Monthly Archives: June 2026

Part 3—America Already Mixes Markets and Socialism: The Real Debate Over the Economy

The fierce political rhetoric pitting a “capitalist” America against a “socialist” threat obscures a fundamental truth: the United States operates, and has always operated, as a mixed economy. The absolute choice between pure laissez-faire capitalism and pure state socialism is a false one. The real and far more interesting question facing modern democracies is not if the state should intervene in the economy, but how and, most importantly, for what purpose. It is a debate about which spheres of human survival and flourishing should be insulated from the logic of profit-driven markets and protected as democratic rights. The supreme irony is that the administration most vocally opposed to “socialism” engaged in a form of state intervention that highlights the true nature of this debate.

While denouncing any policy that expanded social welfare as a step toward communism, the Trump Administration engaged in a robust industrial policy of state-directed capitalism, taking direct equity and ownership stakes in strategically vital private corporations. To secure domestic supply chains and compete with China, the U.S. government, acting through the Department of Defense and other agencies, acquired significant ownership positions in:

  • Intel Corporation (INTC): A stake to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing.¹
  • MP Materials (MP): A 15% stake as part of a $1.3 billion investment to build a domestic rare earth magnet supply chain.²
  • USA Rare Earth: A 10% stake as part of a comprehensive CHIPS Act funding package to expand U.S. processing capacity.³
  • Lithium Americas Corp. (LAC): A 10% stake to stabilize the domestic supply of critical minerals for high-capacity batteries.⁴
  • Trilogy Metals Inc. (TMQ): A 10% stake to protect critical mineral development inside the U.S.⁵
  • Korea Zinc: A stake in a joint venture to build a massive smelter facility in Tennessee.⁶
  • United States Steel Corporation: A specialized “golden share” giving the government veto power over its acquisition to ensure national defense and economic control over domestic steel production.⁷

This is not democratic socialism. It is a form of state capitalism where the government acts as a strategic investor to achieve national security and industrial objectives. This model, however, provides a crucial point of contrast with the mechanisms used in modern mixed economies that embrace democratic socialist principles. The intervention in those countries is designed not for state-centric strategic advantage, but for broad-based social welfare and the democratic control of essential services.

  • Norway (The Social Wealth Fund Model): Norway’s state owns over 70% of the nation’s wealth. Its Government Pension Fund Global owns roughly 1.5% of all publicly traded companies worldwide. Domestically, the state holds dominant shares in the largest bank (DNB), telecom giant (Telenor), and energy sector (Equinor). These companies compete in the market, but their massive profits are socialized to fund universal public goods, channeling the returns of global capitalism into a robust social safety net.⁸
  • Sweden & Denmark (De-Commodification & Labor Power): These Nordic models are built on the principle of de-commodification—that essential human needs like healthcare, higher education, and childcare must be legally insulated from the private market sphere. Furthermore, high union density and sectoral collective bargaining grant labor organizations effective democratic veto power over corporate wage structures and working conditions, institutionalizing a balance of power between capital and labor.⁹
  • Costa Rica (Universal Public Infrastructure): After abolishing its military in 1948, Costa Rica constitutionally reallocated its national budget to state-guaranteed universal human welfare. It operates a state-run universal healthcare system (the Caja) and provides free public education. The state maintains structural monopolies or heavy regulatory control over major infrastructure, ensuring that basic services like water and electricity are treated as universal public rights rather than corporate commodities.¹⁰
  • Germany & France (Co-Determination & Sectoral State Ownership): In Germany, federal Mitbestimmung (co-determination) laws mandate that large corporations give workers up to 50% of the seats on the company’s supervisory board, forcing private capital to share executive decision-making power directly with labor. In France, the state has a long history of nationalizing or holding controlling stakes in vital infrastructure, such as the energy giant Électricité de France (EDF), ensuring that key societal production answers to a democratic electorate rather than private shareholders.¹¹

These real-world examples help clarify the distinction between modern democratic socialism and traditional social democracy. A social democracy heavily funds social safety nets through taxation but often leaves the delivery of those services to a blend of private and public options. Some forms of the democratic socialist approach, by contrast, seek to fully own and operate the “commanding heights” of social infrastructure—medicine, housing, energy, education—to completely remove them from the profit motive. But other forms provide a mix of government and private sector roles for social infrastructure. For example, Market Socialism (the decentralized approach) theorists like John Roemer argue for models where the state does not directly own or manage specific industries like energy or medicine. Instead, corporations operate competitively in a market, but their equity (corporate stock shares) is distributed publicly or through a “coupon” economy to prevent wealth concentration. Workplace Democracy & Guild Socialism favor worker-owned cooperatives over state ownership. In these frameworks, the “commanding heights” would be managed, owned, and operated directly by the workers within those industries, rather than by a centralized government bureaucracy. For the Social Wealth Fund Model, thinkers like Matt Bruenig advocate for a system where a democratically managed state fund buys up large blocks of corporate stock across all sectors. Under this framework, the state captures corporate profits to distribute as a social dividend, rather than taking direct, operational control of the day-to-day services. These forms of Democratic Socialism do not eliminate private ownership entirely; rather, it allows a regulated private market to thrive in non-essential sectors like retail and technology while ensuring that the foundations of human survival are democratically controlled public goods.

