Ideology may not be the primary problem. The deeper question is what kind of world produces the need for the identities that ideology can stabilise.
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why destructive identities take hold
Tag: identity formation
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the gap is the product
Advertising sells illuminated absence, incentivising us to pursue idealised selves that remain permanently, profitably out of reach.
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Malignant Narcissism
Malignant narcissism can be understood as a hollow configuration of mind that emerges when a fundamental relational balance fails, not because the self is excessive, but because the self is excessively and pathologically overdetermined, unable to sustain the essentially harmonic dynamic tension between internal and external that makes selfhood viable. In a healthy cognitive system, […]
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Recuerdas
Memory is often described as a storehouse, but in practice it behaves more like a living weave. Individuals remember unevenly, cultures remember selectively, and civilisations remember strategically. What survives transmission is rarely detail and almost never balance. What persists is pattern: threat, loss, success under pressure, moments where coordination mattered and failure carried cost. Psychology […]
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On Being Smart in Stupid Times
Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are […]
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Unfinished Systems
Large systems of power, regulation, ideology, and identity do not stabilise by winning or resolving the problems they address. They stabilise by remaining unfinished. Political institutions, security apparatuses, markets, cultural movements, and ideological projects sustain themselves by managing problems they cannot conclusively solve: inequality, threat, disorder, legitimacy, desire, dissent. Total control would terminate their function. […]
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Teresa Brennan: Philosophy of Affect
Teresa Brennan was an Australian feminist philosopher whose work crossed psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory, frequently placing her at odds with academic orthodoxy. She challenged dominant Lacanian interpretations by insisting that affect is not a linguistic effect or private feeling but a materially transmissible force that moves between bodies and across institutions. This stance drew […]
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Philosophical Alienation
Consciousness entails perspectival isolation. Subjective experience is necessarily local, bounded by the fact that one mind does not have direct access to another. Philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cognitive science converge on this constraint, whether framed as first-person authority, privacy of qualia, or irreducible point of view. Language does not remove this barrier. It operationalises […]
