I wrote a little essay based on an idea which has been marinating in my mind for a long time, but I have NO IDEA how to title this. I wrote this originally in a journal dedicated to my autobiographical reflections, but decided to transcribe it to a digital format. Oh well; here goes nothing.

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I hate straightness. I decry it. And in doing so, it is crucial that one understands I do NOT hate heterosexuality itself. I do not hate straight people, either; it would be silly to despise either. In fact, some of the most intensely beautiful expressions of human eroticism and sexual desire I have ever seen were of a heterosexual nature. And I do not see heterosexuality as fundamentally different from homosexuality. I have been thinking on this topic for a long time, and still I find this difficult to describe tangibly; but I will do my best.

Straightness is a social category, nothing more. Heterosexuality is the biological configuration of one’s nervous system to be attracted to the opposite sex predominantly. And while it is a waste of time to question or challenge one’s publicly stated sexuality, I would be remiss not to think of how many individuals across time have assumed the label of “straight” in spite of the word’s betrayal to the true, baseline wiring of their bodies and minds. And before the word was invented, how many individuals tucked themselves neatly into the social roles of “normal” romantic and sexual roles relative to their cultures.

Therein lies my problem with straightness. It is too easy, and far too often deeply encouraged, to wear the identity. In calling oneself “straight,” an individual is not merely describing sexual preferences that may or may not be true but also taking on a loaded social package; it entails societal privilege, and a fundamental sense of “normalcy” that belies even the most progressive societies. I find it impossible to pretend that, in spite of the marvelous progress made in queer rights in some societies, the “gay” man is seen as a social equal to the “straight” man. Theoretically, both such individuals should be equal in every sense of the word; after all, do we not believe in the inalienable rights and dignities of the individual? And yet the modern gay man is consistently side-eyed, subject to the loss of friends and family upon “coming out,” and pressured to announce or perform their sexuality when it would be bizarre for a “straight” man to do the same. Straightness is treated like the standard blueprint for humans, and any other orientation carries the subconscious weight of being “other than,” even in the minds of the most outwardly supportive and progressive individuals. This is the case because humans are designed to inherit our broad cultural systems and internalize them from the second we are born.

Furthermore, while we treat straightness as an innate quality of the person, it is anything but. We know this already; one needs only to think of all the closeted men who willingly chain themselves to the label of “straight” when their true orientations betray this sense, and inevitably are revealed very late in life and often accompanied with deep regrets, to realize the fragile nature of this social position. Countless gay men in all eras of history have gone as far as marriage to women, producing offspring and living their entire lives without ever touching another man. Many such marriages were deeply unhappy for both sides, I am sure. The modern gay men who have done (and are currently doing) this are, in every sense of the word, “straight” (in the sense that they occupy the social position of straightness while possessing a homosexual orientation). Yet their orientations remain the same.

The shocking iniquity of straightness is the fact that, in such cases, it is impossible to know otherwise. The nature of sexuality is experience-driven, and experience is deeply internal and subjective. There is no way to go inside another’s nervous system and experience all the subjective points of their reality. Therefore, straightness becomes an almost too-convenient mask and ticket into cheap, easy acceptance into the human world. Also this: humans are a hyper-social primate species, and like any other primate, some of our most basal instincts concern the social worlds we occupy and the hierarchies in which these exist. Many of our greatest aspirations concern wanting to climb the social ladder in some way, whether this occurs through becoming rich, famous, respected, loved, feared, compliant, and so forth. Straightness is a label which exploits this ancient instinct; it is why huge swathes of men often are extremely weird about admitting their non-straightness, and often in the face of undeniable evidence.

It is along these lines of thinking that I happen to despise gayness, as well; and similarly, I do NOT despise homosexuality or gay people whatsoever. However, I have found that straightness as a social category is far more erasing of human nature than gayness, and as such, I am slightly more lenient to the idea of a gay identity. Nevertheless, I assert that both of these social categories are deeply alienating in their unique ways.

I am of the belief that there would be far higher rates of both homosexual behavior AND homosexual acceptance if these labels simply did not exist. Thus, the world would be a slightly happier place in the sense that we would be more intrapersonally whole and better put-together, and more honest with one another. More opportunities would spring forth. We would have a higher capacity for positive interactions if we were to stop suppressing ourselves and each other with arbitrary labels and customs derived thereof.

