New World Dogma – How Capitalism Kills Reason AND Connection

What do Joe Dispenza, Jordan Peterson, and music pedants have in common? Do they all secretly suffer from irritable bowel syndrome? Have they all been implicated in the extinction of a rare species of wombat? Sadly no, but you get to try and guess before I tell you. Here are some hints. It is a particular, important and attractive character trait, that all three of the aforementioned people must shut down. Because today is all about the ways in which information is presented not only to kill inquiry, but also to divide us into in-groups and out groups. Cool, uncool, informed, uninformed, on the ball or behind the times and so on. Yes, ye olde divide and conquer technique is not exclusive to politicians. It spans science, healthcare, pseudo spiritualism and those inescapable games of one-upmanship you get trapped in at hipster parties.

So listen closely, dear listeners, and take note of when you guess today's big character trait. All three of today's dialogues have the same aim, contain the same mechanism, and ensure the same outcome – alienation, and the death of today's incredibly important and attractive character trait. If you’re listening for the first time, I’m Jordan Reyne, a philosophy graduate with a serious allergy to self-help gurus, and this is The Loneliness Industry, a philosophy podcast where we talk about the many, many ways that we are atomised by capitalism, its values, structures and processes. Today, we look at a process that encourages inquiry and the deepening of our understanding – when it is done well, and driven by today's crucial trait. When done badly – or with power in mind – this same process substitutes inquiry for dogma, splits us into in- and out-groups, becoming what Karl Jaspers called ‘un-reason.’ That process is the scientific process, and it’s key human ingredient turns out to be key in ANY field.

A heads up that this is part one of a two part episode. Today we are looking at mechanisms, both the useful and the destructive, in terms of deepening connection and understanding. Via today's three conversations, you’ll learn how to spot one of these mechanisms – one I am calling the faux terminus—a fake ending designed to look like the last word, when it really isn’t. It is as deadly to connection and conversation as it is to the scientific process. In part two, next week, we tour the arenas that flourish when inquiry is stalled—the so-called beauty industry, medicine, diet culture, self‑help and more.

For today's journey we will meet:
1. The Music Pedant (aka the gatekeeping authority of cool)
2. The Western Spiritualist (aka holier-than-though salesman)
3. and, well, Jordan Peterson (aka the tool‑worshipper pushing to rescue a failing theory)
And even though that last one might look more scientific than the rest, we will see today that what Jaspers refers to as “un-reason” renders all things equal. Equally nonsensical, Equally unscientific and Equally annoying.

Let us start by welcoming to the stage “Dougal,” the music pedant. Here is the style of conversation he is versed in.

Music Pedant: “I mean, she called herself a DJ and she’d never even HEARD of Distended Labia & the Fuck Puppets.”

You: “That sounds… bad.”

Music Pedant: “Hell yeah. How can you pretend to be a DJ when you don’t even know about Almidura Kowacs’ biggest side projects, recorded entirely on a lawnmower?”

You: “…Ah, big influence on Nine Inch Nails?”

Music Pedant: “Nine Inch Nails? Oh my god. That is so mainstream! Jesus. They essentially invented grindcore, man, not Jo average FAUX industrial.”

You: “…OK. … important?”

Music Pedant: “Ah YEAH! Jesus. Are you even IN this conversation?”

Whether or not you have met one of the Dougals of this world, I have a question for you. Did it sound like an actual conversation to you? By that I mean, was it about a genuine exchange of ideas, an enthusiasm for another's experiences and perspectives, or was it more about…. proving something? This non-conversation is our first example of what Karl Jaspers would likely have called “un-reason” – exactly because today's star character trait is lacking. If you are watching on YouTube, feel free to write in the comments at which point you guess what this particular trait is. This mystery trait is required for developing ideas or theories together, and for having an interest in someone else's life, and for motivating us to understand things, and others, on a deeper level.

Have you guessed yet? Another clue – whilst Karl Jaspers may not actually have refused to date people who lack this trait, he still found it as much of a deal-breaker as I do. He also lived not far from me, in Heidelberg, but died before I could find him on tinder. Which is very, very sad, seeing as we had this thing in common.

In case you haven't guessed yet, today's star character trait is curiosity, and Karl Jaspers considered it to be part of reason itself. He drew attention to the fact that curiosity is indispensable not only for expanding understanding; but as the very motor on which that expansion of knowledge runs. Along with Thomas Kuhn, Adorno and others, Jaspers highlighted what happens when we LOSE our curiosity, and slip into what he calls “un-reason.” It goes like this. When curiosity dies, inquiry stops. Knowledge then starts to ossify into dogma. Yes. Dogma, where coveted factoids are decoupled from context, and used to divide and reject…. Or to sell shit. Or to make the lives of other party-goers utterly, totally miserable.

A quick example of what Jaspers was talking about – i.e. curiosity being shut down, and dogma resulting: Bishop Ussher’s “the world began in 4004 BCE” idea started as real curiosity — an attempt to reconcile history and scripture. However, once it was printed into Bibles in the 1700s, the calculation became untouchable. The curiosity was there to begin with, but once printed into scripture, questions like “where do dinosaurs fit in?” became heresy. Without inquiry, the idea hardened into creed.