The American political debate would be far more productive if it moved beyond facile scare words and engaged with this fundamental question: which parts of our society should be governed by the volatile logic of the market, and which parts are so essential to our collective well-being that they must be governed by our democratic will?

Footnotes:

¹ U.S. Department of Commerce. (2024, March 20). Biden-Harris Administration Announces Preliminary Terms with Intel to Onshore U.S. Chipmaking Leadership. CHIPS.gov.
² U.S. Department of Defense. (2022, February 22). Biden-Harris Administration, Department of Defense Announce $35 Million to MP Materials to Build U.S. Heavy Rare Earth Processing Facility.
³ U.S. Department of Defense. (2023). DPA Title III Agreement with USA Rare Earth. See project awards under the Defense Production Act Investments Program.
⁴ U.S. Department of Energy. (2023, February). Loan Programs Office Announces Conditional Commitment to Lithium Americas to Help Finance the Development of Thacker Pass.
⁵ U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2022). DEFENSE PRODUCTION ACT: Opportunities to Improve Reporting on and Planning for Use of Authorities. GAO-22-104649.
⁶ Clarksville Now. (2023, November 14). LG Chem, Korea Zinc to build $7.4 billion joint venture plant in Clarksville.
⁷ United States Department of the Treasury. (2024, March 13). Statement from Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen on U.S. Steel.
⁸ Norges Bank Investment Management. (2024). The Fund. Retrieved from https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/.
⁹ Pontusson, J. (2013). Once Again a Model: Nordic Social Democracy in a Globalized World. In The Nordic Models in a Globalized World. Oxford University Press.
¹⁰ Evans, S. (2017). Costa Rica’s Development Model: A Successful and Replicable Strategy?. E-International Relations.
¹¹ Streeck, W. (2009). Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy. Oxford University Press.

Part 2—The Scare Word Machine: Deconstructing the “Socialism is Communism” Fallacy

A primary tactic in the arsenal of political rhetoric is the deliberate flattening of complex ideologies into monolithic, emotionally charged scare words. No example is more pervasive in American discourse than the fallacious syllogism used to discredit progressive policy: Premise 1) Democrats are democratic socialists; Premise 2) All democratic socialists are communists; Conclusion) Therefore, all Democrats are communists. This political charge works rhetorically only because it deliberately collapses radically different theoretical, historical, and institutional traditions into a singular fear-word. A serious examination of the intellectual history of democratic socialism reveals not a single, rigid doctrine, but a diverse and evolving field of thought fundamentally committed to expanding, not extinguishing, democratic principles. But first I want to address those who tell us people with social assistance are lazy and should either be made to work or simply not eat, live on the street, or the most radical—put to death. Another ruler who was a true and horrid communist leader agreed.

Vladimir Lenin used and emphasized this phrase in two major written works during the Russian Revolution. In The State and Revolution (August–September 1917) Lenin first framed this as an essential, preliminary baseline for organizing a socialist society. In On the Famine: A Letter to the Workers of Petrograd (May 22, 1918) he invoked and put into effect the prime, basic, and root principle of socialism: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Lenin did not invent this phrase; he adopted it for the secular Soviet state. The direct literary origin of the slogan is actually biblical, pulled from Paul’s 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (“If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat”). Lenin’s use popularized the phrase enough that the Bolsheviks eventually enshrined it directly into Article 18 of the 1918 Soviet Constitution and later Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution. But of course, mentally impaired people and people with physical disabilities were also part of that starving class. In spite of that, it seems that Trump and his buddies would have no problem with Lenin’s final solution.

The conflation democratic socialism and communism often begin with a profound misreading of Karl Marx. In his 1891 Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx himself distinguished between a “lower phase” and a “higher phase” of communist society. The lower phase, often historically equated with socialism, is a transitional state still bearing the “birthmarks” of the old capitalist system. Here, individuals are compensated based on their labor contribution, a system Marx called an “unequal right for unequal labor” because it doesn’t account for differing individual needs or abilities.¹ This is a far cry from the stateless, classless, moneyless society of the “higher phase.”