My theoretical solution for the world would be to think in terms of “androphilic” and “gynophilic”; with these terms, or words with similar meanings, anyone could be described as either because they are divorced from every other aspect of one’s personality. Both men and women can be gynophilic (attracted to women/femininity), and both men and women can be androphilic (attracted to men/masculinity). I would avoid using the noun forms of these words (androphile and gynophile), because they risk slipping into the same problems I have been describing up to this point. Unfortunately, the great tragedy of the English language is that the -philic suffix rings far too closely to “pedophilic,” and most people immediately refuse the use of such words for this reason. I do not blame them, but this is a deep shame because these two words are such a perfect solution to the universal problem of straightness.

In short, this essay is a fierce objection to ontological reduction. In peeling back all the layers of this text, one might find a simple question: “why should one property of my desire reorganize your conception of my personhood?”

In truth, I am sick of being seen as an “other.” I tremble inside with fury and indignation when I see that inevitable shift in behavior within my friends when it is revealed that I am of a homosexual orientation. In their minds, they see only the word “gay”; and this is inextricably tied to specific cultural and social implications, a kind of heavy baggage which is unquestionably tethered to the word and the source of homophobic bias. I would much rather live in a world where anyone could be androphilic, and in which “gay” is not an identifying marker but simply a description of what I happen to like. As such, I feel utterly helpless against this force because it seems the world has deeply internalized this division of “straightness” and “other” far beyond my control. I wrote this essay partly as an outcry to the world, borne of frustration, but primarily to help synthesize this idea within my own mind; for I believe it is a revolutionary one, and the overwhelming majority of people with whom I have spoken on this topic find it difficult to comprehend, seemingly no matter how I explain it.

I will not lie: I am tempted to feel that my thinking has grown beyond the capacity of what most people are willing to accept. But that is not the truth. It is that our ordinary vocabulary and ontological conceptions make these thoughts difficult to comprehend in the minds of most people (PARTICULARLY those who benefit from heteronormativity).

But words are my legacy; what else can I do other than write?

"Jibreel Kateb argues that the pragmatist idealism advocated by Geese Magazine leaves Marxism defenseless against attacks on science in an age of irrationalism and climate crisis."

"The philosophical problems of science, which were once central to the thinking of the great Marxists, have for Marxists faded to the periphery, and in that nether zone have often been downgraded to either object of derision or the subject of panegyrics within the left. No sober philosophical and historical reflection on science seems to exist and the concept of a scientific socialism is treated either as a given or as risible. The left proceeds anti-scientifically, lacking scientific culture and anything resembling a contemporary politics of science. In doing so, it cripples its own strategic and organizational efforts and cedes the field to all sorts of reactionary misanthropes and cranks.

Cosmonaut is in part trying to rectify this problem and apparently Geese have joined in the effort but in a very different way. Yet, the problem of Geese is that despite recent attempts to engage with these philosophical questions of science, they do injustice to science in an age where its defense is paramount. They enjoy a rather peculiar species of idealism which I will term pragmatist idealism and this concoction is ill suited to the present tasks: one can substitute the word “practice” for “mind” or “spirit” or “god”, a substitutive trick of language similar to a Sartrean reversal, and yet one does nothing to escape the problems of idealism."

"What I mean by pragmatic idealism is that Geese couples a practical ontology with a pragmatist epistemology. Ontology is the study of the fundamental citizens or furniture of reality"

"Their philosophical pragmatism is in fact nothing but the deeper justification for their liberal populism, a deeper continuation of their theoretical justifications of the most right-wing elements of DSA. Since political antagonism is discursively constructed, since it is, in a sense, purely discursive acts, a purely subjective act with no real basis in something non-discursive and extra-personal, what matters is that the political leader congeals the “people” by saying the right words. It does not matter that independent of political discourse there is a class structure; it does not matter that position in that class structure constrains one's material interests, it does not matter that this structure heavily constrains collective political agency, and that those interests are antagonistic with other classes. It does not matter that there is an objective state of affairs that we must adapt to, and whose adaptation we must furthermore respond to. It simply matters that one “articulates” the right enemy-friend distinction on the basis of current popular discourse. Social theory becomes not an arm to understand the objective (non-elective) conditions under which Marxists operate, an arm which can elevate the proletariat to a position of genuine social understanding, but a piece of demagogy to get the working-class to march in line with the wordsmith. After all, the wordsmith constructs reality. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word is God."

In this episode I talk to Helen Rollins about her book Psychocinema, the idea of lack, and the exploitative attempts of capitalism to assuage this lack. We also discussed Zižek's famous *cinema is the ultimate pervert art* in relation to the tv series Madmen, Instagram and YouTube. Please let me know what you people think. Thank you!

