Populist symbolism travels by detaching feeling from place, consequence, and thought, then giving borrowed socio-psychological anxiety the dissimulating smoke and mirrors of a theatrical political and identity performance.
Populist symbolism travels by detaching feeling from place, consequence, and thought, then giving borrowed socio-psychological anxiety the dissimulating smoke and mirrors of a theatrical political and identity performance.
Most people, across most periods of history, have lived less under grand political visions than under a weary determination to survive whichever charlatan, tyrant, or narcissist happens to drift into power at a given moment and in a given place. Populations are carried along in different ways. Some are swept up in the intoxication of […]
The Dalai Lama’s audiobook, recently recognised with a Grammy, is not framed as a political intervention. It is a work of reflection, oriented toward compassion, ethical responsibility, and the cultivation of inner steadiness. Yet the figure of the Dalai Lama does not circulate in a neutral field. His public presence remains entangled with a long […]
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 […]