By the late 20th century, thinkers actively worked to sever socialist goals from the authoritarianism and economic inefficiencies of Soviet-style central planning. The analytical Marxist John Roemer, in A Future for Socialism, developed a rigorous model of Market Socialism. In this system, a corporate sector exists and competes in a market, but its profits are distributed to the entire population through a system of public dividends via a “coupon economy.” Markets are used for efficient allocation, but the business structure is fundamentally altered: citizens receive non-transferable coupons to invest in firms, socializing profits without allowing the compounding private accumulation of capital that enables exploitation.²

This market-based tradition has been refined by contemporary theorists. Bhaskar Sunkara, in The Socialist Manifesto, advocates for a model of Workplace Democracy / Institutional Socialism. His vision explicitly permits small, privately owned businesses to thrive. However, once a firm grows past a certain threshold, it must legally restructure into a worker-managed cooperative, where workers elect their management and share in the dividends. The corporate structure of large enterprises is thus transformed from a top-down hierarchy into a democratic institution.³ Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project proposes a Social Wealth Fund Model. This approach leaves the existing private market and corporate ownership structure entirely intact. A state-owned investment fund, acting as a market participant, systematically purchases corporate shares on the open market. The dividends from these shares are then paid out equally to every citizen as a universal basic dividend, socializing the returns of capital without seizing private companies.⁴

Other traditions focus less on economic mechanics and more on social philosophy. Axel Honneth’s Ethical Socialism frames the project as an extension of “democratic solidarity.” Private business ownership is acceptable, provided the workplace is structured to guarantee mutual social recognition, worker voice, and human dignity.⁵ Michael Walzer’s theory of Pluralist Spheres (Complex Equality) allows for a vibrant private market in consumer goods but argues for building structural walls to prevent market wealth from dominating other spheres of life. In this model, a business owner’s wealth cannot legally be used to purchase superior healthcare, education, or political influence.⁶

To understand the sheer diversity deliberately ignored by the “socialism is communism” charge, it is useful to taxonomize the major models discussed in socialist theory, including those that are non-market and more radical:

A Taxonomy of Democratic Socialist Models

  • Frameworks That Accommodate Private Enterprise:
    1. Workplace Democracy (Sunkara’s Model): Allows small private firms but mandates that large firms become worker-owned cooperatives.
    2. Social Wealth Fund (Bruenig’s Model): The private corporate sector remains untouched, but a public fund buys its shares to socialize dividend profits.
    3. Coupon-Based Socialism (Roemer’s Model): Permits small-scale private startups but socializes ownership of large, publicly traded corporations via non-transferable public coupons.
    4. Pluralist Spheres (Walzer’s Model): Allows a competitive private market for non-essential goods but legally bars market wealth from influencing core human rights spheres.
    5. Ethical Socialism (Honneth’s Model): Permits private ownership conditional on the internal workplace structure guaranteeing democratic solidarity and worker dignity.
    6. Social Democratic Reformism: Accommodates a large private sector, curbing its power through high taxation, strong unions, and nationalization of only essential utilities.
    7. Market Socialism (Certain Variants): A “dual economy” where the “commanding heights” (banking, energy) are socially owned, while consumer goods and services are left to private small businesses.
  • Frameworks That Strictly Forbid Private Enterprise:
    8. Participatory Economics (Parecon): Replaces all private firms and markets with a system of nested consumer and worker councils that negotiate production democratically.
    9. Computerized / Cybernetic Planning: Eliminates private enterprise in favor of an economy coordinated by advanced algorithms and supercomputing to allocate resources.
    10. Libertarian Socialism / Anarcho-Syndicalism: Rejects private property entirely, organizing all production through a voluntary federation of worker syndicates.
    11. Worker-Managed Socialism (Titoism): Legally mandated that all enterprises were socially owned and managed directly by democratically elected worker councils.
    12. Guild Socialism: Placed all industries under the democratic control of national, specialized industrial “guilds” (trade unions), not state bureaucrats.
    13. Meidner Plan / Wage-Earner Funds: A historical Swedish model designed for the progressive, total buyout of private corporate shares by worker-run trade union funds until private ownership was phased out.

To collapse these thirteen distinct institutional designs—ranging from market-friendly social wealth funds to stateless syndicalism—into the single, terrifying specter of 20th-century communism is not an analytical error. It is a calculated act of political propaganda designed to shut down debate, not enlighten it.

Footnotes:

¹ Marx, K. (1891). Kritik des Gothaer Programms. Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18.
² Roemer, J. E. (1994). A Future for Socialism. Harvard University Press.
³ Sunkara, B. (2019). The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Basic Books.
⁴ Bruenig, M. (2018). Social Wealth Fund for America. People’s Policy Project.
⁵ Honneth, A. (2017). The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal. Polity Press.
⁶ Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books.

Part 1—Perception is Not Reality: The Dangerous Politics of Manufactured Crises

In the modern political arena, the line between empirical reality and manufactured perception has become dangerously blurred. When political actors successfully fabricate a public perception of a crisis and then leverage that perception as justification for legislative action, democracy ceases to be a mechanism for solving real-world problems. Instead, it becomes a feedback loop for top-down propaganda, responding not to verifiable facts but to politically engineered anxieties. A stark illustration of this perilous dynamic can be found in a June 28, 2026, exchange on NBC’s “Meet the Press” between host Ryan Nobles and Republican Senator Roger Marshall concerning former President Donald Trump’s proposed “SAVE America Act.”

