This week marks the second week of the second annual British Philosophy Fortnight, and a continuation of the theme #PhilosophyMatters. BPF is a period of time, created by the British Philosophical Association, to make, loudly, the public argument for the importance of Philosophy in different areas of life. It is an attempt to celebrate Philosophy’s importance and fight for its continued existence in universities and schools which are increasingly under pressure to reduce curriculum offerings to meet budget-tightened bottom lines. British Philosophy Fortnight has the potential to be a very good thing, and last year I was an active part of the campaign, featuring in this video making the case for the importance of Philosophy in schools.

I say: “Philosophy matters to students because it’s a unique space in the school curriculum where they’re taught to take everything they think they know and see if this received wisdom can stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Including the wisdom they receive in the philosophy classroom itself. In a world where we are increasingly bombarded with truth-claims, and information and misinformation is coming at us without any distinction between the two, when students have the tools to be able to analyse claims for their validity, it’s a vital intellectual self-defence that we should want all young people to have. And that is why #PhilosophyMatters.”

I also wrote this piece for Philosophy Unleashed about it, interrogating the claim “philosophy matters” and asking if it really does, and this other piece looking at examples of Philosophy mattering in my own classroom.

This year I haven’t been as active with the campaign. I’m not sure why? Perhaps it is because posts like the one I wrote last year are not gung-ho enough about the wonders of philosophy to be widely shared and distributed as part of the pro-philosophy spirit of the fortnight? After all, as a philosopher is wont to do, I didn’t simply accept the premise that philosophy did matter, I questioned it. I considered all the ways in which it might not matter too. The harms philosophy might do. This muddies the message somewhat, even if it ultimately comes out in philosophy’s favour. One of the problems of philosophy is that philosophical thinking is nuanced thinking, and not necessarily easily crammed into simplistic slogans and commercial messaging.

I remember in my early years as a teacher I was asked back to the consortium that trained me to talk about my experiences in the job market and how I found the right school for me. I turned up to the talk and shared my thoughts with the group of new teachers, telling them not to settle for exploitation and bullshit. That each school is different and that you might think you hate teaching but if you work in a few different places you might discover that you just hate the one particular school you are stuck in. I told them to shop around and find the right place for them and not get rushed into the wrong place just because there was pressure from the course to be in position by September so that their numbers looked good to inspectors.

I wasn’t invited back.

But that’s Philosophy for you. We say it like we see it and provide the arguments for how we see it in the hopes that someone will argue back and prove us wrong if there is a mistake in our reasoning. All too often, outside of the Philosophy classroom, such counter-arguments aren’t given. We are simply considered a nuisance, called rude for not towing the party line or stepping beyond our station, and the conversation is shut down. The Socratic gadfly is so frequently unwelcome when all people want is an easy life. That’s why people killed Socrates: that tendency to question and think things through instead of just blindly going along with the unexamined life is frustrating to the powers that be that either do not like scrutiny or haven’t the time or inclination to change their plans.

It is also why Philosophy matters so much. If philosophers aren’t going to do it, who will? And if no-one asks those difficult questions, how much damage will be done by people in power with big ideas but very little thinking around those ideas and their impact?

British Philosophy Fortnight is a big idea. Part of my hesitance to get stuck in again this time round is witnessing the impact, or lack thereof, of the last one. Isn’t the very definition of insanity citing the same unattributed quote from the internet time and time again and expecting it to have resonance this time when it didn’t the three hundred other times you used it? Or something like that? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Did BPF save Philosophy last year? Did it even get people talking about Philosophy who weren’t already talking about it? The only places I saw the hashtags being shared were from people and places I already followed as a philosopher. Talking to ourselves about how the thing we do matter doesn’t really help convince others outside of our pre-existing bubble. Though events were attended, were the people attending those who previously thought Philosophy didn’t matter, or people already Philosophy-curious and attending only because these events were better advertised? And more to the point, what happened in the remaining 50 weeks of the year? Where did the events, and the momentum, go?

From my own point of view as a school teacher of Philosophy, working outside of the University Philosophy world, it was disappointing to start the year with a message from the Association of Philosophy Teachers announcing that, due to the failure of lobbying politicians about the ways in which Philosophy matters, it was maybe time to stop focusing on establishing Philosophy’s subject independence from Religious Studies on the school curriculum and, for the time being, continue with Philosophy living, as it currently does in most schools, through the backdoor of Religious Education, permanently entangled with Theology instead of being seen for a valuable discipline in its own right. The very thing the APT was initially set up to try to redress.

It was disappointing because the lobbying was a large part of the BPF2025, with a big launch event at Senate House and discussion with politicians about the importance of Philosophy in Schools. The message from the APT was that, essentially, the #PhilosophyMatters approach has not worked. Given that activists the world over, of varying stripes, have long debated the efficacy of “hashtag activism”, is it any surprise? Has #FreePalestine freed Palestine? Did #BlackLivesMatter end police violence against Black people? Did #MAGA make America great again? Why would #PhilosophyMatters make philosophy matter?

I might be wrong, but I don’t think a hashtag that didn’t work in 2025 will suddenly go viral and have impact in 2026 either.

I love Philosophy. I believe that it matters. I have dedicated my life to evangelising about the value of Philosophy, including writing this blog for the last seven years. I love the idea of a fortnight celebrating Philosophy’s worth. But I am not sure that the way we are doing it is resonating beyond the borders of those already convinced of Philosophy’s importance.

I also question the wisdom of it being a specifically British Philosophy fortnight. Why British? Surely any philosopher worth their salt has already acknowledged the arbitrariness of national borders and boundaries? If we’re making up the terms of our own philosophical celebration, why not do away with such exclusionary language and at least have a Philosophy Fortnight, open to all philosophers around the world? After all, Philosophy departments are closing and philosophical thinking is being attacked all around the globe, not just in Great Britain. Why be so myopic?

Ultimately British Philosophy Fortnight is a marketing exercise. As such, those selling the product — Philosophy — need to ask who their target audience is and what is Philosophy’s USP? Is two weeks of lectures, film screenings, workshops, conferences, and public debates (mostly held at universities) the thing that’s going to change someone’s mind? Will sharing a positive quote from someone already doing Philosophy about why they like it make those not doing it pay attention and take notice? I’m not entirely convinced. And if promoting our discipline through a marketing strategy that seems ill-thought-out and ineffective is the best we can come up with, is that much of a commercial for the value of philosophical thinking?

Author: DaN McKee (He/Him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Getting students to teach each other is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are not expert teachers, formally qualified in appropriate pedagogies for teaching the assigned material. On the other hand, they should actually be the most expert people in the room when it comes to effective teaching. After all, they sit through six lessons a day, five days a week, and experience, first-hand, what does and doesn’t work in the classroom.

The theory behind getting them to teach each other is the idea that if you properly understand something, you should be able to explain it to a child. So therefore to teach the other children in their class, the students themselves need to know the material they have been assigned to teach inside and out. They need to know how best to break down its complexities and where the likely misconceptions and confusions will be. If the student lessons don’t go well, so the idea goes, then it becomes clear that they do not understand the material. Hence it is a win/win: either the lesson is a success and everybody learns something new, or it is a disaster, and we all learn that there is more work to do before moving on.

As an anarchist educator, getting students to teach their own lessons is also an opportunity to give students some autonomy and power in the classroom to do things for themselves. To learn independence and take control. Reminding them that my own power is mere illusion and, most importantly, that they do not need a teacher to give them new knowledge. The knowledge is there for the taking if they break free of the learned helplessness of the teacher/student model and recognise their own resourcefulness and ability to research and make discoveries.

Sadly, giving students the reigns to teach leaves many of the class uneasy. They doubt the quality of information they receive from their peers and usually await confirmation from me, preferring the familiar hierarchy. Likewise, some of the student-teachers worry that they only reason I am making them teach each other is because I am lazy and just want to give myself a few lessons off. They treat the activity with suspicion and doubt their own ability to pull it off.

Even more sadly is how quickly the opportunity for something radical and different to be done in the classroom is missed for mere replication. I tell students they can deliver the material in whatever way they think will be most effective. drawing on their experiences as students. What works best? What never works? What could be better than any lesson they’ve previously had that they now have the chance to try? But frequently the lessons take the form of lectures with very basic quizzes at the end to check for understanding, or they involve activities which are fun but teach very little. Big questions are asked, but they forget to care about the answers they are given. I give them the power to reward and sanction their students, hoping they will use that power responsibly, and see quickly how power corrupts. Friends’ names fill the board in the reward column and old grudges are reawakened by the names quickly doomed for sanction.

In a current course I am teaching however, all this is a lesson in itself. Soon we will be covering Philosophy of Education as a topic and these lessons I have assigned for my students to teach on a completely different topic (Philosophy of Art) are serving a dual purpose. While four groups are responsible to teach four different theories of art to their peers across four different lessons, the lessons they produce are also case studies for analysis later: what makes a “good” lesson in school? Why is the lesson you plan not always they lesson you teach? What does it mean to “learn” and how do you know when it is happening?

This is the second batch of lessons this particular cohort have produced since September. Their last set, on theories around Self, proved to be an assortment of car-crashes. But each car crash provided new food for thought and this time around each group was determined to keep their car on the road.

Interestingly, the “car crash” lessons were all hugely important topics for the eventual assessment task the students had to complete at the end of the unit. Poor though the lessons were, the students all did very well in the final assessment. Once they realised I was not going to mop up the mess and teach them the same stuff again “properly”, and we had done a lengthy post-mortem on what went wrong with the lessons, they realised it was their own responsibility to learn what their teachers had failed to teach them. And learn it they did. Quite independently.

More interestingly, the reason the lessons were “car crashes” is because in each case the student teachers failed to properly think about the most effective way of delivering their complicated ideas and checking for student understanding. Dry lectures were given, with little thoughtful discrimination made between what was necessary and relevant and what was not from the resources they had been assigned. Key ideas were skipped in places and tangents brought to the foreground. Elsewhere contrasting ideas were presented as if they were all arguing for the same thing. It was clear the student teachers had not spent the requisite time to understand the ideas they were charged with teaching before planning how to teach it. In fact, groups split up tasks before knowing what their subject matter was all about, and then proceeded to learn the information they would teach in this disconnected way: one student “doing the bit of the lesson evaluating the argument” and therefore not bothering to read the actual argument itself first. That was, after all, another student’s job.

The reason this was interesting is because in round 2, none of these recent lessons have made the same mistakes. Each group ensured they knew their material well and planned well-chosen activities to introduce the ideas to their classes. However, this time a new set of problems emerged: putting the beautifully planned and well-considered lesson into practice. Lesson after lesson my students learnt what every trainee teacher discovers in their first weeks on the job: things take more or less time in reality than you anticipate in the planning, and human beings — with their weird and wonderful autonomous minds and choices — ask questions, get stuck, or mess around in ways you cannot possibly predict.

