Categories
power

Professor Elms’ Surprise

Professor Elms had not believed the email at first because it arrived wrapped in the soft vocabulary of institutional care. The university took wellbeing very seriously. The university valued respectful dialogue. The university recognised the importance of psychological safety, inclusion, collegiality, and shared community standards. Accordingly, concerns had been raised regarding the tone of several […]

Categories
Philosophy

Fragmentary Politics

Fragmentary politics is the largely unwitting doctrine of manufacturing and sustaining endless political and sociopsychological friction in order to self-validate. It generates adversarialism and conflict, then feeds on the consequences, mistaking turbulence for relevance and agitation for purpose. This is not strategy. It is structural incompetence: the conversion of social damage into political leverage, and […]

Categories
cybernetics

Duplicity

What is striking is not simply how difficult it is for people with genuine insight, intellectual range, and openness to rise through status hierarchies, but that those hierarchies stabilise themselves by filtering out precisely the signals that would correct them. This is not accidental. Systems that persist must dampen information that threatens coherence, even when […]