Categories
memoir

Structural Exile

I grew up inside fracture. Not the cinematic kind, not the kind that produces easy narrative arcs of redemption, but the slow, dislocating kind that dissolves continuity. Family breakdown did not make me resilient or strong. It pushed me sideways, out of the main flow, and then quietly out of sight. By my late teens, […]

Categories
Philosophy

At the Edge of Meaning

Nietzsche once suggested that metaphysics is about as useful to the struggles and uncertainties of embodied life as would be knowledge of the chemical composition of water to a boatman facing a storm. The force of the remark is not hostility to thought but a boundary placed around it. In conditions of living and existential […]

Categories
Philosophy

Structural Insecurity Precedes Moral Failure

Racism, misogyny, and other forms of exclusion recur not because they are compelling, justified, or desirable, but because large-scale social systems are biased toward generating them, or things like them, under stress. Calling this structural does not mean denying choice. People do make choices, good, bad, and ugly, and they live with the consequences of […]

Categories
humanity

Brain Damage

It’s like being stranded behind a pane of glass—your mind can still build cathedrals, but you’ve lost the key to the front door. The everyday stuff—speech, reading, rhythms of social interaction—fractures. Meanwhile, the deep structures, the insights, the recursive loops of thought—they’re still there, maybe sharper. But try explaining that to someone who’s already decided […]

Categories
cybernetics

Disability Services Fail

Bureaucracy is a dissipative structure, built not to solve problems but to metabolise them. Flows of energy, information, and compliance pass through its channels, and in passing they feed its continuity. The structure consumes instability and recycles it as order, but only order of its own kind—recursive loops of policy, paperwork, and oversight. Like a […]