Just as human exceptionalism and superiority were conceptualized and have been practiced by humans, so too are any and all attempts to go beyond them, to dig our way out of the anthropocene and inhabit a non human-centric world. For any such attempts will be our (human) conceptions and practices....
In 1999, Ken Gergen wrote about the tyranny of the normal—“the pattern of expectations, obligations and swift sanctions within the core of most disciplines.” In 2019, Jerry Z. Muller, zeroed in on how one dominant feature of the normal —metrics—tyrannizes us. His book is aptly titled The Tyranny of Metrics. Lately, I’ve...
Last week I turned 80 and one of the many ways we marked the occasion (in addition to a fantastic truly global Zoom celebration) was for Jan Wootten, my creative advisor, and me to reread an essay I wrote for the book Narrative Identities, Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction many years...
Instead of asking "What's the solution?" ask "How can we become the kind of species/society/community/organization that can create solutions that seem impossible?" That question—"How can we become?"— is unanswerable through traditional means. It requires a completely different relationship to knowledge, expertise, and human possibility. That's what The International Class at the...
Descartes famously said (in Latin): “I think, therefore, I am.” Such is the modernist bias of mainstream psychology. The bias of Social Therapeutics and Performance Activism is a postmodern rewriting of Descartes: "We perform, therefore, we become.” This is the activity of a humanizing mass psychology and a new kind of social activism....
I love dogs. How they are with each other and with humans intrigues and amuses me endlessly. Maybe if I lived in the country or the suburbs I wouldn’t see so much of this, but in a city with a million dogs I probably run into a hundred dogs a...
Today's words to ponder come from David Graeber, American anthropologist and anarchist social and political activist. He died in 2020. “At a moment when the capitalists’ collective refusal to even consider rethinking any of their basic assumption about the world might well mean not just the death of capitalism, but...
More words from Raoul Vaneigem Everything that human beings do and undo passes through the mediation of language. The semantic realm is one of the main battlefields in the struggle between the will to live and the spirit of submission. The fight is unfair. Words serve Authority more faithfully than most...
We humans—with our species exceptionalism, our arrogance, our smarts and our not so smarts, our bloated brains and shrinking hearts, our degenerating ranges of sight and sound, the cooling of our touch, and the freezing of our feelings—are in deep, deep trouble. It is a trouble of our own making....
Today's words are from Belgian radical philosopher Raoul Vaneigem's influential (in the 1960s) book The Revolution of Everyday Life. “People are far too unperturbed, it seems to me, by the way in which the world, in certain periods, assumes the forms of the prevailing metaphysics. No matter how bizarre belief in...
