Steve Fuller

It's Odyssey week! Since everyone's sharing their Christopher Nolan film rankings, here's mine. The difference is that mine is objectively correct.

Nigel Farage comes out fighting against Count Binface ahead of the Clacton by-election, releasing his smash-hit single, “Ain’t No Binface”, surely destined for No. 1 on the hit parade. {satire}

Today in fun philosophy facts: The British philosopher Derek Parfit always wore the exact same thing—gray pants with a white shirt and red tie—to avoid having to waste time picking out clothes. He also drank room temperature instant coffee to avoid wasting time boiling water.

So what's my take on Count Binface standing in Clacton? Well, seven years ago the world all laughed when Ukraine elected a comedian as president. We're not laughing now.

Whether it was Dennis Skinner or Norman Tebbit, Tony Benn or Anne Widdecombe, some part of the rise of populism can be attributed to the disappearance from parliament of people who were highly abrasive but unfailingly sincere.

Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease. 1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is rational. Where Rousseau weeps over the noble savage, Voltaire mocks. He is the master of devastating wit, precise irony, surgical ridicule. Candide dismantles every naive optimism in ninety pages with the efficiency of a guillotine – which is fitting, since the guillotine is partly what his work made possible. 2. His great weapon is mockery. Écrasez l’infâme – crush the infamous, meaning the Church, tradition, inherited authority. He crushed it. With wit, elegance, and devastating precision. He was right that the Church was corrupt, that the aristocracy was parasitic, that the old order was indefensible in many of its particulars. Being right about what to demolish is not the same as knowing what to build. 3. Voltaire is the demolition crew without an architecture firm. He tears down, magnificently. He offers no replacement – only rubble, and the advice to cultivate your garden. Private. Disengaged. The conclusion of Candide: after every horror, every injustice, every system failure – grow vegetables. This is not wisdom. This is elegant surrender dressed as philosophy. 4. His irony is a solvent. It dissolves corruption, yes – but it dissolves everything, including the things worth keeping. A civilization marinated in Voltairean irony learns to mock every claim to authority, every appeal to tradition, every invocation of duty. This feels like freedom. It is actually vulnerability – a society that has learned to be ironic about everything is defenseless against the person who believes something earnestly enough to act on it. Robespierre was not ironic. He was a true believer. He won. 5. Rousseau gave the revolutionary the emotional fuel: the pure victim, the corrupt oppressor, the righteous rage of nature against civilization. Voltaire provided the intellectual solvent: he dissolved the legitimacy of every institution that might have contained that rage. Together they cleared the ground completely. Robespierre arrived and found no Church, no tradition, no inherited authority with enough credibility to resist him. He simply moved into the vacuum and filled it with the General Will and the guillotine. 6. And when he wasn’t playing "champion of liberty", he was on the payroll of kings, literally. He spent years at Frederick the Great’s court and corresponded adoringly with Catherine the Great, flattering both in print as enlightened monarchs of the age. While he was writing these letters, Frederick and Catherine were carving up Poland – dismembering a European nation, erasing it from the map and subjugating an entire people in one of the great crimes of the eighteenth century. Voltaire knew. He didn’t care. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous — unless the infamous is paying well and lives in a palace in Berlin or St. Petersburg. 7. The contemporary Voltaire is everywhere: the late night host who dismantles everything with devastating wit and proposes nothing. The enlightened cynic who sees through every institution, trusts nothing, builds nothing, and considers this sophistication – while cashing checks from the very system he mocks. The fake antidote doesn’t kill you. It leaves you without defenses when the real disease arrives. Rousseau is the fire. Voltaire is the man who dismantled your fireplace and called it progress – and then went to warm himself at the tsar’s. Together they produced the French Revolution, with the Terror, and the template for every ideological catastrophe that followed. The most dangerous intellectual partnership in Western history wasn’t a conspiracy. It was two men who despised each other and destroyed the same thing from opposite ends, leaving the ground perfectly prepared for those who came after them with a plan.