Start Here
This is a great deal of writing, and this page is the door into it. Ten minutes here and you will know whether the rest is for you.
The Claim
Nothing worth saying about people can be said without, somewhere, pointing back at the person saying it.
That is the whole of it. Everything else on this site is that sentence, worked out at length.
An Example
Suppose I say: welfare is bad. I have said something about millions of people I have never met. Now ask what I would have to mean for that to be true. Not feel - mean.
I would have to mean something like: welfare changes what it is like to be a person, and changes it for the worse, so that no one lives a better life under it. That is a claim about experience. It is a claim about what mornings are like for somebody. And I made it - not the data, not the discourse, not the twenty people I read. Me.
So the sentence has a person in it whether I put him there or not. My view is that we should put him there on purpose, out loud, in the open, every time. I call this a reduction of social claims back to the experience they actually rest on.
Here is what follows. If my claim rests on my experience, then it is answerable - you can hold it against your own experience and tell me where it fails. A claim with nobody in it cannot be answered. It can only be agreed with or ignored.
Why It Matters
Most social criticism you will read - mine included, on bad days - is written from nowhere. It speaks in the voice of a study, a movement, or a mood, and so there is no one there to argue with. You cannot disagree with a fog.
I am trying to write the other kind. The kind that says who is talking, what he has actually seen, and what would show him wrong. That is a harder way to write and a much easier way to be caught out. Good. Being catchable is the point.
Four Denials
- Not that everything is subjective and so nothing is true. I am claiming that claims about people are answerable to experience, not that they are immune to correction. The opposite: this is what makes correction possible.
- Not that only my experience counts. Yours is the thing mine has to survive contact with. That is the entire mechanism.
- Not that I have finished anything. The manuscript is a draft in public. Several of its central arguments are stated as promises rather than delivered - and where that is true, I have now said so in the text itself.
- Not that I have special access. I read a lot and I am frequently wrong. You do not need a degree to tell me where.
Where to Begin
1. The Preface (10 minutes) Why any of this is being written, and by whom. Start here even if you skip the rest - it is the most honest thing on the site.
2. The System, Preamble only (30 minutes) Read to the end of “Transition: Preambulatory Purposes” and stop. That is the argument proper: nobody knows everything, everybody’s incompleteness is differently shaped, and here is what I think you do about that. If it doesn’t land, the rest won’t either, and you have saved yourself a great deal of time.
3. The Refutations (as long as you like) Every objection I could think of, stated at full strength in the objector’s own words, answered in mine. Find yours. If it isn’t there, it should be - tell me.
Everything else is an appendage to those three. The Sprawl on the home page is the whole map. Follow it out of order once you know where you are.
If I Am Wrong
I will not take anything down. I will correct it in public, with the correction linked from the thing it corrects, so the error and its repair stay together where you can see both.
Bring a source and I will take it seriously. Details are on the corrections page.
Believe nothing written here. Only if you can practice it might you begin to believe it.