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On Politics and Power — On the ways people organise themselves

• [article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
  Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
• [article] Great Spirits of History — 6 Sep 2024
  The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.
• [article] Speaking in tongues — 23 Aug 2024
  Glossolalia has a unique pattern of neural activity, distinct from psychopathologies and even other trance-like states. So, the feeling underneath is special, but the actual speaking itself seems learned. It makes you wonder where that feeling comes from.
• [article] The value of violence — 9 Aug 2024
  The utility of violence isn’t in the violence itself, but only in the threat of it. It creates immediate behaviour change, but only for so long as the threat is active.
• [article] Everything is Choice Architecture — 12 Jan 2023
  Nudging doesn’t work because people aren’t thinking hard enough. Everything is choice architecture, so look to the way you build things in the first place or turn to our deepest motivations—our communities.
• [article] Explaining group dynamics — 29 Mar 2022
  Group dynamics are often thought to be a complicated thing to explore. But a 50-year-old model explains much of it with only three things: a need for Belonging, for Affection, and for Control.
• [article] It's not 'just' a placebo — 28 Dec 2021
  The phrase “it’s ‘just’ a placebo effect” is used to wave away inconvenient findings that some alternative therapies work, because we don’t know how they work. But many of us frankly don’t know how any medicine works and this blind one-directional faith is often misguided.
• [article] Voluntary Censorship — 8 Sep 2021
  Our education bestows on us a ‘common sense’ that narrows our vision to only those things that ‘can be said’. We censor ourselves and, as a result, have a schizoprenic approach to important issues.
• [article] In praise of the sage — 19 Jul 2021
  Our culture spurns the ‘guru’ as a charletan and the traditionalist as a relic. Legitimate knowledge comes from reasoned observation, not intuition. Except that this is a lie that we tell ourselves and which blinds us to how useful the sage can be.
• [article] Solving the Paradox of Tolerance — 24 Feb 2021
  Every now and then a proponant of ‘tolerance’ will cite political philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’ to justify their suppression of the tolerant. Shame Karl Popper didn’t see it as much of a paradox, then.
• [article] Your personality doesn't belong to you — 17 Nov 2020
  The study of personality has a fairly storied history—a pretty contentious search for the essence of human expression. But more modern approaches to the study of personality show us something interesting—that our personalities might be something that’s forced upon us.
• [article] Female zealots — 19 Oct 2020
  A popular academic fact claims that females are the most zealous religious adherents, despite being marginalised in their own religious communities. We are told this is because they are uneducated and submissive. But a quick look at most of recorded history shows us this was not always the case. Once, female zealots formed the core of what is possibly our most universal religious tradition.
• [article] How we choose our psychic predators — 8 Oct 2020
  Henry Farrell describes Donald Trump as a psychic predator. It’s an interesting concept that demonstrated (to me at least) how we choose certain kinds of pain for ourselves.
• [article] The sophists: natural justice or social justice? — 4 Oct 2020
  Greek philosophers argued whether social morality was a creation of the weak to control the strong, but of course this is simply another form of strength.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 10 Sep 2020
  Folie à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.