In 1831, a nearly forgotten mock-heroic poem (poemetto burlesco) was published in Dublin—though written much earlier by the Tuscan physician and poet Lorenzo Pignotti. It possesses the exact moral-fantasy structure one would expect from an illustrated fairy tale: in Abyssinia, a young man named Ismaele—weary of having devoured metaphysics, physics, algebra, theology, medicine, and astrology without actually understanding a single thing—invokes a household genie and asks for a way to unmask the wise men surrounding him. The genie does not give him an argument. He gives him a cudgel.
The object is simple and perfect: it strikes on its own, without a hand to wield it, anyone who utters nonsense, and it does not stop until the victim shouts "I am an ox" three times. It does not negotiate, it does not nuance, it does not distinguish intent. Ismaele unleashes it first upon an academy of philosophers competing to explain the cudgel's phenomenon—one using mechanics, another electricity, another a dowsing rod—and then upon a college of theologians, upon a pair of friars fist-fighting while arguing in Latin, and even upon an Inquisition tribunal attempting to exorcise it, convinced it harbors the Devil. The cudgel makes no exception for sides: it thrashes the pretentious physicist and the inquisitor who wants to burn it for witchcraft with equal enthusiasm. At the end of the poem, sick of always losing, the theologians bribe the guards and burn it to ashes.
What interests me about this artifact is not its humor—which is considerable—but its function: it is a device that introduces real friction into an idea market that otherwise has none. The scholars of Congo can utter any fantasy about the origin of the world or the nature of matter without paying any cost for being wrong; the cudgel is the literally physical eruption of a consequence. It is skin in the game carved out of wood. One could read the entire poem as an early allegory of something Nassim Taleb would later frame in more sober terms: the asymmetry between those who voice opinions and those who risk something by doing so. The cudgel, in that sense, is not an instrument of cruelty but of epistemic hygiene: it specifically punishes the person who theorizes without risking anything.
Yet before Pignotti imagined this punitive toy, Dante had already harbored the exact same suspicion, albeit with far less of a sense of humor. In Canto XXVII of the Inferno, a devil explains to Guido da Montefeltro—the fraudulent counselor who believed he could sin and repent in time through a well-crafted calculation—why he is dragging him down to hell, with these words: that he didn't expect him to be a logician. Logic, there, is not a neutral tool of reason: it is the devil's own terrain, the space where a well-constructed argument detaches itself from truth and virtue to serve any cause, including one's own damnation. Guido was a perfect syllogist his entire life—and that is precisely why he ended up where he did. Four hundred years before Ismaele’s cudgel, Dante already suspected that reasoning detached from moral grounding leads not to wisdom, but to perdition—and that someone, or something, comes to collect the bill sooner or later.
Pignotti’s cudgel can thus be read as Dante’s logical devil turned into a blunt instrument: what is paid with the soul in Hell is paid with the back in Congo. And it is worth noting that neither of them passes judgment on intent. The devil does not ask Guido if he sincerely believed in his argument. The cudgel does not ask the theologian if his faith is genuine. Both devices operate on outcomes, not on the subjective merit of the reasoner: if the argument was hollow, it does not matter how convinced you were.
Now then. Let us imagine, for a moment, the cudgel unleashed not in Congo, but in any contemporary family WhatsApp group. The brother-in-law explaining with complete confidence why the dollar will hit a certain rate next month, having never put a single dime where his mouth is. The Instagram coach asserting that you failed due to a lack of a "winning mindset." The armchair political scientist who in 1789, 1917, and 2001 would have been equally sure of everything. One imagines them all, head low and teeth loose, shouting "I am an ox" in unison at a Sunday barbecue, and one must admit the fantasy holds an almost vengeful charm. It is the punitive version of what life—more slowly and with far less elegance—tends to do anyway: eventually collecting the check on cheap opinions.
And yet—this is where the poem stops making me laugh and starts troubling me a bit—we would do well to ask the ghost of Paul Feyerabend what he thinks of all this before applauding too loudly.
Feyerabend devoted much of his work to arguing that science did not advance by following a rigorous, disciplined method, but through sheer heresy: Galileo defending Copernicanism with arguments that, judged by the logical standards of his era, bordered on nonsense; theories that sounded like madness and only later, with the benefit of hindsight, proved fruitful. His motto, "anything goes," was not a praise of stupidity, but a warning: if a device capable of automatically beating anyone who said something sounding like a sophism to prevailing common sense had existed in 1610, Galileo would have ended up shouting "I am an ox" before finishing his telescope assembly. The cudgel does not distinguish between the charlatan talking nonsense because he has nothing better to offer and the heretic talking nonsense because he is seeing, however dimly, something no one else can see yet. It thrashes both with equal enthusiasm.
That is, I think, the design flaw that neither Ismaele’s genie nor Pignotti paused to consider: an instrument that punishes mistaken certainty also punishes, indistinguishably, premature certainty. The cudgel would have done humanity a massive favor by thrashing the poem’s entire Sorbonne, yes—but we have zero guarantee that it wouldn't have also thrashed, with the exact same mechanical enthusiasm, the first person to suggest that the Earth rotates, that microorganisms exist, or that time is not absolute. The epistemic hygiene demanding skin in the game is, at its core, conservative: it rewards the non-committal, not the one who takes a calculated risk. And science, according to Feyerabend, has always required a few people willing to utter absurdities without someone waiting for them at the exit with a stick.
Perhaps the most honest reading of Pignotti’s poem is not the one I hinted at initially—that the world needs more cudgel—but its inverse, the one neither Ismaele nor his genie wished to see: that any orthodoxy, as soon as it obtains an instrument capable of silencing the mistaken, inevitably ends up turning it against the person who is not yet right, but will be. The cudgel was ultimately burned by the theologians who hated it most. I suspect that had it survived another century, the Sorbonne itself would have ended up wielding it—and we would have lost, right along with the charlatans, a Galileo or two.
This post was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools.
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