Teaching is an activity which requires constant reaction and adaptation. We can plan as much as possible, but need to also be responsive to what is actually going on in the room. You might be really proud of that interactive quiz you made online, and it may have taken a long time to produce the resource, but if students are slower to grasp the initial concepts than you had planned for, is it actually a useful or necessary activity worth wasting precious minutes for as they get out their devices and log on to school WiFi? Are you making them do the task because it is useful, or because of the sunk costs fallacy: you put so much work into it you can’t imagine not using it?

Teaching is also an activity in which your own actions in the room can affect the room itself! You might be the person who takes the conversation on its tangent or antagonises a student into misbehaviour. The plan might be perfect, but your response in the moment to something said as a result of that plan might throw a grenade into the mix and blow up everything that comes after.

Lesson after lesson, student teachers encountered these difficulties. The lessons they had planned this second time were not car crashes, but occasionally at times the roads became treacherous and they might have lost a wing mirror or clipped the curb. Occasionally a responsible driver had the wheel grabbed recklessly by another member of their group and had to fight hard to steer the vehicle back on course. A few tyres popped along the way. But most got to their destinations, or at least near enough for their class to walk the rest of the way by themselves.

Most important, however, was the reflection afterwards. As I said, I give the students the power to reward and sanction their classes. I never question the rewards given, but when a sanction is given I ask the student teacher the following question: does the student deserve the sanction because of something they did, or did they do what they did because you, as the teacher, failed to do something before it got to that point to stop them? If you had behaved differently, would your student have behaved in the same way?

The question made the student-teachers realise their own role in managing the behaviour in their classroom and in all cases they ultimately decided that the sanction was unnecessary; they shared blame for the incident with the offending student. It was a mutual mistake and unfair to blame the student entirely.

Most rewarding for me in all this has been the realisation across the two sets of lessons from my students of the work that goes into a lesson.

“I didn’t realise how hard teaching was, sir!” Said one student.

“It always seemed so easy before.” Said another. “But I see now how wrong I was.”

And my favourite feedback of all: “I can see now how difficult it must be to teach someone like me, sir.” Said seriously by a student who struggles with their own impulse control after finding the lesson they had spent hours of homework preparing for repeatedly interrupted and undermined by a fellow student with similar issues. “I just wanted to scream at him the whole time to just shut up. How do you manage not to just explode?”

It made me consider how little the art of teaching is understood by most of us, despite the vast majority of us spending years of our life being educated in schools. How hard can it be? You’re an expert in your subject and you pass that information on to kids in the most interesting way possible, right? Those who can, they do something else. Teaching is for those who can’t do anything else.

When we look at the teaching retention crisis in the UK there are a whole bunch of factors. Poor financial compensation for the number of hours actually worked each week and squeezed budgets making so many roles in schools more and more exploitative. Threats to pensions and diminishing benefits. But the least talked about factor is the simple fact that the job itself — being a teacher — is taken for granted by all of us. For we have all sat, bored, in classrooms and wondered why this person was droning on when we could be somewhere else. We have all had to teach ourselves something our professional teacher failed to teach us. And the good teachers we experience — well they make it look easy. Effortless. So easy that surely anyone could do it?

The idea that teaching is a skilled profession demanding a wide-range of high level capabilities intellectually, emotionally, and administratively is just something seldom discussed with the students who are the profession’s only hope to be the teachers of tomorrow. Certainly something very few of them get to experience firsthand.

And — for the anarchist within me, and the critic of the current education system — the systemic barriers to success in the classroom for all and structural questions around what the best way to learn even is (and does it even need to involve schools and teachers in the first place?) can only really be broached once you have experienced firsthand the obstacles and disconnects between teaching as an ideal and teaching in practice. If the first time it is experienced is in your first months and tears of teacher training, then it’s little wonder so many tap out on the profession.

I also love doing these activities with my students because it is a reminder that the ostensible lesson taught inside a classroom can be an abject failure, but this does not necessarily mean that no learning has taken place. While four consecutive lessons on Philosophy of Self were car crashes, and four later lessons on Philosophy of Art were only marginally successful, all eight sessions in the classroom were outstanding lessons in the Philosophy of Education, hopefully reminding my students that education is always about far more than meeting the arbitrary learning objectives of a particular fifty minute period in a classroom.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Skills atrophy is the term used for the slow loss, or diminishment, of previously existing skills due to continued outsourcing of those skills to automation or AI.

For example — once upon a time I might write notes on a book I am reading for research, to organise my thoughts and highlight key ideas. Perhaps I scribble down questions and objections too. If, however, I instead plug the book title into AI and ask it to produce the same sort of thing, and I keep on doing this, eventually I might lose the personal skill of condensing ideas appropriately for myself. I grow dependent on the technology to do it for me for so long that the muscle of my previous skills wither and die.

That’s the idea, and it’s pretty well accepted as a significant issue arising from growing dependency on AI, especially in young people who perhaps haven’t yet even developed the original skills to be atrophied. But, of course, there are varying views about how much we should worry. After all — history has a litany of obsolete skills it can show us that have happily atrophied and died off because they are simply no longer needed as things have advanced. Maybe certain cognitive skills can be offloaded onto our technology so we can better use our minds for higher things? Consider, for example, how much we really need to use mental arithmetic in the age of calculators?

But as eyes turn worriedly towards the future, and how the impact of new technology might affect certain generations, I’d like to call our attention to quite an old technology that I believe has already had a significant impact on children, leading to a hidden skills atrophy, or even the lack of the development of those skills at all. I offer for your perusal the impact of the humble link.

This week my school took a year group to The National Holocaust Museum in Nottinghamshire and something happened that, though minor compared to Nazi atrocities, was almost as chilling as the many harrowing tales of suffering we heard from the powerful testimony of our Holocaust survivor. The Museum has a fabulous exhibition downstairs, detailing the history of antisemitism, the lead up to the Holocaust, what happened, and the legacy of the Nazi’s attempted genocide. And as our students — 13 to 14 years old — entered the exhibit I saw them racing through the different rooms, glancing briefly at images and objects, and completely ignoring the copious amount of text displayed next to them.

“Why is this here?” one student asked. “What’s this?” asked another. And I waited a beat before asking them why they hadn’t read the information right next to the image or object which caused their confusion, where what it was, or why it was there, was clearly explained.

They had no answer. It simply hadn’t occurred to them to read it. To search out connected information to the more immediate object in front of them. To make that link that the nearby writing might be related to the thing it was next to.

The cognitive failure displayed was not the first time I had been disappointed in students’ ability to move logically from A to B. I have always been surprised by how little my students know about me, for example. After all, I am not a very private person, as anyone who reads Philosophy Unleashed will know. I talk frequently about my own personal opinions on a range of issues, have even written an entire memoir about my life, and released scores of songs detailing all manner of personal points of view about the world. I blog, I have been interviewed many times for podcasts and websites. It’s all out there to be found. But so few of them do. It’s one of the things we are warned about as teachers — to ensure we are not searchable online — but is something I am unable to do if I still want people to be able to find and buy my music and writing (which I do). Yet in my entire career it is only the very rare occasion that a student seems to have bothered to do the search. And when they have, it has been extremely cursory.

My first year of teaching after training, I remember being impressed that my sixth form class had managed to find a copy of my old band’s last album online. They even purchased it and brought the CD in for me to sign. Their savvy sourcing and curious digging had led to success. Embarrassed, I signed the disc, and assumed things like this might happen a lot over the years. I worried about my searchability — especially as some of my older punk lyrics are not exactly “school friendly”. But, nearly twenty years on, and they remain the only group to have done that.

That said, when my book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, came out in 2023, I noticed kids around the new school I was working in saying the phrase to me a lot, suggesting they had heard about it somehow. Some were even singing the song of the same name that I had written and used in promotional videos to help plug the book. Oh god — I thought. Now it’s happening. They’d found the videos on YouTube — “I’ve subscribed to your channel sir!” — and one thing would lead to another…

…Except it didn’t. I started to notice that the “anarchist atheist punk rock teacher” kids didn’t seem to realise that the song they were singing was about a book I had written. Even though the video with the song had text advertising the impending publication of the book, and another saw me unboxing my first copies of it, the connection from A to B didn’t seem to be happening. Nor did they seem to twig that I had written other songs too. Nearly one hundred of them. All easily available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music. None of these students had been curious enough to actually buy the book and find out more about me than they saw in the brief promotional videos they’d found. All they knew was that, for some bizarre reason, I’d written a song and fancied myself as an “anarchist atheist punk rock teacher”. Hahaha. None had done the deep dive that was so easily at their fingertips and that, frankly, I am 100% sure I would have done as a teenager if I found out a way of knowing more about my teachers. (I am speaking as a person who went to watch my French teacher perform in an amateur dramatic production of The Odd Couple the moment I found out he was in it, and once tried to track down (pre-internet) my Headteacher’s PhD thesis.)

The experience began to make me reflect on similar absences of curiosity or connection making in my students over the years. In lessons — where more and more over the years students seem to ask questions about things for which the answers are literally in front of them, in worksheets or on the whiteboard; or where it seems to be getting rarer for students to make connections for themselves to previous topics, or different subjects within the school, without you spelling it out to them explicitly — and in their own lives, as their cultural tastes seem guided more by algorithms than personal choices and media is consumed without context or history.

My whole life has been about making those sorts of inquisitive leaps. Why am I a philosophy teacher today? Because when I was a kid I found punk rock. Green Day. And Green Day covered songs by Operation Ivy and were on Lookout! Records, so I explored other Lookout! Bands and Op Ivy, who became Rancid, which led me to Epitaph Records and Bad Religion. My search for all things punk led to me watching this special “punk” episode of Alternative Nation on MTV, which is where I first saw Dead Kennedys. That led to exploring the Dead Kennedys back catalogue, plus other bands on their singer’s label, Alternative Tentacles (such as NoMeansNo, my all-time favourite band). Exploring Dead Kennedys led to a political awakening as I wanted to understand their lyrics, so started paying attention to the news and reading books about politics. All of it made me start asking questions, especially about religion. That curiosity extended to finding out which of my teachers were religious and bothering them with questions which, at some point, they described as “philosophical”. My friend, equally curious, discovered our local sixth form taught a course called “philosophy”, so we decided to sign up. The rest is history.

Maybe myself and my friends were unique cases, but I don’t think so. What I do know, however, is that we lived in a time primarily before the internet. And when the internet arrived in those years we were studying philosophy in the sixth form, it remained slow and clunky. We had to really think about what we wanted to use it for. Hyperlinks existed, but each click took a long time to load. Click too many and you would overload your primitive computer’s poor little brain.

Cut to today. Links open in an instant. Everything is online and, wherever one thing connects to another, a link will show you how. Just click from link to link and fall into a rabbit hole of information you may never come back from.

But the links are doing all the cognitive work — not you. You no longer have to think things such as: this is like X, I need to check out X. Instead, the connection to X is handed to you without effort.

