Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Partial assertions of self-control are foundational in personality formation but where they find themselves amplified at scale into authoritarian pathologies we witness the birth of profoundly insecure, uncontrollable beasts upon and in which no truly happy life might ever be cultivated.
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 […]
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]
A neurosis is a problem-solving solution that has lived past it’s use-by date and just keeps on keeping on.
Where intellectual or ethical bankruptcy is the pivot upon which any untenable political assertion or associated narrative rests, an overinvestment in faulty reasoning becomes something of an inevitability.
PTSD and psychological trauma remain empirical facts to be disentangled and negotiated through tactful intervention but the hyper-medicalisation of that knowledge and administrative reach into an individual’s experience foundationally inflates the expected contours and probable expressions of those pathologies.
Buddhist psychology almost exclusively locates the preponderance of human misery in this world to the many and diverse methods by which we attach ourselves to things in the world, to objects, possessions, people and ideas…
