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One more reminder that you can preorder my book Control Science from Verso right now! It’s out next week, and just got a strong and fair review in the Financial Times, whose reviewer calls it a "a powerful if one-sided case that wealthy elites, including factory-owners, philosophers, economists and ideologues, have over centuries conspired with their managers to suggest that “there is no alternative” to market fundamentalism."

Across cultural traditions if not universally, humanity has warned against speaking with demons. What’s the harm in just talking? Corruption, trickery, and the like. Equally importantly, speaking with demons is pointless. You might resist their temptations, but you will not convince them. A demon, then, is an agent for whom conversation is entirely instrumental toward their existing ends. They will use words exclusively in an attempt to produce external results– to manipulate or command– while refusing to hear words that might change their goals or internal state. They do not converse, they signal and trick. You cannot talk a demon out of malevolence. Even trying is a risk to your own soul.

Some 19th and 20th century thinkers (Herbert Spencer, the game theorists of the 20th century) who will be familiar to regular readers came close to insisting that we are all demons to each other. One of the central arguments of my upcoming book Control Science is that these people are wrong– in it I deconstruct the history of these ideas in order to demonstrate as much. Most people, most of the time, are the opposite of demonic. Even Donald Trump, in other some cases an excellent example of cynical and instrumental communication, famously has a tendency of agreeing with whatever the last person in the room told him. What the people around us think matters to us in profound ways we can barely comprehend. 

Yet we are capable of armoring ourselves against others when we want to be– and we are at our most demonic when we pretend others are. I set out to right a piece here on the perils of doing this in foreign policy with Iran. But there are unfortunate examples of this pattern in critics of “cancel culture” in universities— ironically, given how much they have presented themselves as defenders of free speech and open dialogue.

Originally I was going to write something like this: in the late 17th century, Cotton Mather described Wampanoag Indians as “perfect children of the devil” in his history of Metacom’s War (1675-1678). He insisted that they delighted in violence and torture. The same people he is describing spent decades negotiating with lying and cheating colonists who razed their fields and chased them off of the land they lived on. Putting aside land conflict, Indigenous violence meant things that, as historian Jill Lepore wrote in her book The Name of War, colonists simply refused to understand.