Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present

The provided text is an essay titled "Temporal Ghosts — Tyranny of the Present" by independent scholar Bry Willis, which addresses the concept of presentism, defined as the systematic privileging of the current generation over future ones within modern institutions. The essay argues that this bias is not merely an error but a structural, constitutive feature of Enlightenment democracy that binds the unborn to decisions regarding law, property, debt, and environmental risk. Willis employs a diagnostic approach across six domains—politics, property, law, economics, environment, and technology—to demonstrate how immediate benefits are secured for the living while costs and irreversibilities are externalised into the future. By referencing historical debates (Burke versus Paine) and contrasting Western frameworks with non-Western traditions, the analysis claims that presentism is a "temporal impossibility theorem" because institutions treat the silence of the unborn as illegitimate consent. Ultimately, the work serves as a companion piece to the author's prior work, Rational Ghosts, continuing a critique of the foundational fictions of Enlightenment rationalism.https://zenodo.org/records/17263384