In every part of our universe, there is a surface and then an underlying structure. As surface is the result of interaction with context, it is a balance of external and internal factors, and does not necessarily reveal structure. As such, one has to go beneath the parts of any aspect of life you would [...]
Impulse control
Fiction succeeds because it allows us to, through observing others, make decisions about how we would behave in similar circumstances. We do the same thing every day when we “people watch,” which is one of life’s great hobbies. It would take a billion writers to be as creative as creative as the population of even [...]
Visualize inequality
Many words on this blog have been dedicated to political abstractions, and to attacks on equality, but very rarely do these articles center on showing you what inequality would look like in daily life. Words are tokens. If two people understand roughly the same meaning between the tokens, communication can happen. It still requires both [...]
Trains
When I was little, older people seemed very divided on the topic of trains. “Don’t much care for the kind of people you find on trains,” one would say. “Well now, that’s not so,” another would chime in. “Maggie and I took a long trip out to California on Amtrak and it was just lovely. [...]
Spotlight
The liberal revolutions of The Enlightenment did more than establish a political order. They established a social one. Where previous humankind had tried to organize itself into an order complementing that of nature, from here on we had a new God and Purpose: the individual comes first, before all else. It took only a few [...]
Conservatism
We suffer from information overload. The result is a total lack of clarity, since we receive so many impressions per idea that they lump together into a hazy definition. Since we do not get a clear statement of what any thing is, we tend to view it backward, from instance to essence. That means that [...]
Business opportunity
Want to hear a business proposition? It’s OK, keep on doing what you’re doing, just hear me out. Every few millennia I come around because I can tell my services are needed. It’s a certain smell in the air, like autumn or the singed scent of worn brake pads. That right there is the smell [...]
Silent world
Schopenhauer famously observed that tolerance for noise is inversely proportional to intelligence. If he is correct, our society has made itself a collective idiot through not only its tolerance for pointless and constant loud sound, but its seeming embrace of it. We might wonder why so few gadgets contain an option to not receive warning [...]
Modernity
Articulation is the process of sculpting concepts in words. It is hard work, both difficult and an endurance test. Not all of us have the time or inclination to do it. As the decades have passed, a growing sense of unease has bubbled up among people in this society. We cannot articulate this sensation because [...]
Do right
The shock of awakening to your actual position in history is overpowering. One minute you were stumbling along believing the convenient half-truths the media, government and socialization put into your mind, and the next… aware of that Rome is falling, the enemy is at the gates, and truth is a rare if not fully demonized [...]
