Startling Sleepwalkers, On the Prospects of Waking Them from Their Nightmares.

The New York Times article on Paul Kingsnorth and Dark Mountain. I’m left with a feeling that – if my response were to be reported in The New York Times – the headline would read, “Petulant Doomer Disappointed at Being Misunderstood!” As calm as this story is, its passive aggressive antibodies hidden from view by

Coherence is not reasonable.

This statement demands clarification. Coherence it is not a synonym for reason, reasoned, reasonable. Neither is incoherence: unreason, unreasonable, unreasoned. The key to understanding coherence lies at the root of these distinctions. I’ve found this talk given by Anthony McCann valuable in illuminating this distinction. Anthony uses language centered around what he calls Gentleness. His

On Reflection… part 2

There have been times when it has seemed appropriate to appeal to the metaphor of a snake shedding its skin. This last year brings to mind a different serpentine behavior, stupor induced by the effort to digest an enormous meal. An Anaconda at these times can be mistaken for a fallen tree trunk….

Hanging on

Cognitive Dissonance occurs when perception shows us what we are unable to accept. We fail, actually refuse, to see something because to see it will break something we rely on for our deepest security. This challenge to our world view is too much to bear. It is felt… we just can’t…. Who would have thought

There Is a Gulf Between Foraging and Mining

There is a gulf between two attitudes and ways of working that can be described by looking at the distance between foraging and mining. When we forage we gather what we need. We also limit our effort. If a spot is too resistant to our efforts; if what we’re after is scarce; we move on.

The fantasy of control

So long as we keep expecting that what funnels through public discourse are choices that lead to results we are stuck in the nightmare fantasy of control. Brexit. Trump versus Clinton. All of the day’s public questions are mired in manipulations. We remain complicit so long as we feel we must make the choice our

How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

Division, a not-so-timely second look…

This post has sat in draft form for many months. It’s neither been published nor can I definitively side-line it. As time has passed, it seems unseemly to return focus to the event of Paul Kingsnorth‘s Apotheosis in The New York Times, but there are things here that still matter, that have grown in importance

It’s a crime, part II

Must we be pure? Whenever we confront the depths of our corruption we hear this whining plea. Ego deflates us, How can I meet such a standard? A false question. We are what we are. We will do what we feel we must do. What is in question is what do these questions mean? Who

Political Theater

Policing the norms The dynamic in a dysfunctional family maintains itself through elaborate procedures that perpetuate their norm by maintaining a mythology that celebrates the systemic abuse that holds it together. The ongoing dramatizations of these myths maintain their power. Each member has a role to play. And, so long as we remain enthralled by

Ideological Justification

In recent decades, American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades of our politics will be about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will define our major debates will concern the complexity of

Rational

We believe we are rational. We use logic to confirm it. We ignore the circularity of our arguments. How do we drop defensiveness? We live in a tumult of fear and anxiety. There is a gap between our beliefs and what we know we are hiding from behind those defenses. We are at least in