A healthy system rarely needs to shout. It grows complexity in silence, nourishes dissent without collapse, and tolerates ambiguity because it trusts its capacity to adapt. When systems become brittle, however, they begin to ossify around templates—rubrics of deterministic, historical certainty, slogans that substitute for creative or individual thought, and pageantry that masks—and all while […]
It’s not always obvious, but it’s grimly consistent: most dictators and autocrats aren’t clever—they’re just willing to be cruel. A few have enough low cunning to seize a moment or twist a system, but intelligence isn’t the driver. It’s laziness, brutality, and the fact that violence is the fastest shortcut to power if you don’t […]
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 […]
The generative role of death and decay reaches far beyond the simple yet significant facts of nutrient cycles into narrative and memory. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which our cultures, languages and selves are wrapped around this irreducibly hollow fact of mortality and transience. Pick a culture, a time, a place and […]
Marcus Aurelius once wrote that the very worst a person could do in life is to make themselves into a kind of blemish upon history and the world. We do not have to think very long or hard to find contemporary examples of just such an abhorrence and regrettably misanthropic wart upon all of history […]
So many have suffered so terribly in war. I wonder at times if the greatest act of compassionate remembrance might be to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure that such horrors are never revisited up anyone, anywhere, ever again. Even while those distant autocrats (alongside motley tinpot tyrants) everywhere beat the drums of […]
It is worth noting that the pathological certainty with which tyrants assert their possession of singular truth and privileged certainty is really no less than the driving dissonance from which all human history endlessly retreats. This turbulent misanthropy compels us forward and endlessly regenerates precisely those forms of psychological and cultural insecurity which produce tyrants […]
Daedelus Kite 