Fascinating read! “The real battle is not against external failure, but against the pride and fear that keep us from admitting we may have been chasing the wrong image of what’s good for us.”
Your distinction between appearance and being aligns with something I’ve been trying to articulate in narrative form. In my model, identity emerges from narrative pattern rather than substance — coherence rather than solidity. “Identity emerges from narrative pattern rather than substance—coherence rather than solidity – a trick of scale, a truth far older than molecules or wood or a child trying to hold herself intact.” The danger isn’t just that images replace reality, but that they replace the underlying pattern that gives reality its stability.
At a time when Meritocracies are-correctly-criticized for their being a mere appearance (merit as always resulting from long standing structural inequalities), it is interesting to see Leshed take this word, in Arendtian fashion, at face value and expose its follies from within.
I still believe that the word Merit in itself has always been a fairy tale (perhaps more so in the hybridity of a social realm which Leshed is right to emphasize). Regardless, Leshed's point that the fairy called Merit is itself flawed and false is a necessary aspect of this ongoing lively debate on meritocracy.
Thanks for reading! I’d say that even if the fairy “Merit” always runs into structural inequalities in the public realm, it can still function more naturally than conventionally in the intimate life of the individual, where the question is not what society rewards, but what kind of person one becomes.
According to Buddhist cosmology, we are supposed to have entered the Age of Appearances ཚུལ་ཙམ་གྱི་ལེའུ་ which is the penultimate period before the Age of the Lifespan of 10 years. In that period, we will only have 10 years to live. Children will be born with the ability to speak upon birth. etc etc.
As someone who considers myself an ambitious person, this piece felt like both a challenge (and it's great to be challenged!) and a strangely healing experience. I often find myself trapped in the prison of my own inner wants and perceived lack, which I really ought to question more often. Thank you for writing this!
This idea of substituting attention reminded me of another idea I've read about. That modern man is often presented with a fork in the road "To be someone (famous) or to do something (worthwhile)"
Radical honesty is the way to choose the latter, I’d say.
Thank you! I very much enjoyed this. The Platonic diagnosis feels exactly right. But I wonder whether it would also benefit from a Darwinian one.
Plato explains why we are vulnerable to appearances. What seems new is that we now inhabit environments that systematically reward them. A politician today is no longer speaking only to the people in the room. Increasingly a speech is crafted not for the audience present but for the short clip most likely to spread across social media afterwards. Outrage travels further than nuance and certainty further than doubt. What begins as an incentive soon becomes a competition of provocation. Politicians adapt not necessarily because they value outrage but because those are the behaviours the environment rewards. Over time the environment doesn’t merely reward provocative politics. It selects for increasingly provocative politicians.
That is why your concept of Imageocracy strikes me as so useful. It is more than a moral diagnosis of individuals mistaking appearance for reality. It also describes a social environment that increasingly selects for appearances over substance. As Arendt warned politics risks becoming performance rather than a space where a common world is disclosed through speech and action. Today’s attention economy pushes us even further in that direction.
Perhaps this also suggests a small shift in the object of ethics. Plato rightly asks how we cultivate good character. But if Imageocracy is also a product of the environments we build ethics can no longer concern itself only with character. It must also ask what kinds of institutions and technologies select for the kinds of people we become. Radical honesty remains indispensable but in an age of algorithmically curated attention it is no longer sufficient. We are responsible not only for our own character but also for the conditions under which character is formed.
I agree. The movement begins with the examination and formation of the soul, but it cannot end there. It must eventually grow outward toward the social, and ultimately the political. Our responsibility to one another, and to the institutions we build as a society, is indispensable. At the same time, a rightly ordered soul remains the building block without which nothing further can develop safely.
The Alcibiades is a great example. The person who goes out to speak and drive social change is rightly criticized for doing so without first ordering their own soul. After all, how could you teach “music” you haven’t mastered yourself first?
