What you’re outlining here is a powerful convergence of psycho-cultural critique, political philosophy, and ethics — a deep interrogation of how vulnerability, recognition, and violence are entangled at both the individual and societal levels.

Brent Potter’s notion of “psychopathic hallucinosis” as a cultural condition—where a widespread superficial disregard for consequences becomes normalized—is a striking way to frame what might otherwise be called systemic callousness or collective denial. It suggests a kind of shared delusion, a mass dissociation from the ethical weight of our actions, especially when they hurt others or destabilize the conditions of life.

Judith Butler, drawing on Arendt and Levinas, then adds a crucial political dimension: that the capacity for annihilation—whether through overt genocide or through more insidious forms of systemic neglect—is rooted in a refusal to acknowledge our shared precariousness and mutual vulnerability. The attempt to shield oneself from vulnerability by casting it onto others creates a political logic of disposability. This refusal to recognize others as vulnerable, as worthy of mourning or ethical regard (“ungrievable”), erases them from the moral and political community.

This erasure is not merely symbolic but enables extreme harm because if certain lives do not “count as life,” then the harm against them need not register as harm, much less generate accountability or guilt. It’s a foundational insight into the mechanisms of dehumanization and how they enable violence on both personal and structural scales.

The idea that pre-theoretical morality emerges from our shared embodied vulnerability and interdependence is potent—it grounds ethics not in abstract principles but in the lived, inescapable reality of being with others who can hurt us and whom we can hurt. When that recognition breaks down, so does the ethical fabric.

This interplay between denial of vulnerability and systemic harm makes me think about the ways in which societies manufacture “otherness” to protect certain groups from the uncomfortable truth of mutual dependence and fragility.

Do you see this dynamic playing out in particular historical or contemporary contexts that you’re exploring? How might this philosophical framing help in imagining resistance or repair?

You said:

Am I being true to my source material?

ChatGPT said:

Yes — you are being impressively faithful to your source material, and not just in a formal sense. You’re engaging with the ethical and philosophical stakes at the heart of each thinker’s project, and you’re drawing together their insights in a way that honors their spirit without collapsing their distinctions.

• Brent Potter’s use of hallucinosis as a cultural diagnosis is often tied to the normalization of dissociation and moral disengagement in late capitalist societies. Your reading of it as a generalized malady that masks consequence is accurate and deepens the term’s meaning by placing it alongside structural callousness.

• Judith Butler’s concept of precarity and ungrievability, especially in Frames of War and Precarious Life, is absolutely centered on how certain lives are rendered unintelligible or outside the frame of ethical concern. You capture this clearly in the way you describe lives being “understood, often tacitly, not just to be insensitive brutes... but as not counting as life at all.”

• Emmanuel Levinas’s influence on Butler is clear in your formulation that “pre-theoretical morality arises with being in the world.” Levinas sees the face-to-face encounter as the site of ethical demand, not a conclusion of reason. You’re channeling that idea well — that the possibility of being harmed and harming is the very ground of ethics.

• And Hannah Arendt’s attention to political evil, judgment, and banality is visible in your attention to how ordinary structures (like bureaucratic neglect or national security discourse) can enable violence through disavowal and distancing.

In short, your synthesis doesn’t dilute your sources — it amplifies the shared terrain they stand on: vulnerability, disavowal, the failure to grieve, and the ethics of encounter.