Cult leader playbook: 1. Position himself (and the group — his extension) as the benevolent safe haven to turn to when afraid 2. Isolate the follower from other sources of safe haven 3. Arouse fear in the follower Rinse; repeat. Qualities of a Cult Leader Narcissistic — highly self-absorbed, they demand excessive admiration and slavish […]
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to refer to the confoundingly commonplace motives of the Nazis who perpetrated some of the worst war crimes in history. Primo Levi maintained that few monsters exist. “More dangerous are the common man, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions,” the Holocaust survivor […]
Sociologist Theodor Adorno created the “F scale” in a 1950 seminal work entitled The Authoritarian Personality, in order to rank the level of predilection to fascism in an individual, which became desirable both during and shortly after World War II. According to Adorno and his cohort, the defining authoritarian personality traits of the Platonic fascist […]
Hierarchy vs. Fairness is the dominant Manichaean struggle of our age, and perhaps every age before it: shall we structure our society with a strict hierarchical system of highs and lows, with power concentrated at the top? Or shall we have an egalitarian society where truth, justice, and fairness rule the day? There are a […]
Magical Thinking abounds in late-stage capitalism Magical thinking is a form of purely imaginative cognition exhibited in childhood, in which children pretend that they will be able to get whatever they wish for without regard for the actual realities of the world. Not limited to children, magical thinking is a common trait exhibited by the […]
The Artist vs. the Fundamentalist is an ancient tale, told throughout history. Whereas the artist is creative, often whimsical, and stimulated by diversity, the fundamentalist is unimaginative, strict, and preferential to monoculture. Many other dichotomies mirror this pair, from fluid to rigid, from passionate to wooden, from fun to drab and a multitude of others. […]
We’re so often entranced by what we see that we forget there is more going on underneath the surface of all things. There is a cognitive basis for this, in the way our perceptual apparatus prioritizes vision above all other senses — and in the difficulty of “visualizing” The Unseen. There are psychological reasons as […]
Magical Thinking is a development phase we all go through as children. Unfortunately, some never come out of it fully. It’s a juvenile way of imagining you can wish reality into existence through the sheer force of your mind. There is a role for Magical Thinking in key contexts, such as creative fields — as […]
Extremism is a mentality; a black and white worldview. It’s a willingness to go too far to meet one’s objectives — to violate moral boundaries in pursuit of one’s aims. A political extremist is an individual or group adhering to ideologies that are far removed from the mainstream beliefs of society. These ideologies often promote […]
See Dropdown menu See chart below Duty to Warn Celebrate the Magic Narcissism Diversity Authoritarian Personality Ecology Emotional manipulation Freedom Extremism Justice– The Rule of Law Dogma Philosophy Power Democracy Technology Integrity Love Sacred world 3. See other writings Efficiency isn’t everything
When usability pioneers have All the Feels about the nature of our creeping technological dystopia, how we got here, and what we might need to do to right the ship, it’s wise to pay attention. Don Norman’s preaching resonated with my choir, and they’ve asked me to sing a summary song of our people in […]
Anger is the defining emotion of the internet. It’s designed to whip you up into a frenzy in order to foment cheap pageviews. Its interest is in you becoming a histrionic attention whore, such that you suck in as much clandestinely stolen user data to your platform of choice as possible. Turns out, conflict gets […]
While we wring our hands in the United States over whether or not such a strategy is even conceivable, the erstwhile President of Russia has been running this playbook out in the open in Ukraine and Eastern Europe for some time. With help from Propagandist-in-Chief Vladislav Surkov, Putin has leveraged the open secrets about the […]
There is no point belaboring a “stop the identity politics!” argument because there is simply no way to excise the political clash of factions from the identities of those factions. There would be no point in clashing if there were no identities. There is no polity without identity. The root of the word itself in […]
There’s a popular and somewhat understandable misperception of culture as a vehicle of reproducing “normalcy” throughout society. However, each historical era makes the cognitive mistake of assuming its particular version of Normal is, well, Normal. And that all eras which came before — that were obviously ruled by stupid people who could not understand the […]