Putin’s relationship with NATO possesses the essential characteristics of a pathological psychosis. He is so profoundly shaped by a narrative of fear and insecurity that he can not imagine (or influence) a world without it. He has in effect done everything in his power to ensure the continuity of the “threat” as reflexive self-validation for […]
Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
Persistent cycles of historical catastrophe suggest that the foolish gambits of the autocrats do not make history anywhere near so much as history makes them. Small consolation as it may be when witnessing the horrors and brutality currently being unleashed on the Western end of the Great Steppe, I find it helps a little to […]
I have seen what trauma does. It can take good people and bend them backwards against their will, leading into all manner of despair and hardship. I have seen the ways that people self-define through the things they know and the suffering that has shaped them. I have witnessed as their lonely lives lead them […]
Trauma bites twice. The first time is when we suffer what others or the world through them inflicts upon us. The second time is when we suffer what we force ourselves to endure because, having been so shaped and bruised by the unthinkingly callous cruelty and endemic darkness and ignorance of a life we never […]
It’s a general observation of human nature that those among us who most deeply need to trust or depend on others are often also those least able to do so. A further complication and irony of this is that it is commonly those whose trust has been broken who both incessantly seek and foundationally fear […]
What already seems as though it were some distant, mythical past when human beings gathered en masse in carelessly-shared social places and no one had to hold their breath or jealously secure their body-borders for fear of some invisible viral death. How soon we forget the frenzied rush and crush of crowds, the night-lit noisy […]
PTSD and psychological trauma remain empirical facts to be disentangled and negotiated through tactful intervention but the hyper-medicalisation of that knowledge and administrative reach into an individual’s experience foundationally inflates the expected contours and probable expressions of those pathologies.
Daedelus Kite 