It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]
A blank sheet of paper, indeed. In the Tao Te Ching (“Way of Life”), Lao Tze wrote of the ways in which the void and vacuum which is always an absent presence represents the anchor of life, of experience and freedom. The hole in the wheel is that which makes it useful; the absence in […]
Cultural processing of information is one of the main tasks we carry out. It is costly and can be very difficult. Our brains are on one hand dedicated to the maintenance and sustainable continuity of the bodily vessels that support them but also must process the symbolic complexity required to sustain the systems of culture […]
The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]
Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]
Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]
The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]
Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]
We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]
Fools rush in but only the insane choose to stay. Only a fool or a madman, finding themselves stuck deep in a hole of their own making and desperate to make a catastrophic failure seem less terrible then proceeds to dig a much bigger and more disastrous hole around themselves. I very much doubt that […]
A feeling of synchronicity. A flash of light and a howling wind. Fire, darkness, confusion. Screaming, suffering, burning, crushing and chaos. A metallic taste and cells being slowly cooked from the inside by radioactive fallout. Oblivion and forgetting. My greatest fear has always been this horror. Not because I will cease to exist although no […]
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: freedom is not of self, it is from self. The boundaries and borders by and through which we define and cultivate our selves are also and quite counter-intuitively the shackles and chains that bind us. It is something of a paradox – the more we […]