But wait. This is a podcast on loneliness. What does un-reason have to do with loneliness?

This: un-reason is death to connection, because it kills the very trait that is vital TO connection. i.e. Curiosity. Curiosity doesn’t just drive us to deepen our understanding of the WORLD, it drives us to want to understand OTHERS. Without genuine curiosity, we don’t get to know one another. Instead, we do similar to what Dougal does – vomit out facts in an attempt to try and impress (or depress) someone else. Without curiosity – and lets not forget we are living in the cult of the individual here – all we end up doing is trying to cultivate particular perceptions of us; trying to make others see us as: cool, as “in the right” or “in the know.”

When we stop being curious about each other, parading and posturing is all that is left. On a larger, general scale, this leads to the whole in-group out group thing. In the same way that music pedants make you feel uncool, feeling shit about yourself can be invoked on a societal level when un-reason is going on.

All that means recognizing a total lack of curiosity – i.e. unreason – is a very useful means of saving your self-esteem, your connections and your sanity. And beyond that – un-reason is what allows knowledge to crumble into dogma – in ways we cannot see unless we know what to look for. Because when money is involved, as it invariably is under capitalism, un-reason gets better at hiding. Un-reason is not averse to putting on a lab coat and saying things like “studies have shown...” in order to convince you to buy the cure-all everyone else is using, or even just to make you stop questioning. We will dive very deep into examples of this in part two.

All this makes curiosity an antidote to un-reason. It shows how vital asking questions actually IS – even when everyone around you has stopped doing it, and all you can hear is them parroting the latest cure-all, health trend or pop psych theory.

This episode is for all of you have ended up encountering a particular catch 22 – feeling even more outcast BECAUSE of your search for more info; because of your search to make life more tolerable, less lonely, less exhausting and less stigmatising. It is for those of you who end up shut OUT by those who’ve shut themselves IN – in to trends, into performance, into the un-reason of repeating what needs to be repeated to be considered “in the right.”

This is for those of you doing your best with the tools on offer, only to find that those tools don’t cover it, and that YOU get blamed for their inadequacy. Today you will get a tool that works, and is free. We hone in on the faux-terminus, so you can see when someone’s headed into dogma. Thomas Kuhn is also going to help us discern the scientific from the unscientific and make you feel a lot less bad about being labelled the outsider. Even if that means we have to spend time defining what a paradigm is.

Cos some of the biggest issues facing us, arise when inquiry is over – when we are stonewalled or outcast cos a paradigms has been STOPPED from shifting, even when it should, and for the sake of making money, propping up power, or fortifying existing societal values. Values like individualism, control, etc etc, surprise surprise.

So this episode is in praise of curiosity, and in warning of what happens when it dies. It aims to shield you from the emergence of dogma - the profitable fog from which all holy grails emerge.

Un-reason-able arguments

Lets recall our music-pedant-tedium exchange. Our first example of a conversation that isn’t one. One potential sign you are dealing with unreason is that it is annoying, tiresome, and ends with your making lame excuses to leave, like the urgent need to vacuum your dog.

But lets paint a more accurate picture of what's going on – of what Jaspers calls un-reason. As mentioned, he considers curiosity and inquiry indispensable parts of reason, so taking them out of the picture means you are not actually USING reason at all – even when you are spouting bits of knowledge. But curiosity also plays another role. It BINDS reason to knowledge. Curiosity is the motor that drives the inquiry that is necessary to make knowledge the ever developing, deepening, shifting and re-contextualising thing it should be. Reason, in action, is a preparedness to question our assumptions, and what we think we know.

An example of the shifting, developing nature of knowledge, and how vital it is to continually question our assumptions. Only a hundred years ago, we thought we knew that animals had no inner world. Behaviouralism was becoming popular, and animals seemed to be sort of meat-machines that did thing X in response to stimulus Y.

If we had left it at that, our understanding of them would not have deepened. Instead, new observations and a questioning of existing knowledge went on, and we realized stuff like – this cat is literally manipulating me into becoming its servant. It PLANS, and adjusts it’s plans like some evil genius. It has an inner world. Uh oh. Thank fuck it doesn’t have opposable thumbs.

Adorno and Horkheimer also shared Jaspers opinion, about how critical curiosity is. No. Not for killing manipulative cats, though there is killing involved in their warning – they suggest that Capitalism works to kill off curiosity. Capitalism likes to settle on information that is marketable, and that reproduces it’s own values. When you find stuff, “backed by science” that seems to do that, you don’t necessarily WANT to look further. It might destroy profits when new info means altering or re-framing what we know. So curiosity dries up. With no deepening, re-thinking or re-shaping of what we know, we can end up in situations where we genuinely think we know it all. You can guess what happens then – a breeding ground for dogma opens up. Adorno and Horkheimer tip us off to the idea that we sometimes DECIDE we know ENOUGH, because the factoid we just gleaned will help us sell something.

