How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

Stop Counting

In dreams we approach a form of knowing that we find difficult to access while awake. We tend to discount the sensation that there was “something to it.” Or, we displace our fascination within the dream in a vain attempt to narrate its dramatic particulars. As this fails to match our original wonder, as we

On Wealth

Wealth is an abstraction. It is the taking of value from the realm of the actual, the fabric of a living earth, and creating a gradient of poverty. What is read as wealth is a condition of lesser poverty than those wealth pushes into the maw of destruction and diminishment it shoves along ahead of

What Realism…?

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. Frederick Douglas Looking at a history of Europe and its entry into Modernity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries one factor stands out. The legacy that lead to Modernism was filled with internalized violence and the passing down of abusive behavior and the

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

All of our myths

It strikes me that today all of our publicly accepted myths are propped up and support profit, for someone, some entity, institution or other. As we fear the commodification of everything, everything, as can be found in the stories we turn to to give our lives meaning, has already been commodified. All the bluster that

“The Greatest Illusion in the World is the Illusion of Separation”

The greatest benefit I’ve found from the internet is the way it functions as a tool for Serendipity. It is an electronic I Ching of sorts, though with many additional pitfalls one avoids by sticking to casting bones or sticks. The title of this post appeared as one of those FB images sent out to

On the Impossibility of Mediated Ritual

Attempting to watch a video of a recent gathering in Britain I was struck by this thought; that no actual ritual can survive passing through a mediated filtering intact. Not only will our understanding of it be broken, but any value it might have held risks being destroyed in the process. If we give it

From Efficient to Effective

Efficiency, at best, in my most charitable moments, I would recognize as an accumulation of tips and attitudes that make things work well during times when expected practices are useful. At such times to be effective is at least in some degree to be efficient. The key here is in recognizing what it means to

On Medieval Cathedrals and the Limits of Proprioception

The inevitable question arrived via Twitter. “If civilization is all bad, what about the cathedrals?” I must say I invited this kind of question, literally asking for examples to unpack…. Still, I’m leery of the exercise. I don’t write to convince anyone. I write as a record and a way to extend and fill out

Liberal & Conservative, Bankrupt, empty labels.

Liberal meant freedom-loving once. Conservative meant upholding time-tested values. Their “competition” could be seen, within the noise brought on by corruption and bad-faith, as a way to work out differences held for laudable reasons, a balancing of perspectives. This may never have actually been true, but it was the way the struggles were portrayed, the

The love of the Fire-hose

The sign that we’ve arrived is to be complemented – and self-congratulating – on our capacity to “drink from the fire-hose.” The elite universities are fire-hose drinking academies. Their graduates’ claim to fame, ticket to success, that they can thrive at the fire-hose. The Future! is always seen as a place where even greater fire-hose