No, Elon, empathy is not the weakness of civilisation. Kindness, compassion, and mutual care are the conditions that make civilisation possible at all. Large-scale cooperation, cultural continuity, and institutional complexity do not emerge from fear, dominance, or competition. They emerge from trust, reciprocity, and the slow accumulation of relational stability. Without these, society collapses back […]
Disability is not an edge case that happens to someone else. It is a statistical certainty built into biology and time. Unless a life ends early, bodies age, systems degrade, injuries accumulate, genetics express themselves, and cognition changes. This is not moral failure or personal deficiency. It is physics. Entropy at the level of lived […]
Life is difficult for everyone, in different ways, at different times. We exist as partially individuated selves, each with a limited point of view, shaped by desire, belief, hope, and fear, often without reflection. Language gives form to this condition, allowing meaning to emerge while also carrying the weight of suffering. To be a self […]
Peace is not something to be found; it is something that stops hiding when you stop searching. The world teaches us to chase — love, success, meaning — as though fulfilment were a horizon one could reach by running faster. Yet the quiet truth is that nothing is missing. Beneath the constant reconstruction of identity, […]
Peace begins where the self dissolves, not as annihilation but as return. The mind’s reflex to grasp at identity falters, and what remains is the stillness that underlies all becoming. In the portrait, serenity is not performed—it emanates from absence. Light and shadow no longer compete; they coexist, sustained by the same field. The face […]
If a genie appeared and offered three wishes, the first would be the only one worth making. Infinite wishes betray the premise—they hollow out the point. The trick isn’t to ask for more, it’s to ask well. So I would wish for the ability to write as though casting spells upon the world. To breathe […]
From the outset, holism concerns not wholes but the strange seam between parts. From Plato’s Forms and Spinoza’s substance to cybernetics, ecology, and dynamical systems, holism persists as an intuition of unity. Each turn sought not larger aggregates but subtler grammars of interaction—non-linear feedbacks, attractor basins, emergent orders. Unorthodox approaches—Prigogine’s dissipative structures, Bohm’s implicate order, […]
I accidentally bought a pack of chicken hearts, cooked half of them, and then found myself staring at the rest, wondering whether I should bury them instead of eating them. It was a strange moment, almost an epiphany—suddenly seeing that animals must have their own context, their own interior lives, and even if no one […]
Unemployment is never just a matter of individual misfortune; it is the visible seam of a whole system that, by its very structure, requires some to fall outside. Support services exist to catch those who slip, but the system is double-edged: their presence signals both care and the ongoing persistence of the very gaps they […]
It seems quite petty and inadequate to aspire to “simply” solve just one of the world’s complex problems. Let’s solve them all, simultaneously. What is the one thing that every thing shares? What essence or abstraction binds the world together in some way as “reality” or intelligibility and experience? While it may be possible that […]
Money is not the solution. It is the source of most of our problems. The worst thing about this strangely powerful abstraction of value and possession is that it seems as though inequitable outcomes are not only probable, they are positively mandatory in this complex system of systems that our world represents. For anything to […]
For a world in which aggression, control and variously domineering forms of persuasion and exploitation have been serially celebrated and canonised as virtuous – communicating the significance of humility and compassion takes on all the character and significance of an authentic act of kindness. You are never simply stuck in bad traffic, you (and we […]
Daedelus Kite 