Destinations
I suppose, in the end, all of this has been an exercise intellectualization. I had a hard childhood. I lost all bearing on meaning and belief. Ask too many questions, receive torpid answers. Adults often forget how malleable children are. Actions always speak louder than words. I spent the past year reading the words of (mostly) dead people. I thought it would provide me answers. It did not. I am right were I began.
We draw sharp lines in the sand.
"Man is an invention of recent date. And perhaps nearing its end... one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."
– Michel Foucault
But as with all mutable things, the universe continues. So small. I know nothing. That is what this year has taught me.
Darwin & Structuralism: The Animal and The Alphabet
So let's take stock of the damage. The magnificent Fortress of the Self is now a ruin.
Its divine foundation was dynamited by a madman with a mustache who declared that God was dead. Its proud, autonomous resident has been exposed as a fraud—a puppet whose strings are pulled by the vast, impersonal forces of economics, and whose own mind is a haunted house run by a stranger in the basement.
The fortress is foundationless. Its resident is a puppet.
But even a puppet in a haunted ruin can cling to one last shred of comfort: specialness.
Sure, he might be a puppet, but he’s a human puppet. On the old map, the one we lived with for thousands of years, humanity sat on a comfortable pedestal. We were our own special kingdom, a unique creation with a divine spark that made us fundamentally different from a beetle or a baboon.
Then a quiet, unassuming English naturalist named Charles Darwin published a book, and in doing so, he didn't just kick the pedestal out from under us—he revealed that the puppet was made of the same ashes and dust as everything else.
Alright, the pedestal has been kicked over. Now, let's get to the real meat of the argument—the part that transforms Darwin from a mere historical figure into a modern-day philosophical horror story.
The Mindless Algorithm
The true, gear-grinding horror of Darwin's idea isn't that your great-great-great-etc-grandparent was a primate. The part that truly demolishes our claim to specialness is the how. It’s the revelation that the entire magnificent, terrifying diversity of life on Earth was generated by a blind, brutally stupid, and purposeless process.
It’s an algorithm.
Let's frame it in modern terms. Imagine a simple computer program designed to solve a problem, any problem.
Step 1: Start with a million mediocre, slightly varied solutions.
Step 2: Test all of them against one, brutally simple fitness criterion: "Does this work even 0.0001% better than the last one?"
Step 3: Immediately and mercilessly delete all the failures.
Step 4: Take the handful of tiny, accidental survivors, make a million slightly mutated copies of each, and go back to Step 1.
Now, let that program run, not for a few hours, but for four billion years.
That mindless, wasteful, glacially slow, but ruthlessly efficient process is Natural Selection. It requires no designer, no foresight, no goal, and no purpose. It is the ultimate dumb search engine.
And you are its product.
Your eyes, which can distinguish millions of colors; your hands, with their opposable thumbs; your brain, the lump of wrinkled meat reading these very words and feeling that dawning sense of dread—none of it is a masterpiece of divine design. You are the temporary, accidental, and entirely contingent output of the longest-running, dumbest, and most prolific search algorithm in the known universe. There is no "special spark." The algorithm is the only spark there is.
And, true to form, humanity immediately took this new, terrifying map of reality and used it to justify its worst impulses. The concept of "survival of the fittest" was twisted into Social Darwinism, a monstrous ethical framework used to defend the brutalities of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and scientific racism. The suffering of the poor, the conquest of "lesser" peoples, the eugenics movement—these weren't seen as moral failures. They were reframed as the natural, inevitable, and even good workings of the evolutionary algorithm playing out in human society.
It's a map that takes the profound, cosmic indifference of nature and weaponizes it into a justification for human cruelty.
The Bridge: From the Body to the Word
So Darwin trapped us in the impersonal system of biology, revealing that the magnificent human form is just the temporary output of a blind algorithm. A brutal blow that decenters "Man" from the natural world.
But even after that, there’s a final line of defense for human specialness. There's still the Fortress of the Mind. We have language. We have logic, reason, poetry. The Word. Surely this is what makes us truly different. The hardware might be an accident, but the software we run on it is our own glorious creation. Right?
What if it's not?
What if your most profound, unique, and personal thoughts aren't yours at all? What if you don't speak language, but language speaks you?
