Lies

We fall for lies because we want to be told what can’t possibly be true. This formulation came to me recently. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise why lies might come into focus these days….

Saying No to Facebook

The Violence Behind Likes and Opinions   I recently removed myself from Facebook. I joined reluctantly and have regretted it since the beginning. Was pushed along by expectation and crowd-mentality. I’ve long felt that Zuckerberg is the worst kind of nerd entrepreneur. Caught-up in fantasies of egotistical superiority requiring that he WIN at all costs

Falling Awake

We say, we “fall asleep.” We imagine a vertiginous scene, leaning over a precipice. Just a moment’s loss of attention, and over we go. We see this as a kind of death. A conflation of self-consciousness with life? There is an expectation that attention and reflexive self-awareness are identical, or at least that we cannot

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

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

Coherent Action, from unintended consequences to catalytic response.

We struggle with unintended consequences. In frustration we turn to chasing after power to force our will to prevail. We enter a spiral of increasing suffering and greater dislocation as the violence this process unleashes destroys every remaining scrap of coherent life. Blinded to our delusion by delusion, we increase our efforts. We twist and

Normalization

The parallels between abusive families and the culture of civilization illuminate why protest has become futile. Futility is not to say that something is difficult, verging on the impossible. Futility arises when an action makes the condition it is meant to ameliorate worse. When unintended consequences pile on, blocking any possible benefit from making a

Being Stuck

Déjà Vu is a common experience for those stuck in abusive situations. We find that the current crisis looks much like the last. No amount of feigned surprise, or pronounced insistence from the abusers that, “This time is different!” can shake the feeling we’ve been here before. And, most likely, we’ll be here again. If we

Contamination

Our progress today is more of a process of disillusion. We are confronted, assaulted, by evidence of the enormity of what is taking place. We react in various ways. Sometimes we strive to deny what is going on. We distance our selves from awareness at the risk of numbing in-attentiveness. Sometimes we buckle under the

“Why Is It Important for You That History Have a Direction?”

This question is asked by John Michael Greer in a reply to a comment on his most recent post. He has been slogging through the log-jam of our cultural resistance to abandoning the bi-polar insistence that we are bound either to Heaven or Hell, Utopia or dystopia. That if we cannot have our heart’s desire

Communication, driven by assumptions

We cannot connect or communicate intentionally without some assurance of common assumptions to buoy us through the effort. I find that through subtle hints – the sort of unintended communication that takes place whenever there is one organism perceiving another and “making sense” of what they see. Through these hints, if I feel the gap

A hint concerning a relationship with power

What if the trouble with power is in our insistence that it can be accumulated, stored, and then controlled by will? If this were the case, the trouble with power dissolves when we accept that it exists. It moves through and around us, and we have access to it, and can influence its direction and