culture war dynamics

Forgiveness Prayer

In this moment of stillness,

I release the weight of past hurts and grievances,

Letting them dissolve like morning mist in the warmth of understanding.

To those who have caused me pain:

I acknowledge that you, too, were walking your own difficult path.

Your actions, though they wounded me,

Were born from your own struggles, fears, and u... See more

Remember that to always be rebelling against a thing is still to be controlled by it.

New worldviews are bubbling away in little cauldrons all the time, but they only flow into the mainstream (eg become part of corporate trainings, official gov't policy, school curricula) when they are structurally of service to preserve the power status quo.

man's capacity for good makes markets possible; man's propensity for evil makes markets necessary.

what is the relationship between ideological commitment and status seeking? is an ideology a particular status game you've opted into? do people select the highest status ideology they can get away with? are they just two independent drivers of social behavior?

The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage

It would sure make things easy if this election were a simple contest of good versus evil. But this is the way of thinking that is tearing the world apart. Those who think that way always consider themselves to be members of Team Good, of course. If your opponent is evil incarnate, then any means to stop him are justified.

Donald Trump is an uncannily accommodating vessel for projection, good and ill. It occurs as something of a cosmic joke that his last name is “Trump,” which is the Joker in a deck of cards, a wild card, the card that can be any card. So it is that Donald Trump can be any character, whatever people hold him to be. This serves both to elevate him and... See more

I won’t play the game of denouncing or endorsing. The psycho-social patterning of “which side are you on” springs from one of the chief narratives of the mythology of Separation. It understands the world by simplifying it into a drama of good versus evil, and also simplifies the human beings who play roles in that drama into subhuman or superhuman ... See more