ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 10 MAY 2025
The name Socrates is one of the pillars that hold up the aesthetic of philosophy to all those who wouldn’t dare to pursue such a boring hobby. Famously, despite the habits of (what feels to be) every other thinker, Socrates didn’t write anything down. As the general story goes, he saw dialogue as the only valid way of searching for truth, deeming writing as too authoritative. We will never know how Socrates truly felt on this matter, or if he was even a real person to begin with, but it’s a sentiment that no other big-name philosopher can hold themselves to. Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault… any philosopher you can think of (other than Socrates) is also a writer; staying alive as a recording of their thoughts to be played over and over and over again.
I think an interesting aspect of writing, art, and philosophy is the question of why people do these things in the first place. To say it cynically: why did Kafka feel he was worthy to live beyond physical death? Why did da Vinci feel his talent was worthy of being realized? Why did Socrates feel he knew, or could know, anything about the world? And why did Lenin feel he knew what is to be done?
When it comes to pragmatic politics, there is a noticeable divide between what is believed by the speaker, and what comes out of his mouth. Mussolini wouldn’t be able to inspire the masses with the boring philosophical basis of Fascism, so he instead used fanciful political and insurrectionary rhetoric to take over the Italian state. The Bolshevik soldier wasn’t fighting against expropriation and the superstructure and other Marxian jargon, but to liberate himself from the rich man. Recently, I removed a few articles from this blog that I could only look at with an anxious desire to assassinate my inner dictator. I started this blog with the angle of politics, like what Mussolini and Lenin used to inspire their projects into fruition. Upon reflection, I’ve since rejected this approach to writing, not out of any moralistic or humanist mission for authenticity, but because I finally answered the question of why I wanted to write. I don’t want to be a political writer. I don’t want to carve my name into history, or gain a hegemonic following. I don’t want to bang pots and pans together; make incessant noise to arouse people to whatever political or insurrectionary cause. Neither do I have any plans for after my death.
Maybe it’s out of pride or out of boredom, but I have solidly abandoned the political theater. I itch to write, so I will write. But that’s enough about me.
All of philosophy is defined by the search for truth; what is “real”. It is the nature of philosophical writing, from basic observations to wrestles with the essence of the universe, to therefore pose itself as an authority on reality. This entire article does so. This inescapable property of writing is what pulls in many political writers: the ones who want to write the rules of reality, and then decide what should be done of it. This is the inner dictator in us all, but don’t be ashamed: it’s simply human. Against the absurd and strange universe, we assert meaning and understanding onto our surroundings. We try to work things out with rationalism- no, empiricism- no, maybe nothing at all- no, maybe analytical logic… ‘round and ‘round the table of talking heads, competing to be the truth tellers; the dictators who can chart the journey through the thick jungle. Our mental security depends on it.
It’s hard to say anything against the authoritative nature of language. How can someone even write that nothing is certain? Wouldn’t that then mean they are certain in their claim and reasoning?
There is a certain permanence to writing, too. Writing something down records it, and lets it play back when someone reads it, as many times as they do. There can be evolution in the writer, but never the written. This makes writing about philosophy, or even talking about it, have a sort of arrogant property. You can bake your points in “probably” and “maybe” and “perhaps”, but those are still statements of absolute truth [1]. The nature of political writers is one of subjugation, and the establishment of authority and law. In other words, to venture into the world, wrap some claim in rope, and drag it into your blog as the Truth. It’s definitely an arousing endeavor; I do it all the time. And to be humble about it, in any real sense of the word, is nearly forbidden in our society of competition and domination. Either you are the authority, or you answer to it. And as a consequence of the democratization of information, any jargon junkie with a libido can indulge themselves in the subjugation of reality.
Since the dawn of philosophy, it has never been a personal matter, in the grand scheme, no matter how intimate conscious thought is. Philosophers want to write the rules of another’s life, for one reason or another, or to write the rules of metaphysics, epistemology, morality, politics, etc. In the school of critique, the critique of the rules even becomes the establishment itself, and doomed to an eternal renewable of authority. If the primary goal of this sense of philosophy is to search for the truth, then it is the secondary (or even just primary for many) to subjugate the thought of others under whatever system of truth you uncover. The writer and the politician, then, are the exact same. Both utilize rhetoric and persuasion to have their audience do one thing or another, and believe one thing or another. It is then the archetype of the political writer can be extended beyond putting words on papers and screens. The writer is the Political Writer, the politician is the Political Writer, the artist is the Political Writer, Socrates is the Political Writer, all who seek to subjugate reality and truth, if there even is either in the first place is the Political Writer.