Think of the cigarette ads from the 1940s, where doctors posed, puffing away, under slogans like “More doctors smoke Camels!” Back then, “science” had apparently confirmed that smoking calmed the nerves, aided digestion, and even helped with weight control. It was perfect—profitable, reassuring, and utterly untrue. When early research DID begin linking smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry didn’t wish to rethink very quickly. No. First it doubled down, funding fake studies to keep the “facts” closer to where the money was. This doubling down is a behaviour that will come up again today. In any case, for the tobacco industry, as for the sugar industry and others like it later on, curiosity had become an existential threat to profit.

From Alienation to More Alienation and a Double Bind

Lets look at how this decoupling of saleable facts from curiosity works using another everyday conversation. Now, our music pedant already showed us how factoids can be used to alienate. It was more subtle in terms of how real inquiry was absent, because a lot of facts WERE being slung around. Not to facilitate inquiry though. More as a dick slinging contest to find out who is “in.”

Next though, a typical pseudo spiritualist convo. The shutting down of inquiry is clearer here, and additionally, it shows how grains of truth are decoupled from their context, robbing them of any contextual sense, in order to sell stuff.

Dispenza-type: “I mean, it’s mindblowing, isn't it. Your thoughts can literally change your DNA. When you raise your vibration, your cells reprogram themselves. They even showed it in studies. It’s SCIENCE.”

You: “Right… but those studies were about gene expression in mice under stress — did the relaxed ones eliminate stress with their thoughts?” Dispenza-type: “That isn’t the point. Humans CAN change their thoughts! And when you do, you’re not just healing trauma, you’re altering your genetic destiny.”

You: “So… I should skip the chemotherapy and buy a vision board?”

Dispenza-type: “Look, self-healing is SCIENCE. It’s PROVEN. And I can tell from how you’re talking that your attitude really IS the problem. Seriously, you need Dispenzas course. You are a prime candidate.”

If this looks scientific to you, I am so sorry. It is sales patter in a lab coat. The actual research into stress biology has been hollowed out and repackaged as a miracle doctrine. You’re NOT being invited to ask how we got from frightened rodents to curing cancer with vibes, instead, inquiry is shut down with a move that turns out to be typical when dogmatism is involved – making YOU, personally, the problem. Western spiritualism often takes this even further, as we talked about in episode 10 on western spiritualism. It labels you the problem AND the EVIDENCE that the disembodied doctrine makes sense: “see? You DO have an attitude problem. Evidence that that's where your cancer comes from,”

This issue goes beyond bad logic, which we DO get to. It’s about being issued the end move of “nothing more to see here,” before real questioning can start. This kind of stonewalling is necessary to prop up such dogma, because further scientific inquiry might show that regardless of whether we can change our thoughts about them, certain kinds of stressors DO make you ill.

Stressors like uranium for example.

And yes, I DID just say that Jo Dispenza isn’t scientific. Feel free to rail at that — especially if you are in Dispenza’s target market: men looking for meaning, but terrified of seeming flaky or ‘too feminine. I am counting on such comments to illustrate the structure of un-reason we will be teaching you to identify later on.

And before we get to why Jordan Peterson shows just as much un-reason in action as “Dr” Dispenza or music pedants, we need to dive deeper into something we often take for granted: what science actually IS.

Thomas Kuhn – the Scientific Process

We tend to think of “the scientific method” as a clean, step-by-step process: observe, hypothesize, test, conclude, publish. But Thomas Kuhn — in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — showed that this neat procedure is not quite how things operate in the real world. There are other key elements that almost always go unseen.

First: most science happens inside what he called a paradigm. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what that word even means — despite the fact that its popular use came from Kuhn’s work.

Lets start with a great example of what a paradigm ISN’T. This comes from L’Oréal, who use the most hilarious pseudo-scientific words – like “pro-collagen bio-actives,” “micro-resurfacing peptides” to market what is usually, essentially, face cream. I find this of creative lying, I mean, marketing, is so hilarious that I invite you to post any similar faux-science claptrap you have come across in the comments. In any case, at the time of recording, L'Oréal are literally using the phrase “paradigm shift” on their website, to mean a change in marketing strategy from whatever they were using before to what they are calling “Proactive Beauty.”

They think it's a “paradigm shift” if you move from selling products professing to fix existing “problems,” to selling products professing to fix problems you DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE YET. That is their proactive beauty thing.

So. What a paradigm shift is NOT: it is not monetizing anxiety about the future, when you were previously focussed on monetising anxiety about the present. When Thomas Kuhn talks about a paradigm, he is talking about a whole world-view — a framework that sets the rules of the game: what counts as knowledge, what questions are worth asking, what methods are valid, what counts as evidence, and even what answers are thinkable at all. It is therefore much larger and more important than rousing panic about wrinkles. L’Oreal have NOT changed their world view in any way. It still fits right inside the dominant capitalist paradigm, with all of the control, comparison and heteronormativity that entails.