I’m also curious about the Darwinian framing. Plato explains why we are vulnerable to appearances, while the environment helps explain how those vulnerabilities become reinforced and selected for.
Thanks, I think that is where our views converge. I fully agree that a rightly ordered soul is indispensable. But it doesnt develop prior to the environments in which it lives. Darwin suggests a reciprocal picture. We build institutions, technologies and norms which in turn shape us. Character and environment are continually co-constructing one another. That is why I increasingly think the unit of ethical analysis has to become the organism and environment together rather than the individual alone. Plato gives us an account of why we are vulnerable to appearances. Evolution helps explain why certain environments reliably amplify those vulnerabilitiess while others cultivate practical wisdom. So Darwin doesn’t replace Plato. He explains why Plato’s ethical project succeeds in some environments and fails in others.
Take a society where corruption is widespread. If promotions depend on patronage and honesty carries great personal costs even a well-ordered soul faces constant pressure to adapt. Virtue becomes harder to sustain because the environment repeatedly rewards vice.
I find this argument especially compelling because it points toward a problem deeper than the simple claim that human beings are irrational: perhaps much of what we call reason is reason already shaped by forces that reason itself has not examined.
Plato’s distinction between appetite, ambition, and reason is useful here. Desire and ambition can indeed become the attorneys of conclusions we have already reached. But I wonder whether the problem becomes even more difficult when we move from the individual soul to the society in which that soul is formed.
Our desires and ambitions do not develop in isolation. The society around us teaches us, often long before we consciously question it, what counts as success, security, intelligence, responsibility, progress, and even happiness. Anxiety can present itself as responsibility, as you point out, but institutions can reinforce that anxiety until it becomes indistinguishable from common sense. Status can masquerade as excellence, accumulation as security, productivity as virtue, and efficiency as rationality.
This is where I think the modern problem of reason becomes particularly interesting. The Enlightenment sought to liberate human beings through reason, but reason can itself be transformed into an instrument of the systems in which it operates. Once we stop asking “What ought we to pursue?” and concentrate almost entirely on “What is the most efficient way to achieve what we have already decided to pursue?”, rationality becomes instrumental. It can become extraordinarily effective without becoming wise.
A bureaucracy can be rational in its procedures while pursuing an unjust end. A market can efficiently allocate resources while leaving untouched the question of whether what it rewards is actually good for human beings. Technology can enormously expand our power while leaving unanswered the question of what that power ought to be used for. Expertise can tell us what is possible, but it cannot by itself tell us what is worth doing.
This also connects strongly with your discussion of appearances. The modern world does not merely produce individuals who chase appearances; it produces institutions that quantify, measure, advertise, rank, and reproduce those appearances. Eventually the representation begins to replace the reality. We don't simply want to be successful—we learn to want the measurable signs of success. We don't simply want to be healthy, knowledgeable, or free; we increasingly encounter these things through metrics, credentials, consumption, and institutional definitions.
So perhaps the question is not only whether our appetites and ambitions impersonate reason. We should also ask: who taught our appetites and ambitions what to desire, and who constructed the world in which those desires appear reasonable?
That, I think it is one of the great unfinished questions of the Enlightenment. Reason was supposed to free us from inherited illusions. But reason itself can become institutionalized, routinized, and detached from ethics. At that point, the danger is no longer simply that irrational forces pretend to be reason. It is that rationality becomes so successful at organizing the world that we stop asking whether the world it is organizing is one we should want.
Radical honesty, therefore, may require more than examining our private motives. It may require examining the social, economic, political, and technological frameworks that have taught us what seems reasonable in the first place.
The task is not to abandon reason, but to make reason capable of examining itself.
Fascinating read! “The real battle is not against external failure, but against the pride and fear that keep us from admitting we may have been chasing the wrong image of what’s good for us.”
Very deep
Congratulations on an amazing piece. It’s one of the best, most insightful and introspective articles i’ve ever read
Thank you Carolina!
