Nilsi

It’s Not a Phase, Mom “God is dead,” Nietzsche declared - not to abolish meaning, but to diagnose the collapse of its traditional foundations. He was not making a metaphysical claim. He was naming a crisis: the failure of the great legitimating narratives - religion, reason, progress - to ground value and orient life. With that collapse, the burden of meaning shifts radically onto us. Postmodernism is often misunderstood. Critics from both conservative and integrative camps routinely misread it as nihilistic or immature. Jordan Peterson - whose increasingly erratic culture war crusades place him outside the bounds of serious philosophical discussion - dismisses it as the root of moral collapse. Ken Wilber, by contrast, offers a more systematic and ostensibly integrative critique. But his framework, for all its sophistication, misrepresents the postmodern ethic in subtler and more pervasive ways. It is Wilber’s interpretation that will serve as the primary focus of critique in this essay. Nietzsche’s Dangerous Freedom and the Birth of Postmodern Ethics Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God marks a rupture, not a rejection. What dies is not Being itself, but the old architecture of justification. No divine blueprint, no metaphysical scaffold, no teleological arc will save us. But this is not despair. It is the beginning of dangerous freedom: to live without transcendent guarantees. The Übermensch is not a figure of domination, but one who affirms life by creating values in a world stripped of cosmic authority. The task is not to replace the dead God with new idols - nation, race, system, spirit - but to stand in the open, where meaning must be made, not inherited. This is the spirit that animates postmodern thought. It is not anti-truth, but acutely aware of truth’s fragility, historicity, and construction. Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze do not mourn the loss of foundations - they begin from it. Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze on Living Without Guarantees What unites Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze is not a shared doctrine but a shared orientation. Each takes the death of transcendence seriously and refuses the twin temptations of despair and restoration - neither collapsing into cynicism nor grasping for new absolutes. They begin from the fragility of the human condition - finite, situated, plural - and ask: how shall we live without guarantees? Foucault reframes ethics as a practice of freedom. In his later work, especially on the care of the self, he moves beyond disciplinary critique to explore how subjects might actively constitute themselves. Ethics, for him, is not obedience to a universal law but the aesthetic and political labor of self-formation. Through genealogy, he reveals how norms are produced - so that they might also be resisted or reconfigured. His is an ethics of lucidity: to understand how one is shaped in order to shape oneself otherwise. Derrida brings ethics to bear on language itself. His deconstruction is not a demolition of meaning, but an exposure of its structural exclusions. For Derrida, justice always exceeds codified law; the Other always exceeds the concept. His notion of the messianic without messiah refuses the closure of any final horizon, keeping open the space of responsibility and response. His ethics is one of infinite postponement and vigilance - an unending attentiveness to the singular, the unassimilable, the yet-to-come. Deleuze, by contrast, turns to becoming as the ethical horizon. He rejects both fixed identities and dialectical resolution, proposing instead an immanent ethics rooted in transformation, affect, and connection. His ontology of difference affirms multiplicity, not as fragmentation but as creative potential. The question is no longer “What is the good life?” but “What can a life become?” His ethics is experimental, embodied, and generative - an affirmation of intensity over stability, creation over judgment. Together, these thinkers do not offer moral blueprints - they offer orientations for navigating a world without metaphysical assurances. Their ethics is not about knowing what is right in advance, but learning how to live well amidst uncertainty, complexity, and difference. Why Integral Theory Misses the Point Ken Wilber’s critique of postmodernism does not emerge from careful reading or genuine philosophical engagement. It is not the product of wrestling with Derrida, Foucault, or Deleuze on their own terms and arriving at a reasoned conclusion. Rather, it is a paradigmatic case of epistemic closure: a preconstructed model absorbing foreign material without allowing itself to be altered in the process. Wilber does not approach postmodern thinkers as interlocutors capable of challenging or reshaping his framework. He already has a developmental system in place - Integral Theory - built to encompass all perspectives from the outset. When he encounters postmodernism, he does not ask what it reveals about knowledge, power, or subjectivity. Instead, he asks: where does it fit on my chart? And so it gets filed under the “green meme,” a stage of pluralism and relativism to be transcended. This is not engagement- it is assimilation. It is not critique - it is categorization. The gesture is not philosophical, but managerial: interpret the other only insofar as it reinforces the structure of the system. This is the epistemic equivalent of mapping unknown lands only to paint them in the colors of one’s empire. The model Wilber uses - derived from Spiral Dynamics and the work of Don Beck and Clare Graves - has found popularity in coaching and New Age circles, but lacks robust empirical support and is widely seen by researchers as overly schematic and culturally reductive. In contrast, Suzanne Cook-Greuter’s ego development theory offers a more nuanced view of post-conventional consciousness. Her “construct-aware” stage captures the reflexivity, paradox-tolerance, and ethical subtlety that define postmodern thought. Far from representing a regression, these thinkers exemplify the most mature forms of cognition she describes. To caricature Foucault, Derrida, or Deleuze as immature pluralists is not only philosophically lazy - it is epistemically perverse. These are not voices of collapse, but of lucidity. They resist finality not to celebrate confusion, but to preserve the dignity of difference. They practice a form of thought that does not claim mastery, but dwells in complexity. Wilber’s error, then, is not simply theoretical - it is structural. His system cannot be disturbed. It absorbs critique only by labeling it and moving on. He rehearses the very gesture postmodernism exposes: the totalizing logic that cannot tolerate singularity, ambiguity, or epistemic vulnerability. His integration is not a transformation of consciousness - it is a refusal of it. The Courage to Live Without Guarantees The point of postmodernism is not to deny the Absolute. It is to recognize that the Absolute is silent where it matters most. It offers no guidance on how to live, how to love, how to respond to the suffering of others, or how to act with integrity in a fractured world. These are not metaphysical questions - they are ethical ones. And far from evading them, postmodernism confronts them with unprecedented seriousness. To live without final answers is not regression - it is maturity. To acknowledge that meaning is constructed, not received from on high, is not confusion - it is clarity. And to act without the safety net of transcendent guarantees is not nihilism - it is courage in its purest form. This is the ethic postmodernism calls us to: not submission to truth, but fidelity to difference; not mastery over meaning, but responsibility in its making. It is an ethic grounded not in certainty, but in sensitivity - to the other, to the moment, to the irreducible complexity of lived life. It resists the closure of systems and the comfort of universals. It stays open where others rush to conclude. Such a stance cannot be slotted into a developmental sequence or subordinated to a higher tier. It is not a stage. It is not a meme. It is a way of being. And it does not seek integration - it demands embodiment. Not a theory to be mapped, but a life to be lived.

