Philosophy

Question your freedom
A few days ago I was riding a bicycle down the Berliner Prenzlauer Allee and slowed down behind a fellow cyclist whose calves inspired me. As he pedalled, I discerned a tattoo that read "Question your freedom". I sensed this is an interesting phrase to chew on, but I wasn't sure exactly why. I needed ...
Some notes on Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism
In reply to a noteworthy article in the Guardian about the book "Postcapitalism" that is published on July 30. 1 Mason interprets the transition from capitalism to postcapitalism as a parallel to the one from feudalism to capitalism. This serves to explain that such a societal transformation takes many decades and gives rise to 'a ...
... a playful, self-defeating gesture
Real and apparent social hierarchies
The idea is that we get a useful classification of behavioral patterns in primates when we observe what happens when a group gets attacked. For each individual, we will observe some combination of three possible impulses: Seek to protect other members of the group Seek protection from other members of the group Engage in a ...
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance This is about overcoming obsolete dichotomies. Cognitive dissonance is the result of a paradox the receiver was unaware of. It discontinues her consequential reasoning. In other words: it stops her in her tracks, catches her off guard, and ideally makes her re-evaluate the basic assumptions of her belief. A paradox alone is not ...
Miraculous Miru
The book "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (and the movie with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) is a character study of a girl, Amy, who had been spoiled to such an extent that she developed a very specific psychopathology. Amy was the only child of a couple that derived a dangerously large proportion of their ...
We need…
to find meaning, not in what we are doing, but in the superlative of what we do.
Dialectical Hypocrisy
1. It's Sunday so I would like to describe the history of our civilization as the dialectical process of overcoming hypocrisy. I don't believe in interpreting historical development in a Hegelian way as the embodiment of a purely logical principle, and to be honest I lack the intellectual vigor to pursue such an endeavour. But ...