Start Here

This is the first door. There’s a lot of writing behind it and most of it is long, so here’s the short version — ten minutes and you’ll know whether the rest is for you.

The Two Claims

There used to be one. There are two now, and they’re doing the same work from different ends.

Nothing worth saying about people can be said without, somewhere, pointing back at the person saying it.

The whole premissive system is that sentence worked out at length. Follow any claim about people back far enough and you arrive at somebody making it out of what they have seen, and out of nothing else.

And nothing gets seen without also being placed in time — which is a thing you can catch yourself doing, and take apart.

The newer one, and you already do it constantly. You find out Newton spent years on alchemy and something jolts, because a physicist is not supposed to come with an alchemy habit. But the jolt has a structure. There is the shape of a sequence as you move through it, in the body, before any interpreting starts. There is everything else it gets laid alongside from all you have met before. And there is the comparison of one period’s habits with another’s, which is the part people usually mean by history. The essays on historical consciousness take all of that apart instead of enjoying it and moving on.

So the first says a claim always has a person underneath. The second says it has a moment underneath as well. Neither of them is much use on its own.

An Example

Say I tell you that welfare is bad. I’ve just said something about millions of people I’ve never met, so what would I have to mean for that to be true? Not feel — mean.

I’d have to mean something like this: welfare changes what it’s like to be a person, and changes it for the worse, so that nobody lives a better life under it. That’s a claim about experience. It’s a claim about what mornings are like for somebody. And I’m the one making it, not the data and not the twenty people I read last month.

So the person is in the sentence whether I put them there or not. What I argue is that we should put them there on purpose, out loud, every time.

The consequence is the part I care about. If my claim rests on my experience, then you can hold it against yours and tell me where it fails. But a claim with nobody in it can’t be answered at all — you can only agree with it or ignore it, because there’s no one there to argue with.

Why It Matters

Most social criticism is written from nowhere, and mine is too on the bad days. It speaks in the voice of a study or a movement or a mood, and because there’s nobody behind it there’s nothing to push against. You can’t disagree with a fog.

I’m after the other kind. The kind that says who’s talking, what he’s actually seen, and what would show him wrong. That’s harder to write and much easier to get caught doing badly, which is the point — being catchable is the whole idea.

Four Denials

Things I’m not saying, because people reliably hear them anyway.

Not that everything’s subjective and so nothing’s true. Claims about people are answerable to experience. That’s what makes correcting them possible, and it’s the opposite of saying they can’t be corrected.

Not that only my experience counts. Yours is what mine has to survive contact with. That’s the whole mechanism, and without it none of this works.

Not that any of it is finished. The manuscript is a draft in public, and several of its central arguments are promises rather than deliveries. Where that’s true I’ve now said so in the text itself.

Not that I have special access. I read a lot and I’m wrong often, and you don’t need a degree to tell me where.

Where to Begin

Three ways out of here, and they are genuinely different. Take the one that is true of you rather than the one that sounds most serious.

If you want to learn this — if you’d sit with a system somebody built and work inside it long enough to find out whether it holds — go to Learning. That’s the second doors, and there are two of them: the premissive system, and the essays on historical consciousness. I’ll warn you there and I’ll warn you here: it’s an initiation, not a survey. You come out of it thinking in somebody’s terms.

If you just want the work, go to the videos. That is the history and culture side of it, and it is what most people know me for. It asks nothing of you at all. Most of them have transcripts now, if you would rather read than watch. Nothing on this page is a prerequisite for any of it — the videos came first, and they stand on their own.

And if you’re here because something I said annoyed you, you don’t need either of those. Commitments is the list of rules I’ve agreed to be held to, written before you turned up so I couldn’t move them afterwards. Corrections is what to do when I’ve broken one. Bring a source and I can actually act on it, which is more than most people who argue online will offer you.

If I Am Wrong

Nothing comes down. The correction goes up instead, linked from the thing it corrects, so you can see the error and the repair together rather than just the tidied result.

Bring a source and I can act on it. Details are on the corrections page.

Believe nothing written here. Only if you can practice it might you begin to believe it.