But back to actual science, not scientific-sounding word salad.
A paradigm always has certain, foundational assumptions that have long been considered accepted. In that “everyone already knows this” kind of way. We take these foundational assumptions more or less for granted — things like gravity behaving a certain way on Earth, or the atom being the smallest possible unit of matter. When we do experiments, they happen kind of “on top of” these accepted foundations. Meaning, within the paradigm of what questions are relevant or askable, based on what we think we already know, and what results we consider comprehensible.

As long as the paradigm holds, scientists do what Kuhn called normal science: within the current framework, they test details, patch small anomalies, and basically tidy up the existing world-view.

But over time, anomalies build up — in the form of results that don’t fit. Sometimes, their lack of fit is because they don’t make sense at all in terms of what our underlying assumptions even ARE. When that happens too often, curiosity starts pushing against the foundations. Scientists are forced to ask,
“Hmm. Are our basic assumptions actually correct?”

Here’s an example from Toruń, in Poland, where I also once lived. Again, several hundred years too late to find this guy on tinder. Copernicus, another curiosity-loving dude. Back in the 16th century, he started getting some seriously weird results, considering the foundational belief of the time was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. He asked a very risky question at this point: “Does it really though? Does the Sun really revolve around the Earth if I am seeing this?”

Priests and Popes and so on did not like this question. Which brings us to element two of what Kuhn draws our attention to: You don’t have to be a priest or a pope or a Jo Dispenza enthusiast to HATE the idea you might be wrong. Everyone hates being wrong, but imagine how much MORE you would hate it is you were the one who built the assumptions, or... potentially worse, if your career, reputation, or power DEPENDED on them. Kuhn reminds us that it’s humans doing science, and that humans have egos, reputations, and university chairs to protect. They’re not always keen to say, “Hmm. Maybe I was incorrect,” or worse, “Maybe that thing I’ve built my entire career on — and passed on to generations of students — is total bullshit.” When power is involved, that reluctance becomes institutional. Back to what Copernicus cracked open; a century later, Galileo, who kept up with the annoying questions about the sun not revolving around the earth copped fury from the Church. They were so allergic to the idea of being wrong (and losing all their power because of it) they waxed bloodthirsty and murdery with anyone continuing this line of inquiry. In short, they shut DOWN inquiry. With death. And guillotines.

Fast forward a few centuries. When markets are making money, a similar thing occurs. When people started asking about the link between sugar and disease risk, the sugar industry were not keen on this line of inquiry. When evidence began to mount in the 1960s, they did not say “Shit, sorry, our product might be harmful and addictive.” No. Instead they steered attention, and industry funding, toward dietary fat as the bigger issue—a sort of “there is nothing to see here! Look there!” way to shut down inquiry.

Whether it’s power, reputation, money or tenure at stake, what happens, Kuhn shows us, is this: when question marks start popping up like syphilis sores on the face of a founding-father theory, a kind of stuck phase sets in — the evidence that threatens the paradigm gets ignored or sidelined or written off. The people pointing out the festering sores get dismissed or ridiculed — or, if they’re unlucky enough to live a few hundred years ago, potentially put to death. Today, even in the absence of such OBVIOUS power structures, Kuhn shows how it can take years of reputational bloodshed before the scientific community collectively sighs and says, “OK then. Maybe we were wrong. Fuck.”

Then, and only then, do things move – and foundational beliefs get properly re-examined. That is when an actual paradigm shift can happen — if said foundational beliefs DO turn out to be incorrect, or inaccurate. Then, what follows is a complete re-framing of what counts as reality. Yes, a complete re-framing of everything we thought we knew. Like when you find out that a syphilis riddled imposter is not your real dad. And NOT like when you are convinced to worry about the number of wrinkles on your future self. I hope that difference is clear.

Here is a more serious and classic example — Newtonian physics. It worked beautifully for explaining motion on Earth and even for predicting planetary orbits, but as measurements became more precise, the numbers started getting weird. Experiments and astronomical observations began giving results that didn’t quite fit.

The assumption behind those experiments was that space, time, and motion behave the same everywhere — that the same “laws” apply universally. But when scientists looked more closely, that assumption started to crack. Einstein came along and showed that space and time aren’t fixed at all; they bend and stretch with gravity and speed. He didn’t just tweak Newton’s formulas — he reworked the underlying premises, the bedrock. The framework of physics itself had to be overhauled.

Nobody's Perfect – including bodies of knowledge

All this to say, that whilst it can procure extremely helpful results, and serve to deepen our understanding of the world, the scientific method isn’t perfect. It is NOT an objective conveyor belt to truth - cos it has people in it. It’s a social process — and can therefore fall prey to forces with an interest in STOPPING curiosity – forces like religion, politics, or marketeers who think inventing sciency-sounding words will fool women into buying stuff. The big point is this, even in the places where we don’t expect it, like science, investigation gets shut down. Stuck phases happen - where anyone doubting the current paradigm, or the theories that come out of it, is shoved into an out-group. Labelled incompetent, uninformed, paranoid, or simply not worth talking to. They may linger in this out group for years, and may even lose their job or tenure.
BUT, these kinds of patterns are not LIMITED to scientists doing science.