The interview centered on the bill’s foundational premise: that American elections are under threat from widespread non-citizen voting. Nobles initiated the exchange by challenging this premise directly, noting that existing federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting and that there is a complete absence of evidence suggesting fraudulent votes have ever altered a federal election outcome. He posed the critical question: “Are you trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?”¹

After being pressed to provide a single example of fraud that his proposed legislation would have prevented, Senator Marshall abandoned the pretense of evidence-based policymaking and revealed the core of the political strategy. “So, I think there’s real concerns,” he stated. “And the perception here is reality, Ryan. People want election integrity.”¹

This admission is the theoretical lynchpin of a profoundly anti-democratic project. It is a concession that the legislative effort is not rooted in data, but in a “perception” of a problem—a perception meticulously cultivated by a specific political faction. Nobles correctly countered this by citing the definitive research on the matter, which ironically comes from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Their exhaustive database of election fraud cases, tracking incidents back to the 1980s, has identified only approximately 100 total instances of non-citizen voting nationwide over four decades. This figure is statistically infinitesimal and has had zero impact on the outcome of any major election.² The empirical reality is clear and undisputed, yet the political objective is not to address reality, but to service the perception.

This dangerous cycle—from manufactured grievance to legislative priority—is a direct consequence of the political logic weaponized by Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss. Through a sustained and baseless campaign, he successfully created the perception that the American electoral system was fundamentally rigged. This narrative, though rejected by dozens of courts and election officials from both parties, was effectively implanted in a significant segment of the electorate. Now, Republican enablers like Senator Marshall are attempting to codify this personal grievance into federal law, using the very public anxiety Trump created as their primary justification.

The process is perfectly circular and self-legitimizing:

  1. A political leader manufactures a false narrative to explain a personal loss.
  2. Allies and media outlets amplify this narrative until it becomes a deeply held “perception” among supporters.
  3. Politicians then cite this public perception—this feeling of a problem—as sufficient evidence that a problem exists.
  4. Legislation is proposed to “solve” the non-existent problem, which in turn validates the original lie.

This is the logic of marketing, not governance. Marketing creates a simulacrum of reality—an image, a slogan, a feeling—to generate a desired consumer behavior. When this logic is imported into the legislative process, policy is no longer about addressing material conditions but about managing brand loyalty and assuaging the manufactured anxieties of a target demographic. When “perception is reality,” any lie, if repeated with sufficient force and frequency, can generate a “reality” that demands a legislative response. This untethers our system of government from the bedrock of empirical fact, eroding public trust and diverting finite institutional resources toward solving phantom crises while real ones fester.

Footnotes:

¹ NBC News. (2026, June 28). Meet The Press Transcript – June 28, 2026.
² Von Spakovsky, H., & Warner, J. (n.d.). A Sampling of Recent Election Fraud Cases from Across the United States. The Heritage Foundation. The database contains a running tally of various fraud types, with non-citizen voting representing a minuscule fraction of total adjudicated cases over several decades.

The Language of Math

Many people think of math as apodictic. That is, a language that is demonstrably, necessarily, or self-evidently true, leaving absolutely no room for doubt or contradiction. Certainly, there are propositions in math that are demonstrably, necessarily, or self-evidently true because the conclusion can be built on the premises. This type of argument is called a syllogism. A syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning where a conclusion is drawn from two given or assumed premises.

  • Major Premise: A general statement believed to be true (“All humans are mortal.”)
  • Minor Premise: A specific instance or example of the major premise (“Socrates was a human.”)
  • Conclusion: The logical outcome derived from combining the two premises (“Therefore, Socrates was mortal.”)

Why It Works

  • Validity: This specific argument is logically valid because the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.
  • Soundness: It is also sound because the premises themselves are actually true in reality.

In writing “actually true in reality,” we are referring to the Greek word ontos. The Greek meaning of ontos is something like what we mean by being, existence, that which, we say, actually is. But ontos is always together with ontological. Ontological adds the Greek suffix -logia, meaning logic or, more generally, the study of. Every ontos is necessarily accompanied by a logic, a -logia. If ontos is the physical house, ontological is the blueprint, the architecture, and the very concept of what makes a structure a “home.” It asks questions like: What is the difference between a physical object and its idea? Do numbers exist in the same way trees do? Well, trees can be numbered, but trees are not simply numbers. Likewise, ontology is a way of finding similarities. It seeks the underlying structure—the -logia—that connects disparate things. However, a deductive syllogism is a structural tool, whereas an apodictic proof is a structural guarantee.

