John Conlin's recent piece (link below) hits a nerve because it names a pervasive intellectual sleight-of-hand: treating abstractions as if they were concrete, agentic entities with wills, desires, and god-like powers. He calls it the Left's "core fundamental error." But it is deeper than Left or Right; it is a metaphysical error that has infected modern thought across the spectrum. The name philosophers give it is reification: the fallacy of treating an abstract concept as though it were a real, physical substance that can act independently in the world.
1. Government as the Prime Reification
When someone says "Government should fix homelessness" or "Government needs to lower prices," they speak as if "Government" is a giant benevolent organism floating above us, capable of intention, perception, and effective action. In reality, "government" is a shorthand for millions of individual human beings, politicians chasing re-election, bureaucrats protecting turf, contractors maximising revenue, voters signalling virtue, all operating under rules, incentives, and constraints that almost never align toward coherent, efficient outcomes.
The entity does not think. It does not care. It has no nervous system, no conscience, no peripheral vision. Every time we say "the government did X," we are committing the same category error as saying "General Motors wants to sell more trucks" when what we really mean is that a shifting coalition of shareholders, executives, engineers, and union reps, each with conflicting goals, somehow produced a truck and a marketing campaign.
Yet this reification is politically priceless. Once "Government" is treated as a real actor, it can be imbued with superhuman wisdom ("the experts know best"), infinite compassion ("government cares about the poor"), and moral purity that no actual human collective has ever possessed. The abstraction becomes a puppet whose strings are pulled by whoever controls the microphone.
2. The Soft Sciences and the Reification Factory
Conlin correctly notes that the "soft" academic disciplines are saturated with this error. Entire literatures treat "society," "capitalism," "patriarchy," "toxic masculinity," or "late-stage capitalism" as if they were tangible substances that can oppress, liberate, feel pain, or demand reparations. These are conceptual models, useful only to the degree they map onto observable individual behaviours. When the model is granted ontological status, when "structural racism" is said to act the way a virus acts, the game is already lost. Policy then devolves into exorcism: we must pass the right law, say the right incantation, or redistribute the right amount of money to appease the malevolent spirit.
This is why replication rates in psychology and sociology hover below 40 % in many cases. Real science deals with measurable, falsifiable entities that exist whether or not the researcher likes them. When your core independent variable is an abstraction you have reified into a causal agent ("misogyny did this," "neoliberalism caused that"), replication becomes impossible because the entity only "exists" in the minds of believers.
3. Sex, Gender, and the Ultimate Reification Test
The contemporary debate around gender identity provides a vivid test case. Many institutional policies treat subjective gender identity as ontologically superior to biological sex. This effectively prioritises an internal mental state over material reality — a clear instance of reification as I've defined it. This critique is directed at the conceptual framework, not at individuals navigating it in good faith. In my opinion the statement "trans women are women," is another example of reification. Taken literally, this is a metaphysical claim: a person's sex is not the observable, immutable, binary characteristic written into every diploid cell of the body, but rather an interior essence ("gender identity") that can migrate between male and female and must be acknowledged as the new reality.
Here the reification is explicit: an internal feeling is granted higher ontological status than arguable physical reality. As I see it, the feeling is treated as though it were a physical substance capable of overriding chromosomes, gametes, and secondary sexual characteristics. Institutions, schools, prisons, sports bodies, governments, are then instructed to reorganise the material world around the newly reified abstraction; policy coercion, not harm to individuals. This is a conceptual critique of gender ideology, not of any person.
Conlin's blunt point stands: disorders of sexual development (DSDs, the old "intersex" conditions, using the strict medical definition) affect roughly 0.018 % of live births and do not create new sexes; they are developmental variations within the binary framework, analogous to any other congenital anomaly. Treating them as evidence for a spectrum of sexes is another reification trick, turning rare exceptions into a new metaphysical rule.
4. Only Individuals Exist
At the bedrock level, only individual human beings exist, finite, flawed, motivated by a mixture of self-interest, fear, altruism, and delusion. Every higher-level phenomenon we discuss (governments, corporations, races, classes, gender categories) is an abstraction layered on top of individual action. These abstractions are tools. When we mistake the map for the territory, we hand extraordinary power to whoever gets to draw the map.
This is why collectivist ideologies of every stripe, national socialism, international socialism, gender ideology, require reification to function; this is a structural analogy, not a claim of moral equivalence. Once the collective has been granted agency, feelings, and rights superior to the individuals who comprise it, the stage is set for coercion in the name of the abstraction.
5. The Practical Antidote
The cure is simple and brutal: every time someone says "Government should…," "Society must…," or "Trans women are…," translate it back into individual human terms.
"Which specific human beings will be coerced, and by what specific mechanism?"
"Which flesh-and-blood person is granted the power to redefine material reality for everyone else?"
Relentlessly forcing the conversation back to observable individuals and measurable physical reality collapses most utopian and identitarian projects within minutes. It is the intellectual equivalent of turning on the lights at closing time.
Hold fast to the fact that only individuals act, only individuals bear moral responsibility, and only physical reality is real. Everything else is a story we tell—useful until we start believing the story can bleed. When we do, the puppeteers take over, and the price is always paid in someone else's freedom.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/11/no_problem_too_large_for_government_to_solve.html