Categories
politics

Political Problems: the ubiquitous, intractable and shared enigmas of outsourcing our rationality to those least able to effectively use it

A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]

Categories
environment politics

Climate Strike: Which Economy?

I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]

Categories
Philosophy politics systems

Levelling-Up in the Civilisation Game

It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]

Categories
culture politics Psychology systems

Directionless: The Teleological Vacuum of Global Civilisation

Humanity spends far too much time bickering and fighting over how we will collectively move forward to ever actually get on with the very serious business of actually ensuring our own continuity, survival and ongoing tenure on this planet.

Categories
politics systems

Populist Simplicity

The road to hell is paved with populist simplicities.

Categories
politics

There is no perfect social system

Just as there may never be any isolated closure and teleological endpoint to logic, physics and mathematics – there can also never be any such thing as the “one true way” or ideological and social perfection. There are only successive approximations and iterative algorithmic refinements towards a better world, without end.

Categories
culture politics

Faltering Balance: the International Society of States

The international society of states appears to be faltering and order looks to be crumbling from within.

Categories
politics

Ideological Entropy

Where intellectual or ethical bankruptcy is the pivot upon which any untenable political assertion or associated narrative rests, an overinvestment in faulty reasoning becomes something of an inevitability.

Categories
culture history Philosophy politics

On Stupid Ideas and Clever Solutions

Countering stupid ideas proves to be a matter of some subtlety and intelligence…

Categories
culture Organisation politics

On Leadership

Organisational cultures are not born fully-formed (or in any sense static or complete), they are best cultivated and nurtured. For better or for worse, our leaders reflect the ground from which they grow…

Categories
politics

A Paradox of Online Political Engagement

The endless stoking of the fires of difference might do little over a longer term to benefit the ideological and political voices and positions of liberalism and humanism.

Categories
culture politics systems

On Facts, Truth and Public Narratives

You could be mistaken for believing that the primary public narratives and political engagements of our era are dominated by simpletons and misanthropes…