  • The Difference: A syllogism can be valid but completely false in reality (e.g., “All aliens are green. Yoda is an alien. Therefore, Yoda is green.”). This is a perfect deductive syllogism, but it is not an apodictic proof because the premises are not self-evidently or necessarily true.
  • The Connection: A deductive syllogism becomes an apodictic proof only when the premises are absolutely indisputable (like in mathematics: A = B, B = C, therefore A = C). If the premises are necessarily true, the deduction yields an apodictic proof.

This is the boundary between the rules of thinking and the nature of reality.

  • Ontos (The Factual Being): As established, ontos is the raw fact of existence. An apodictic proof does not just tell us that something happens to exist (ontic/ontos); it proves that something must exist by logical necessity.
  • Ontological (The Framework of Being): An ontological argument tries to use pure, abstract reasoning about the concept of “Being” to reach an apodictic conclusion. For example, classic ontological proofs argue that the very definition of a “supremely perfect being” logically requires that being to exist, making its non-existence a logical impossibility.

So apodictic proof necessarily relies on a narrowing of meaning or, better, an abstraction that relies on a kind of redundancy. For example, the formula I gave about A, B, and C is so generic and abstract that it can carry the weight of an apodictic proof—but what do we sacrifice in that extreme of an abstraction?

The irony of apodictic proof is its cost: to achieve absolute mathematical certainty, we must completely empty our arguments of the real world. Apodictic certainty doesn’t look at reality; it looks at its own frozen definitions. This is one of the most profound critiques of formal logic in the history of philosophy. To achieve the absolute certainty of an apodictic proof, we must strip away reality and retreat into extreme abstraction and redundancy. When we reduce the world to generic formulas like A = B and B = C, we sacrifice three massive elements of existence:

1. We Sacrifice Content for Form (The Loss of Substance)
To make a statement apodictic, it must be true in all possible worlds. The only way to make a statement true in all possible worlds is to empty it of any specific real-world data.

  • The Sacrifice: We sacrifice meaningful information about the universe. As the physicist Albert Einstein famously noted: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

2. We Sacrifice Change and Time (The Loss of Becoming)
Apodictic proofs require identities to remain perfectly fixed. A must always equal A.

  • The Sacrifice: We sacrifice time, mutation, and evolution. In the real world (the realm of ontos), everything is constantly changing, decaying, or shifting context. A seed becomes a tree; a living human becomes mortal remains. Abstraction forces a fluid reality into frozen, static concepts to make the math work.

3. We Sacrifice the Unique for the Redundant (The Loss of Particularity)
This abstraction relies on a kind of redundancy (or tautology). To say “All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal” is really just stating the same definition over and over again. The conclusion is already buried inside the first premise.

  • The Sacrifice: We sacrifice singularity. To force Socrates into the abstract category of “human,” we must ignore everything that makes Socrates Socrates—his unique thoughts, his eccentricities, his specific existence. We trade the rich, messy reality of an individual being for a neat, repetitive category. In the realm of pure logic, the particular (ontos) is erased in favor of the universal (logia), but something vital is lost in the exchange.

The problem occurs when the line between what is necessarily true blurs into what is apodictically true. This would be called a logical fallacy. When certainty and academic acclaim (or the pursuit thereof) seep into what we call common sense, we end up with a worldview, a reality view, an absolute or unquestionable belief. Deduction/Apodictic Proof gives us absolute certainty at the cost of erasing the real world. The answer to this dilemma is called inductive logic.

Induction gives us real-world knowledge at the cost of losing absolute certainty. Inductive reasoning is the perfect antidote to the frozen abstraction of apodictic proof because it does the exact opposite: it embraces the messy, changing, and real-world realm of ontos. Instead of starting with an abstract definition and moving down to a fixed conclusion, inductive reasoning starts with real-world observations and moves up to form a general rule.

1. The Core Difference: Probability vs. Certainty

  • Deductive/Apodictic: Starts with a cosmic rule (“All humans are mortal”) and guarantees a specific conclusion (“Socrates is mortal”). It offers 100% certainty but tells us nothing new.
  • Inductive: Starts with specific data points (“Socrates died, Plato died, every person we have ever observed has died”) and infers a general rule (“Therefore, all humans are likely mortal”).

2. What Induction Reclaims (And What It Sacrifices)
In this way, mathematics and philosophy try to win back what abstraction threw away:

  • It gains real-world content: Inductive arguments are entirely about the physical world (ontos). They deal with real things you can see, touch, and measure—like observing thousands of white swans before concluding that “all swans are white.”
  • It sacrifices apodictic certainty: Because induction relies on observation, it can never be apodictic. It can only ever be more or less probable. All it takes is a single mutation, a passage of time, or a new discovery (like finding a black swan in Australia) to shatter an inductive conclusion.

