I went on one of my habitually isolated late-pandemic afternoon walks today, just soaking up an ambient not-quite-optimistic Spring mood of renewal with which to soothe my sense of wistfully-idiomatic rebirth amid the decay of winter’s persistent, yet currently overgrown, detritus. Defocussing attention on any one experience or sensation, we open the doors of perception […]
Tag: truth
Categories
Ignoring Truth for Temporary Happiness
The most mystifying truth of all is that we live in a world that defines value and success in such limited terms, as being little more than successfully replicating the patterns and conventions of behaviour and thought that we encounter and through which we learn to play a game of simple (or – often enough […]
Categories
We are all born broken…
How else is it that we might spend our lives seeking a comfort, consolation and closure that always seems to dwell just out of reach, just beyond our grasp and ever-beckoning as a tantalisingly seductive certainty of reflexive self-definition or unambiguous security and psychological or existential safe harbour in the open arms and tender touch […]
Categories
Priceless Beauty
Not all beauty has a cost. It is the things, people and places which do not have any associated, attributed monetary measurement of worth that are the most valuable. This is why we are all, in general, so unhappy – we place value in altogether the wrong things. We spend our lives chasing meaningless token […]
My recent fixation on flowers is quite plausibly an instance of psychological transference, where feelings or emotions that might find themselves unattainably inhibited in one direction find new avenues, channels and vectors of (self) expression. We often enough observe the rapid and adaptive transmutation of emotional needs and impulses from one goal to another and, […]
Categories
Disinformation Questions
Some general philosophical questions and reflections on disinformation: To what extent is disinformation not only evidence of directed or (even, in a limited sense) desirable artefacts, belief systems or entities, and to what extent is disinformation itself an irreducible property of large-scale sociotechnical systems? Our languages and institutional, geopolitical and self-organisational logics require we leverage […]
Context: ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial Notice how the frame of reference represented by this (or for that matter – any) belief system is so easily detached from the reality and unassailable facts upon which it actually and constitutively depends for sustainable continuity and existence. Systems […]
Categories
The Necessity of Self-Deception
We are always and already primed, cultivated and prepared by those cultural information systems we inhabit to possess some primitive – but essential – form of self-deception. There is a necessary blind-spot in self-identity that very much forms the core around which that aspirational bundle of ambiguities, uncertainties and insecurities we identify as Self is […]
Categories
Seduced by Illusion
I wonder what it is about an image that fools the mind so swiftly, so sweetly and so completely. The suspension of disbelief in the essential illusion with which we are presented is so natural and so subtle as to be all but invisible to us. It is perhaps precisely in this invisibility that they […]
Categories
How Disinformation Works
The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]
Categories
Time is Running Out
Yes, time is running out – for all of us. For each and every one of us, we inexorably inch closer towards our own demise and existential obliteration. Cheerful? Hardly, but it is a truth rarely acknowledged beyond the feeding frenzy of catastrophically-selfish corporations and political parties at the trough of manifest human insecurity that […]
Categories
Global Conflict: Time to Grow Up
While it may be low-hanging fruit and all references to it may be quite akin to stating the bleeding obvious, there is a distinct lack of unity in the world: wars, political dissonance, conflict, sabre-rattling and a thousand different flavours of internecine anger or paranoid fear. What might be somewhat less obvious in such an […]
Daedelus Kite 