Conflict emerges not as a necessity but as a probabilistic orientation, seeded by inherited biological reflexes and cultural traditions that tilt cognition toward opposition. The self-determining narratives that grow from this inclination reinforce and entrench opposition until behaviours and thought patterns sustain the narrative above and beyond any substantive rationale for it. Evolutionary pressures honed […]
This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
Substantive, meaningful content in our shared information spaces is suffering from an information-systems evolutionary selection mechanism that is implicitly biased towards continuity over coherence.
A certain talent for inflammatory monosyllabic rhetoric and self-aggrandising histrionics might never have percolated up through the selection processes of liberal democracy had these qualities not already been a greater part and functional necessity of the political game…
Successful perception-manipulation through information-mediated reinforcement requires an intuitive comprehension and insight into a cultural, historical “moment”…
What it is about negative psychological or emotional states and narratives which seems to be so very much more contagious than the positive ones; what is the barb on the hook of negative narrative which just “sticks” in consciousness so successfully and resonates so broadly across social networks and cultures ?
Daedelus Kite 