And then there are the algorithms. If you liked X we think you’ll like Y. The old cognitive labour of making those discoveries yourself through trial, error and reflection has been taken out of your hands and the computer does it for you. Watch a movie and before the credits even roll there are five more movies you might like being suggested without having to leave your chair. Listen to a song and the shuffle feature will give you a new artist to try without you lifting a finger. Our social media feeds shove things into our attention their algorithms think we might like and, often, they are right, so we no longer have to go hunt them out.

We accept all this as normal. It has become the way of the world very quickly since those clunky dial-up modem days of the early 1990s internet. And very little is discussed about the impact of now living in a world where cognitive connecting is done for you. But we know that skills atrophy is a real thing, and if making cognitive links from A to B is a skill (which we know it is, a higher order intellectual skill), and that skill has largely been outsourced to our computers (or, in the classroom, to teachers doing everything for you, including providing scaffolds and essay structures so you don’t have to think about how to order and organise your own thoughts to write an essay), then we shouldn’t be surprised to find young people not properly developing the basic cognitive abilities needed to be intellectually curious and make their own connections and discoveries. Why search for something to read about the subject you’re interested in when a reading list will be provided? Why hunt for things that go beyond what is taught in the classroom when a pre-planned extension task will be set? And why waste energy trying to see for ourselves what might be connected to the current focus of our attention when the computer will do it all for us?

People don’t even choose their partner for themselves these days — they are happy for an app to whittle down the possibilities and reduce personal connection to a series of photographs and bios to passively swipe either right or left on.

My suspicion is that, in a world where connections we used to have to work for ourselves have been repeatedly handed to us for so long (and without any resistance) by pre-loaded links and algorithms, adults raised in the previous paradigm will have seen a serious skills atrophy in their cognitive abilities to make such links for themselves, and children, who have never needed to develop those initial skills to atrophy, will be raised with a serious deficit in such skills. They may well never atrophy because they are not even there to begin with.

Again — whether this is a problem or not is for you to decide. Are these skills we might be losing important ones, or is it OK that we are making them obsolete and outsourcing this particular cognitive capacity to our machines?

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

But what interested me as a philosopher about the subsequent furore around Davidson’s impossible to control outburst, was not the BBC’s shameful choice to keep the N-word in the show, but their choice to edit any of what Davidson said at all.

If you have seen I Swear, the movie Davidson’s life story inspired (and for which Robert Aramayo won best actor at the BAFTAs that night), then you will know the entire point of the movie is how difficult life is for those with Tourette’s to find acceptance in a world that is so uninformed about, and unforgiving of, the verbal and physical tics the syndrome makes them have.  The worst possible things — racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. — will pop out of the mouth of a person with Tourette’s completely involuntarily, as will physical tics, strange noises, and movements which might amount to violence (an errant swing of a fist).  What the movie reminds us, as with all “disabilities”, is that what “disables” the sufferer is more about the world around them than the symptoms themselves.  Davidson’s issues portrayed in the movie are only issues when the people around him don’t understand or accept what his brain makes him do involuntarily.  If, for example, they take offence at something he says.

When a person intentionally chooses to call you by a racist slur, being offended and upset makes a lot of sense.  When they call it you because they cannot control the words their brain makes their mouth form, you can still feel upset and hurt at simply hearing this awful thing directed at you, but offence is the wrong response.  This is not someone unknowingly saying something insensitive and still choosing the wrong words, this is someone not choosing at all.  They are simply not responsible.  Part of the syndrome’s difficulty is that it makes you say the absolute worst thing at the absolute worst time.

So what I Swear reminds us, and what makes it such a heart-warming story, is that it is in all of our power to make the lives of Tourette’s sufferers’ easier through understanding and learning to to over-react to the things they say and do uncontrollably.  Once you turn a blind ear to the outbursts and focus instead on only what the person is choosing to say or do, Tourette’s stops being a “disability” and simply becomes a character quirk.

The problem, however, is that the condition is rare enough that most of us don’t come into contact with people who have it.  So when someone says or does something that seems hurtful and insensitive, our first thought is seldom “perhaps they have Tourette’s?”  It is usually an instinctive upset and outrage.

At the BAFTAs, therefore, in conjunction with this wonderful movie about Tourette’s, the BBC, and BAFTA organisers, had the opportunity to sensitively highlight exactly this.  Have the host explicitly remind us upfront that Davidson is there, will say and do things uncontrollably, and that in the spirit of the movie and the activism he has spent his whole life trying to do, it will not be edited and the audience are kindly asked to try to ignore it as best they can and be accepting.  A completely unedited version of the night, with all the interruptions and outbursts would help to normalise to the audience what having someone with Tourette’s around is like.  The unfortunate N-word moment would still be broadcast, but it would have context, and Jordan and Lindo would not be so taken off guard.  If the message to everyone is, expect outrageous and horrible things to be said, then, when they are said, there is a built-in understanding and charity.

How the BBC dealt with John Davidson’s attendance at the BAFTAs last week is definitely morally questionable and offensive, but not because they let the racial slur slip past the censors when other insults were cut.  It was offensive and immoral because by censoring anything Davidson said it continued to contribute to a climate of outrage and ignorance around Tourette’s when it could have been, instead, a catalyst for change.

If you haven’t seen the wonderful, I Swear, I suggest you do.  (Sinners too!  That movie is marvellous in a completely different way).

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Anyway…on with this week’s post…

Neuroscientist, Dean Burnett, made a very astute point earlier this week following the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. On his Facebook page he noted:

“Not the key point, but all the ‘Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’ coverage shows how quickly and easily the entire UK media complex can switch to someone’s new name/title, even after using their old one for decades, when it’s an incredibly pampered white male deviant.

So, you know, it’s not *that* hard...”

Dean’s a funny guy. A writer of witty popular science books and a former stand up comic. Back in university, he actually taught me improv and directed the first improv show I was in. His post was funny, and honest about this not being the “key point” of the arrest, but, like all good comedy, in his joke there was a powerful truth. It is the same truth we saw during the pandemic when sudden and far-reaching changes in areas once thought impossible occurred almost overnight. The obstacles to change are almost always in our willingness to try. They are seldom as insurmountable as we are told they are, and the people telling us change is impossible almost always tend to be those people with some sort of interest in things staying the same.

A person transitions from a male name to a female one, or a daily social practice we once thought we could not live without is deemed too dangerous to continue in the face of a deadly virus — if the will is there to adapt to the changes proposed to us then the change is quickly embraced as a “new normal”. (Just ask any UK teacher who now marks GCSEs once given lettered grades with a number, one to nine). As soon as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles, because the full force of the law was behind the new edict the entire British media jumped in line without question and references to a “Prince” Andrew vanished almost immediately. When, instead, well-funded think tanks, politicians, or powerful lobby groups make it more financially lucrative to ridicule and question proposed changes then the alternative occurs. Stagnation and obstacles. Resistance to change depends on who is proposing the change. The powerful, or the marginalised? It is almost never about objective reality.

I was thinking about this as I read this weekend about the seeming decline in vegetarian and vegan options across UK restaurants and fast food outlets. According to the news, the boom in plant-based alternatives to meat earlier this decade has now bust and people in the food industry have moved on to the latest nutritional fad: high protein diets. Mainly chicken. Animal rights be damned.

It’s not that the vegan/veggie options are disappearing entirely off the menu, but they are becoming fewer. One writer described it as merely an equilibrium being finally met after an initial over-correction towards plant-based. Wanting to assure all consumers were being catered for, food outlets packed their menus with so many new plant-based options it simply wasn’t financially viable for them. They have now kept the dishes that made them money, but got rid of the offers that people weren’t buying.

As a vegetarian since 1998, I had noticed firsthand this sudden rise in veggie options across the country and, more recently, its decline. New favourites I had started ordering from different places were suddenly unavailable on menus. A trip to New York last year left my wife and I surprised that so few places there catered for vegetarians beyond a single, ill-considered dish. It hadn’t used to be like that. Compared to the UK it felt so backwards. But then the UK started following suit.

What has this got to do with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Dean Burnett’s post? We’ll get there. But first I want to recount an argument I used to have with animal rights activists when I was younger. We were protesting our fourth McDonalds in as many weeks and I raised the question of whether our boycott of the chain and standing outside with our leaflets was maybe less effective a strategy for improving animal rights than it would be to simply encourage moreconsuming of McDonalds’ vegetarian products? If we made it economically viable for McDonalds to sell less meat and more plants then surely they would? The chain weren’t murdering animals because they wanted to be cruel. They wanted to make money and, currently, meat was their means to that money. If selling veggie burgers could be just as lucrative (or even more lucrative) then they would likely pivot to vegetables instead.

The activists disagreed. They hated the idea of giving McDonalds their money even more than they hated the continuing massacre of animals their refusal to engage in the logics of capitalism sustained. Better to feel morally pure than, perhaps, achieve the more moral outcome. The age old battle between deontology and consequentialism. But I think the recent diminishment of plant-based options in the UK food industry exposes something about the logics of capitalism I had forgotten about at the time: a morally neutral economic market only cares what makes them money, and so even if activists poured all their money into making a compelling economic argument for McDonalds to kill fewer animals and sell more veggie burgers, they would only do so for as long as it made them profit. Without a global change in thinking about our diets, and the rights of non-human animals, eventually the novelty market would run out and the company would be back to selling what it had always sold. Capitalism simply doesn’t care about anything loftier than the bottom line. The rise in plant-based diets in the UK was never about animals, or even the powerful environmental arguments against eating meat. It was about personal health and, rightly, recent reactions against ultra-processed foods made consumers realise it was probably healthier for them to be eating “natural” food, like chicken, than processed fake meat alternatives.

Which, finally, brings us back to name changes and neuroscientists. Dean’s post. Change happens whenever we choose to embrace change. When I was first boycotting McDonalds and choosing not to eat meat back in 1998 it seemed impossible that vegetarians like me would ever be catered for in every restaurant in the country. More impossible still that vegans would ever be! Yet, when the decision was made to cash in on the growing boom in plant-based diets that “impossible” change was made real all over the country. Now that the economic motive is no longer there, and people are choosing not to bother again, the change is slipping. Showing that change — even radical change — is simply a matter of effort. Change is always possible if we will it to be. When someone tells you change is too difficult, they are only ever really saying that they can’t be bothered to try.

From now on, therefore, I want you to scrutinise those who say some change you think would make a better world cannot be achieved. Is what they’re saying true, factually? Is it actually impossible? Or is it simply difficult and they are unwilling? And if so, why are they unwilling? What do they gain from things staying as they are and what do they lose from things changing?

The more we recognise how much of the way we do things in the world is the result of human choice rather than unavoidable circumstances, and that some different choices could make a different world, the sooner we might start making such choices and dismantling the impoverished way things are for something better.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

I’ve defended Noam Chomsky a lot in my time.