The Prison of The Alphabet
Let's run one final experiment.
Try to have a thought—a truly deep, complex, and original thought—without using words.
Go on, I'll wait.
You can't do it. You might be able to conjure an image, a feeling, a vague intention. But the moment you try to give that thought precision, structure, and meaning, you are forced to reach for words. And the second you do, you are no longer free. You’ve just stepped into a prison you didn’t even know existed.
This is the core insight of Structuralism. The grand takeaway is this: the systems we use to make meaning in the world—chief among them, language—are not tools that we freely wield. They are pre-existing, invisible structures that we are born into. We don't invent the rules of grammar each morning to suit our unique, brilliant thoughts. For anyone to understand you, you must pour your supposedly unique consciousness into the rigid, pre-made container of your language.
The structure comes first. Your "thought" comes second.
And here’s the truly radical takedown of the self: If your thoughts are only possible because of the pre-existing structure of language, then who are you? For the structuralists, the individual "I" is not some wellspring of original meaning. The self is merely an effect of the system. The "I" is just a grammatical function, a convenient placeholder, a node in the network where the impersonal rules of the language system happen to intersect.
You are a function of your grammar. A creature of the alphabet. You think you are the one speaking, but you're just the instrument through which the language speaks itself.
So, where does that leave the proud resident of the Fortress of the Self?
He’s a prisoner, twice over.
Darwin’s revolution reveals that he is an animal, trapped in the blind, impersonal, and purposeless system of biology. His body and mind are not a special creation, but the accidental output of a dumb algorithm, a talking ape whose sense of divine spark is a profound evolutionary rounding error.
Then Structuralism reveals that even the ape’s thoughts aren't his own. He is a puppet, trapped in the invisible, pre-existing system of language. His most cherished ideas, his sense of "I," are merely the echoes of a grammatical structure he had no hand in creating.
He is not a special author of a unique story. He is a character in a book he didn't write, speaking in a language he didn't invent, living out a biological script he doesn't control.
The fortress has been overrun, and its resident has been exposed as a ghost. An animal ghost. A ghost that talks.
But surely, even in this ruin, we can build something new. We can tell new stories, grand stories of Progress, Reason, and Liberation to give ourselves meaning, right? We can build a new ladder to the sky.
Right?
We draw sharp lines in the sand.
"Man is an invention of recent date. And perhaps nearing its end... one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."
– Michel Foucault
But as with all mutable things, the universe continues. So small. I know nothing. That is what this year has taught me.
Darwin & Structuralism: The Animal and The Alphabet
So let's take stock of the damage. The magnificent Fortress of the Self is now a ruin.
Its divine foundation was dynamited by a madman with a mustache who declared that God was dead. Its proud, autonomous resident has been exposed as a fraud—a puppet whose strings are pulled by the vast, impersonal forces of economics, and whose own mind is a haunted house run by a stranger in the basement.
The fortress is foundationless. Its resident is a puppet.
But even a puppet in a haunted ruin can cling to one last shred of comfort: specialness.
Sure, he might be a puppet, but he’s a human puppet. On the old map, the one we lived with for thousands of years, humanity sat on a comfortable pedestal. We were our own special kingdom, a unique creation with a divine spark that made us fundamentally different from a beetle or a baboon.
Then a quiet, unassuming English naturalist named Charles Darwin published a book, and in doing so, he didn't just kick the pedestal out from under us—he revealed that the puppet was made of the same ashes and dust as everything else.
Alright, the pedestal has been kicked over. Now, let's get to the real meat of the argument—the part that transforms Darwin from a mere historical figure into a modern-day philosophical horror story.
The Mindless Algorithm
The true, gear-grinding horror of Darwin's idea isn't that your great-great-great-etc-grandparent was a primate. The part that truly demolishes our claim to specialness is the how. It’s the revelation that the entire magnificent, terrifying diversity of life on Earth was generated by a blind, brutally stupid, and purposeless process.
It’s an algorithm.
Let's frame it in modern terms. Imagine a simple computer program designed to solve a problem, any problem.
Step 1: Start with a million mediocre, slightly varied solutions.
Step 2: Test all of them against one, brutally simple fitness criterion: "Does this work even 0.0001% better than the last one?"
