Successfully negotiating the resonant dissonance of any democracy is indeed deeply problematised by an obligation to successfully define, negotiate and evolve strategies with which to do so. I see the contemporary American problem as being on one hand unique and specific to a particular entanglement of histories, motivations, incentives and value (or belief) systems but […]
In all its forms, a totalitarian state is reflexively oriented towards and dependent upon the threat and insecurity that conflict and difference with Others represents. Even if they invade and conquer Taiwan, the Phillipines, Thailand and Indonesia – the Chinese regime is constitutively unable to cease its aggressive rhetoric and actions as every part of […]
Gullibility has no bounds, particularly when tightly coupled with ultranationalist machismo. The ease and simplicity with which the human dopamine reward system is coopted for nefarious political purposes in really no surprise. A little more than disinformation, the pre-existing sociopsychological symmetries in human behaviour represent templates upon and into which nationalism and imperialist brutality are […]
Concrete evidence that the West does not have a monopoly on gullible fools. The question is, or becomes, are citizens in democracies or in totalitarian regimes more prone to dissociative conspiratorial narratives? Intuition suggests that it may be the totalitarian states that generate more compliant idiots but the greater freedoms of the West leave people […]
I always find it so disheartening that the constructive differences by and through which psychological self (and cultural or national) identity emerge from the form and flow of human experience are so easily warped, twisted and co-opted for vacuous political purposes. The totalitarian turn, perhaps more of an oscillating historical cycle, is a haunting atavism […]
Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]
The role of language in cultural and political systems of belief is such that geographic tropes are anchors that provide internal narrative self-validation to such systems and their inhabitants. It doesn’t mean their assertions of territorial impropriety are valid, merely that such adversarial gambits are the perennially ascendant low-hanging fruit of belligerent nationalist pathologies everywhere […]
There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]
Context: If We Make Contact With Aliens The Biggest Danger Will Be Our Politicians, Say Scientists Yes. It is quite true that the communication systems endemic to our species have had a catastrophic tendency to percolate precisely the wrong kinds of self-interested personalities into positions of power. While it is not always the case that […]
Much stranger than that such belligerent fury and reckless risk-taking exists is that it persists and returns (with uncanny frequency) in cyclic political episodes and internecine escapades to haunt humanity in the ways it quite clearly does. There is a recurring theme of totalitarian ideological dependency upon the trope and narrative fabrication of having suffered […]
Context: ‘The Russians have started coming’: Finland considers tourist visa ban The curious thing about the autocratic regime reacting negatively to other nations taking rational actions against them (and their war) is that for all their sabre rattling and vigorous external finger-pointing, the difference and opposition they are creating is precisely the dissonance and turbulent […]
The essence of the paranoiac is in every act and thought to reproduce, invoke and justify the circumstances that generate their paranoia. To indicate a specific instance may be to miss the point. Being a generalised bias of identity, individuation and subjectivity – it is a global property that appears in and as culture, communication […]