Another dimension of the subjugation of reality is the acquisition of fame, whether the justification for such is rooted in personal egotism or the egotism of the ideas themselves. Philosophy, in the public sphere, necessitates the competition of ideas, and by consequence creates a competition of figureheads. When we talk about philosophy, its primary subject is the figureheads. The ideas themselves are even named after the thinkers rather than the thoughts: Marxism, Hegelianism, Kantianism, and so on. Even if the specific “-ism” isn’t used, many ideas are understood, explicitly or not, to belong to certain thinkers. This subtle worship of the philosopher himself, rather than his work, is the first step in the commodification of ideology[2].
I recently stumbled upon a book by Ann Coulter, a conservative actress within the political theater, titled If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans. I haven’t read the book, but just the title itself captured me. This book was published in 2007, after all, right on the cusp of the Tea Party movement, the infant that grew into the modern American Right. For a writer in 2007 to have such uncompromising beliefs about the intelligence of Democrats seems completely ridiculous compared to the nature of today’s politics. Republican-Democrat discourse in the 2000’s has an inconsequential nature in retrospect, and becomes characterized as political white noise.
The only real change that has occurred between the Republican-Democrat discourse of the pre-Trump and post-Trump eras is an existential threat to democracy, or more accurately, a peeling of the illusion of democracy, and realization of tyranny as the motivator of all political action. What hasn’t been realized is that the left hand and right hand of the institution belong to the same body, which ultimately makes the differences between the pre-Trump and post-Trump eras arbitrary. Nothing has truly changed except for a burgeoning and insufficient understanding of political systems. The rhetoric of the preservation of democracy is still the most pervasive thought-monster of political ideology, but that is soon transformed into the desire of tyranny, and perhaps thereafter the admittance of tyranny. The political noise machine hasn’t altered its process since the 2016 Trump campaign: it’s just continued the course as the natural order of the political theater.
This puts into question whether the many parts of the noise machine believe in anything at all. There’s no doubt the prime influence of the makers of Red Noise is Red Noise itself; same thing with Blue Noise. When everyone believes only this thing or that thing, with only slight variations in policy and rhetoric, is the mainstream political writer anything but a mean in which noise produces itself? We are conditioned to absorb and accept noise from our very birth, with our brains defaultly taking lying as an exception rather than equally normal to truth, and the structure of societal conditioning and education. It’s extremely difficult to find an American that doesn’t know the prime values and slogans they’re conditioned to believe in: the absolutes of democracy and legal equality; “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. These Americans, going on to become the political writers, find no conviction in these sentiments; they simply are the truth, just as the Earth is round. And once someone stands against the absolute truth, it’s simply ridiculous [3]. Then, in the specialization of an individual into a political writer, they are captured by one colored noise or the other, and relates those basal absolute truths to the ideological frosting of the politicians, pundits, and their local culture. The political writer then has no convictions other than to keep up the noise. Perhaps they believe their positions are more than implanted into them, and they’re motivated to yell louder against whatever noise is yelling at them from the other end of the accepted political spectrum. Either way, it’s been white noise since the presses started printing.
What course is there for a writer, when faced with the black hole of the Political Writer?
Ultimately, this archetype is an inescapable quality of not only writing, but language itself, which has been made such a fundamental part of being human. It’s easy to assign moralistic rejections to the Political Writer: “the Political Writer has too big an ego! The Political Writer is too pretentious! The Political Writer can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw, yet tells me the winds blow southerly!” And even then, those statements drone on from the muttering larynx of the Political Writer. At this point, it isn’t individuals that adopt the imperialism of the Political Writer, but the Political Writer, some sort of eldritch entity, that colonizes individuals. The might of his empire cannot be unfurled even with his own weaponry.
In this battle for our art to hold up to some faint moralistic standard, there is no option but to surrender. It may hurt your own humble ego to accept surrender against the evils of truth statements, but with every sentence, you tumble into the same black hole as the rest of us. And as an amalgamous entity sitting in the heart of the singularity, the Political Writer takes a corporeal form.
So what will I do, as a limb of this beast?
It’s no longer ego, in any subtle or overt form, that drives me to write. My writing does indeed take an ego of its own, the ego that petty cynics hate, but only in consequence of the medium and audience [4]. At the end of the day, there is no cynical rejection that can answer the question of what to do with yourself, when all actions have been argued away as rooted in selfishness [5].
There is a simple formula that I employ now, when I have my affairs with writing: I itch to write, so I will write.
1.
“Maybe this is true,” suggests the truth that “this” could be. There’s uncertainty of which truth to select, but very much certainty in what options of truth there are. “Uncertain” statements become even closer to authoritativeness with “probably” and so on.
2.
I plan on further explaining this concept in a later article. It’s too much of a deviation to be contained within the scope of this article.
3.
Although, in the case of Flat-Earthers, the position is simply ridiculous.
4.
I should also note: publishing this article does necessitate that it enters the competition for the subjugation of reality. But, for me, it’s simply for the love of the game; a social experiment, even.
5.
This is mainly a criticism of myself when I was first getting into philosophy.