Two encounters with academia, decades apart, reveal the peculiar machinery through which institutions reproduce authority, exclusion and their own necessity. A personal account of education, alienation and the questionable meaning of progress.
Tag: systems thinking
How strategic incompetence reproduces itself through relational dynamics, distributes costs across society and the planet, and constrains future change.
Natural philosophy, harmonic structure and the cybernetics of social complexity.
The distinction between a system and its surroundings arises through the relationships that constitute both.
What makes a system possible, what sustains it, and how might understanding those relationships help us repair a damaged world?
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What Is Political Identity?
Why do political movements become trapped in the conflicts that hold them together, even when those conflicts threaten to destroy them?
How institutions become vulnerable to exploitation through their own rules, incentives and dependencies, and how political, commercial and technological competition can accelerate systemic decline.
A practical introduction to Field Logic: a relational framework for exploring complex systems, generating new possibilities and navigating change. Think of it as an ontological skeleton key.
Electoral victories may avert immediate catastrophe, but democracy requires genuine institutional renewal, adaptive intelligence and human judgement beyond performative reform.
Language made civilisation possible, but its capacity to reproduce belief, identity and conflict offers no guarantee of survival. Planetary first aid begins with understanding what our communication does, not merely what it says.
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Our revels now are ended.
“The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.”
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.
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Transformation without Change
The world is changing, and institutions are working frantically to ensure that nothing fundamental changes. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which the machinery of (i.e. self-)preservation becomes an engine of destruction.
