From the outset, holism concerns not wholes but the strange seam between parts. From Plato’s Forms and Spinoza’s substance to cybernetics, ecology, and dynamical systems, holism persists as an intuition of unity. Each turn sought not larger aggregates but subtler grammars of interaction—non-linear feedbacks, attractor basins, emergent orders. Unorthodox approaches—Prigogine’s dissipative structures, Bohm’s implicate order, […]
Post-stroke psychological exhaustion often reveals itself less in physical depletion than in the operant futility of psychic investments once thought indispensable. Much of the energy that is demanded—whether in meeting social obligations, navigating institutional protocols, or maintaining the relational tissue of external expectations—proves to contribute little to healing. Instead, it perpetuates an endless circuit of […]
There is no privacy. That’s the first line, the one nobody wants to read, but it’s true enough to carry the weight of the whole argument. What we call privacy now is a commercial product, a marketable illusion. Platforms sell the promise of protecting what they already capture. Governments legislate rights they cannot enforce. We […]
Australian universities now draw more than 40% of their revenue from international students, with billions funneled into research, teaching, and infrastructure, much of it mediated by digital platforms. Government support has shrunk to under 30% of funding, while tech companies capture not only the delivery mechanisms but also the analytics, intellectual property pipelines, and student […]
At some point, Trump will be gone. The man will vanish from the stage, but the field that made him possible will remain. That’s the real danger—confusing the collapse of a figure with the collapse of the system that sustained them. Without structural change, the vacancy will simply pull another body into the same orbit. […]
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round…” The 2024 US election is an interesting historical inflection point, quite clearly bordering on hysterical in some regards. The fuel of both political continuity and change is stochastic difference, not unity – a tough pill to swallow. A simple enough concept and yet rendered as almost […]
Engaging whole and holistic systems is a little like trying to orchestrate and sustain the infinitely complex requisite variety of a universal remote control. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯/𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦, 𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘴: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘴𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺) 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 – […]
Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]
It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]
We trade substance, experience and a visceral, lived sense of meaning for a hollow representation of these same things and in finding ourselves dissatisfied and haunted over the transactional deficit of a mechanism that always loses energy and value, we feel quite positively compelled and emotionally motivated to double-down on our losing hand. This is […]
These broken words and worlds are mirrors of broken selves that we have carried around like those old coats that, ragged and torn, serve no other purpose than to give us something reassuring to cling to and in being or becoming so accustomed to bearing these burdens as second-skins and masquerades or shades upon a […]
I am as though that myth that as soon as you stop believing in me, I cease to exist. The beliefs we hold are very much like this but it is (also) we who stop existing when they vanish. For this reason, but perhaps not only for this reason, we all find ourselves committing to […]
Daedelus Kite 