How to alienate and enrage 99% of the world? Tell them that almost all of their contemporary cultural practices, beliefs, interests, hobbies and pastimes are shallow, superficial assertions of tribal identity that do little more than provide temporary comfort in an ultimately hostile, selfish and uncaring world. It is not that these cultural practices and […]
Tag: difference
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Swimming Against The Stream
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
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Borders and Boundaries
We live in a world that perhaps needs and unwittingly depends on its borders and boundaries but in many cases they persist not because they are necessary in any ultimate or foundational sense but quite simply because they can. There are deep truths here; of humanity, of history and of minds.
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Cultural Life is Unity through Difference
Cultural life is a beautiful thing. In many ways it represents the hidden bonding unity of a people or a place. Always be wary of anyone who attempts to crush or erase cultural difference – the living thread and flow of human history is because of any fear of difference or Otherness, it is what […]
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Information Wildfire
Viewed in gestalt from a holistic perspective, information systems are naturally predisposed to moving through the combinatorial possibility-spaces of entropy into dissonant states. The question is as to whether that dissonance represents a literal sociopolitical or interpersonal turbulence and concrete representation of lost and unrecoverable (i.e. adversarial, belligerently futile) information or energy-processing potential, OR, if […]
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Peace, Dissonance, Complexity
Difference and dissonance is neither intrinsically good or bad. It is endemic to information system self-replication and information systems are autonomously oriented towards the reproduction of a threshold level of “noise” or turbulence through which to optimally ensure resilience and continuity – this is how emergence manages to NOT produce the same things but represents […]
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Partisan Pathology
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
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War and Peace
There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]
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Difference, Information, Discontinuity
Those referendums, surveys, elections, measurements and points of difference by and through which we generate information-as-difference are also the reflexive anchors of aspirational certainty and ordered taxonomies of Self upon which we have anchored an entire civilisation. The binary or ontological difference, distance and inevitable dissociation we need to self-define is the source of all […]
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Broken Symmetry
In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]
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Human Beings Being Human: Anger
It is a simple truth. Fear drives most of our irrational decisions and our inability to admit it is in fact the greatest fallacy of all. Violence, war, hatred, discrimination, cruelty – it is all at base and in essence just fear under another name. People fear the truth of their own essential vulnerability more […]
Context: Officials see extremist groups, disinformation in protests A Gordian Knot. How much of this disinformation is generated internally and how much externally to national borders? Have we all (i.e. Globally) arrived in a set of circumstances that suggest that, functionally – at least, the differentiation of source and attribution is not as (ultimately) significant […]
