Propaganda and Influence
Jacques Ellul: Propaganda as the Defining Technology of Mass Society
On how propaganda is not an aberration but a structural necessity of mass democracy, and why rational citizens are its most effective subjects
Psychology and Human Sciences
McGilchrist
The Left Hemisphere’s World
On how bureaucratic systems reduce irreducible complexity to categories they can process, and what gets sacrificed when administration colonizes every domain of human life
Girard
Envy and the Double
On how envy transforms admiration into a desire for annihilation, creating rivals who become indistinguishable mirrors locked in mutual destruction
Body and Somatic Traditions
Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk: Trauma, the Nervous System, and the Body Keeps the Score
On how trauma lives in the nervous system as frozen survival responses, why talk therapy alone cannot reach it, and the somatic practices that allow the body to complete what danger interrupted
Bateson
Learning to Learn
On Bateson's levels of learning, and why the deepest learning transforms not what we do but how we understand the contexts that shape behavior
Attachment and Relational Psychology
Attachment in the Adult
On how the attachment system reorganizes in adult love, and why the person we choose reflects the safety patterns encoded in infancy
Anthropology of the Sacred
Arnold van Gennep: Rites of Passage and the Structure of Transition
On how van Gennep discovered the universal three-phase structure underlying all human transitions, why the threshold itself becomes sacred space, and what societies lose when they abandon formal passage rituals
Flow and Peak Experience
Positive Psychology and Its Limits
On Martin Seligman's turn from learned helplessness to human flourishing, the PERMA framework, and where the science of wellbeing runs up against the questions it was not built to answer
Psychedelics and Consciousness Research
Be Here Now
Ram Dass, the Psychedelic Threshold, and the Turn Toward Practice
Trauma and the Wounded Self
The Polyvagal Theory
On how the nervous system recognizes safety through relationship, and why genuine regulation requires a living, attuned other
The Sacred Masculine
The Lover’s Body
On the suppression of masculine emotional presence and sensory aliveness, and why patriarchy fears the man who cannot be controlled through shame
The Sacred Feminine
Shakti and Tantra: The Divine Feminine in Hindu and Tantric Cosmology
On how Hindu philosophy makes power itself feminine, Shakti as the dynamic force without which consciousness remains inert, and tantra's integration of this principle against Western misreadings of the tradition