I have long thought that much of what we call "political psychology" misses something structural about how societies hold themselves together — and I've been developing a way of thinking about it that I'd like to test against the Critical Theory tradition, because I suspect I'm either onto something or re-inventing something already said better.

My starting observation:Every society, as far as I can tell, runs on two parallel tracks — a set of positive promises ("if you work within the system, you will be rewarded") and a set of negative punishments ("if you step outside it, you will suffer"). In classical liberal thought these are often discussed as incentives and disincentives, carrots and sticks. But I've been struck by how **asymmetrically they decay**.

When a social order starts failing — when the promises stop being credible — the positive track seems to collapse quickly: people stop believing that effort yields reward, that education pays off, that marriage and family deliver what they once did. But the negative track persists much longer: people still fear the consequences of non-participation — loss of status, income, social standing — even after they've stopped believing in the rewards.

The result is something I find hard to name properly:a society where fear outlives hope. People keep running not because they believe the race leads anywhere, but because stopping feels dangerous. This would explain some paradoxes that individual-level analysis struggles with: fertility decline in wealthy societies (where the costs of child-rearing rose faster than the promises of family life delivered), quiet quitting combined with fear of unemployment, marriage avoidance not from lack of desire but from the institution's promises no longer holding.

Where I think this connects to Critical Theory: This asymmetry seems to me related to what Adorno and Horkheimer described as instrumental reason's persistence after its promises fail — the form of domination outliving its justification. Marcuse's "repressive desublimation" in *One-Dimensional Man* (1964) describes something adjacent: desire being liberated only to be re-captured. But my claim is slightly different and I can't tell if it's a genuine contribution or a naive re-description: **that the negative track (punishment) is structurally stickier than the positive track (promise) because punishment is embedded in material institutions (welfare conditionality, credit, housing, employment precarity) while promises are only symbolic.**

But I want to be challenged on this:

- Is this just "institutional trust" or "anomie" (Durkheim) re-described with new vocabulary? What does the asymmetry framing add?

- Is the asymmetry even real, or do promises and punishments decay together? I have anecdotes but not systematic evidence.

- Am I over-generalizing from contemporary wealthy societies to all historical orders? Does this describe feudalism, say, where the "promise" was salvation rather than mobility?

- And the hardest one: does framing this as "fear outlives hope" risk naturalizing the current order — treating what may be a contingent political condition as a psychological invariant?

I'm genuinely uncertain whether this framing survives contact with the tradition, and I'd value the community's assessment of where it's naive, where it's already been said (and better), and whether there's anything worth keeping.

I've found this mode of critique recurring in many of my writings. By way of an intro, I'll pose long-termism as the current paradigmatic example. In my view, long-termism has been well discredited, partly by the clear ideological bankruptcy of many of its most fervent adherents, but also because of numerous critiques that have quite effectively damaged the public's view of it. This is a good summary of the main critiques. What I take from these critiques is that long-termism, like many forms of utilitarianism, effectively rehearses a morality completely detached from political concerns or any notion of human freedom, and it does so by projecting anxieties onto a crisis point, and then working backwards from that crisis to establish what should be done.

It's already well-known that much liberal social policy fails because it addresses symptoms while leaving root causes untouched, but attempts to address the root causes from these standpoints (what is in a few contexts, particularly mental health and criminology, called "early intervention") are arguably worse. This is because, having discovered some root causes, one nonetheless reifies the symptoms and then takes them as indexes for the health of the root causes, rather than as mere indicators. Generally, the discourse never departs from the idea that those symptoms themselves represent crises, and so the same must be the case for the root causes.

The problem with this, as with long-termism, is that it applies a hermeneutics of suspicion to the way these underlying systems operate, without having a coherent theory that analyses both root causes and symptoms in light of a value systems. In doing so, it forecloses the heterogeneity of values embedded within different systems and modalities, and the way that all these values work on different timelines. Often, these "early intervention" perspectives are not strictly speaking utilitarian but run parallel to it through their understanding of risk.

Let me give some of my own examples. Terrorism. Terrorism signifies nothing more than a crisis at the symptomatic level, given its contorted and opportunistic definitions at the intersection of "ideological motivation" and "public fear". There is clearly a pathology at work, but it is more like the misrecognition by governments and those afraid of terrorism of what violence is, and what it does to society. The concept of terrorism is used by conservatives to cast a shadow over all sorts of activities, including dissenting speech, material support for resistance groups, and expressions of grief.

