On a freedom scale from 1 to 9, even the “best” countries of today would only score about a 5 for most of its citizens — There are bound to be minorities within each country who have significantly lower degrees of freedom than others, just as there are elites whose freedom is significantly higher. Let me suggest this simple scale without lingering much upon it. Slavery — your rights and freedoms are at the whim of…

A simple bullet list of stances on existence, spirituality, and aesthetics from a metamodernist perspective — In modern life, spiritual, existential and aesthetic aspects of life have all taken a backseat. Of course there’s lots of these things going on, but there’s still a sense of woo-woo, pretentiousness, silliness, embarrassment, light-headedness, fake, fraud, self-aggrandizement and so forth. Physics, economics and possibly sexual drives and desires are…

Is there such a thing as Karmic law? What goes around comes around, huh? Or does it? Everybody gets what they deserve in the end. Or do they? — How about this one: Does being a good person ultimately count for more than being powerful and successful? Is the world a fair place, a cosmic order of morality? Are there rewards inherent in kindness and morality — and are our sins and evils really pregnant with punishment? Or is…

Fake rebels just stay on the safe side and “critique”. The irony and sarcasm of the last few decades just don’t carry any longer — it’s time for sincere irony, or ironic sincerity. — A weekend long-read on the nature of trust, irony, and the renewal of faith in our time. It is from an earlier draft for a chapter in my book, 12 Commandments. Prologue: On the nature of trust — and how it is created by irony

In a meaningless world, our minds automatically cobble up meaning out of pure emptiness — There is no apparent reason, no deeper meaning behind it. The text reaches for nothing, seeks to achieve nothing, is devoid of other meaning than pointing towards its own vulgar meaninglessness and absurdity. I challenge readers to view the text without irony, humor, or that twinkle in the eye. There…

NFTs were contemporary art crossed with crypto, attracting speculation and fraud— but ironically, they can help us democratically reimagine society. In the wake of AI art, don’t forget about them! — Remember NFTs? Sam Bankman-Fried, anyone? As recently as 2021, the phenomenon of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) shocked the world. In the wake of AI art, it’s easy to forget about this craze. But, more importantly, we should not forget the positive potential of this mostly bad phenomenon:

Neuroatypical people often have a mixture of very strong and very weak sides compared to the average. This puts them in a strange category besides the conventional hierarchies of society. — A brief note on neuroatypicality in today’s world. Why are so many metamodernists neuroatypical? As an author on the topic of metamodernism I have not been able not to notice the extreme over-representation among metamodernists of some form of neuroatypicality and otherwise far-from average nervous systems:

My early 2017 appraisal of these two public intellectuals proved more on point than I could have imagined — Preface to 2023 re-launch Welcome to this re-launch of my detailed reading and commentary upon the first time Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia spoke together: about society, about identity politics, about feminism, about campus activism. In retrospect, I can see that my resistance to the trend of these two rising at the time was…

Jumping off the edge of your “maps of meaning” takes a sense of inner safety — (from the book, 12 Commandments) Owned by Our Maps Maps aren’t there to be owned. They own us. And then we draw our little life projects on them, our little dramas and traumas and stories and rises and falls and getbacks. So once you break the chains of shame and guilt, and face the…