Imperialist wars such as this are the absurd brutalities upon which intergenerational trauma, reflexive fear and the inevitability of future conflicts are anchored. Putin will one day fade away from the world, leaving behind him only the bitter sorrow and haunting regrets of a broken people, on all sides of whichever borders prevail after this […]
Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]
Context: Will Putin Outlast the War? I can never quite get past the astonishing degree to which these things resemble individual psychological pathologies writ large. There may indeed be some kind of unhappy statistical inevitability of cognitive macrocosm here but for all its failures, the antithetical pole of liberal democracy certainly resembles a more successful […]
There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]
Anger almost always reveals an unconscious truth and as a general principle is an agnostic omnipresence across interpersonal and complex (intra- or inter-system) psychological and social dynamics. Extrapolating on this: the generation or cultivation of frictive behaviours or narratives forms the basis and constitutive self-validation of a largely and autonomously self-propagating neurosis. The pathology is […]
Love is an experience and representation from inner to outer, from system to environment and from self to other. It is that direction and momentum that inversely generates and cultivates the experiencing “I” or loving person in reflexive self-definition through their relationship to that other. Imaginary hypotheses of “other” are metaphysical fictions no less than […]
There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]
Speaking of identity, we may as easily speak of language or any other indefinitely-extensible and recursively self-generating symbolic system of information definition, encoding, compression and self-propagation. Language is always and already that discontinuous difference and dissociative experience that simultaneously facilitates and creates us as Subjects in, through and as communication (or culture) while also implicitly […]
The most mystifying truth of all is that we live in a world that defines value and success in such limited terms, as being little more than successfully replicating the patterns and conventions of behaviour and thought that we encounter and through which we learn to play a game of simple (or – often enough […]
We might all be quite surprised to one day discover that dissonance and entropy are irreducible properties of systems of social organisation, that the sustainable continuity of any socio-political (or economic) system is only ever really a measure of the extent to which it successfully negotiates this internal dissonance and/or offsets and displaces it as […]
Context: Jonathan P. Baird: Nazi Germany and the fall of law It is a curious property of the dissociative logic and intractable pathology of any extreme ideological position, not just to sweep along compliant and unwitting collaborators who see in the asserted “strength” of their hollow belief system a reflexive framework upon which to hang […]
Daedelus Kite 