Categories
Philosophy

Why do Ideologies Emerge?

Why ideology? Partisan individuation is (an) optimal method by which sociocultural (and technological) systems autonomously self-propagate, through and as us. A threshold level of entropy is constructively reintroduced back into the system as noise that invokes adaptive resilience in and as the distributed information pattern encoding across the entire “surface” of an integrated system of […]

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Philosophy

Fascism

Context: The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz – The New York Review There is “a certain orientation of life toward death” that forms the basis and existential kernel of a pathology that transcribes the arc and trajectory of (an) industrialised or mechanised rationality that in being (or becoming) aspirationally unbounded from the consequences of its […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief is a System of Fictional Narrative

Belief is a system of fictional narrative that by sufficient self-replication begins to masquerade as truth. In systems of language and communication, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions that inevitably loop back to enfold the entire system in a singularly intricate autocatalytic loop of self-referential tautology. Systems of belief are similarly self-inflected […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Dragon that Ate its own Tail

The general arc and trajectory of a pathology is rarely identified or recognised by those that inhabit it; this functional blind-spot is a partial representation of core cognitive factors that exist as much inter as intra individuals and in or as distributed ideologies. Notice, though, that the curious self-organisational resiliency of autonomously self-propagating (and entirely […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Nuclear War? Nope.

Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]

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Philosophy

War

Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]

Categories
Philosophy

We’re all Amateurs

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]

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Philosophy

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]

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Philosophy

Ethics and Power

Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why War is Failure

Note: this was originally written as a response to a specific contemporary geostrategic context for an audience that was spectacularly uninterested in my opinion, so I share it here just to keep it in some modest sense “alive” as a bundle of ideas. I can’t help but wonder if the threat of war is itself […]

Categories
Philosophy Psychology

An Unconscious Truth

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 […]

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Philosophy

On good ideas…

Good ideas sell themselves. It is only the bad ideas that need to be brute-forced upon a people that then, having been bludgeoned by repetition for so long, comes to believe that such incessant cruelty is the normal state of things. Human beings are really quite naturally amazing and despite their natural curiosity and native […]