I’ve been reading his work since the mid 1990s, and any time I publicly stated any appreciation for his work there would always be someone quickly there to tell me how he turned a blind eye to a genocide here, or an atrocity there, in his research. I’d take the objection on board and then painstakingly explain his wider philosophy of American imperialism and media hegemony — the propaganda model and the manufacturing of consent — and argue back that sometimes accurate information about such things may be difficult to acquire, but that his larger argument seems to remain unscathed even if a specific example or two faltered.

Sometimes the objection to his work was subjective: an individual’s disbelief at his refusal to go along with a traditional narrative of a particular event. His denial of a “genocide” or “atrocity” as genocide or atrocity more a refusal to go along with US propaganda about it than a sign of anything more sinister. Chomsky’s lifelong critique of American foreign policy and capitalist elites wasn’t faultless, but there were a few stale canards out there against his work, raised time and time again, that were widespread acts of intentional propaganda to try and deny the overall soundness of his argument rather than critiques that held any force. Overall, Chomsky’s work has documented decade after decade how America consistently acts in the interests of a small number of powerful people and corporations, at the expense of the wider global population, and how the media has played a continuous role in enabling those acts and keeping the domestic population largely uninformed.

What made his work so compelling for me, was that this worldview wasn’t some wild Conspiracy Theory nonsense about shadowy organisations controlling the global agenda. It was the meticulous laying out of evidence in support of an organic, rational and entirely self-perpetuating accidental conspiracy taking place willingly and in plain sight. Of norms and ideological frameworks that simply ran themselves as those who towed the ideological line tended to rise up the ranks and succeed in the world, and those who asked too many questions, or presented a competing narrative, tended not to. People, therefore, learned to self-censor for their own personal success rather than needing to be forcibly censored. Dominant narratives prevailed and shaped the next chapter of history. And as economic prosperity coincided with ideological compliance, the choice for self-censorship was financially rewarding too. It paid to not think too deeply or ask too many questions about America’s geo-political intentions in the world.

For me then, despite occasional question marks around some of his examples and omissions, and a recognition that (unlike most philosophers) the man never seemed to acknowledge any possible mistakes in his work, change his mind, or admit that he was ever wrong about anything, Noam Chomsky seemed always to be one of the good guys. Out there fighting the good fight and speaking truth to power despite so many attempts to slander his name, ridicule his work, and dismiss him as a crank.

Even those negative aspects of Chomsky I just mentioned — the lack of any public self-reflection or self-criticism of his own work (I once was given the opportunity to interview Chomsky online for UK punk ‘zine, Fracture, in the early 2000s, and when he didn’t return any answers to my questions I suspected it was because one I had asked was whether there was anything he felt he had ever been wrong about or changed his mind on) — were explained by the political weight of his critique. In a country with a history of COINTELPRO and many documented cases of attempted character assassination of any leading figure on the left, Chomsky was perhaps wise to be cautious. Within the propaganda model, complex and nuanced thinking would always lose out to more black or white assurances. Were Chomsky to ever publicly acknowledge some fault in his own thinking, that “Chomsky admits he was wrong” would no doubt be the only fact standing, crowding out all conversation around the many things he was actually right about and shrouding his entire intellectual project in a cloud of doubt. I therefore accepted on some level that the specific target of this particular public intellectual’s critique made it difficult for honest reflection as his work was always entering the world pre-dismissed by the mainstream discourse and carrying the burden of needing to be bullet-proof just to even be listened to.

But in recent months, as you probably already know, Chomsky’s name and image has come up repeatedly in some of the newly released Epstein files. After years of instinctively defending Chomsky from cynical smears to his character, my initial reaction was to seek some less damning explanation for his apparent friendship with a monster. Perhaps, for example, he was unaware of Epstein’s crimes, or ended up in Epstein’s orbit by mistake? But the more I read, the more my instinct for defending Noam Chomsky seemed to have finally run out of ground. While, of course, there have been far worse offenders exposed in these files (and many more likely protected by the redacted and incomplete nature of the drip-feed releases), and the fact of Chomsky relationship with Epstein has been loudly shouted about with clear political motivation, Chomsky’s undeniable involvement with the billionaire sex offender has been heartbreaking to discover and leaves one with serious questions.

On the one hand, philosophers have long argued the importance of distinguishing the person from their argument. Well known ad hominem fallacies and appeals to authority have been dismissed as irrelevant to an argument itself, and it can remain theoretically true that Chomsky turns out to have questionable moral character yet his arguments remain robust. Consider, as comparison, the well-documented racism of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Hume and Locke. Awful though it is, we can despite the men but still appreciate (at least some of) their ideas. In more recent years I have recommended famous modern thinkers to my students or shared some of their excellent philosophical work only for a curious Google from someone in the classroom to reveal terrible accusations of abuse or impropriety. Again, their ideas and arguments remained relevant even if the person making them had now lost our respect.

On the other hand though, sometimes the actions of the thinker, or their vile personal opinions, become reflected in their work. A recognition of a particular prejudice or moral failing could have legitimate impact on their arguments. For example, when Hume argues against the existence of miracles because they have only ever been reported in “ignorant and barbarous nations”, the xenophobic basis of such a dismissal undermines it. Once we accept a level of education and intelligence is possible in the countries of the Bible’s origin that Hume’s racism disallows, we have to find other reasons to dismiss the testimony of those there claiming to have witnessed a miracle.

Some of what Chomsky is reported as having said, for example, can be charitably dismissed by those familiar with his work. Readers of Chomsky will be familiar with his droll writing style and frequent use of dry humour when discussing terrible events and awful people. Hearing that Chomsky is reported to have said maintaining “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein was a “most valuable experience”, we can hear echoes of similar sentiments from Chomsky’s written work when cynically condemning the things he has learned from reading, say, the business press or a particularly biased historical record. Indeed, some of the purported correspondence literally has Chomsky claiming Epstein taught him “about the intricacies of the global financial system” far more than “the business press and professional journals” could. Sentences which could be damning Epstein more than praising him, depending on context.

However, it is clear from the released documents that Chomsky seemed to consider Epstein to be a “friend”. While it is not impossible to find a villain appealing, or stay friends with someone we believe has done terrible things, it does feel strange to think that such an eminent and vocal critic of American capitalism and powerful elites became friends with a figure who seems the very personification of all that Chomsky vilifies in his writing. Of course, Chomsky famously engaged with the things he opposed. Most of his written work details the lengthy engagements he had with books, journals and newspapers he took great issue with but appeared to read voraciously. To praise Epstein’s “extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals” and deem him a “regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation” could be more of Chomsky’s trademark cynical wit describing a fascinating source, fascinating precisely because Epstein exposed his worldview to Chomsky “without a trace of pretentiousness”. A similar reason might explain Chomsky seemingly using Epstein to also get in direct personal contact with people like Steve Bannon.

Likewise, also being charitable, it is absolutely true that Chomsky had many years of personal experience of attempts to slander and defame him, and therefore if he believed Epstein was being similarly smeared in 2019 — whether a friend or foe of Chomsky’s (Chomsky historically defended all manner of arguable reprobates he didn’t politically align with when it came to freedom of speech or anti-smear issues) — it would make sense, if the two were in contact, that Epstein might solicit Chomsky’s advice on how to deal with such a thing. If Chomsky really believed Epstein, his friend, was a victim of a smear campaign then it would explain both him describing “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public” and the advice he is supposed to have offered, advice he has taken himself many times when being accused of things he has not done: “the best way to proceed is to ignore it”.

Even the very worst soundbite from the released files — Chomsky saying he was “fantasising about the Caribbean island” Epstein owned, and where children were sexually abused — can be charitably explained away if we imagine a man who did not know about, or believe, such things about Epstein (despite him being already convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor at the time of their exchanges), and was simply enamoured at the idea of a possible tropical vacation in his future. A vacation which, according to Chomsky’s wife, he never took.

However… Should we be so charitable? And if we aren’t charitable, does Chomsky’s friendship with Epstein, taken at face value, mean that Chomsky’s philosophical arguments about American power and the media should be somehow reevaluated?

Although nothing released so far seems to implicate Chomsky personally in any of the sexual abuse Epstein was involved in, and there is no reason to assume there will be, an argument against being charitable to our interpretation of what has been released so far is that it does show Chomsky repeatedly schmoozing with the very worst example of the sort of amoral billionaire monster his life’s work seems to oppose. Doing so long after Epstein had already been convicted of sexual crimes against minors once and doing so seemingly completely uncritically despite an existing public record against the man. Although Chomsky’s wife, Valeria, apologised last week for their “grave mistake” in being “careless” about not thoroughly researching Epstein’s background before befriending him, and admitted “it was deeply disturbing for both of us to realise we had engaged with someone who presented as a helpful friend but led a hidden life of criminal, inhumane, and perverted acts”, it does make one ask the question: if Chomsky failed to research Epstein all that thoroughly, what else in his academic work might be equally glazed over so that it fit the conclusion he wanted? And if Chomsky was not aware that the billionaire who, in the words of his wife, “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively” might be doing this “as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for”, then how secure is Chomsky’s claim to understand the hidden ways in which power works across society to achieve the ends of a minority of elites?

Ultimately, Epstein was a blindspot for Chomsky. One he seems to have enjoyed the company of and advantages of being friends with. An example of the way power can corrupt imperceptibly and insidiously by offering certain benefits in return for compliance and support, and the threat of their removal if too many questions are asked.

Finding out Noam Chomsky was friends with Jeffrey Epstein is like finding out that the DIY punk band you’ve always admired for their ethical integrity were secretly funded by Sony all along. The songs might sound the same, but something about them feels different now.

But is the story of an old man, in the latter decades of his life, married to a second wife and trying to sort out the finances of his estate being seduced by a wealthy and influential snake sufficient to undo Chomsky’s lifetime of philosophical work and political activism? Especially at a point in Chomsky’s life where, at 97 years old, he has been bed-bound and unable to communicate at all, let alone defend himself, since a stroke he suffered in 2024? Is it really a sign of something important or merely another example of Epstein’s exploitation? Another self-serving scam, this time targeting the elderly and vulnerable instead of those vulnerable and young?

If Chomsky’s persistent thesis since first criticising the war in Vietnam in the 1960s has been that powerful elites will use their power to hide their crimes against humanity and justify their egregious acts in the language of moral righteousness and necessity, then the case of his latter day friendship with Epstein could be seen as yet another example of just that. A rich and powerful man getting away with terrible crimes because his wealth allowed him protection from an enabling and complicit media, with Chomsky himself being used this time as part of Epstein’s own “propaganda model”, offering (without coercion) his own liberal credentials in support of his friend to bolster Epstein’s false narrative that he had done nothing wrong?

Or, less charitably, Chomsky the celebrity had, at this stage in his life and career, reached the position himself of becoming one of the powerful elites. And did so, as per his own thesis, by turning a blind eye to any discrepancies and moral inconsistencies in those around him from whom he personally benefitted so that he could continue enjoying his privileges, regardless of the potential human cost.