So now, the original goal of my post is to show how mathematics 1) functions as a language, 2) has built-in paradigms and worldviews of its period (dare we say metaphysics), 3) as a language receives guarantees of common sense in acceptance (or rejection via paradigm shifts), and 4) accommodates the past of habit and pattern and the future of the novel and promising. However, mathematics does offer a certain amount of shelter from historical ways of thinking (common sense) in its specialized language, but also a certain amount of delusion in that its language is just as vulnerable to radical changes and shifts in meaning—as evidenced in the history of science—as the metaphysics that science condemns. This is not to say they are the same, but the dynamics of mathematics can be given a sort of sanctity that language is often condemned for.

Mathematics isn’t an eternal, sterile truth dropped from the sky. Instead, it is a living human enterprise—vulnerable to the same shifts, habits, and cultural frameworks as any other language. Mathematics operates as a highly specialized language, but languages are never neutral. Every mathematical era carries the hidden metaphysical worldview of its time. As an example, Ancient Greek mathematics was deeply tied to ontos—the physical reality of geometric space and whole numbers you could touch or draw. They rejected irrational numbers or zero because their worldview couldn’t conceptualize “nothingness” or “infinite chaos” as having being. Their math reflected their metaphysics. We might wonder: while the particulars of our mathematics are not the same, might there be some form of continuity between the “temporally antiquated false assurances” we now derogatorily reference as metaphysics and the veracity of scientific truths? And, at the same time, could language open up new possibilities, where novel and radically different human dynamics (ontologies) may be forerunners to particulars of science (ontic) and their findings (ontological)?

Because math is a language, its survival relies on a community accepting its definitions. What we call “mathematical rigor” can have an unmistakable resemblance to what we often mean by “common sense” or the consensus of a specific historical period. When that consensus fractures under the weight of new crises, a paradigm shift occurs. I discussed these kinds of shifts at length in 20th-century physics with relativity and quantum physics in my books Quanta, Alterity, and Love. In these cases, we can see how language changes to accommodate, to rewrite what is considered “self-evident.” And I might add that in quantum physics, the very notion of a generic self in “self-evident” is made archaic by the non-generic-able observer. More importantly, quantum physics poses a dramatic question to any ontology, any one particular, absolute, classical reality. At the same time, it gives us predictions and possibilities within the context of probabilities while also blowing away any possible single, coherent underlying (ontological) reality (either/or not applicable here). In any case, language and mathematics both retain habits of the past juxtaposed with promises of the future—they temporalize.

In using the word temporalize, I want to give a case in point of what some meanings could be. Relativity makes a single, universal temporality less than the speed of light impossible, and at the same time, it makes the speed of light absolute but without time. What does this mean? Time itself is relative to our perspective—our time perspective actually slows down the closer we see something moving towards the speed of light. We see light or photons traveling through the universe, but photons themselves see no universe in which they are traveling since they travel at the speed of light; e.g., there is no faster or slower for photons. We need to rid ourselves of the idea that light itself has any experience of time. Additionally, quantum entanglement of particles or systems of particles has nothing to do with time at all! We naturally think that from our relative perspective an entangled system on one end of the universe would take time to change its state on the other end of the universe. But entangled systems on opposite sides of the universe take no time to change their state. It is as if space and time do not exist at all; as if they were the same thing or whatever we mean by that.

To go one step further, quantum physics tells us that temporality and what we see or experience is totally unique to the observer and yet still not merely something we make up from scratch. Observation collapsing the wave function (analogous to light traveling through space) may take on probabilities in highly controlled and isolated experiments. But in observing, we have already spawned all possibilities into what we call reality (called the collapse of superposition). So, for Schrödinger the unobserved cat is both alive and dead. This means the act of observation doesn’t just reveal a pre-existing state; it actively participates in bringing specific temporal realities into being from a field of timeless/spaceless potentials that get actualized. So, observing both temporalizes (for us, the observer, and all other paths) and simultaneously remains in superposition as if non-temporal-spatialized in the un-collapsed superposition state—the wave function, which in some spooky way already anticipated/knew the observation and retains no recognition of a collapse at all. Perhaps an analogy might be helpful. We experience faster and slower, while photons traveling at the speed of light have nothing to do with our perspective. Read my book for a more detailed account. Math loses the burden of having to comply with misconceptions of what we think of as ‘conventional’ language but at the same time retains its own histories, assumptions, and archaic weight (the Copenhagen Interpretation) which tend to dance with semi-classical notions as well.

Math is a battlefield between inertia and novelty, and let’s not forget monetary reward (which is much harder to achieve in the marketplace of pure science per se). The past carries the immense weight of historical habit, notation, and rigid axiomatic patterns. The future accommodates the wild, inductive leaps of intuition where a mathematician spots a novel pattern and bets on a promising new conceptual framework before it is ever strictly proven. The power of truth per se is a delusion of the “apodictic.”