Because if even scientists can end up cornered into dogma, we are ALL subject to it. We are doing it when we shut others out for not agreeing that OUR pet theories/ favourite diet/ most prised self-help recommendations. We are doing it when we spout facts not to encourage exchange or getting to know someone, but to prove we are “cooler” or “more enlightened” or even just “more correct.” Remember our non-conversations with the music pedant and the Dispenza devotee? In each case, one person thought they had the answers, and when the other person had different ideas, the conversation got shut down. A “final move” was issued and a verdict was given. One person labelled the other stupid, unenlightened, not knowledgable, or simply not worth talking to. Same pattern – un-reason shutting down inquiry, conversation and connection.

In the absence of curiosity, we will cherry-pick the factoids that serve our existing agendas, image projections, likes, dislikes, and biases. We no longer look at – or let anyone else look at – the paradigm that produced them, and if THAT is flawed. We covet decontextualized fragments that support what we already think – fuck context, and end of story. This is dogma in action. Now to the good news.

Yes, dear listeners, there are tools that help us spot this. Un-reason leaves traces. Along with a few behavioural cues, there are tell-tale rhetorical devices that help us see when it’s in play. That is where we are going next - examining the signs that occur when someone is clutching pet factoids, intends to shut you out and...

Block block block!

Sign number one that cracks in a paradigm have started to show; that pustules are already oozing on a syphilitic face - but no one is ready to see them. Doubling down.

We mentioned this before in non-convo two with the Dispenza enthusiast. This same pattern exists inside and outside scientific inquiry. Kuhn shows us that during stuck phases — when anomalies pile up but no one wants to admit it — sciences practitioners also double down on protecting existing assumptions, rather than questioning or testing them. One safe way to do this – meaning, one that doesn’t draw attention to the theory being flawed, is to defend the tools that emerged from said theory — meaning the rulers, the metrics, the devices used to give those theories weight.

It’s worth remembering that the tools of inquiry are built inside the paradigm too. So when the paradigm starts to wobble, this is like a shift from using one’s measuring sticks to defending them. This defence consists of reassert accuracy as opposed to questioning relevance - as if confirming accuracy affirms the theory they were founded on. Peterson is a brilliant example of this that we look at very soon, I promise.

First a more amusing example though, where we see that the accuracy of tools has zero to do with the accuracy of theory:
Phrenology — everyone's favourite ludicrous 19th-century “science.” Phrenology has become a kind of poster child for demonstrating just how dumb-ass, racist and sexist things that call themselves a “science” can actually be. Here, practitioners measured skulls with gleaming brass calipers and took meticulous notes on every bump and curve. The idea here was that the shape of your skull was directly related to your personality, intelligence and character. These ere callipers and rules. So, very accurate. The assumptions though? ah... deranged. But because the data looked mathematical, it became the gospel of the time. It was also deemed to procure sufficient “evidence” that women were emotional, poor people were lazy, and colonised peoples were conveniently less evolved.

Defending the accuracy of tools is a wonderful way to sidestep very flawed underlying theories.

Another such tool is BMI — the Body Mass Index. It was built in the 1800s by Quetelet in an attempt to describe l’homme moyen—the average white European male—not to diagnose anyone. Insurers and public-health bodies later adopted it to sort and price bodies; “average” slid into being “ideal.” Clinically though, the categories rest on population-level associations with risk (mortality, diabetes, etc), not an individual-level causal threshold—but associations do not equal diagnosis. Like, eating a mediterenian diet is apparently associated with health too, and people in the mediterenian still die of heart disease and cancer.

Key here is that the early reference body was the European male and only later did researchers come up with data for other groups – and in the case of women, the numbers were largely arrived at by men simply assuming what female values would be. The limits for other groups were revisited and tweaker, (e.g., lower Asian thresholds) but these tweaks and need for different cut-off pints didn’t turn BMI into a biologically universal yardstick – they showed that it WASN'T one.

Today, BMI is used to police bodies despite saying little about composition, fat distribution, hormones, or disease—especially for anyone who isn’t the original “average man.” At the individual level it’s a weak proxy, and the thresholds were policy choices, not discoveries of nature. It survives because of how brilliantly it fits into capitalisms world-view: it promotes control – both in the form of self-regulation and authority figure regulation. It promotes comparison. It is profitable yet cheap: governments/insurers get a tidy proxy; doctors get quick authority; industries get endless “corrections” to sell. It regulates because it moralises deviation as failure—you are unhealthy because this number says so.

So the tool remains a holy grail, despite its inadequacy, and because it props up a world-view – it props up a paradigm no one wants to shift.

There are Tools, and there are TOOLs

This very mechanism – of tools being defended because power structures gain from it – shows up in our next conversation. As does the rhetorical tool of shutting down inquiry with un-reason. See if you can spot them now, cos those two things are the tell-tale signs that dogma is incoming. We turn now to Jordan Peterson.
Peterson (paraphrased, because his language was even more offensive):
“Even if we don’t like what it tells us, IQ tests aren’t wrong. And that means we have to accept that people of colour are less intelligent.”