He’s not trying to prove that moral statements are objective in the rigorous analytic sense. But I don’t think that’s a confusion on his part - it’s just that he’s operating in a completely different discourse. When Peterson talks about morality, he’s responding to Nietzsche’s death of God - the collapse of any stable master signifier - and trying to rebuild meaning from the structure of lived human existence, not from transcendental, mind-independent facts. He’s much closer to Heideggerian existentialism than to analytic moral realism. He explicitly draws on Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological: humans are the beings who both exist contingently and are aware of Being itself. So for Peterson, morality is rooted in the primary structures of human Being - not in some detached logical realm. His claim to “objective” morality is Heideggerian in that sense: it is objective within the clearing of human existence, but still ultimately contingent on human primacy. It’s not objectivity in the sense of truth existing independently of all life - it’s objectivity that emerges within Being, because of Being. Honestly, I thought analytic philosophy had already caught up to this after Dreyfus… You, on the other hand, seem to be asking for a form of objective morality that’s external to human life altogether - morality as truth independent of all subjects. Which is fine, I guess - but it’s simply not the project Peterson is engaged in.

To be fair, I don’t think Peterson is even trying to be rigorous in the Anglo-American analytic sense - which seems to be the standard you’re dismissing him by. His thought is actually much closer to European existentialism, which I obviously align with. I just think his ethics are ridiculous and totalitarian. Existentialism doesn’t need to be logically rigorous - human life isn’t logically rigorous at all, so why would philosophizing it be?

Also, how ironic that this is a thing:

“Well, you see, it’s like the story of Cain and Abel, right? It’s the first representation of objective morality in the human psyche — because it’s not just ‘what you feel,’ it’s ‘what works’ across time, across being itself, right? It’s encoded into the narrative structure of reality! And if you ignore that, you invite chaos, suffering, and resentment into your soul, and into the broader fabric of society.”