Even if that unthinkable latter scenario were the true one, it seems that on either interpretation of Chomsky’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein it serves, while certainly throwing doubt on the moral character of the philosopher himself, to add only further supporting evidence to the validity of Chomsky’s philosophical argument about the nefarious and self-serving nature of power in America.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Those natural resources from which things are made would not disappear, and those artificial creations of human ingenuity which combine existing resources into brand new things not available by nature alone could still be produced if the motivation was there.

Money is an imposed fiction designed to organise and control the use and exchange of those pre-existing resources, and to motivate people into using them to achieve certain ends. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. And imposed economic scarcity and the created need to “earn” a living has led to a cavalcade of necessities which have spawned all sorts of products and ideas. But other motivations are possible. And much of what we humans produce serves only the purpose of profiting someone rather than providing anything of any real value into the world. If we got rid of money we would lose those unnecessary and useless things perhaps. Meanwhile, those wonderful things which do have value and serve a purpose other than paying the bills for someone else, could still be created. Not for pay and profit, but for their use and enjoyment.

It was with this thought in mind I asked my junior Philosophy Club this week to imagine a world where the internet was invented without any profit motive. A world without money that was still motivated to invent computer technology because of its many useful applications. If the internet were invented in such a world, how might it differ from today?

I asked it because it occurred to me that most of the negativity around the internet boils down to the economic model of capitalism which infects it. Spurious influencers begging us to “like and subscribe” so that they can earn an income from their vacuous content. AI slop creeping into feeds so that tech companies can learn what we like and sell it back to us. Social media which mines our personal data and sells it to advertisers. Advertising in general, which generates the revenue most “content creators” get paid by and incentivises quantity over quality. Even competing companies offering variations on the same theme and vying desperately in the attention market for their piece of the pie.

Why are tech companies hesitant or immobile when it comes to stopping hate-speech, violent pornography, or online bullying and misinformation? Because they fear losing customers. Because controversy and scandal creates views and generates cash. The most outrageous, the most awful, the most viral thing gets the most clicks, so what incentive is there to take it down, even if it ruins someone’s life? Two days after starting up the new Philosophy Unleashed Substack, for example, The Guardian revealed how Substack profit from Nazi and other far-right newsletters being sent out on their platform. Which, under capitalism, of course they do!

Even the simple phishing email or online scam that one is vulnerable to when online stems from a profit motive in a world where we need money to live and money is in short supply. Such scammers use the internet to target their victims, but would have no need for their scams if all things they needed were available without a fee. In a world without money, where everything is available for free, what need would there be to scam people out of their already happily empty bank accounts?

Together my students and I imagined an internet used only to connect people. To play games together designed for excellent gameplay and stories, not merely as a means to get you to buy more and more upgrades and updates. To share information which no-one had a financial incentive any more to distort or dispute. To share art and funny things without the intent to get anything out of it. Not clogging up the feed with a billion similar nothings all seeking to get your click, but things that are genuinely funny or interesting. A place to keep in touch with those we love and like, and, yes, maybe even to connect with new people out there with similar interests. But not a minefield of bots trying to trick you into connection to serve some other financial purpose for the bot-masters.

There would still, of course, be some dangers. Just as there remain dangers in real life. The existence of the internet in such a world reminds us that money is not the only motivation, and crimes motivated by things other than money could still be carried out online, just as they currently are. But it remained the case that in today’s real world those sorts of crimes are made worse by the possibilities for financial gain some perpetrators find in them. For instance, someone seeking to trick someone online into meeting them in real life for some terrible act of abuse might still occur (just as such abuse happens offline too), but there at least would not be the sorts of professionalised human traffickers and organised gangs seeking to turn such abuse into a profitable business that we currently have with the internet as it was made under capitalism. Likewise, I am sure that awful far-right hate would continue to spew in an internet made in a world without money. At least to some extent. Such is the cost of free speech. But at least we would lose the hate-speech financially incentivised by social media demagogues or well-funded think-tanks who build empires of bile not because of ideological commitment to a terrible cause but because it lines their pockets every time their hate-speech is shared.

Gone too would be the economic circumstances in which such rhetoric and hatred rise. It becomes hard to falsely blame economic inequality on immigrants, asylum seekers and any other “other” the far-right likes to target when there is no longer an economy! No longer anything people don’t have. No longer anything “they” can be accused of “taking” from you. One suspects, in an internet made in a world without money, any far-right chatter which might still live on to infect online spaces will be confined to easily ignorable faraway corners, along with other cranks and crazies the majority of the world are happy to ignore.

We imagined the phone in our hands as a powerful tool for communication, sharing and hope, rather than a demanding lump of temptations we were all addicted to to serve the financial needs of other people. Something we could use to create and collaborate with instead of passively scroll on for someone else’s profits.

When you think about the fact that, in 2026, most of us keep in touch with friends and family using some sort of platform that accompanies our connection to loved ones with advertising, it is quite a chilling thought. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, as I did, I couldn’t imagine having phone-calls to the same people repeatedly interrupted by commercial messages, or letters we wrote to each other bundled with ads we had to trawl through before we got to the next paragraph. Yet today, this daily financially-motivated commercial violation into such private spheres of life is the norm.

If we took away money right now, everything that exists would still exist. Those natural resources from which things are made would not disappear, and those artificial creations of human ingenuity which combine existing resources into brand new things not available by nature alone could still be produced if the motivation was there. Imagine how much better the internet would be in such a world. Imagine, then, how much better many other things might be which are currently corrupted by that same insidious profit-motive lurking beneath the surface of so many norms and decisions, distorting our everyday life just so that someone else can pay their bills. Bills that we have collectively invented, with the shared fiction of “money”. A fiction it is entirely within our power to end right now with the simple act of disbelief and rejection of this imposed fantasy. A disbelief in money, fuelled by a far stronger belief that a much better world is possible without it.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com   

At least anecdotally. From my own hazy memories. But despite believing that, I still indulged instinctively in the idea that things were better “back in my day”.

A few years ago I heard a parent saying that they weren’t worried about the impact of smartphones and AI on their children because their own parents used to be worried bout the impact of rock and roll and television on them, and they turned out fine despite the loud guitars and TV. At the time, the argument seemed solid. Every generation faces a moral panic about the changes in the next. But it is not borne out of anything more than a fear of, or lack of understanding about, how things are changing. Cars replacing horses and carriages, the radio replacing direct communication, the telephone connecting places that shouldn’t be connected, the television replacing the radio, the rise of the computer and the invention of the internet… The music is faster now, the lyrics harder to hear, the films have lost their heart and the acting has changed, we don’t talk enough about a shared culture because we’re all on different streaming services, what happened to the ballet, the opera, the symphony orchestras… Humans like to wrap up the unknown and the unexplained in moral outrage and disapproval. My instinct was to agree with the parent’s point of view: ignore what fearful adults are saying about change and have faith in the wisdom of children and how cultures and people evolve.

These days, however, I’m not so sure.

Of course I, too, am older. Perhaps it just took a little bit longer for my knee-jerk “back in my day” instinct to emerge. But I don’t think it’s just that because I think my problem with kids these days is that the kids these days are the product of people like me: kids from back in my day. And they, in turn, were the product of their own parents before them. Kids from even further back in the day.

In philosophy we are well aware of the fallacy of the Slippery Slope. But unlike a formal logical fallacy, the Slippery Slope does not indicate a definitive problem with an argument. It merely sounds the alarm for what might be the case. What is possible. And often (hence it being seen as a fallacy) the possibility can be highly unlikely. But unlikely does not mean the problem can be completely ignored. It still might prove to be an issue.

I look around the world today and wonder if, perhaps, the car, the radio, the television, rock and roll, the computer, the internet, etc. might not have been, in themselves, the dramatic danger past generations worried they were. That the panic older people expressed about the “kids these days” might still have been an over-reaction. But that, maybe, taken as a whole, and taken as an interconnected cultural progression of technological advances which supercharged the gradual advances of culture and civilisation over hundreds of years and accelerated change, within just over a century, beyond the speed of evolution and the capacity for the human brain to adapt swiftly to it, the worry highlighted a Slippery Slope concern which we might now be suffering the impact of?

In other words — what if too much television did rot our brains? What if the replacement of well-considered poetry with commercial song lyrics did mark some sort of intellectual decline? What if the computers we started spending too much time on were a problem, and led to us being addicted to the phones in our hands? What if delegating everything to AI is the disaster it feels like it might be? What if what our parents warned us about did cause us harm but we were too harmed to see? What if one damaged generation has been socialising each consecutive generation into a worse and worse declining culture until the end of the Slippery Slope is reached?

If thinking is something we still do, it might be something to think about. But, of course, you’d have to read this first to do that.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.  For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com     

Not that I knew how to play that until I was shown how by a friend. He needed a bass player for his teenage punk band and I was a willing mate with time on my hands. I didn’t even know what a bass guitar was until he explained it to me. I went home from school that day and listened to my Green Day albums with brand new ears. That thing I liked so much on “Longview” — that was a bass line, it turned out. The next day my friend stuck bits of Blu-Tack on the fretboard of a borrowed school bass guitar and told me to follow along. Before I knew it, I was a bass player. I still am.

I’d never played drums before, but I’d programmed them for songs. Made decisions in Logic Pro and GarageBand about beats and fills, sequences of patterns. I had a good ear for it and had some of the most fun songwriting putting together drum parts for my music. But I wouldn’t have had the first clue how to play any of them myself on an actual kit.

I always knew I liked the drums. Mike Dirnt’s bass was a powerful part of what made Green Day great to my young ears, but the older I got the more I appreciated the power and ingenuity of Tre Cool’s pounding of the skins in tandem with the bouncing bass. One of my favourite bands, NoMeansNo, featured a brother and brother combo on drums and bass. Rob Wright, the bass player, continues to be my musical inspiration, but his bass-playing was made all the more exciting to listen to because of what his brother, John, did on the drums. Recently, John Wright started a new band — Dead Bob — and the drums there really are the main focal point of every song. I adore them. But it never occurred to me to think about the mechanics of what John Wright was doing to create those sounds. What was the point? I’m a bassist, not a drummer. I don’t really know how all that drum stuff works?

But two weeks ago my wife bought me this drum kit. On January 10th, I set it all up in my office and sat behind it for the very first time. Predictably, I was terrible. No lessons, no experience, no understanding of how it all worked. But on January 11th I sat behind it again. Watched a few videos on YouTube. And, as I had all those years ago when my friend showed me what a bass guitar was, I put on a few of my favourite songs and finally paid attention to the drums. Really paid attention. Noticing what was being done with feet and hands in ways I’d never considered before. Noticing when the kick drum was used, the snare and hi-hat. The cymbals. The rhythms, the beats, the rolls. I listened and tried to mimic what I could. Learning new things about my own coordination (or lack thereof!) as I did and figuring out how to get sounds through trial and error. I was still pretty terrible, but I was enjoying myself a lot. And I remembered those early days with the bass. Before I even had a real one myself. Picking up my mom’s acoustic guitar before school and plucking away on the top two or three strings, improving marginally each time. Getting more proficient and confident. Starting to write little songs of my own. The start of a very long journey.

