Tag Archives: poetry

The Sleep of Reason: Why Goya’s Monsters are Winning in 2026

In Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the artist is not merely napping. He has collapsed. His tools, the pens and paper of the Enlightenment, lie abandoned on the desk. Behind him, a swarm of owls and bats emerges from the blackness.

Goya’s Los Caprichos served as a warning to Spanish society, blinded by superstition and corruption. But today, the etching feels like a live-stream of the 2026 news cycle.

When reason sleeps, we don’t just dream of monsters. We build them.

The New Bestiary: Algorithms and Echoes

In the post-truth era, the “monsters” are digital. They are the algorithms that prioritise cortisol over comprehension.

According to the 2025 Digital News Report, we have reached a tipping point: 47% of the global population now identifies national politicians and “influencers” as the primary architects of disinformation. Reason hasn’t just faltered; it has been outsourced to partisan actors who benefit from its absence.

The Arendtian Nightmare

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt understood that the goal of total deception is not to make people believe a lie. It is intended to ensure that they can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood.

In her 1967 essay Truth and Politics, Arendt warned that factual truth is “manoeuvred out of the world” by those in power. We see this today in the “defactualisation” of our economy. Despite rising consumer prices and growing unemployment, a barrage of “official” narratives in 2025 and 2026 has attempted to frame the economy as flawless. As Arendt predicted, when the public is subjected to constant, conflicting falsehoods, they don’t become informed—they become cynical and paralysed.

The Outrage Addiction

Why do we let the monsters in? Because they feel good.

Neuroscience tells us that outrage is a biological reward. A landmark study by Dominique de Quervain showed that the act of “punishing” a perceived villain lights up the dorsal striatum—the brain’s pleasure centre.

Social media is essentially a delivery system for this chemical hit. We are trapped in a cycle in which we conflate “online fury” with “social change.” This outrage functions as a smokescreen: while we argue over individual “villains” on our feeds, the structural monsters: inequality, surveillance, and capture – continue their work undisturbed.

The Architecture of the 1%

While the public is distracted by the digital swarm, wealth has been consolidated into a fortress. In 2026, the global wealth gap is no longer a gap; it is a chasm.

  • The Fortune: Billionaire wealth hit $18.3 trillion this year, an 81% increase since 2020.
  • The Control: The top 1% now own 37% of global assets, holding eighteen times the wealth of the bottom 50% combined.

This concentration of capital is the ultimate “monster.” It allows a tiny elite—who are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than the average person—to dictate the boundaries of reality.

Cognitive Atrophy: The AI Trap

Our most vital tool for resistance, the human mind, is being blunted. A 2025 MIT study confirmed that heavy reliance on Large Language Models (LLMs) for critical thinking tasks correlates with weakened neural connectivity and a “doom loop” of cognitive dependency.

As the Brookings Institution warned in early 2026, we are witnessing a “cognitive atrophy.” If we offload our judgment to machines owned by the 1%, we lose the very faculty required to recognise the monsters in the first place.

Case Study: The Epstein Files and Systemic Silence

The release of 3 million pages of Epstein documents in January 2026 should have been a moment of total reckoning. With 300 “politically exposed persons” implicated—from British peers to European heads of state, the scale of the rot is undeniable.

Yet, the reaction has been a repeat of Goya’s etching. We focus on the “monsters” (the names in the files) while ignoring the “sleep” (the legal impunity and wealth-purchased silence) that enabled their existence. Epstein was not a glitch in the system; he was a feature of it.

Waking the Artist

Goya’s etching ends with a caption: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”

To wake up in 2026 requires more than “fact-checking.” It requires a reclamation of our tools:

  1. Cognitive Sovereignty: Limit the AI-driven “doom loop” and reclaim the capacity for independent analysis.
  2. Structural Sight: Stop chasing the “bats and owls” of individual outrage and look at the “desk”—the economic and political structures that house them.
  3. Institutional Integrity: Support the few remaining impartial bodies capable of holding power to account.