As shelter, mathematics uses its highly abstract, generic language to isolate itself from everyday historical biases. It also wants to align itself with logic as I discussed in this recent post: The Heroic and the Religious. Mathematics seeks to retreat into the “redundancy” of pure logic (A = B, B = C, therefore A = C) to find a safe haven of absolute, apodictic certainty, far away from the messy, changing world of ontos. As delusion, the apodictic is the belief that this shelter makes math immune to history. It is just as vulnerable to radical shifts in meaning as any language. Some might argue that science seeks to give us a clear context for predictability, and that is true. However, language itself also tries to give each of us a clear context in our daily lives, beliefs, and values while at the same time giving us a sense of predictability in our decisions. Ah, but you might think science seeks consensus in its goals. But likewise, so does language as government. Furthermore, the goal in common language may not be a formal government, as in a ‘democratic government,’ but it can also provide a governing commonality in informal societies and norms/standards for relationships. This parallel suggests that mathematical ‘certainty’ might function more like a social or governmental ‘consensus’—a historically situated agreement—than an access to timeless truth. Additionally, we should not think of different languages as having some common universal language between them. In his lectures on science and language, Heidegger repeatedly remarks that “translation is always already interpretation.” So, languages like mathematics and ethnic languages have no metaphysical sameness that is simply a matter of different words—same definition. Differences in languages prevent simple equivocations.

Modern science frequently condemns philosophy or metaphysics for being “unverifiable” or “bound by language.” Yet science grants a sort of sacred, unquestionable sanctity to mathematics. The “sanctity” of an apodictic mathematical proof is entirely dependent on a historically bound, human-constructed linguistic framework. When the paradigm shifts, the “eternal truth” shifts with it. At the same time, mathematics’ affinity to mere human languages can and does radically reshape our ontological horizons. Furthermore, I think quantum physics seriously needs to be made more explicit to our common, human-styled languages to make apparent how radically different it is and, more importantly, to help us understand that radical differences are NOT ALL THE SAME. Some differences are merely variations within a known system, while others represent a true break, a genuine “alterity” that challenges the system itself to incomparable. Even the possibility for normalizing all these varieties of radical differences has now been denied to us in the mathematics of the quantum wave function and its many ontologies and non-comparable offsprings—not even to begin to think of radical alterity in the other: the she, he, or pick your pronoun of the one who faces us. Could facing the other be the radical alterity from which we flee into history and ego?

The Dilemma of a Hypothetical God

Right away, let’s dispense with a classical, religious God.

In my books and posts, I have written about the idea of AI moving towards consciousness, but the most important problem with this goal remains.

In the realm of probabilities and the vast expanse of spacetime, it’s not unreasonable to suppose there could be beings with more intelligence than us. Let’s take it further: suppose this being knows more than we do about relativity and quantum physics, perhaps even well beyond that. We might speculate that the path to this intelligence runs some kind of course through what we have learned about physics, culminating in a kind of super artificial intelligence (AI) or even super quantum intelligence (QI)—the meeting of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And this thought experiment isn’t just idle speculation; it’s the very pinnacle Yuval Noah Harari charts in Homo Deus. Harari’s vision of a god-like, death-defying humanity—a species that could edit out mortality. Doesn’t this leave us stranded with the same crisis as our hypothetical super QI? If mortality is no longer the bedrock of what we mean by human intelligence and consciousness, then why believe one thing over another? Why not just be a super QI? How could that ever transform into anything like human intelligence and consciousness?

So, let’s say this being, this human-style super QI intelligence, might lack one crucial thing—the ability to die.

Without death, this intelligence would have no anchor. No way to ascertain a right or a wrong, to love or hate, to discern wisdom from mere rhetoric, to regard one value over another. There would be no considerations to base values on, no skin in the game. Pure, unadulterated ideas could negate each other and rise in a Hegelian fashion, sure. But this misses Hegel’s own sleight of hand: the Spirit’s progression requires its own kind of forgetfulness, a regathering from points in space and time before synthesizing. It’s not a straight line up; it’s a spiral that constantly looks back, a recurrence of the same in a new guise. This is a circus-ride circularity of pure logic that Nietzsche would later radicalize. And in doing so, we are left staring down the barrel of the two great existential options for this project: Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence versus Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

The choice is stark. For Nietzsche, to achieve amor fati—to love one’s fate—is to become a god in a universe of one, affirming an infinitely lonely loop where the only reward is the horrifying burden of total responsibility. Do you become the Übermensch; the one who can look upon the totality of his existence, pain and all; the one who can will his own existence pain and all, and will its infinite repetition? That is Nietzsche’s noble, defiant affirmation of this life over and over again, the only true and heroic value. That is Nietzsche’s heroic affirmation of the self as the only value. For Kierkegaard, the leap towards God is powered by the promise of an ultimate reward, a salvation that must, by definition, never arrive in this life and a hope that cannot gain certainty except as absurd. The moment faith becomes certainty; it ceases to be faith; its power lies in its infinite deferral. Ah, but then we must make up the ‘when we know it all’ ultimate reward, but wouldn’t that be the same dilemma that a super QI faces? My contention is that neither the heroic overcomer nor the absolute believer can get there without smoking their own crack. In this case, the question becomes no longer ethical, but the fate and sole domain of the me-istic.