The crucial point is that there is no stable Self. God is not the “Self” in the Jungian sense - not the integration of all separateness into unity. God is radically open, like a Mandelbrot zoom: infinite, recursive, never settling. There is never a moment where God can look at itself and say, “this is what I am,” because what God is is always in flux - not random chaos, but a continuous, self-differentiating unfolding. Every moment, every movement, God invents itself anew - not by returning to unity, but by multiplying possibilities without end.

But there’s also another path - if you’re sharp enough to see it. You don’t have to funnel desire back into the old symbolic structures - power, sex, money, status. You can let it move freely - productive, nomadic, untethered - the way Deleuze mapped it: a will to power without justification, pure intensities chasing their own unfolding. You’re not escaping the game - you’re just refusing to play it on its terms. But let’s be real: that path is just as brutal, just as selective. There’s no mass redemption here. Whether you play to win in the old economy or ride the fractures into something freer, it’s still a minority move - still a Redpill.

Your AI is hitting something real here - but it goes even deeper. Sex at Dawn - Ryan and Jethá - got some of it right: early human groups were more or less egalitarian, less locked into the hierarchies we see now. But the real rupture wasn’t just culture - it was surplus. Marx already saw it: once you have agriculture, property, capital - you get real asymmetries. Not just in wealth, but in status, in mating, in everything that matters. The sexual revolution tried to roll some of that back - break up rigid ownership, give people freedom again. You can see the echoes of that optimism in Reich, Marcuse, and the early Freudo-Marxists - the idea that if you just liberated desire, the old authoritarian structures would collapse. But they underestimated how capitalism could capture liberated desires even faster than it captured labor. The revolution didn’t touch the material structure underneath. And by trying to “free” sexuality without dismantling the economic base, it actually unraveled the few structures that had kept the worst dynamics more or less in check - monogamy, the burden of childbearing, fidelity, basic long-term pair bonding. Lyotard already saw it coming: liberation doesn’t stop the machine - it feeds it. Desire gets re-coded, re-marketed, turned into endless circulation. Nick Land just pushed it to the logical conclusion: capitalism doesn’t repress desire - it is desire, stripped of any pretense, accelerating toward total abstraction. You can adapt - you can build skills, increase your value, move differently - and you can win if you play it tight. But the deeper structure isn’t going anywhere. The genie is out of the bottle. The machine isn’t stopping - it’s accelerating.

You know what? Looking at some of his pictures, I’m starting to think he’s probably on gear. He looks way too round, full, and vascular - even in bad lighting.

I’ve actually explicitly trained it not to mess with my formulations, because working in high-ticket sales is a very delicate rhetorical business - one wrong word can be a huge legal liability and undermine entire negotiations.

lol 95% of everything I write is me. I just feed it through ChatGPT to tighten up my disorganized stream of consciousness. Sometimes it suggests a phrase or formulation I wouldn’t have come up with myself, but that fits perfectly. Still, I think it would be very vulgar to speak on behalf of a machine.

I don’t really care about masculinity one way or the other, but let’s be clear: Lacan’s “Name-of-the-Father” quite literally refers to your surname - the name of your father - and represents law, prohibition, symbolic authority, and the entry into the Symbolic Order. So the picture of the metrosexual man you’re painting is actually what Lacan would call a perversion - where the subject disavows the Name-of-the-Father in favor of the first name: the image, the ego, the personal identity. For Lacan, masculinity means taking up a position under the authority of the Name-of-the-Father - under tradition, symbolic law, patriarchal authority. But it’s important to understand that for Lacan, this position is never fully successful. There is no pure or triumphant masculinity: it’s always marked by split, failure, and alienation, because entry into the Symbolic always entails a loss. It has nothing to do with physiology or biological vitality. Lacan was not a vitalist. If you want to get into these kinds of questions, you’d be better off reading Nietzsche or Aristotle first.

Ehh, he doesn’t look that freakish. Good genes, diet, and training can get you there naturally. He’s probably on TRT, given how deep he seems to be into physiological optimization, but that can be a very healthy and sustainable thing if you don’t overdo it - so I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

lol, I don’t buy that. I know my fair share of guys who actually live like that unironically - and honestly, I used to be one of them. This is symptomatic of a very narcissist, atomized masculinity. Notice how in his videos, the “other” is always just anonymous passersby or disembodied hands serving him. I think it’s not only valid but important to critique this kind of sigma grindset bullshit - because frankly, it’s a miserable way to live, even if it looks cool to some insecure men from the outside.

