Explaining the shift from collective self-confidence to jadedness — It’s a pretentious cliché to talk at all about postmodernity, let alone about how late-industrial cultures incorporate cynicism and apathy, implicitly taking truth to be relative and subjective. It’s another cliché to say that postmodernity was only a fad, and that we’re living in post-postmodernity, or in some new era…

And how to dismantle Ayodeji Awosika’s advertisements for the creator economy — If you squint hard enough, you can often tell how self-help hacks write like wily, duplicitous advertisers. They promise miracles with the headline and walk it all back in the small print, and they avoid harsh truths with slick slogans. This is what happens when someone with a salesperson’s sensibilities…

Tracking American attitudes towards violence, sex, and profane language — Why do Americans love violence and hate sex and foul language? In case you weirdly doubt that they do, I’ll go ahead and cite the obvious to support the premise. America’s strange censorship regime The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates American television broadcasts and routinely engages in discriminatory censorship which seems bizarre to non-Americans…

Gilgamesh, Gnosticism, and the fear of human progress — The Garden of Eden story in Genesis is an odd Rorschach test in that the story’s simplicity and universal themes have lent themselves to endless interpretations. But the myth isn’t as subjective and poetically inspired as it might seem since that story is rather a censored, highly condensed, and reworked…

If children are natural philosophers, and philosophy is akin to childish play, culture’s bedrock assumptions must be frivolous — Children are infamous for asking awkward questions that cut right to disconcerting possibilities. Relying on their imagination which provides them a fresh perspective and lacking an adult’s inhibitions or overfamiliarity with a topic, children are liable to question the foundational assumptions that most adults take for granted.

Comparing hypnotic trances, behavioural automations, delusions, and antisocial inclinations — HBO’s “The Gilded Age” depicts the machinations of late-nineteenth century’s wealthy American elites as a mild comedy of manners, presenting the servants as fawning over the aristocrats and gossiping about them like schoolchildren. …

The obsolete religious context of ownership — Perhaps the most shameful calamity to befall any late-modern materialist is the loss of his private property and especially his home. If you find yourself evicted and homeless on the streets, no longer the king of your castle, you’ve been effectively anathematized by the Church of Private Property. …

The childish foundations of social and scientific laws — We take for granted that children benefit from the maturity of the elders who raise them. And compared to a child, the average adult is wiser if only from having lived through the additional experience which the child lacks. But suppose that adults were childlike in certain respects so that…

Deflating religion and mysticism by recognizing our mind’s unconscious side — Christians and Muslims say God watches over everything we do and will judge us after we die. He’ll do so not behind our back, mind you, but to our faces in the afterlife. And similarly, many Hindus and mystics say that a cosmic consciousness underlies all natural changes, and that…