Your distinction between appearance and being aligns with something I’ve been trying to articulate in narrative form. In my model, identity emerges from narrative pattern rather than substance — coherence rather than solidity. “Identity emerges from narrative pattern rather than substance—coherence rather than solidity – a trick of scale, a truth far older than molecules or wood or a child trying to hold herself intact.” The danger isn’t just that images replace reality, but that they replace the underlying pattern that gives reality its stability.
Interesting. The gradual replacement of substance by appearance is definitely the ultimate danger. Thanks for reading!
At a time when Meritocracies are-correctly-criticized for their being a mere appearance (merit as always resulting from long standing structural inequalities), it is interesting to see Leshed take this word, in Arendtian fashion, at face value and expose its follies from within.
I still believe that the word Merit in itself has always been a fairy tale (perhaps more so in the hybridity of a social realm which Leshed is right to emphasize). Regardless, Leshed's point that the fairy called Merit is itself flawed and false is a necessary aspect of this ongoing lively debate on meritocracy.
Thanks for reading! I’d say that even if the fairy “Merit” always runs into structural inequalities in the public realm, it can still function more naturally than conventionally in the intimate life of the individual, where the question is not what society rewards, but what kind of person one becomes.
According to Buddhist cosmology, we are supposed to have entered the Age of Appearances ཚུལ་ཙམ་གྱི་ལེའུ་ which is the penultimate period before the Age of the Lifespan of 10 years. In that period, we will only have 10 years to live. Children will be born with the ability to speak upon birth. etc etc.
This is phenomenal, that's all I can say.
Thanks Jessica!
Absolutely fascinating. Didn’t realize our personal vanities could be an inverted people-pleasing trait.
As someone who considers myself an ambitious person, this piece felt like both a challenge (and it's great to be challenged!) and a strangely healing experience. I often find myself trapped in the prison of my own inner wants and perceived lack, which I really ought to question more often. Thank you for writing this!
Thank you for reading Maudy!
A very insightful piece for my first morning read! 👏🏻
This idea of substituting attention reminded me of another idea I've read about. That modern man is often presented with a fork in the road "To be someone (famous) or to do something (worthwhile)"
Radical honesty is the way to choose the latter, I’d say.
Absolutely correct. I explore these issues in my current research project at the University of Cagliari: https://sites.unica.it/aok/ .
Simply brilliant...surely be revisiting this to read again.
Thank you Rickson!
Thank you! I very much enjoyed this. The Platonic diagnosis feels exactly right. But I wonder whether it would also benefit from a Darwinian one.
Plato explains why we are vulnerable to appearances. What seems new is that we now inhabit environments that systematically reward them. A politician today is no longer speaking only to the people in the room. Increasingly a speech is crafted not for the audience present but for the short clip most likely to spread across social media afterwards. Outrage travels further than nuance and certainty further than doubt. What begins as an incentive soon becomes a competition of provocation. Politicians adapt not necessarily because they value outrage but because those are the behaviours the environment rewards. Over time the environment doesn’t merely reward provocative politics. It selects for increasingly provocative politicians.
That is why your concept of Imageocracy strikes me as so useful. It is more than a moral diagnosis of individuals mistaking appearance for reality. It also describes a social environment that increasingly selects for appearances over substance. As Arendt warned politics risks becoming performance rather than a space where a common world is disclosed through speech and action. Today’s attention economy pushes us even further in that direction.
Perhaps this also suggests a small shift in the object of ethics. Plato rightly asks how we cultivate good character. But if Imageocracy is also a product of the environments we build ethics can no longer concern itself only with character. It must also ask what kinds of institutions and technologies select for the kinds of people we become. Radical honesty remains indispensable but in an age of algorithmically curated attention it is no longer sufficient. We are responsible not only for our own character but also for the conditions under which character is formed.
Thanks for reading!
I agree. The movement begins with the examination and formation of the soul, but it cannot end there. It must eventually grow outward toward the social, and ultimately the political. Our responsibility to one another, and to the institutions we build as a society, is indispensable. At the same time, a rightly ordered soul remains the building block without which nothing further can develop safely.
