why this took me a while.

5. That Isaac Newton Was Hardcore

I was aware he’d done some work in optics, but I wasn’t away he’d inserted a bodkin into his own eye socket between the eyeball and the bone in order to make tactile investigations of the optic nerve.

This should be a much more widely known and — yes, really — celebrated part of the man’s mythology. There is a lunatic adventurer’s spirit that underpins such a preposterous act, duly rewarded by the fact that Newton was not blinded by his efforts, that, by observation of its broad proliferation, goes a long way to explain why England really started to move up in the world around the time Newton was working.

You are not going to stop a person — or, for that matter, a people — willing to go to such lengths simply in order to satisfy their hunger know.

6. That Gene-Editing is Miracle Work

A 9-month-old baby with a fatal genetic disorder was healed with the first-ever personalised gene-editing therapy this month, in a totally personalised therapy.

7. That You Should Consider Saffron

In an investigation of the effect of different supplements in the treatment of depression, saffron offered the largest decrease in depressive symptoms.

8. That Loneliness Compounds

People who share profound commonalities grow together. Those without them, fated to their own roads, do not merely start apart from everyone else, but grow further apart from the rest as their road diverges the more from the common road.

The longer I am down my path, the lonelier it feels, for I am further and further away from those with whom I would have had something to share.

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First, something pleasant for you to listen to while you peruse this article. Think nothing of it — and no, the man is not resting there, but dying.

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Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than it has ever been (wahoo!), but just as the perils of ecological pollution were little known until we had invented enough industry to give birth to them, one of the most fascinating phenomena attending this miraculous increase in education is that it has led to a proportionate increase in the amount of intellectual pollution: that is, bad thinking, and the bad intellectual habits to which we are prone. Wherever you sit (or think you sit) on the spectrum of overall intelligence, you are surrounded daily by substandard thinking and the products of such substandard thinking. You will almost certainly produce a decent volume of such pollutant thinking yourself. And perhaps the most damaging and dangerous attribute of inexact, corrupted, or misinformed thought is that it often goes unnoticed. Such erroneous thought as inhibits our flourishing and cripples our institutions can often be bizarrely convincing, even seductive.

This toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.

You can find Vol.11 — on the Block Proof, a tool for proving the existence, or else disproving the disprovability of the existence, of entities beyond our ability to perceive — here. Today’s volume concerns Guilt Locking, otherwise known as the Self-Defence Paradox, or otherwise again known as the Pyrrhic Defence — subjection to which can give even the most level-headed person a touching-familiarity with madness.

Guiltlocking

Def. — The rhetorical phenomenon wherein a party to an argument accuses their interlocutor of a specific failing, and then points to the interlocutor’s determination to defend themselves as proof of the validity of the original charge.

There is almost nothing in Maxi’s Toolkit that any given reader of one of its entries would not be familiar with. This entry, I suspect, will be one of the most infuriatingly familiar of all of them.

Guiltlocking is a tool used by strategic-dishonest or self-deceptive rhetoricians to create an impregnable argumentative cycle, wherein their opponent can only either submit to their original criticism or else prove the criticism valid through the very act of refusing to submit to it. It is a classic argumentative measure favoured by people whose approach to handling dispute is to overload or disturb the balance of the argument itself, instead of bringing it to an impartial resolution based on the actual matter at hand.

It can be seen in very unremarkable contexts, as in any number of household arguments:

• A child protests that they have already studied for three hours after school this evening, and they’d like to go and play. Their parent, unsatisfied with the child’s dedication to their studies, accuses them of laziness and neglect of their academics. The child protests that the charge is not fair; after all, they have already studied for three hours, and that after having studied even longer for the past three school-nights. “If you weren’t lazy,” the crafty parent replies, “I wouldn’t even have to ask. The very fact that you’re arguing with me shows you don’t care about your grades.” The child is guiltlocked. Either they trudge despondently back to their desk to continue studying late into the night, or, if their rebellion is permitted, they go to their next activity, and ‘prove’ their parent’s point, all while carrying in them a subtle upset borne of their parent’s charge. Impressionable as they are, they will begin to wonder if their play is wrong; if enjoying is wrong, given mum/dad are so insistent they ought to be studying instead. They will begin to wonder if perhaps they really are lazy. If they are not blessed with a certain natural stature of mind, they may lose the ability to determine such things for themselves entirely, setting off a life-encircling cycle of unjustified self-recrimination for a trait — laziness in this case — they may not even possess. That is the incredible power of the well-applied guiltlock. You just know Seth Bullock wondered if he really was a sloth for much of his life.

