Whiteness, a Community of Narcissists

This post was drafted in August of 2015. At the time I was concerned whether it was complete enough. Whether it said enough. On looking it over today I am struck by how this theme has continued to strike us day after day. And how little, outside of the works of James Baldwin and his

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….

It’s Learning…

It is learning! Once we stop thinking of learning as the product of teaching, as an accumulation of knowledge, data, information; we can begin to look at what it is. Learning is how we remain open in the face of conditioning. It involves deciding without making judgments – to mangle Alan Watts.

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

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

Beyond Judgments and Opinions…

We all have opinions. We all make judgments. None of us is satisfied…. What if these are connected? I’ve long felt a hankering for getting beyond opinions. It’s easy to see this as a form of striving after certainty. We see opinion, as it relates to truth, as a negotiation with authority. Whoever has authority

This Means War!

Rufus T. Firefly scuttling center stage to make his pronouncement…. There’s always a hidden glee behind the crowd’s reaction. “Before, I had to hold it together. Now? I can let go. A free pass. No resort is too extreme. We’re at war.” The next stage is the rush to, “Get in the fight!” After all,

Questions of Identity

Schools fail us by teaching students how to work with knowledge rather than how to deal with ignorance, not be a sucker with the unknown. Nassim Taleb This neither begins nor ends with schools. In a time when the most popular public stance is to celebrate our fears and idolize those who act on them

I haven’t got time for this!

This common complaint came to mind recently in relation to the resistance I often encounter to my interest in looking at the basics, at how we tend to glide right past fundamental discrepancies – incoherence – in a rush to “Get on with it!” What came to mind was how this had been the attitude

Contempt

Peeling away layers of Ego I found anger and disappointment blocking the way to compassion. There’s another block hiding beneath them, contempt. We see it all around us. This is a society choking on contempt. Every faction and group is held together by the contempt in which it holds the rest. The path to anger,

Is Wild Willful?

Is wild willful? This question came to mind reading this essay. Is it willful in the same sense as we know wilfulness to mean acting out however we please? I don’t know. I don’t think so. We used to talk about acting out of our “natures.” This seems closer, though whenever we turn to that

Beyond the Thrall of Ego

We are raised to be Egotists and then resented for it. This is the means of our alienation. Our organism knows what to do and how to act. It has been functioning in this way since before we were born. Through the accidents and consequences of what we know as thought, and the pernicious illusion