Categories
culture

On Nipples and other Taboos

The form and flow of culture forms in no small measure the persistent expression of an introspective neurosis. The abstractions of convention, of time and place are small and hollow. A thousand years from now, everything we now hold to be self-evident will be unveiled as rank absurdity but taboo will, like the ball being […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Ghosts of Pandemic Isolation

What already seems as though it were some distant, mythical past when human beings gathered en masse in carelessly-shared social places and no one had to hold their breath or jealously secure their body-borders for fear of some invisible viral death. How soon we forget the frenzied rush and crush of crowds, the night-lit noisy […]

Categories
Psychology

Control is only really Fear wearing a Mask

No one is in control of life anywhere near so much as we might choose to believe. At some level we all know this but we also rarely choose to acknowledge it; it frightens us. Our endless fascination with pattern and order, with declarations of certainty and knowledge – these are at least in part […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Crown of Thorns: this gathering storm

This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

We lonely atoms…

…and these, all of these bodies, these artefacts and inscriptions that were once dust will once again be dust. These that were once lonely atoms drifting in all of cosmic space and time will once again be set free to wander. Many, many trillions of years from now even atoms will devolve into a slowly-dissasembling […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

FOMO

Fear of missing out is much deeper and more challenging than the superficiality with which it is commonly portrayed. At some level we are all aware that we have very little effect on this world, that despite our starring role in the narrative theatre of our own life – we have almost no influence or […]

Categories
Organisation

Organisational Inertia

Entrenched resistance to mature and well-informed organisational metamorphosis and (useful) new ideas is simultaneously: a concise characterisation of (the) fear of novelty, difference and change; the essential pattern and shape of (pretty much every historical instance of) organisational, political and ideological pathology; a reflection of core psychological symmetries and reflexive boundaries through which self- (or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Fascism Oscillates

Extreme ideologies manifest in patterns of ebb and flow like everything else…

Categories
culture ideology ignorance systems

Disentangling Hate

Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?

Categories
culture Psychology

Social Media and a Self-Curated Spiral of Depression

Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?

Categories
Philosophy Psychology

A Fascination with Broken Things

Broken things and imperfect people are often far more interesting than are complete and whole ones…

Categories
culture

A World at War with Itself

At the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, it is a good time to reflect upon where we are all going as a civilisation and what we might plausibly achieve to inhibit, interdict or halt the possibility of any similar global catastrophes from ever occurring again.