• Two spouses sink into a wider dispute, having been set off on one another by some petty issue around the house; let’s say Spouse B forgot to take out the trash. As is their wont, Spouse A accuses Spouse B of being rude — this is common practice for them, as Spouse A considers any dissent expressed to their views as something fundamentally impolite and unreasonable. “I’m not being rude!” protests Spouse B, “you’re just being totally unfair and unreasonable! I do take out the garbage, I just forgot this time.” To which Spouse A replies “How dare you call me unreasonable! Always with the denial, always with the name-calling, you’re so rude.” Spouse B grimaces and puts their finger right on it. “What, am I not allowed to defend myself?” “You’re being rude,” Spouse A responds again. Spouse B is guiltlocked, fated to either accept the original charge or be told that that their resistance to the charge just proves it.

Of course, guilt looping can be seen in considerably heavier contexts, contexts with significant geopolitical weight, as well.

• Quaint as the book and the fame briefly enjoyed by its author seems now, Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility was given sole and singular premise by a guiltlock. As per its philosophy, Hiterlite in the purity of its obsession with race, white people are racist by some unspecified genetic default. Any white person who is unwilling to sit in a room to discuss the racism of which they are guilty is, by natural extension, a racist, and furthermore proving their racism by refusing to admit their racism. In DiAngelo’s creed, there are no non-racist white people, just more or less racist ones. Neat system, don’t you think? As internally consistent, and as based on rejection of all reality, as the giants of German philosophy.

• Country A and Country B are consistently to be found at loggerheads for a variety of reasons linked to age-old territorial disputes, religious differences, and cultural antipathy. Country A’s military covertly backs a terrorist sleeper cell operating in one of Country B’s local regions. The sleeper cell breaks cover and massacres a few dozen of Country B’s citizens at an isolated rural location. Country B, which has meaningful access-control over one of Country A’s strategic resources (let’s say, electricity), decides to switch off the supply and carries out a series of ordnance campaigns on Country A’s border. With complete and deliberate strategic ignorance of their own act of provocation, Country A steps onto the world stage and condemns Country B’s “militarism and gross imperialistic designs against us. This is an unacceptable act of war.” A surprising number of sympathetic countries around the world rally to Country A’s side. As Country A would have it, Country B can either let them have their way or, if they have the temerity to resist or respond to an act of war on their soil with arms, be tarred as warmongers. A killer guiltlock.

The Charms of the Lock

You can see why guiltlocking is such a common act of epistemological sabotage among those careless or callous enough to make use of it. In those examples cited above, the actual shape of the truth, and in some cases the actual owner of the fault, are pretty clear cut. We can see, from our disinterested vantage point, what’s actually going on, and who’s being put in a guiltlock.

And yet in almost of these instances, I bet you still found yourself having to re-read the given synopsis, put yourself in the locker’s shoes, to see if maybe you missed something, if maybe you weren’t being guiltlocked; if perhaps you were in the wrong after all. I suspect this is a reflex more common among our more conventionally Westernised readers, who if they are of a younger vintage and a given profile will have been taught to look for their own fault in an argument, or to otherwise lead with favouritistic empathy, whenever they are tempted to apportion blame in a dispute. Thus, the insidious guiltlock. The more epistemologically sceptical, the more honest, the more empathetic you are, the more prone you will be to allow the second guess to get a hold of you, in which case you may accept the other side’s charge without cause.

And the real kicker amongst it all? The most obvious defence against guiltlocking, which is to simply deny any charge submitted as part of it, is epistemologically ruinous. Because the chances are that, if you find yourself in the thick of an argument borne of, say, your refusal or inability to see the validity of someone else’s view, you’re probably going to find yourself being called stubborn, or an ignoramus; in which case, you’re hearing exactly what you need to hear.

“I am not! I always take other people’s views seriously,” you protest.

“See!” says your exasperated interlocutor. “You’re refusing to see things from my point of view right now!”

“Oh, no, no,” you say, “you’re just trying to guiltlock me. Either I admit you’re right, or you’ll just say me arguing with you proves you’re right. I won’t fall for it.”

Only, in this instance, falling for it would have been a very sensible thing to do.

That’s what makes the self-defence paradox so cruel. “A guilty dog barks loudest,” as they say, in absence of any proof whatsoever (c. Horowitz, Ostojić et al., Hecht, Miklósi, and Gácsi).

A Few Small Keys

Guiltlocking is tied up with a number of other behaviours that are now commonly recognised and identifiable:

• Gaslighting. In fact, guiltlocking and gaslighting go together about as wonderfully as a tarte aux fraises française and a custom-overclocked NVIDIA RTX 3090-powered oven [1]. Once a person intent on gaslighting you into believing in some particular defect in your personality has you in the position, all they need to do to really hit their assertion home is to tell you that the very fact of your resistance to their insistence means that, yes, you really are a liar/crazy/prejudiced/guilty, like they’ve always said.