You: “Wait — IQ tests were designed to measure performance within a narrow, white, Western schooling context. They don’t account for structural disadvantage, chronic stress, or the fact that the people who defined intelligence were white men in the first place.”

Peterson: “You might not like it, but IQ tests are one of psychology’s greatest achievements. If you throw them out, you’re throwing out all of psychology and everything it has achieved.”

Did you spot the faux-terminus here? The hostage taking move of “you have to agree or you are dumb enough to go against the whole of psychology”? We will be delving right into the mechanics of that in a minute, but I want to point out too that the logic itself is flawed. Peterson is using a compositional fallacy (what’s true of a part must be true of the whole). So it isn't logically valid, even if it might look that way, to some. Did you also spot how the defence of a tools accuracy (I mean IQ tests, not Peterson himself) was used to defend the paradigm behind it too? A paradigm in which white privilidge is subtly embedded? A short aside here, because this particular kind of faux terminus – where it looks like it is logical – is particularly dangerous. It blinds us to all the other, deep seated issues in a theory and the paradigm itself. So a reminder of why IQ tests don’t measure much that we can legitimately define, other than school performance.

A Tool with Big Issues

For a start, when building a tool, you have to agree on what the tool is meant to measure. Temperature, for example.

Now, in the case of “intelligence,” there has never been any agreement on what it actually is. I’m not exaggerating. A major survey (Sternberg & Detterman, 1986) asked professionals across disciplines to define intelligence, and no two groups agreed. This went beyond country or cultural differences in definition. No two groups even agreed within the same universities. So the field basically ended where it started: measuring whatever skills happen to predict success in white, Western schools.

Now, another thing we need to know about tools is when to throw them away. In scientific contexts, tools are developed with reference to theory. A tool is deemed unfit when it stops giving results that make sense for that theory.

For example, if a thermometer said it was freezing while we were sweating through our shirts, we wouldn’t “adjust” reality to fit the reading — we’d throw the thermometer out. Unless we are in perimenopause, where that shit actually happens.

But because we are humans, problems occur when a tool gives us readings tell us what we want to hear — or readings that confirm what we already believe. Any astrology charlatan knows this – dish out readings that say “you will soon meet the love of your life” and you will get great ratings. The point is, we suddenly become blind to the fact that the tool might be measuring bias, not truth. This is what psychology calls confirmation bias. Just as Kuhn reminds us that scientists are prone to human frailty, Karl Popper points out quite directly that scientists are just as vulnerable to bias as anyone else. There are some seriously sexist, racist and homophobic scientists out there, and yes, it does interfere with what they EXPECT as valid results.

Quick notes on the scientific untenability of Racism

To claim that some ethnic groups are inherently less intelligent hinges on the assumption that there are major genetic differences between those groups. But research by Richard Lewontin (1972) showed the opposite: around 85% of genetic variation occurs within so-called racial groups, and only 15% between them. Meaning, ethnicity can’t explain differences in test performance.

Now, recall that tools are built with reference to a theory, meaning that you have to constantly ask whether the results you’re getting are reasonable — or not. It would NOT be reasonable, for example, if a temperature-measuring device showed Sweden as always warm and Poland as the only country with temperature variation. We would know this tool was faulty.

IQ is assumed to be innate — that is, fixed. If we’re measuring something innate we wouldn’t expect scores to rise when people from excluded groups then gain access to the same educational and cultural institutions. That isn’t “innate.” It’s contextual. It’s correlated with opportunity. It is not reasonable to expect innate abilities to show a rise (or fall) if the tool is sound.

But speaking of expectations - what would we expect to see if a theory of intelligence was BIASED?

Well, if it was built by Culture A, we’d expect that people from Culture B — who weren’t trained or rewarded in that system — would inevitably score lower. We’d also expect that, within Culture A itself, groups marginalised by class, gender, disability, or anything else would ALSO perform “worse.” And this is exactly what happens with IQ testing.

Peterson’s readiness to defend a failing tool for dear career-life at the expense of already disadvantaged groups isn’t the sign of a curious guy wanting to enhance his understanding. He is doing exactly what we mention as sign one: doubling down on a tool to defend the assumptions behind it. It’s dogmatism in action. That he fails to see how variations based on ethnic group, gender, and access are SIGNS THE TOOL IS FLAWED, and NOT actual confirmation of his world-view, is racism in action.

What If You Are Still Convinced?

Finally, we come to the structural part of recognizing unreason. Because even when the content of un-reason blinds you, and Peterson really manages to blind a lot of people, the structure can become your eyes instead.
Cos here is the thing. The structure of un-reason goes beyond psychology or science. It can be seen every time an individual or group rallies around one thing as the answer — as a “scientifically proven” path to salvation. It can be seen every time you are shut out or shut down for asking why a holy grail didn’t work in your case, or your friends case. Because when evidence to the contrary exists, the dogmatic double down. They do not question their holy grail, and they do not allow questions ABOUT their holy grail - because industries, or identities, or in-groups have been built around it. We come to my oft-stated point here – it is not your fault when you find yourself in an out-group for daring to ask questions. The blame belongs to those who would shut down curiosity – which can be anyone from Jo down the road to your healthcare provider.

