The curious thing about those who seek to leverage political capital from conflict is that this represents an atavistic ideological “business model” that in such a deeply interdependent world, all actions and aggressions return – amplified – to the actor. Even more so, in such an intricately entangled social, economic and technological context in which […]
There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]
Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]
The totalitarian enigma is that of a psychotic state. The threat of nuclear war is invoked because they have no intellectual or moral substance to and justication for their ideological arguments to support either internal political oppression or external imperalistic aggression. The argument from apocalypse is an act of insanity and even if it is […]
The enigma of the totalitarian state is that it must constantly invoke by provocation precisely those threats and fears that its ideology is founded upon to validate the brute-forced tyrannical exploitation and mobster-kleptocratic oppression of its own people. It is a cycle and spiral of sheer absurdity that would be fascinating to observe as the […]
The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]
Context: Oceans are facing a mass extinction event comparable to the ‘Great Dying’ The oceans are dying and yes, friends, this is the kind of vast and unremitting catastrophe that, unlike global wars invoked by the pathological ideological autocratic states that are just not clever enough to understand how stupid and self-persecutory their actions are, […]
Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]
Paraphrasing what Hemingway wrote on the topic of bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises”, it seems that the descent into totalitarianism occurs first gradually, then suddenly.
We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]
The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]
Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]
Daedelus Kite 