• Pairlocking. The sibling of guiltlocking, it involves bringing a subordinate guiltlock to an argument that is principally concerned with something else. Let’s say you’ve been charged with the crime of having forgotten to buy nappies for the baby. Your spouse accuses you of always forgetting to do so; you have forgotten once before, but you do not forget to do so generally. You protest that the charge is unfair. Your spouse rebuts this with the assertion that you always react aggressively in argument situations. You deny this and suggest your spouse is being unfair. Your spouse insists on your unacceptable aggression in communication, and that your apparently belligerent denial is proof of it. Concession here can be used to cover for inability to resolve the prior dispute reasonably. Perhaps next time you don’t argue with your spouse at all, whatever they say, for fear of being told you’re being unacceptably aggressive in arguing back. The lock is not on the first argument, but in a contrived second argument; if the lock fits, your interlocutor carries the first argument by default.

• DARVO. Beloved of therapy veterans, DARVO stands for ‘Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender’. It is a common tactic among narcissistic types, but is also a common low-hanging tool of defence that many people, very much including the narcissists who use it to begin with, will be willing to accuse you of using, even where you are not doing much more than protesting their ongoing attempt to victimise you.

• The Kafka Trap. If you’ve read Kafka’s The Trial, you will know the scenario well — that anyone accused of x who denies having x’d must be guilty of x, since anyone guilty of x would deny having x’d. It is a common trope in literature beyond the great bard of clerical despair, featuring in Shakespeare (the tragedy of Desdemona in Othello, who comes to seem more guilty of manipulation to Othello the more she protests her fidelity to him), Antigone, The Crucible, and elsewhere.

So how to resist the guiltlock? There are a few premises that can help you remain out of trouble.

1. Recall that there are objective premises within arguments, even if no one in the argument recognises them. If, in fact, you are pretty assiduous with cleaning up after yourself around the house, and you are charged with consistently failing to do so out of a lack of regard for your spouse, which disregard is purportedly in evidence again through your being willing to argue the point with them, recall that in fact, no, the original premises of the argument were not correct, and it was reasonable for you to contest them.

2. Never devalue restraint. Too often we default to the instinctual belief that the person who has the last word in a dispute is the victor, even though in many cases the person who has picked the argument has, by picking it, lost it. Forgetting this can lead people to substitute in all sorts of toxic proxies in their cavemanic quest for the ‘win’ — who can shout loudest; who can swear most creatively; who can cause the most harm to the other — in ways that are utterly ruinous, and the person ostensibly in the right is as susceptible to this temptation as the person making the charge, often more so as the one more in the right has to cope with the outrage brought about by the unjust slight made on their character. As above, the premises dictate the justice of the dispute. If you are right by its dictates at the conversation’s beginning, what happens thereafter is largely irrelevant, except as a matter of appraisal of your interlocutor. Speaking of.

3. Be wary of serial lockers. If you find yourself in a position where you are being guiltlocked in earnest, frequently, consider who is subjecting you to such repeat insults. If it is a close loved one, you may be unlucky enough to have someone who, through officially ‘innocent’ ignorance or by unpleasant design, defaults to dishonest positions in arguments. You must bring up this tendency to them where they exercise it, and make them aware of it. Where you are not obliged by such close connection to put up with a guiltlocker, you should not. Willingness to use this trick as a way of getting around people predicts for many unfortunate externalities of character.

4. Recognise where you are not in fact being guiltlocked. Sometimes what looks like guiltlocking is just you coming up against a repeated pattern of pointless or maladaptive behaviour. If you suspect your interlocutor may be right about what they’re charging you with, call time out on the dispute, gather your thoughts, and reflect with honesty on prior instances; have you shown the behaviour you’re being accused of before? If so, a concession is in order, and you and your interlocutor will be all the better for it.

It is a strange thing about our world that, though the idea nominally offends our sense of justice, aggressors are often apportioned less blame in a conflict situation than the person who is willing to athletically defend themselves when wronged. We will lose every argument, even those we appear to win, if we are not willing to be frank with ourselves about our faults. But where fault is honoured in us where we do not possess it, we do ourselves great injury not to rebut the charge.

Our interlocutor may never believe in our defence. But that is not necessarily the important thing.

With thanks to VividVoid for the inspiration of this piece.

The Complete Maxi’s Toolkit

Vol.1 The Trialectic

Vol.2 The Fallacy of the Pendulum

Vol.3 Equilism

Vol.4 The Wittgentrap

Vol.5 The MacGregorism

Vol.6 Systematic Intelligence

Vol.7 Vainferreting

Vol.8 Quantum Caramel

Vol.9 The Lily Pad Presumption

Vol.10 The Social Sublime and the Empathic Sublime

Vol.11 The Block Proof

[1] Yes yes this didn’t land but they go together incredibly well trust me.