The past month of American politics have been utter chaos. Former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by a matter of millimetres. Joe Biden went to Las Vegas, reportedly got Covid, and disappeared completely from public view. A day …
Immutable Rules Made Mutable in the New Age
Even just a few years ago, there was a certain certainty about the world, about society.
Now there is only probability and it’s as if civilization has been forced to shift from a Newtonian worldview to a quantum consideration.
That …
Why Denial Persists
We recently returned from a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where we spent several days after the event’s conclusion exploring this beautiful city and its environs. While there, walking Lisbon’s famed ‘seven hills,’ mostly surrounded by throngs of other visitors – …
Death Gods and the Attack on President Trump
Have the powers of gods of death been unleashed in our relatively peaceable nation?
I’m in a hip, storied, deep-blue Catskills town; I was having a restful little writer’s retreat on my own, in a miniature cottage overlooking a small …
The Fraught Relationship between Science and Power
I would like to start a conversation on the relationship between science and power. By “science” I mean the field of study (trying to figure out how the world works) and the people doing the studying (scientists, and, in an …
The History We Make Today
After a discussion of Western bourgeois confidence in work, the present and the future, as well as Henry Ford’s disdain for history and tradition in favour of the present (‘the history we make today’), Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, p. 132) …
Do People Want Precious Freedom?
That most perspicacious of social theorists, Zymunt Bauman – on whose work I have drawn before (see for example here) – has raised a question that has become even more relevant today than when he first posed it in Liquid …
Eradication Fantasies Don’t Come Free
Two decades back when the War on Terror™ was announced—you know, that thing that killed millions, cost trillions, made no one safer, and enabled the Covid fraud by giving people a crash course on how to cower and comply in …
Life among Anti-Life Forces
Every so often it is a good idea to revisit our foundational concepts — that is, those important words and definitions that are commonplace in everyday discourse, which we take for granted and we think we have pinned down.
This …
Savage Reservations
Because we have a need to understand the world around us – some more than others – most people, myself included, tend to look to George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) as the right model in terms of which one …
Elite Envy as a Civilizational Toxin
It will be recalled that, in my previous two posts, I wrote about nihilism having to do with a belief in ‘nothing,’ and a concomitant, wanton destruction of (everything valuable in) society, and about two kinds of nihilism (passive and …
Triumph of the ‘Mass-Man’
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would deny that we are living through an age of staggering cultural change, and that has as one of its more salient features a generalized decline in human attentional capacities, as well as …
Two Sides of the Nihilistic Coin
In my previous post, it will be recalled, I wrote about the emergence of the condition known as ‘nihilism’ in modern culture and society – one characterised by an awareness that things, relationships, institutions, and so on, lack the self-evident …
We Approach State Singularity
Many citizens of the West believe that they live in free societies, or something close. But as time goes on, public authorities increasingly insist on having a say in everything.
People cannot build things on their own land without permits. …
The Sorrows of Empire
Metaphors And Historical Understanding
There is no such thing as fully objective history, and that’s for a simple reason. History is generated in narrative form, and the creation of every narrative—as Hayden White made clear four decades ago—necessarily involves the …