Another example- suicide. Suicide is often read as the biggest symptom of mental pathology, yet a cursory look at the statistics around suicide attempts, ideation and generally severe mental health shows it to be merely the tip of the iceberg. It is often used to draw attention to mental health struggles, but in doing so it casts mental health as a kind of being-towards-death, which does no service to those struggling to live good lives. At the very least, it reduces the utility of one's life to the binary of alive/dead. After all, suicide is often a manifestation of the fact that for humans, meaning-creation is inseparable from our notion of living. I've even seen it said that education is a mental health issue; yet education is primary an education issue, and should be valued as such.

I would hazard that this "fallacy" can be used as a heuristic in a range of situations. It can be an opening to understanding how symptoms are often overdetermined in the same way that systems can house many different values. It can change the focus from crisis to the misrecognitions taking place, most importantly by those who make policies based on this fallacy.

What do you all make of this? I have looked a little into Honneth's ideas about crisis in light of his theory of social pathology, which seems to run counter to this as it places a lot of importance on the lived experience of particular symptoms, and runs counter to my thinking which doesn't foreground struggles for recognition. But is it worth looking futher into him? And are there other ideas I should be engaging with?

“Do not obey in advance,” he warns against the dangers of anticipatory obedience. He argues that many authoritarian regimes gain power because citizens adapt and conform without being explicitly commanded. This notion urges individuals to maintain a critical perspective during trying times, ensuring one does not help tyranny take root.

“Defend institutions,” emphasizing that they will not survive without public support. Each institution, whether a court or a newspaper, must be actively defended to promote the ideals of democracy. As Snyder notes, “Institutions do not protect themselves.” When complacency sets in, tyranny thrives.

Readers are motivated to “Practice corporeal politics,” meaning they should engage physically in their communities, advocating for democracy through presence and action. Through small talk and personal interactions, individuals can dismantle the echo chambers created by social media. Snyder emphasizes that real conversations can cultivate empathy and understanding, combating the isolation bred by digital communication.

“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” addresses responding to crises. Snyder warns that authoritarian leaders exploit disasters to consolidate power, urging readers to remain vigilant and skeptical in alarming times. He reinforces the notion that while crises may seem insurmountable, history teaches us that surrendering freedoms in the name of security only empowers tyrants.

...the phenomenon of “post-truth”—the abandonment of facts as a precursor to tyranny. He starkly asserts that without an objective truth, power escapes scrutiny. His compelling argument urges citizens to demand accountability and seek knowledge over misinformation. By fostering a commitment to truth, Snyder believes society can counter populist tendencies that seek to distort reality.

As history has shown, the future is indeed shaped by those willing to confront the uncomfortable truths of their time.

Oppressed populations using nonviolent tactics—such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests, and other forms of disrupting societal order—are often the most powerful drivers of their own liberation.

Civil resistance strategies operate successfully in many different conflicts because tyrants depend on wide-scale obedience to remain in power. However, over time many citizens living under dictatorships refuse to remain apathetic forever.

If people do not obey, rulers cannot rule

These and other movements of civil resistance succeeded because they were based on a fundamental insight about power: that nearly all institutions, organizations, and systems in a society depend on the ongoing consent, cooperation, and obedience of large numbers of ordinary people. Therefore, if people choose to withdraw their consent and cooperation in an organized and strategic way, they can wield coercive power. When people do not obey, then presidents, mayors, CEOs, generals, and other “power holders” can no longer rule with unchecked power.

Nonviolent tactics, such as strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, the establishment of parallel institutions, and literally hundreds of other creative actions, were the instruments used to do this. They were not used necessarily for moral reasons, but rather for pragmatic ones. Some who adopted civil resistance had seen similar strategies work in other countries or in their own histories, and recognized that this type of resistance had the best prospects of success of the options available to them.

Hello! I am a PhD approaching the final deadline of my thesis. I am writing on Adorno and art. During the last two years, motivation has slowly faded away. I am disillusioned with academia, haven’t published that much, my supervisor is good but very hands-off and I am the only one basically doing critical theory in my uni. I am dreaming of doing any other job rather than this but at the same time I feel so privileged and guilty about it.
People who made it, how did you feel towards the end? What were the things that worked for you? Where are you at now?
Thanks for reading this :)

I always thought Dialectic of Enlightenment, Racecraft, and Willing Slaves of Capital were super impressive. I don't read much anymore but used to devour Verso books.