How To Spot An Un-reasonable conversation

Finally – lets talk about what today's three completely unreasonable conversations have in common. It’s all about the faux terminus. Peterson, Dispenza, the music pedant, along with a tonne of commenters on forums share the desire to shut down curiosity. They share this cos whatever ideas they are pedalling are designed to give them some advantage. In other words, this is about power and image. Be that looking “cooler” than you, being able to sell you something, or being able to look like an authority on some subject. Each maintains an upper hand by making it LOOK like “there is nothing more to discuss here,” when there actually IS. They maintain their power position by serving a full stop – but that full stop is not one. It is a faux full stop. A faux ending. A faux terminus.
Its function is shutting down inquiry, like Jaspers talks about, making the faux-terminus a sign of un-reason in action.

The Many Means of Executing a Faux Terminus

Now, it just so happens that there are a number of ways to DO a faux terminus. A lot of the particular ways already have names – fancy names, sometimes with Latin in them, which is why I followed suit. Yes. I made this up guys, but because it is useful and hopefully something others can catch onto and use, because being able to NAME what is going on makes it easier to call out. I will be doing more on the faux terminus in another mini-episode too, cos I think it is important.

The Function of the Faux Terminus

The term “faux terminus” groups rhetorical tactics by their FUNCTION. In this case, the function of preventing further inquiry. Lets look at how each of today's three convos pull this off.
Peterson’s faux terminus is a hostage-taking variety. It says:
“Question this, and you have to throw out everything.”

It’s a rhetorical gun-to-the-head — surrender your question or be accused of burning down the entire field. You’ve seen this before: “If you question capitalism, you hate freedom.” “If you question gender norms, you hate men.” “If you question medicine, you’re anti-science.” Each one pretends that asking a question at all is treason to the whole.

Dispenza’s faux-terminus is typical of many western spiritualist arguments. It consists of a double bind AND an unfalsifiable premise. Just quickly, Popper suggests that if something is unfalsifiable, meaning, you cannot prove it or disprove it, it isn’t science at all.

Dispenza and western spiritualism have a hidden premise that says this: “Any objection is diagnostic of the problem I’m talking about.” That’s an unfalsifiable structure. The ending is baked in: whatever you say becomes proof. If you’re angry, it’s evidence that you “have something you need to forgive.” If you’re sick, it’s evidence of your negative attitude. Every objection loops back as proof that he’s right — a conversational Möbius strip where curiosity dies of exhaustion.

How about ye old, bog average music pedant? Their faux terminus is much like those you see on online forums, and beneath YouTube videos, including mine. It is a contempt terminus. You’re not even “in” the conversation. You’re too mainstream, too uninitiated. You are in some out-group not worth talking to. There is also a masked appeal to insider authority in there too, as the hidden premise is: “Only insiders count as knowers.”
In short, it’s a gatekeeping move dressed as epistemology. The “terminus” is an attempted status flex.

Now, the list of ways to do a faux terminus goes on, and the mini episode will go through more of them. But a few more, just briefly – let me know which ones you recognise. The music pedant example was loosely related to the discrediting termini type of faux-terminus—which probably all of us have experienced. Lines like “you just think that because you’re bitter / a woman / Chinese / twenty-two.” Arguably the most famous faux terminus of this particular kind?

“You know nothing, Jon Snow.”

An argument ended, not because it’s resolved, but because one party declares the other unworthy of discourse. Though still worthy of having sex with in a mountain spring. Oddly.

Another online classic is the appeal to authority type of faux terminus. This comes up when you question someone's holy grail. I got one in my comments section recently – so if you are someone who likes practising, just do some scrolling under my videos to hunt out examples – and maybe name them via a comment. Anyway, I had talked about how CBT is based on the false foundational belief of cognitive primacy, and someone used a great example of this – “But it’s the gold standard.” Other variations on the appeal to authority faux terminus is stuff like “ask any physicist” or “everyone knows that unless they’ve been living under a rock.” The translation in each case is “I cannot, personally, build a convincing argument, so I am hereby informing you that someone smarter than me WOULD.”

Lastly, a personal favourite, by virtue of it’s being occasionally amusing. The non-sequitur. I get a lot of these. I’ll be talking about how loneliness is structural — and someone writes, “Yes, but in 1867 Nietzsche said X.” Which he probably did, but it has nothing to do with… anything, and especially not the point I was making. This fax terminus “works” cos the person says something that is clearly TRUE, and even though it has nothing to do with anything, it gets packaged like it ends the discussion. I mean, it DOES kinda work to end discussions, cos it flummoxes you. Like, what WOULD you say to that? “Yes! And there are 17 ingredients in rice crackers that make mice horny – we ARE playing a game of pluck-random-facts-out-of-our-asses, right?”