Sunday the 11th, I was all over the place and barely knew what I was doing. But Monday the 12th, I came home from work and sat back down at the kit. Watched a few more videos. Downloaded a little app for my computer that allowed me to play along and teach me a few things. Continued the journey.

Every day since then, I have done a little more drumming. Getting a little bit better each time. Two weeks in, I’m nowhere near even a little bit good…but I’m better than I was at the start, and understanding more each and every day. Last Thursday, to test myself, I recorded an improvised bass line to a click track and then tried to record drums for it. They’re not bad. Ropey in places, but far from terrible. I’m calling the recording “Project Drumm #1” and intend to keep working on it and record different things each month to track my progress as a player.

What I’ve noticed though, since starting to try and teach myself the drums, is that I am hearing music differently now. Getting lost in the drums. Hearing things in familiar songs that I have never heard were there before.

The other day, driving to work, I missed my exit on the motorway trying to figure out what was going on in some old Wings song that came on in my car. How were they using the toms? Was that a kick-pedal or a stick making that sound? Were they playing on the beat or on the half-beat? I had to make a six mile detour to get to work on time but I was too engrossed to care. I’d heard the song a million times, but now there were all these new layers to it. Just as, in my youth, the depth to songs I had simply taken for granted revealed themselves to be intricate bass-lines played for specific effect with intent and purpose. Bass lines my ears had simply not been attuned to before.

It is one of the oldest questions in philosophy — to ask if the world we perceive is the world as it really is. If what we think we know about the world from our experiences is the truth about the world. In many ways the drums are a perfect instrument for showing us this. After all, their job in a song is to make explicit hidden time signature(s) the music is following. Reveal the ticking of an internal clock that has always been pulsing just beneath the perceptual surface.

Every time I start to learn a new musical instrument and it unlocks old music in new ways, I am reminded just how much work the brain is engaged in constructing the world we experience. How much it decides to bring to the foreground or push to the back. To bring into focus or distort or ignore. The world is out there causing all these experiences, but there is a layered and wonderful richness to it hidden beneath the more superficial rendition we become accustomed to in our daily lives.

We ought to remind ourselves every once in a while just how little of that full picture of reality we are getting most of the time. Remind ourselves of how powerful it can be to simply force ourselves to notice something new that has always been there, just below the surface of our everyday perceptions. Something we can now perceive so clearly when we give it new attention. For it makes us ask ourselves how much else we might be missing?

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.  For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com     

Not in the way that competitive people do. I don’t spend time plotting out how to win. I’m far from a competitive person. In fact that’s what I spend most of my time thinking about when I think about winning: why do people care so much?

For example, it was only last year, playing Cluedo with my younger niece and nephew, that I realised some players (most players?) actually enter the game with a strategy. I never have. Despite the obvious logic puzzle that a good whodunnit is (eliminating possibilities in a rational manner until only one possibility is left), I myself always just enjoyed making random guesses and crossing things off without any wider thinking about the most useful pieces of information to acquire or efficient strategy for getting it. I simply never cared enough about winning to strategise.

Board games, for me, are very much the journey and not the destination. An excuse to sit around with family or friends and have a chat and a laugh. It never comes into my mind that I would also like to beat those friends and family and win.

These days I’m also a football fan. And like any fan I do want my own team to win, and feel a sense of satisfaction when they do. But unlike many other fans, when we don’t win I am more than happy to acknowledge the strengths of the other team and the deserving nature of their victory. As long as the game was enjoyable to watch, I’m happy whoever wins.

When I watch football on TV and see the crowd shots they use when a goal is missed or a result goes the other way for someone, I usually feel alienated and a little disturbed by the level of despair apparent in every pained grimace. I never want to feel that strongly about a competition I’m not even involved in. After all, we’re only spectators. It wasn’t even us who lost!

Strangely though, being a spectator of a competition — like with the football — tends to be the only time I really care about who wins. Not because I want to win, but because I invest in the hopes and dreams of the people I am watching. It is a sense of compassion and empathy that drives me to hope for victory. I know how much it means to to them that they win, so I hope — for their sake — that they do too. But it is a sensation that is accompanied by a very real sense of bewilderment about why they care so much about it.

I’m not naive or blind: winning is important to people only because capitalism has made it so. Winning is a means, in our rigged and unfair system, for some of our intentionally limited resources or opportunities to be granted to the victor(s). Winning means access to prizes previously forbidden or inaccessible. But it’s important to acknowledge that prizes are a social construct made meaningful only because of their manufactured scarceness or the inequalities we’ve chosen to allow in the distribution of the resources from which the prize comes. People want to win the FA Cup, for example, because of its history and prestige, but its history of prestige is largely because winning the FA Cup translates into more money, either for the players or their clubs. Money that is important in the dog-eat-dog capitalism of professional sports. Not because it makes for better football, but because it makes for better business.

I only want to win the lottery because we live in a world where money is scarce. Give me everything I need, and the lottery loses its allure. The prize of millions of pounds becomes meaningless in a world without the need for excesses of money.

Watching the BBC reality competition, Race Across The World, recently, I have marvelled at people missing out on experiences of a lifetime in countries they have never visited before so they can race across borders at the fastest speed to win not even the competition, but that one leg of the competition. Getting their name in a book first instead of stopping off along the way and seeing something or somewhere extraordinary. The show is compelling precisely because different competitors make different decisions as they race about what they hold valuable and how they want to balance winning against not missing out on precious moments. But the show only works in this way because we live in a world where travel is expensive and few can afford to take time away from their every day lives (and families) to see the world. It takes a television show’s budget and social status to fund it and justify the time off work and away from home, and the conditions under which competitions agree to get that opportunity are conditions under which they have to want to win. Very easily, a whole cast of racers could simply agree to take five days off together to just see the sights and enjoy the world on the BBC’s budget. Ignore the competition, forget about winning for a few days, and have a holiday. But the fear that someone else might break the agreement — race to the finish line and win ahead of them — is what stops it. Solidarity which ensures that everyone wins is always eroded by the individualism of zero-sum games. Not because people are naturally selfish, but because people are fairly rational and understand that in a world where the deck is stacked in so many ways and no-one has responsibility for if you live or die but you (entirely by design) then you would be foolish not to strive for the advantage that comes with victory.

The sheer number of reality competitions which exist on TV is a sad testament to the fact that we can’t just enjoy arts, talents and skills, it seems, without the corruption of competition being placed on top of it. Rather than watching a travel show, or a baking show, or an art show or a drag show, such things are only worth viewing if someone can lose each week and be eliminated. If, in the end, a winner can be declared. After all, the manufactured prestige of victory is what gets contestants applying each season, and every new season is more money in the bank for the production companies. Capitalism, once again, making the artificial logic of competition seem inevitable and natural when it is, in fact, a choice.

It’s not just reality TV. In all film and TV, for example, a decision has been made that industry recognition, instead of simply celebrating the many accomplishments of everyone, must come in the form of individual awards. Movies and shows which win, and movies and shows which lose. Jobs too. Instead of paying everyone a decent wage, workers are pitted against each other in competition for limited promotions which come with extra money or benefits. There is no objective reason this ought to be the way that financial compensation is awarded — to the few and not the many — but we accept it because it is the unquestioned norm.

I think the insidious ease with which we accept the narrative of competition and assume the value of winning is one of the main reasons our unequal and deeply unjust world continues to tick along without significant objection. The seemingly natural idea that there must be winners and losers and that everything is a competition is an artificial result of intentional choices made by those with an advantage. But they have convinced us that this is simply an organic state of affairs or result of an inherently selfish human nature. A self-serving ideology that benefits only those already deemed “winners” The more we pretend that it is simply the way things have to be, the less we question and challenge it.

I suppose my suspicion around the desire to win comes from a lifetime of watching professional wrestling on TV and being involved with improvisational comedy. In each endeavour the illusion of competition is offered to an audience which works only because the performers are actually in secret collusion with each other, working collaboratively to put on an entertaining show. To “lose” in wrestling might well be to “win” in terms of audience drama and long-term storytelling. To “lose” in improv might be to fail for laughs in a short-form game or sit back in a supportive role so that someone else can shine in a hilarious scene. When we go into business for ourselves and try to legitimately “defeat” the people we are performing with, the whole thing falls apart and audiences go home unhappy.

It works in wrestling and improv because when we all work together everybody wins. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled (or, rather, the greatest trick those who currently benefit from the unequal and unjust distribution of wealth and resources across the world ever pulled) was getting us to forget that the same is true in everything. If we all work together, everybody wins. When we strive against each other to be the only winner, the spoils go only to the victor, and the rest of society suffers.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.  For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com     

No doubt there are fascinating questions we could spend hours debating about the nature of international law. How such a law is underwritten only by the international community’s continuing acceptance of it — there being no real authority over and above these laws of convention to enforce any international norms objectively — and, therefore, if the international community simply accepts Trump’s violations of those laws (as they have also recently done with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or the Israeli atrocities in Gaza) then it could be argued no violation has occurred. The so-called “law” is simply the rubber stamp of the powerful in a dog-eat-dog, might makes right world as perceived by the majority of powerful norm-makers.

The idea might be interesting. But it doesn’t protect the people of Venezuela from further American interference. Or the people of Colombia or Greenland (or anywhere on the map) from further unchecked American aggression. Nor, really, do the arguments which appeal instead to some stronger moral law. We might make a compelling philosophical case for the objective wrongness of America’s imperial foreign policy — just as many can convincingly prove the objective wrongness of genocide in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But do our fantastic arguments stop the objective wrongness from happening, or convince others that it must end? I am not necessarily convinced these days that it does. Moral battle lines are drawn every day, on seemingly every issue about which there is some disagreement, with perfectly compelling arguments given to make the case for or against any particular transgression. But they seem only to cleave us into teams pitted against one another intellectually than spur a genuinely open-minded conversation about right and wrong that leads to a progressive way forward. Whatever arguments may be provided to show why Trump is morally wrong to have done what he has done, will merely place the provider of those arguments into the “anti-Trump” camp. Meanwhile those who are “pro-Trump” will have arguments of their own. The idea that one side or the other’s arguments might be better or worse, or dare I say even correct, doesn’t come into it. Nor does the possibility that the “other” side will listen to those arguments and change. Their separate algorithms will likely mean the opposing arguments never even get heard.