The monsters only vanish when the artist wakes up. It is time to pick up the tools.

Key References

The Playbook: What the Left Can Learn from the Right’s Online War Part 2

The far-right’s online dominance is not an accident. It stems from savvy, adaptive tactics that exploit platform algorithms, human psychology, and cultural voids, turning fringe ideas into mainstream forces. While the left should never mimic their toxic elements like hate and disinformation, there is immense value in borrowing their structural and strategic tools to counter far-right gains.

Drawing from recent analyses, the key is ethical adaptation: using their methods to focus on hope, facts, and inclusivity, creating “alt-left pipelines” that radicalise people toward justice, not division.

Here are five transferable lessons for a progressive counter-strategy.

1. Build a Multi-Voice “Roster” for Narrative Dominance (The WWF Model)

The Right’s Method: They succeed with a diverse “ecosystem of creators“—intellectuals, meme-makers, and podcasters—who cross-promote and create social immersion. This “multiplicity of voices” normalises extremism, turning a single opinion into a perceived chorus.

The Left’s Deployment: Create a “Red-Green roster” of 20-50 voices (eco-activists, union organisers, TikTok storytellers) focused on core issues like inequality and climate. Use X Spaces for collaborative “story arcs” and fund collaborations through platforms like Patreon to foster community. The goal is viral, relatable formats that explain complex issues simply, like “why your rent doubled.”

2. Craft Gradual “Pipelines” for Positive Radicalisation

The Right’s Method: Their infamous “alt-right pipeline” hooks users with benign frustrations (e.g., “woke overreach”) then uses algorithms to pull them into echo chambers. This process of self-radicalisation happens without overt pushes.

The Left’s Deployment: Design an “alt-left pipeline” that starts with empowering content, like TikToks on “union wins” or stories of community success. This can funnel users to deeper dives on podcasts or documentaries about systemic issues. Ethically used AI tools could even offer personalised recommendations that target disillusioned centrists with messages of hope, addressing alienation head-on.

3. Weaponise Memes, Humour, and Emotional Storytelling

The Right’s Method: Irony, memes, and “outrage farming” create addictive engagement that polarises audiences and evades content moderation. They tap into real anger but channel it with simplistic, divisive narratives.

The Left’s Deployment: Flood platforms with joyful, subversive memes (“Billionaires vs. Your Rent” cartoons) and powerful, emotional stories, like videos of successful worker strikes. Use social media for provocative but substantive threads that expose hypocrisy. Focus on a “politics of substance” by creating new cultural symbols of solidarity, like remixing old union anthems for a modern audience.

4. Invest in Local Organising and Power-Building Networks

The Right’s Method: Online tactics are merely the recruitment arm for their offline infrastructure. They channel digital anger into real-world rallies and loyalty, building power from the ground up.

The Left’s Deployment: Mirror this by linking online campaigns directly to local action. Use platforms like Discord for one-on-one recruitment based on what matters to people in their communities. Channel energy into sustained wins, like establishing tenants’ unions or mutual aid groups, rather than chasing fleeting viral moments.

5. Play the Long Game of Institutional Capture and Patience

The Right’s Method: They understand that short-term wins like elections are secondary to long-term cultural entrenchment. They play the “long game,” infiltrating institutions like local school boards and media outlets over decades.

The Left’s Deployment: Shift from reactive online debates to proactive, institution-building. This means creating progressive media co-ops, getting involved in local governance, and controlling the narrative with preemptive framing (e.g., “Before you ask about taxes, here’s how billionaires dodge them”). As mainstream platforms become more toxic, this also means scaling safely on decentralised alternatives like Bluesky or Mastodon.

Ethical Guardrails and Risks

Any adaptation of these methods must prioritise anti-hate safeguards and robust fact-checking to avoid the pitfalls of disinformation. The goal is to turn the right’s tactics of scarcity and division into a new strategy of abundance and solidarity. The left’s greatest advantage is substance; these tools can help make that substance go viral.