Whichever method lies behind it, a faux terminus is essentially stonewalling in fancy dress. Each mimics the syntax of reason while amputating its soul — curiosity. Each says, in different dialects, “Question time is over.” That is the FUNCTION of the “faux terminus.”

Questions Are The Antidote to Dogma - especially these ones!

Now, remember how Peterson used not-actual-logic to make his argument look definitive – along with that hostage manoeuvre. That not-actual-logic is called a paralogism – thanks to Immanuel Kant. So in the mini episode I go much deeper into that into what I am calling a faux terminus paralogism. That’s because they are often the hardest to spot, and because doing more on logic in this episode would be exhausting. Some other star figures will be in that mini episode, by virtue of using that same tool. So do check out that mini episode when it drops.

Whether or not you ever listen to that episode, this starter kit should help you spot a faux terminus, however it is executed. It is a kind of “identification kit” that contains 6 questions you can ask yourself. You can remember it with this acronym: Qualified Curmudgeon tries Vicarious People Pleasing.
1. The Q from the acronym is for “question”
What question just got banned?
2. The C is for context.
What context was stripped out? (poverty, stress, history, incentives)
3.Here, the T is for Tool.
Is a tool being defended instead of an assumption?
4. The V in this question refers to values.
Are any of capitalisms key values being supported by this claim? (control, cognitive primacy, individualism, competition and comparison, heteronormativity)
5. P is for pathology here.
Is dissent being pathologized or exiled here?
6. The other P is for profit.
Does anyone profit if I stop asking?

Of course, if capitalism hasn't decoupled you from your own intuition yet, you might actually FEEL when a faux terminus happens. You might feel it cos it feels like a door being slammed in your face. It’s closing makes you realise, with a jolt, that this person was never trying to get to know you was never trying to discuss or connect in the first place. There was no curiosity there, and curiosity is the vital, living, breathing force behind connection and understanding – be that understanding each other, or the wider world around us. Without curiosity, every conversation becomes a competition, a power game or a performance – sometimes all three at once.

Bringing it together

So that’s today’s map: curiosity as the motor of reason, un-reason as the choking of the engine, and the faux terminus as the neat little cork jammed in the fuel line. We met three versions of the same move — the contempt gatekeeper, the vibes-in-a-lab-coat salesman, and the tool-defender with a hostage note — and watched each of them do the same job for power: stop questions, sort people, sell certainty. Why does this belong on a podcast about loneliness? Because when curiosity dies, connection dies with it. The moment a conversation is turned into a performance, a sale, or a verdict, you and I get moved from interlocutors to audiences — or worse, defendants. In that shift, we don’t just lose information; we lose each other.

The Way Out

Now I want to discuss the ways out – which I will be expanding on in the episode to follow. The way out isn’t a braver speech. It’s being brave enough to ask questions. Whether that means asking questions about the premises of an argument, or questions about the hopes and dreams of a person you are trying to get to know.
When you feel that sudden door slam – when you get shut out or shut down - use the kit we built today:
• What question just got banned?
• What context was stripped out?
• What tool is being defended instead of an assumption?
• Which values of the dominant paradigm are being smuggled in?
• Who got pathologized or exiled for asking?
• And who profits if you stop?

If even one of those lights flashes, you’re looking at a faux terminus: a fake full stop wearing a lab coat, a halo, or a merch link. Name it, and the spell goes up in smoke. Curiosity gets air. And once curiosity is breathing, you can do the one thing that dogma can’t survive: converse, inquire, be interested—in the person in front of you, not the performance around them.
Before we close, a small pact. Next time you feel that familiar drift — the bit where someone slips into performing knowing rather than really pursuing knowing — try these two-steps:
1. Ask for a piece of missing context (“What would change this if we factored in X?”).
2. Offer curiosity in good faith (“Here’s what I still don’t get — can we poke at that?”).
It won’t fix capitalism. It will, however, refuse its favourite trick: turning dialogue into display. And refusing that trick — again and again, in kitchens, clinics, forums, and friendships — is how we keep a public world alive enough to revise itself. Next week we follow the money and the mirror: We’ll track how “holy grails” in the health/beauty/fitness space smuggle in control, comparison, competition, and heteronormativity — even when there’s no obvious checkout cart. From intermittent fasting to “gold-standard” metrics, we’ll see why stuck phases are commercially fertile, and how faux termini police bodies, belonging, and gender roles. We’ll use the faux-terminus kit to test the claims, spot the hostage notes (“question this, and you hate science/health”), and keep curiosity — not compliance — in charge.

Until then: keep your beautiful, magnetizing curiosity on, your bullshit detector calibrated, and your measuring sticks in the junk-drawer where they belong. This was The Loneliness Industry. I’m Jordan Reyne. And if you’ve spotted a faux terminus in the wild, drop it in the comments with which type you think it is — hostage note, contempt gate, appeal to authority, non-sequitur, or paralogism. See you in Part Two, and the mini episode. Bring questions. Dogma hates that.