Centuries ago, the Italian philosopher and priest Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote, “Good can exist without evil, whereas evil can not exist without good.” The good […]
Category: Psychology
Until Morale Improves
“The beatings will continue until morale improves.” ~Cartoonist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe (1936) Many years ago a friend of mine was managing a sales team. […]
The Memetic Heretics
Memetics, the science of information flows, existed long before the internet, but a Belgian court went against long-held knowledge when it sentenced a group of […]
The Little Man
In the summer of 1945 psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) wrote a riveting essay entitled Listen, Little Man! – addressing all the forms of the ‘Little […]
Computer Still Says No
Humor is often prophetic. The sketch from Little Britain –‘Computer says No’– is exactly twenty years old. An unfriendly, cold-hearted hospital receptionist conveniently suspends all […]
The Triviality Trap
In our world today the good needs strengthening through resistance, protection and creation. The bad needs closure through demolition, justice and learning. The past needs […]
The Conditionality Curse
Freedom is the absence of conditionality. In this industrial, mechanical, technical era, however, conditionality is the ever-expanding center of existence. All of our appliances and […]
From Individual Power to Collective Shame
In 1919, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) founded America’s first public relations firm, applying psychoanalytic discoveries to promote consumerism and to use latent sexual […]
Building the Non-Lie
It’s harder than it seems to build a truthful venture atop the ruins of a World of Lies. Whoever has had the courage to start […]
Addiction Cure Suppressed
The strange disappearance of books and articles on baclofen “Drinking heavily, you abandon people–and they abandon you–and you abandon yourself–It’s a form of partial murder […]
Assumptions are Dangerous
Especially for the Targets of PsyOps: You & Me “Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for […]
Revenge of the Epistemologists
How to Acquire Knowledge? What can we know? Perhaps not an uncontroversial question nowadays, yet an important one. Right after his speech at the Heritage […]
On Indifference and Identity
When Moral Relativism Becomes Nihilism Back in 2007, Argentinian native Máxima Zorreguieta, who married Dutch crown-prince Willem-Alexander in 2002, angered many Dutch people by saying […]
Er klopt iets niet
Het was nog erg vroeg, maar zoals altijd en overal in New York was het leven op straat in volle gang. Ik liep vlak bij […]