Not Remotely Good Enough

I’m very encouraged to see articles like “Authoritarianism is making a comeback” getting around. And this one is over a year old now. As far as I’m concerned, every step in the right direction is a good one. And yet I read it with a pit in my stomach, although a little more hopeful than…

Thought You’d Never Ask

Much if not most (I’m tempted to say all) of our thinking about authority has been perverted by indelible imprints of authoritarian upbringing, education, and incessant social reinforcement. We’re all brainwashed, literally, and it started before we could even talk, when our parents first negated and violated our wills, and sometimes our rights and bodies,…

Getting Free From Authority

Authority is a story we tell each other. That’s all it is, no more. Telling a story does not make it true. Telling it again and again does not make a story more true with the telling. Repetition automatically creates credibility, but this effect is a cognitive foible that we need to be aware of…

Supremacism

What is supremacism? Most people seem to think it’s superiority taken to extremes, but that’s to misunderstand how minds work. The need to be treated as superior isn’t the kind of thing that’s good in moderation but a terrible in excess. The need to be treated as superior is a defect of the psyche that…

Cynics

Cynics make a basic and glaring mistake of characterization. And they do it twice. One, they characterize all of us by the worst of us. Two, they characterize each one of us as we are at our worst. So our best isn’t credible enough to characterize our nature, but our worst is. That hardly seems…

Real Wisdom

I see spirits. But don’t worry, I’m not alone. So do you. Of course I don’t mean mythological, paranormal, metaphysical, ethereal spirits, (although I don’t rule them out, either.) I mean something much more real and pragmatic. I’m talking about the spirits which all those other kinds of woo-woo “spirit” are more or less just…

Anarchy Means Chaos — In Figments of the Blind

The entire argument that chaos will erupt from a lack or absence of authority rests on blind faith. No one yet has conducted intelligent, controlled, well-performed studies to find out what happens when people manage their affairs under non-authoritarian conditions — so what actual, non-speculative, reliable data does the argument rest on? None. Further, people…