Recommended Articles

 George Monbiot - Neoliberal Economics - the root of all our problems  - The Guardian

A superb summary of the problems that we are facing as a result of the economics of Reagan and Thatcher.

E Saez and G Zucman - The Triumph of Injustice - How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

A graphic description of the effect of the reduction of corporate taxes on equality. Turns out that in the US, corporations contribute less than the working class.

Angela Nagle - The Lost Boys - The Atlantic

Describes the belief of adherents to the Alt Right that civilization is in decline and that feminism and egalitarianism are to blame.

Paul Thagard - Jordan Peterson's Murky Maps of Meaning - Psychology Today

Assesses Peterson's psychological theories in the light of actual research in the areas he covers and concludes that "Peterson's ideas are a mishmash of banal self-help, amateur philosophy, superfluous Christian mythology, evidence-free Jungian psychology, and toxic individualistic politics." 

Grant Maxwell - Why are so many young men drawn to Peterson's Intellectual Misogyny?

Maxwell offers a straightforward critique of Jordan Peterson as an champion of the status quo who appeals to the adolescent aspects of masculinity, likening his appeal to that of Trump. 

Stuart Kauffman - Reinventing The Sacred - Beyond Reductonism

This is a fascinating two hour lecture delivered by Stuart Kauffman explaining his ideas about science, the error of scientific reductionism (the belief that everything can be explained in terms of matter and the laws of physics), and the sacred.

Michael Hudson - The Vocabulary of Economic Deception

Michael Hudson is interviewed about his book, J is for Junk Economics. He says today's economists and financial institutions "...try to portray their product – in this case, neoliberal economics, dismantling protection of the environment, dismantling consumer protection and stopping of prosecution of financial fraud – as ‘wealth creation’ instead of impoverishment and austerity for the economy at large. So basically, my book reviews the economic vocabulary and language people use to perceive reality."

Ann Applebaum - The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Ann Applebaum is interviewed about her book, The Twilight of Democracy, where she looks at the causes of the rise of the authoritarian right or "new right".

Two Misleading Intellectual Habits

Two misleading and persistent intellectual habits dominate thinking and much of politics:

1. The myth of the isolated mind and 
2. The legacy of the theological divide.

1. The myth of the isolated mind is the belief that human minds are purely private, locked within our skulls. Merlin Donald, neuro-paleontologist, demonstrates the flimsiness of the idea in his remarkable book, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. (Here's a review.) He makes it clear that no human beings can develop their human cognitive potential in the absence of culture. Cognition and culture are mutually dependent. Their dependence raises some questions about ethical responsibility, personal freedom, freedom of speech and of other areas in which people are ineluctably interdependent actors whose sense of meaning and justice has changed throughout history and varied across cultures.

2. The theological divide separates heaven and earth. Here is how it looked before Nietzsche:

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Divine intellect | Randomness (unpredictability)

Here's how it looks now from the "secular" point of view: 

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Laws of (mechanical) Nature | Randomness (unpredictability)

Much of the ontological edifice of theology remains intact. It's basically a decapitated theology. 

But as thinkers such as Stuart Kauffman and Manuel DeLanda convincingly show (they each have many lectures, interviews and short talks on line if you're interested), there is now an approach that makes matter dynamic rather than a passive receptacle of form or logos or laws of nature and that reinstates the ontological status of virtual or potential. It looks more like this:

• Evolving Cosmos
• Self-organizing Matter
• Dynamic Nature
• Sentient, encultured Body
• Knowledge that reason cannot work without emotion
• Virtual and real complement each other 
• Chaos and complexity theories
• Intrinsic unpredictability in evolutionary biology (non-deterministic)

This new, emerging approach might help us feel at home in nature and on this planet in a more sustainable and responsible way.

Change Discourse: An Aside on Planning and Evaluation

In large organizations, in the accepted practices of planning and evaluation, we are hampered by our inability to acknowledge unanticipated benefits, i.e., the creativity of what is proposed. We seem to be unable to value options that we haven't anticipated in advance or even to accommodate valuations of unanticipated options. What would count as legitimation in these instances?  The unanticipated benefit cannot be considered relevant, based on pre-established criteria.

Why do we deprive ourselves of anything more than our presupposed potential?  The standard (ontological and meta-ethical) notions of objectivity and fairness in evaluation are in need of a major rethink, especially in a complex, rapidly changing world where future potentiality becomes at least as important as present actualities. Adaptability and responsiveness are more important than adhering to artificial and outdated notions of objectivity, which for at least two millennia, have been more about projecting our conceptual filing cabinets on events than on encouraging openness to new an novel ideas and approaches. To add irony to insult, in today's variant, to mimic the successful model of reductionist science, it is assumed that the ability to assign a number to some evaluative criterion makes that criterion objective. 

The difference between living and mechanical linear/reductionist notions of objectivity needs to be emphasized. In the linear/reductionist model, the relevant determinants of an event  are isolated and identified in a rigorous way, such that they can be arranged and used in planning experiments and building machines. As successful as this method has been, however, according to scientists such as Eugene Wigner, the approach legitimately applies to only a small set of relatively easily manipulable things (which is why basic physics is about necessary laws and anything more complex is statistical at best at the lowest level of granularity.)  The attempt to apply it to a large open-ended organization occasions the kinds of issues described by Burt Perrin (Paragraph 103). 

Stuart Kauffman shows that a living system is one where the boundary conditions are intrinsic to the phenomena under investigation, which are not "placed by hand" as they are in a more mechanistic model. He further argues(cf. pp. 131-143) that there is "no way to pick out the relevant collective variables that will play a causal role in the further evolution" of living systems.  (p.140-1) Nevertheless, we put our methodological carts before our ontological horses, and worse, we justify our aims based on our methods, rather than the reverse. This is not only reductionist. It reduces us.


Our model of measurement needs to change from a mechanical one to one that respects that we work in living systems. We need to use something a bit less pedantic than a pre-established list of specific criteria for evaluation and learn how to acknowledge context, the context being our actual overall aims in relation to what is being evaluated both now, and as they change, with learning, over time.  We need to look at a higher level of granularity if we're really serious about innovation or getting beyond a nihilistic means-focused outlook (a hamster wheel).  This will require a sea change at every juncture. Responsiveness and resiliency will be key.