Categories
cybernetics

Statistical Tyrrany

Tyranny is not an aberration, it is a statistical phase of collective system dynamics. Choice persists, and ethics matter, but the options available are constrained by effectively entropic structural conditions that favour transmissibility over nuance. In turbulence, blunt and repetitive signals spread most efficiently, and power arises as both the effect of this modulation and […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistical Inevitability

It is a mistake to imagine that cruelty or deception arise from the rare brilliance of tyrants or the careful engineering of conspirators. The truth is flatter, colder: given time, scale, and opportunity, suffering emerges almost as a default outcome, an entropic drift in human systems. Power does not require genius to become exploitative; it […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pathologies of Self-Control

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.

Categories
history

Do states inadvertently depend on the stateless?

To what extent does the concept or operational implementation of boundaries and nation states quite necessarily both depend on and inadvertently amplify the ongoing and relentless human displacements we currently observe? We might say that the existence and sustainable continuity of boundaries and associated patchwork quilt of international relations (quite beyond the intermittent discontinuities of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Problems of Constitutional Democracy

Watching the information bonfire of the current US election processes is troubling, to say the least. Beyond external interference in the fidelity of democracy and the internal dissonance of a nation being in many ways torn apart by incessant adversarial posturing and partisan self-interest, there is in this situation an instance of some broader unresolved […]

Categories
politics

There is no perfect social system

Just as there may never be any isolated closure and teleological endpoint to logic, physics and mathematics – there can also never be any such thing as the “one true way” or ideological and social perfection. There are only successive approximations and iterative algorithmic refinements towards a better world, without end.

Categories
culture Organisation politics

On Leadership

Organisational cultures are not born fully-formed (or in any sense static or complete), they are best cultivated and nurtured. For better or for worse, our leaders reflect the ground from which they grow…