I get where you’re coming from - but the core of my argument is a bit different. The structure you’re enacting, even when it appears coherent and hierarchical, doesn’t come from some stable source. That’s exactly what I’m pushing against - this Petersonian idea of a “religion that is not a religion,” where reality is framed as pathological unless you align yourself with a certain implicit structure. Sure, actions have consequences. Sure, some behaviors statistically align better with desirable outcomes. But that’s not the same as saying there is an underlying metaphysical hierarchy you can - or must - latch onto. It’s just that certain flows, certain configurations, are rewarded under current conditions. That doesn’t make them ontologically stable or ultimately meaningful. My point is that there is no stable self enacting these structures. Even when you act “as if” they were real, you’re still improvising, still suspended in radical contingency. Yes, people act hierarchically. Yes, reality responds to actions. But the point Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others make is that the absence of a stable structure or master signifier doesn’t flatten reality into meaninglessness. It intensifies it. Without pre-given order, life becomes a pure affirmation of forces, of intensities, of styles. There is still striving, willing, becoming - but it’s not about organizing these into a hierarchy, or subordinating them to some goal or structure. Even action itself doesn’t imply a hidden order. It doesn’t create hierarchy by default. It’s closer to an act that affirms itself - not because it serves an overarching aim, but because it is the expression of force in its purest form. Like an unmoved mover, not in isolation, but in the way life entangles itself through intensities - each gesture affirming itself without needing justification, without needing to slot into a system. Not a means to an end, but an end in itself, in the pure unfolding of becoming.

Okay, let’s be real - this is still #1. Nothing else hits my teenage nostalgia quite like this song. It plays like a Supercut behind my eyes - house parties glowing in slow motion, wild vacations unraveling into endless nights, kisses that rewrote time, fights that shattered it - all collapsing into this one perfect track. This song will always be a doorway back to the most unreal summer of my life. I was fourteen, away from home for the first time - three weeks on the Atlantic coast of France, with this song stitched into the air like a secret frequency only we could hear. It wasn’t just the first kiss, the first drink, the first cigarette - it was the way the world cracked open around me. Everything was cool, dangerous, electric. Every glance, every touch, every night felt like a secret initiation into a life I had only dreamed of. For the first time, it felt like anything was possible - wild, golden, infinite. That summer changed me - a rupture in the fabric of time, a shimmer of eternity I still carry somewhere under my skin.

Been relistening to Lorde all day. This might be one of her greatest. Also, what a brilliant allegory a "Supercut" is - definitely stealing that for future writings.

Quick follow-up: I think - and that’s just the vibe I’m getting from you, I haven’t deeply read through everything you’ve written - we actually disagree on a very important point. Jordan Peterson’s disavowal of Nietzsche is just emblematic of it. You know, when he says Nietzsche was a great genius yada yada, but nonetheless, you can't create your own values. He falls back into his usual structuralist psychology, drawing mainly from Freud, Jung, and Piaget, and argues that there’s an implicit value structure - what people today sometimes call the "Religion that is not a Religion" or whatever campy phrase they’re using. But I think this is precisely what the thinkers I’ve listed are challenging: that there really is no such thing. And I’d even argue that trying to reduce their ethics to some disguised religious framework dressed up in postmodernist drag completely misses the point. There really is no such structure. When even the "Self" is put into question, there’s no up, no down - only an ensemble of multiplicities. Contingency. Radical freedom. Style. Deleuze’s rhizome might be the best allegory for this: everything looping into everything else, like a DMT fractal-scape. There is no master signifier anymore. God really is dead at this point. It’s just a trip. And one hell of a trip.

Good one! Seems like we agree (maybe?)!

@Carl-Richard, I swear to God, if you plagiarize this for your shenanigans, I will send you an invoice!