While one might want to take that criticism and note that it is a criticism of the world we are living in, not of philosophy, I would counter by asking how many different intellectual camps you can think of in professional philosophy itself, and how often it is that thinkers from one camp actually find themselves moved by the arguments of the other? Petty disputes about what is “real” philosophy and what isn’t go on in university departments all the time. As do professional refusals to entertain particular questions for their not being “meaningful”. Ideological schisms about the very nature of certain problems being discussed are common. And these familiar academic battle-lines all share more in common with our divided and divisive social media landscape than they do with the idea of some genuine pursuit of “wisdom”. Philosophers dig their heels in and cover their ears to the other side just as quickly as any online agitator.

A philosophical case could easily be made for Trump’s act of international aggression to be considered a grave moral wrongdoing. Mainly because it so obviously is. But there will be other philosophers eager to make the contrasting case that it was right. One could imagine conferences and special journal issues all dedicated to the topic, ultimately achieving very little beyond fodder for new talks and articles.

I have long had a distaste for competitive academic debate competitions, precisely because they seem to trivialise the quest for truth by replacing it with the aim of simply winning an argument for your designated side. Philosophy, I always held, was somehow purer. Not simply a tool to win a debate but a tool to get to the truth. These days I am no longer so sure. The tool is still there for those who want it. But more and more it feels like those who use it properly are like Plato’s ignored navigator on a sinking ship of fools, enamoured by the power of ignorant strength.

So I’m not going to make a philosophical argument about Trump and Venezuela in this first post of 2026 and make the moral case for what should be intuitively obvious. Because if you’ve read this post this far, you likely already believe that Trump’s actions (all of them) were wrong. And if you are the sort of person defending his actions in Venezuela then you likely will never stumble upon this essay.

And it is this situation which makes me continue to ask questions about the value of philosophical discourse in a world that has seemingly forgotten that we are collaborating on a shared project of mutual existence, where we ought to be seeking answers for the collective good of all, rather than an atomistic battle of self-serving ideologies where only the loudest voice wins.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.  For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com           

— Dermot O’Keeffe

I returned to Cardiff this weekend for the first time in over a year. Having lived there between 2001 and 2008 I still can’t quite get over how changed the city is with the addition of the new St David’s Centre (“new” being, of course, deeply subjective considering the place has been there now for over fifteen years). So many familiar high street chains that either seemed unlikely to ever come to Cardiff when I left the city, or didn’t yet exist.

To be fair, the same could be said of my home city of Birmingham. When the “new” Bullring came, the city felt fresh and new, and it continues to attract new businesses even if it couldn’t sustain the mammoth yet impractical John Lewis that once stood at the heart of its revivified “Grand Central” offering at New Street Station. Likewise, in nearby Solihull, where John Lewis continues to survive, the town’s Touchwood shopping centre was still being built when I left for Cardiff at the turn of the century. Walking through the town centre today, my childhood self wouldn’t recognise it. Except for the McDonalds, still standing in the very same spot where a pre-boycott and anti-corporate young me used to excitedly get his Happy Meals.

It’s often been said that the corporate gentrification of cities and towns, not only across the UK but across the whole world, has made travel dull and boring. Whether you’re in Birmingham, Cardiff, London, New York, Paris, Stockholm, or anywhere else in the globe, the preponderance of the same old corporate chainstores everywhere has made one location pretty much like any other. The question is no longer is there an Apple Store, but where is it?

And like many, it used to make me sad. Corporate always meant bad to a kid growing up in the anti-capitalist punk rock 1990s. “Selling out” when you should have gone indie. I bought all my records at Tempest in Birmingham, and, when I moved to Cardiff, Spillers. Chains like HMV were only good for ripping off. Buying one CD, copying it onto tape, then returning it the next week in exchange for something else. Two for the price of one. And it served them right for being “the man”. Not for me the clothes shops with the expensive branded clothes; there were always charity shops and DIY punk bands’ merch tables at gigs. And I’d always rather a second-hand book than one bought from a chain.

But as I grew older, I grew lazier in my consumer habits. It still made me sad to see smaller shops pushed out of the high street and replaced with the same old chains you got anywhere, but I also acknowledged that in most cases I myself had stopped using them too, eschewing the physical shop for the ease of the online click.

And worse — in a world where the chainstores kept on coming, both on the high street and on your computer, it became too easy to not only grudgingly use them, but to find exactly what you wanted there. The spread of the same old chains across the globe meant that I could get the exact coffee I liked whether I was in Cardiff, Birmingham, Amsterdam, Ho Chi Minh City, or Las Vegas. I remembered touring Italy as a teenager in my old punk band and rolling my eyes with disdain at the drummer who didn’t want to get lunch from the Italian supermarket and instead bought a McDonalds Big Mac. But then I found myself in my 40s seeking a quick and dependable vegetarian meal at a Swedish train station and heading to the Burger King.

I always kind of hated myself when I saw myself doing that stuff. “Selling out”. Betraying the ideals of my younger self and becoming too accepting of the rampage of monopolistic capitalism.

But this weekend, walking through Cardiff and seeing the same chains we have at home in the Midlands, remembering the convenience at a book launch a month ago in Newbridge of knowing the local Greggs would have a vegan sausage roll when I was hungry for lunch in an unfamiliar place, and the strange momentary comfort I once got from seeing a Costa Coffee sign in the middle of a very alien Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I wondered about that self-hatred, and my knee-jerk anger at the world for selling its unique and independent character for a homogenised set of global chainstores.

I wondered why it was that people used to use these independent small businesses and realised that it was ultimately about trust. You used your local butcher because you trusted the quality of their meats, your local grocer because you knew the produce they sold would be good. You went to the local pub because they had what you liked to drink on tap, and went to the little restaurant that was run by the local chef because the food there was good.

It’s certainly, even in the changing 1990s, why I liked the indie record and bookstores: they actually had the strange and obscure stuff I was looking for. Rare imports and DIY releases. I could trust that the weird thing I wanted would be there.

Cut to 2025 and we live in a far less local and far more globalised world. We no longer are limited to the handful of businesses which happen to exist in our local geographic area and frequently travel well beyond the borders of our hometowns, even our home countries. If I want good quality meat, groceries, drink, food, books, records, or whatever, then I can no longer gain that knowledge of quality from the slow and organic approach of the olden days: getting to know your local businesses through word of mouth and hard-earned experience. What I can do is establish that experience at home of the chain stores I think offer the best quality, the chain stores that I trust, and then, when I am in another town or country, find that chain. The brand becomes the trusted butcher, grocer, bar, restaurant, bookshop, music store, not the random individual who runs it.

Growing up there was a hardware store in my village, named after its owner. He had everything anyone would need in terms of hardware, and a visit to his shop always meant you got what you needed and you’d get about half an hour of random chat and gossip. A proper old fashioned shopkeeper, he wore that sort of blue jacket seen in shows like Open All Hours, and knew everything he had on his shelves. It was great. But when I moved away from that village and found myself in a different hardware store, I had no idea what I was looking for and the guy who ran that one knew even less. I soon learned that a place like B&Q or Homebase (back in the day) probably had what I needed in a far more consistent way, and both brands seemed to be everywhere, so wherever I lived in the country, they had what I needed.

Last time I drove through my old village, the hardware store wasn’t there. A Sainsbury’s stands in its place. I used to think it was sad — but is it? Or do chain-stores now serve the same function our familiar, trusted, small, independent, local businesses once did?

The hardware store owner’s chatter used to annoy customers, and I knew someone who once worked there part-time for the summer and was verbally abused by the owner so bad that they quit. The sins of a single small business owner will never match the egregious crimes of the corporate mega-companies in terms of scale, but where one might point to the awful things most huge companies promote, do, or endorse with their profits, I do wonder how much we knew about the people who used to run the smaller independent businesses we used to love and trust? Were they all righteous saints, or did they have their own skeletons in the closet commensurate with their scale?

This is not a defence of capitalism, nor a defence of the current order, but it is a defence of the notion that perhaps the proliferation of corporate chain-stores everywhere, which once made me mourn the quirky individuality of the independent high street, is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not necessarily because people have blindly “sold out”. It is an argument that we are still trading in the same value — trust — on which the old arguments for the smaller, individual, businesses over the faceless corporate entity were made. And that in the modern age perhaps (sad though it may be) we have collectively decided that it is better the devil we know (the familiar chainstore, with all its known faults and known products) than the devil we don’t (whatever this unknown indie is). After all — capitalism corrupts and the aim of all businesses, big or small, is to make profit, not to be morally good. Maybe, therefore, it is merely nostalgia for a different time that makes us think there is something morally superior for engaging in inherently dubious capitalist transactions with a single, independent, scoundrel than it is to make them with a larger, corporate entity? Maybe instead of seeing the proliferation of corporate chains on the high street and across the globe as the end of something we should see it merely as an appropriate evolution, in an increasingly globalised world, of the exact same instinct for trustworthiness and familiarity which once gave worth to the local independent high street? when the whole world gets to share its thoughts on the subject, it is no longer enough for you and the people in your town to trust a provider of goods and services. A trusted global brand will always be more highly recommended.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. My Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. 

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com 

I gave myself a creative challenge at the start of this year. Write, record and release a new song every month of 2025. I called it my Social Media Avoidance Project. A way of better occupying my mind and scrolling fingers than by endlessly staring at my phone.

The other rule was that the songs had to be written and recorded using only my Arturia Keylab synthesiser and the drums on Logic Pro. Not using real instruments I’ve spent a lifetime playing, like my trusty bass guitar.

Last week I completed the challenge. My final song for December.

Not only that, but I compiled the whole project into an album, complete with a bonus track. A cover version of a song I released back in 1999 with my old punk band, Academy Morticians. The original version was all jangly guitars and youthful energy. The cover is a brooding synth version full of adult despair.

What has any of this got to do with philosophy? Many things. Firstly the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” When it comes to creative acts the answer is usually simple: because someone chose to make it. And yet many feel intimidated or alienated from the possibility that they too could make some art. Art, of any kind, is often seen as something produced only by special, talented people. But in my experience the main distinction between the artist and the non-artist is simply the artist’s decision to have a go. Make something. See what happens. Make mistakes, and not be afraid.

I didn’t release my song each month because it was perfect. I released it because there was no more time left in the month. And I was inspired to write each month not because inspiration grabbed me, but because, knowing I had a creative deadline to meet, I engaged with the world differently, seeking out inspiration instead of waiting for it to seek me.

My musical background is punk. Do it yourself music. Not waiting around for the permission of record labels or venue owners to make music, just making it, however best you can. No more gatekeepers putting up the obstacles of ability and talent. Just grab an instrument or a microphone and make some noise. I have also been involved in improvised comedy for decades. Stepping into stages with no script, no plan, and just hoping ideas will come. And they always do. Why? Because like with my Social Media Avoidance Project, knowing you have to be inspired makes you find the shiny things in the everyday that will inspire you which might otherwise have been missed. The same way I seem to find something to turn my philosophical attention to every week when I decide I’m going to meet my Monday morning deadline for Philosophy Unleashed.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Because the desire to make something can make us redefine the original “nothing” and see new potential in it we were previously blind to.