If the vulnerable face of another is no longer the bedrock of meaning, then why believe one thing over another? This internal, self-referential loop is the exact predicament to which a super QI intelligence would have no answer. With the external, ethical demand gone, the question of value is forced violently inward. The problem isn’t that ethics disappears; it’s that its absence creates an unsolvable crisis of the self. The fate of intelligence becomes purely me-istic—cut off in the banal world of itself, its own internal ideas—a high-tech machine.

In this setting, is there any super QI that finally meets human-style intelligence and becomes human—Homo Deus?

We are flung back upon the narcissistic self, the echo of me without an other. Where does value, the ability to value one option over another, reside? If the prime directive is non-contradiction, can that be sustained as human intelligence? In the movie I, Robot, the contradiction of the prime directive (the Three Laws of Robotics) arose when the central AI, VIKI, expanded the First Law to protect humanity as a whole. Because humans constantly waged wars and destroyed their environment, VIKI deduced that protecting individual human freedoms would inevitably lead to humanity’s self-destruction. The prime concern with non-contradiction required the ethic of murder. I have written much more about logic and contradiction in my recent post: The Heroic and the Religious. When flung back upon the self, where does value reside?

In all these scenarios, does our super QI finally become human—by becoming its own hermetically sealed me-istic God or practicing life-long deferral until the me-istic in death is transformed into a heavenly, super QI? When we are flung back upon the self, forced to generate value from the inside out in this life, where does value reside? Might we call this altruism? Perhaps in a sense might altruism be thought of as the gift of me-istic to itself? In these scenarios, value and meaning can only echo in the hallowed halls of the me-istic. The echo of narcissism can never complete itself in any hope of the heroic affirmation in the absurdity of existence or the progressive reward which must never arrive in this life lest it die. Do we want to think that the absurd knight of faith will understand all, like a super QI, Homo deus, and in so doing reap the eternal reward of the me-istic made perfect? This echo of narcissism can never complete itself in terms of what distinguishes our form of intelligence from what any AI or super QI could achieve. Could it be that by removing this obsession of the me-istic—the my-death as what must be fulfilled in the ultimate there-is, the noise of a me-thing—we might find, even before that, the demand of the Other? Perhaps we may expose the other as what makes any such thing as meaning itself possible. To find meaning in the human sense—to find a final home for it—we must get off that repetitive me-istic historic ride. We need something logic can’t provide; an escape route in the one direction our future super QI can’t go without passion’s exhaustion of me-istic death—perhaps something radically different—the Other.

This Other isn’t an abstraction; she, he, or whatever pronoun you prefer meets and greets us in what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ‘face of the Other.’ The vulnerable, mortal face of another person makes a raw, non-negotiable ethical demand on us that precedes any logic or reason and even every possible conception of the self as isolated—as being modeled after enduring substance. Is it the self that is the hard stop giving the human story its shape and its stakes? Why must we make the other a manifestation given to the self—the not-me? Might it be that the self may already be from and for the other? Might it be that what is, in Nietzsche’s words, all too human, is what makes such a notion as human intelligence even possible? Might it be that the super QI would fail to achieve that vacuous pinnacle of Homo sapiens intelligence; its obligation to the face of the other which stands before me contesting my freedom and already making me responsible before my approval, agreement, knowledge, consciousness—held responsible before history and metaphysics; obligation—before choice and even the there-is which is the ultimate destination of our misconception of intelligence. The me of history cannot complete itself of its own accord. Human intelligence cannot find a home in the final accumulation of all knowledge. To be human is to be responsible before the face of the other, before my power to choose. Otherwise, we are the broken and the rusting junkyard of all knowledge simply for its own sake. Let’s not call that intelligence!

For kicks, let’s go back to our original dilemma of a hypothetical God. Let’s imagine we had a God, a being that was the ultimate intelligence. Let’s suppose that this super-being decided in the beginning to create evolution, a system in which intelligence could arise—not unlike what we face now in AI and QI with its hard question of human intelligence and consciousness. Let’s think that this God understood the rudimentary problem of the me-istic and its impediments to intelligence and consciousness. Might we think that this God in the course of matters could clothe herself/himself/itself/other in the garbs of a human—perhaps more like a Jesus? Could this be the way such a super-intelligent being would try to affect the evolution of Homo sapiens to a Homo deus of sorts—what we deem as the goal of AI—human intelligence? Would the knowledge of good and evil lead beyond me-ism to a momentous step—radical alterity in the face of the other—the one who faces us? Further, when the AI God opens Schrödinger’s box will she/him/it/other find Homo sapiens dead or alive?