"Since I was seventeen, I gave you everything. Now, we wake from a dream - well, baby, what was that?" Lorde returns. And not quietly. It’s been eight years (and yes, we’re skipping that sun-drenched detour) and the dream only thickened. This isn’t just a comeback - it’s a reckoning. What begins as a whisper blooms into a full-bodied meditation on youth, fame, and loss. It’s no coincidence she cites seventeen - the precise age she became a generational voice. This lyric isn’t just autobiographical; it’s psychoanalytic. The line collapses personal history, career trajectory, and collective nostalgia into a single stunned breath. A dream. A glitch. A decade lost in the feedback loop of iconhood. And musically? We’re right back where it started. But it’s not derivative - it’s recursive. Lorde re-enters the sonic space she helped define: electro-pop’s post-Lana melancholia. It’s like watching someone walk back into the house they built and finding it filled with strangers. Yes, the Chainsmokers may have taken her early sound to its EDM-saturated extreme in the mid-2010s (see: that sweet, cringe, immortal Halsey feature), but Lorde was always working in a different register: less product, more prophecy. And here she sounds like the ghost of the genre returning to haunt it. The production is immaculate: sparse, simmering. Jim-E Stack, fresh off Bon Iver’s own introspective odyssey, and Daniel Nigro, the architect of Gen Z’s most potent pop confessions, create a frame of synthetic hush - low synth pulses, muted piano, ghost percussion. It’s as if the track itself is holding its breath. "I wear smoke like a wedding veil Make a meal I won’t eat..." She opens in dissociation. A dislocated self drifting through a furnished life. The meal, uneaten, is a gesture toward ritual with no appetite - nourishment denied, performance without consumption. The veil of smoke evokes both matrimony and mourning. She’s cloaked in the ashes of her own myth. "It comes over me." What does? Nostalgia? Grief? The return of the repressed? The production dips, the synths shimmer like the edge of memory, and we plunge into the chorus: "MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up..." Call it corny, but for anyone who’s lived through those ecstatic nights of chemical communion, it hits hard. This isn’t indulgence - it’s testimony. The imagery is vivid, tactile, true. We’ve all had that “best cigarette of my life” moment: that instant of false eternity, when the world condenses into skin, breath, and a pair of dilated eyes across from yours. But here, those memories become unbearable. Not because they weren’t real - but because they were too real. Too perfect to last. The very ecstasy becomes the trauma. And when she sings “I want you just like that”, she’s not longing for a person, but for that impossible moment outside time. And so the dream breaks. "Now we wake from a dream - well, baby, what was that?" It’s not just about a failed romance. This is Lorde facing the Real. The big Other, if we’re looking through a Lacanian lens. The fantasy that structured her youth - fame, love, the perfect chorus - was never quite hers. It’s all been a kind of dreamwork. The garden, the drug, the lover: they were all stand-ins for something more absent, more structural. The “you” here is both intimate and abstract. It’s a lost lover. It’s a lost self. It’s the symbolic order that no longer makes sense. "Do you know you’re still with me / when I’m out with my friends?" Her presence haunts her. She scans party faces, the simulated intimacy of social life, but finds only absence. The moment she tries to reintegrate, to "face reality," it slips again. "I tried to let / whatever has to pass through me / pass through..." But grief, desire, memory - they don’t just pass through. They stay. They lodge in the body. They mutate. They sing. And then the chorus returns, heavier now. It’s not a climax; it’s a loop. A spiral. The production builds, yes - but the devastation deepens. The lyrics repeat, as if trying to work through trauma via repetition. She’s caught in the song’s structure, unable to exorcise what haunts her. This is no longer just a pop song. It’s a dialectic. A confrontation with the past in the form of pop. A psychic exorcism wrapped in synths. The very structure of the track - the repetition, the swirling buildup, the synthetic haze - is the dream. And at the heart of it, that devastating refrain: "What was that?" She sings it again and again like someone who has seen the divine and can’t remember what it looked like. It’s the perfect Lacanian question - the realization that the object of desire was always a fantasy. That what you longed for was never the thing, but the longing itself. And yet she wants it just like that. Even knowing it was a dream. Even knowing it was never enough. Even knowing it might destroy her. That’s art. And if this is the lead-up to her next album… buckle up.

WTF hahahhaha

You somehow make even Leo look reasonable next to your obnoxiousness.

If that’s what you call “slightly slightly” altered consciousness, then by your standards you should be levitating as a fully realized Flying Spaghetti Monster by now.