Step 3: Immediately and mercilessly delete all the failures.
Step 4: Take the handful of tiny, accidental survivors, make a million slightly mutated copies of each, and go back to Step 1.
Now, let that program run, not for a few hours, but for four billion years.
That mindless, wasteful, glacially slow, but ruthlessly efficient process is Natural Selection. It requires no designer, no foresight, no goal, and no purpose. It is the ultimate dumb search engine.
And you are its product.
Your eyes, which can distinguish millions of colors; your hands, with their opposable thumbs; your brain, the lump of wrinkled meat reading these very words and feeling that dawning sense of dread—none of it is a masterpiece of divine design. You are the temporary, accidental, and entirely contingent output of the longest-running, dumbest, and most prolific search algorithm in the known universe. There is no "special spark." The algorithm is the only spark there is.
And, true to form, humanity immediately took this new, terrifying map of reality and used it to justify its worst impulses. The concept of "survival of the fittest" was twisted into Social Darwinism, a monstrous ethical framework used to defend the brutalities of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and scientific racism. The suffering of the poor, the conquest of "lesser" peoples, the eugenics movement—these weren't seen as moral failures. They were reframed as the natural, inevitable, and even good workings of the evolutionary algorithm playing out in human society.
It's a map that takes the profound, cosmic indifference of nature and weaponizes it into a justification for human cruelty.
The Bridge: From the Body to the Word
So Darwin trapped us in the impersonal system of biology, revealing that the magnificent human form is just the temporary output of a blind algorithm. A brutal blow that decenters "Man" from the natural world.
But even after that, there’s a final line of defense for human specialness. There's still the Fortress of the Mind. We have language. We have logic, reason, poetry. The Word. Surely this is what makes us truly different. The hardware might be an accident, but the software we run on it is our own glorious creation. Right?
What if it's not?
What if your most profound, unique, and personal thoughts aren't yours at all? What if you don't speak language, but language speaks you?
The Prison of The Alphabet
Let's run one final experiment.
Try to have a thought—a truly deep, complex, and original thought—without using words.
Go on, I'll wait.
You can't do it. You might be able to conjure an image, a feeling, a vague intention. But the moment you try to give that thought precision, structure, and meaning, you are forced to reach for words. And the second you do, you are no longer free. You’ve just stepped into a prison you didn’t even know existed.
This is the core insight of Structuralism. The grand takeaway is this: the systems we use to make meaning in the world—chief among them, language—are not tools that we freely wield. They are pre-existing, invisible structures that we are born into. We don't invent the rules of grammar each morning to suit our unique, brilliant thoughts. For anyone to understand you, you must pour your supposedly unique consciousness into the rigid, pre-made container of your language.
The structure comes first. Your "thought" comes second.
And here’s the truly radical takedown of the self: If your thoughts are only possible because of the pre-existing structure of language, then who are you? For the structuralists, the individual "I" is not some wellspring of original meaning. The self is merely an effect of the system. The "I" is just a grammatical function, a convenient placeholder, a node in the network where the impersonal rules of the language system happen to intersect.
You are a function of your grammar. A creature of the alphabet. You think you are the one speaking, but you're just the instrument through which the language speaks itself.
So, where does that leave the proud resident of the Fortress of the Self?
He’s a prisoner, twice over.
Darwin’s revolution reveals that he is an animal, trapped in the blind, impersonal, and purposeless system of biology. His body and mind are not a special creation, but the accidental output of a dumb algorithm, a talking ape whose sense of divine spark is a profound evolutionary rounding error.
Then Structuralism reveals that even the ape’s thoughts aren't his own. He is a puppet, trapped in the invisible, pre-existing system of language. His most cherished ideas, his sense of "I," are merely the echoes of a grammatical structure he had no hand in creating.
He is not a special author of a unique story. He is a character in a book he didn't write, speaking in a language he didn't invent, living out a biological script he doesn't control.
The fortress has been overrun, and its resident has been exposed as a ghost. An animal ghost. A ghost that talks.
But surely, even in this ruin, we can build something new. We can tell new stories, grand stories of Progress, Reason, and Liberation to give ourselves meaning, right? We can build a new ladder to the sky.
Right?
26-30