You sit on a sofa, day after day, staring blankly at a TV screen, thinking nothing of it. Then one day you take a creative writing class and are given this prompt as inspiration you must use as the first line of your story: “You sit on a sofa, day after day, staring blankly at a TV screen.”  Now you see potential where once before you saw banality. You add a next line: “You realise you stare more at that box in the corner of the room than you look at the faces of your wife and children.” Wow! Now I’m interested.  Or perhaps: “You wonder how long it will be before someone finds you? Your death, your soul leaving your body and finding itself condemned to haunt this grim lounge for all eternity, was not nearly as shocking a revelation as the realisation it had been over a week now and still no-one had noticed you were dead.” Or maybe: “but you like your job as a security guard. You get to listen to music while you monitor the screen. And every so often, amidst all the nightly nothingness, you get those very rare occasions where you are given a God’s-eye view of a crime about to happen and you — only you — get to intervene and stop it from happening.”

Being creative is simply giving yourself the permission to see the potential in anything. And sometimes we need to force ourselves to do that by setting ourselves an arbitrary deadline or some unreasonable restrictions to adhere to, which give us no choice but to find the inspiration we were previously ignoring.

My Social Media Avoidance Project could also be considered philosophical because the lyrics deal with different themes and many of them raise philosophical questions.

Right Now asks us whether we need an alert on our phone to tell us every headline and current affairs event or if life might be better without it?

The Worst Is Not asks if anything can be considered the “worst” when you have someone to share it with?

The World’s Not Worth Saving Anymore is fairly self-explanatory and certainly provokes a lot of questions!

I’m Alright, We’re OK is about the disconnect between what we project on social media or in our creative outputs, and reality.

The Poverty of Low Expectations is about the distinction between education and schooling and the many ways in which schools fail to educate.

The Actor, The Cello, and the Dark, Dark Cloud is about cancel culture and the guilt of still liking the art of morally questionable people.

How Do You Ignore? asks us how we are able to continue living normal lives is such cognitive dissonance to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, climate crisis, and creeping rise of fascism all around us.

Is This a Song Yet? explores the very nature of art and who gets to define it.

Scared of the News is a Halloween song with a serious point: for all the terrors of famous horror movies there is nothing scarier than what we see in the daily news.

Holding My Phone Again asks whether the social media avoidance project worked, and examines how addicted we are to this harmful online world?

Early Christmas This Year questions if the date people start putting up their lights and decorations tells us something about the state of the world that year?

And what is more philosophical than asking about the meaning of life? There Must Be More Than This To Life does just that.

In other words - it was a busy week last week releasing my final single and a whole album, and tonight (Monday) I’m hosting an improv comedy show by students I’ve trained to make stuff up on the spot. So I didn’t really have time to think up an amazing piece of new philosophy for this week’s Philosophy Unleashed and was forced to find inspiration in what I had. And I think I did, thus proving the point. You read something rather than nothing, because I made a choice to find something in the apparent nothingness for you to read about.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. My Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. 

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com 

I thought about Ahmed’s work a lot recently in the most trivial of settings: an issue with my broadband.

I have already mentioned that it was down in the middle of October. An incredibly frustrating experience in itself, but most frustrating was the experience of trying to make a complaint to the provider — EE — and get the issue fixed. Long story short, the fault was reported on October 14th but wasn’t fixed until October 20th. During that time I spent 40 minutes first trying to report the issue and get some information of when it would be sorted — and was lied to about the timeframe of the fix — and then another 44 minutes on the phone with EE on October 17th finding out why the promised repair hadn’t happened and what our compensation would be. Each 40 minute interaction was a frustrating mess of establishing credentials, rehashing the problem, being fobbed off with unsatisfactory answers, fighting the case further, and finally being told things would be sorted a little bit quicker than they would had I not made the complaint.

Except they weren’t. My “expedited” fix promised on the 14th took place three days later than the original lengthy estimate. And as my November broadband bill arrived in my inbox last week, I noticed that for the second time in two billing cycles since the fault, we had yet to receive any of the promised compensation. I’d been lied to again.

Now I don’t know about you, but 40 minutes is a substantial chunk of a life to give up to something futile. Think of watching a 40 minute television programme that offers no entertainment, no joy, and when it ends the final credits just laugh at you for watching. Or a 40 minute lesson in school where the teacher just goes round in circles and nothing is ever learnt. Or the first half of a terrible football game with no goals, no attempts, and no excitement. These are obvious wastes of our time. 40 minutes with EE customer service, knowing as you go into it that it will be 40 minutes of your life you will never get back, is — as Ahmed has written about — a feature, not a bug, of their complaints system. They don’t want you to want to get in touch and complain. They want to put you off. They don’t want to give me my compensation and they hope that by making it so off-putting and difficult to raise the complaint that what is owed has not been paid, I simply won’t bother to complain.

But of course I did. Because of a commitment to justice and what is right, but also because it’s nearly Christmas and I could do with the money (fun fact: since it began in 2019 I’ve spent nearly £1500 of my own money running and maintaining this free website, and have only ever been donated a fiver by any of its many readers in support). So on Saturday morning I took a deep breathe and re-entered the hellscape of the EE customer service chat to ask where our refund was. Again, it took 46 minutes of back and forth chat but eventually I was promised the money would be paid within three working days.

And maybe it will be? Who knows? All I know is that the thought of having to waste another 40+ minutes of precious life talking to an EE customer service ”guide” was enough to make me not pursue the complaint when the first bill came through in October, and when the November bill came and there was still no compensation paid, it took me several days to work up the stamina to bother. And when I finally did, and the near-hour had passed, I still had no idea if my complaint was resolved because I’d been promised similar things by EE before and they had not happened. I felt defeated even though I had, on paper, “won”.

And this is utterly trivial stuff. An unreliable broadband provider, an unpaid refund. Ahmed’s point is that such hostile systems are present in far more important venues. Complaints about workplace bullying or sexual harassment, complaints about severe misconduct from institutions of authority. Complaints politically, about how our country does or doesn’t work.

Complaints are important in any honest endeavour. A willingness to openness to being told that the thing you’re trying to do is not working and needs to be improved. An honest endeavour wants to hear its complaints because it wants to meet its objectives. It wants to fix those things being complained about.

But a dishonest endeavour, entangled in a dishonest system, where complaint means fault and fault means accountability and accountability means job-loss, profit-loss, or even jail-time, does not want to hear your complaints. They want complaints kicked down the road to someone else’s door. Or muffled and silenced. Drawn out until you give up at the futility. Made into a molasses you can’t unstick yourself from which drags you down into a state of despair so pulling that you drop the complaint simply to reclaim what’s left of your everyday life.

Needless to say, once my contract is up with EE I shall be leaving. I’d love to leave sooner, but the procedure there, too, for leaving the contract early is made intentionally difficult and hostile even when the company has failed to provide the things for which it has been  contracted. Alternative companies might be just as bad — and probably are — but of all the broadband companies I’ve used, EE has had by far the worst complaints procedure.

And ultimately that is what this post is about. The complaint as a canary in the coal mine. Think about the companies you use, the institutions, the workplaces, and ask yourself how open they are to complaint. How easy it is to do. How complaints are dealt with. And ask what that tells you about the honesty, or dishonesty, of its endeavour.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. My Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. 

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com 

Turns out that the politician,

who made his name pointing fingers at immigrants

and blasting out divisive rhetoric

about “them” and “us”,

“over here” and “over there”,

for decades,

in public,

was a racist at school too.

Who knew?

I also thought it might be appropriate, in light of the findings of the Covid inquiry, to flag up some prescient posts from Philosophy Unleashed we made during the pandemic that seemed to already know what a shambles the Johnson government was at the time:

36. COVID-19 AND PHILOSOPHY: Thinking Clearly In Times of Uncertainty

37. ELEMENTARY LOGIC - Why UK Schools Must Close Now

65. IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE COVID-CHRISTMAS - Re-Thinking The 2020 Festive Season

69. WHAT, IF ANYTHING, HAVE I LEARNT FROM HAVING COVID 19? - Reflections on Getting the Plague

89. THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF COVID 19 - Checking For Symptoms In The Dark

90. FREEDOM DAY - An Anarchist Account

104. DOWN ON DOWNING STREET - Refocusing The Ethical Inquiry Away From Christmas Parties

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. My Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. 

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com 

“We heard from a cab driver it’s the same when it snows,” he texted, incredulous.

You bet it is, I told him. The white stuff comes down and the country grinds to a halt. Schools close. Transport freezes. And roads and sidewalks are left to thaw, melt, refreeze, and turn into muddy, slippery death-traps until they die a natural death, inevitable accidents be damned.

It’s always worth paying attention when you get your insular little bubbles popped. This January we were in Sweden for New Year’s. Our second new year in the country and both times it snowed heavily on New Year’s Eve. The first time we were amazed that the downfall had no impact at all on the roads and subsequent plane home we were due to get the following day. This year it was trains. A train to Stockholm and a bus to the train station, all running smoothly and on time despite the previous day’s blizzard.

In the US I have seen flash-flooding bring down power lines and flood roads and cars, but I have also never seen a state where such downpours are frequent radically fall apart in the provision of public services because of a known and predictable weather system. If the frequent rain means your trains can’t run, they seem to work out that something needs changing with the way we run our trains.

Which is not to say Sweden or America have everything perfect. They obviously don’t. And they too have their bubbles of how things just are or have to be because they always have been. But it is to remind us that when things fall apart or don’t work in known and predictable ways, it is perhaps worth asking if what seems so inevitable and unchangeable really has to be?

I was speaking to students about war this week. It was, after all, Remembrance Day on Tuesday. And this is another classic example of a bubble. If a country does something violent to our country, what do we do? Go to war was the inevitable answer. So I asked them to consider what we could do instead of war? For many it was the first time they ever considered not fighting could be an option. War as the response just seemed so obvious. Likewise prison is another obvious consequence they have never considered revising. What could we do instead of prison when a crime has been committed and still feel justice had been served? It had never occurred to them that a crime might go unpunished and that lack of punishment be more just than the punishment.

Another class were discussing free-will and I asked them what they would do if they discovered someone they loved was cheating on them.

“You’d have to break up, sir.”

“Why?”

We traced the assumption to just what you’re supposed to do according to every film, book, TV show, song and play. The relationship must end according to culture and we are massively influenced, potentially causally determined, by that culture.

But what if it didn’t?  What if you work out why the cheating happened and see if you can get through it instead?

“What if we didn’t do what we always do?” is one of the most powerful questions a philosopher can ask. Because there are always bubbles clouding our instincts and intuitions about what must be, and it is also true that, somewhere in the world, at least someone has a completely different instinct or intuition to the dominant one and are doing things very differently indeed. Not always for the better, of course! But sometimes.

So next time you unthinkingly accept that what you’re about to do, or what is about to happen, is just the way things have to be, stop and have a think about it. Because it’s highly likely it is not. And you could be the first domino to fall that makes things go in another direction.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. My Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. 

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com