The Alcibiades is a great example. The person who goes out to speak and drive social change is rightly criticized for doing so without first ordering their own soul. After all, how could you teach “music” you haven’t mastered yourself first?
I’m also curious about the Darwinian framing. Plato explains why we are vulnerable to appearances, while the environment helps explain how those vulnerabilities become reinforced and selected for.
Thanks, I think that is where our views converge. I fully agree that a rightly ordered soul is indispensable. But it doesnt develop prior to the environments in which it lives. Darwin suggests a reciprocal picture. We build institutions, technologies and norms which in turn shape us. Character and environment are continually co-constructing one another. That is why I increasingly think the unit of ethical analysis has to become the organism and environment together rather than the individual alone. Plato gives us an account of why we are vulnerable to appearances. Evolution helps explain why certain environments reliably amplify those vulnerabilitiess while others cultivate practical wisdom. So Darwin doesn’t replace Plato. He explains why Plato’s ethical project succeeds in some environments and fails in others.
Take a society where corruption is widespread. If promotions depend on patronage and honesty carries great personal costs even a well-ordered soul faces constant pressure to adapt. Virtue becomes harder to sustain because the environment repeatedly rewards vice.
I find this argument especially compelling because it points toward a problem deeper than the simple claim that human beings are irrational: perhaps much of what we call reason is reason already shaped by forces that reason itself has not examined.
Plato’s distinction between appetite, ambition, and reason is useful here. Desire and ambition can indeed become the attorneys of conclusions we have already reached. But I wonder whether the problem becomes even more difficult when we move from the individual soul to the society in which that soul is formed.
Our desires and ambitions do not develop in isolation. The society around us teaches us, often long before we consciously question it, what counts as success, security, intelligence, responsibility, progress, and even happiness. Anxiety can present itself as responsibility, as you point out, but institutions can reinforce that anxiety until it becomes indistinguishable from common sense. Status can masquerade as excellence, accumulation as security, productivity as virtue, and efficiency as rationality.
This is where I think the modern problem of reason becomes particularly interesting. The Enlightenment sought to liberate human beings through reason, but reason can itself be transformed into an instrument of the systems in which it operates. Once we stop asking “What ought we to pursue?” and concentrate almost entirely on “What is the most efficient way to achieve what we have already decided to pursue?”, rationality becomes instrumental. It can become extraordinarily effective without becoming wise.
A bureaucracy can be rational in its procedures while pursuing an unjust end. A market can efficiently allocate resources while leaving untouched the question of whether what it rewards is actually good for human beings. Technology can enormously expand our power while leaving unanswered the question of what that power ought to be used for. Expertise can tell us what is possible, but it cannot by itself tell us what is worth doing.
This also connects strongly with your discussion of appearances. The modern world does not merely produce individuals who chase appearances; it produces institutions that quantify, measure, advertise, rank, and reproduce those appearances. Eventually the representation begins to replace the reality. We don't simply want to be successful—we learn to want the measurable signs of success. We don't simply want to be healthy, knowledgeable, or free; we increasingly encounter these things through metrics, credentials, consumption, and institutional definitions.
So perhaps the question is not only whether our appetites and ambitions impersonate reason. We should also ask: who taught our appetites and ambitions what to desire, and who constructed the world in which those desires appear reasonable?
That, I think it is one of the great unfinished questions of the Enlightenment. Reason was supposed to free us from inherited illusions. But reason itself can become institutionalized, routinized, and detached from ethics. At that point, the danger is no longer simply that irrational forces pretend to be reason. It is that rationality becomes so successful at organizing the world that we stop asking whether the world it is organizing is one we should want.
Radical honesty, therefore, may require more than examining our private motives. It may require examining the social, economic, political, and technological frameworks that have taught us what seems reasonable in the first place.
The task is not to abandon reason, but to make reason capable of examining itself.
The question is always: what governs what?