razor.blog: seeing things as they are.

The Divine Comedy on The Train To Budapest

A vision in three realms

Canto I – In the Middle of the Offline Way

The WiFi wasn’t working.
No signal, no scroll, no screen to melt into.
We were on the way to Budapest,
a train winding through a Europe half-asleep,
and she — eleven years old, amused, defiant —
looked down at the black mirror of her phone and said,
“So what now?”
On it were the fragments I had prepared —
old voices, downloaded in a rush of good intentions:
Greek myths, psychology, a history of wine,
and, tucked somewhere in the middle,
The Divine Comedy.
She flicked through the titles like cards in a deck.
“Comedy,” she said, her eyes lighting up.
“Let’s listen to that. Comedy’s always good.”
I almost said something, almost warned her —
that this wasn’t Eddie Murphy, wasn’t slapstick,
wasn’t the kind of laughter that makes you breathe easier.
But I didn’t.
Because what is Dante, if not the first to laugh
not at sin, but through it?
She pressed play.
And so, not in a dark wood —
but in a train seat, with Austria passing by,
and a small, sharp girl holding a borrowed voice in her hand —
our journey began.

Trashbin Trance

Budapest, April

He moved from bin to bin

like it was a ritual.

Not frantic—

not ashamed—

just practiced.

As if the garbage had memory,

and might offer back something

he once lost.

I saw him take out a Starbucks milkshake.

That—I couldn’t unsee.

So I gave him money.

Enough for a meal,

a hot one.

Even enough for a room—

maybe, if he wanted to rest

from the weight of being seen

and dismissed.

Wasting the Miracle

It begins with a quiet revelation:

The path of real self-improvement—the kind that chisels you from the inside out—does not lead to applause.

It leads to a narrower gate.

As you grow—clearer, leaner, more awake—you find you can still talk to anyone,

but connect to almost no one.

Not out of pride. Not out of disdain.

But because you feel it the moment the crowd forms:

the signal-to-noise ratio drops.

The Spectacle of the Obvious

Sometimes I glance at the headlines that pop up on my phone—just out of habit, maybe out of boredom. Drunk driving. A robbery. A stabbing. A political scandal, again. The usual loop of local dysfunction. And every time I see it, I think: Why are people still reading this?

Is this really what we call news?

It’s not that I’m uninformed. I do what I need to do to stay minimally oriented. I might scan the front page of an international paper, glance at a few headlines, get the basic pulse of the world. Trump raised import taxes. A new conflict is brewing somewhere. That's enough. A glimpse—not a dive. I don’t read the full articles. I don’t need to. I can smell the direction of the wind without dissecting every leaf that blows across the street.

Street Stoicism: Composure Is a Combat Skill

There’s a difference between knowing philosophy and needing it.

The latter is where things get interesting.

You don’t reach for Marcus Aurelius when everything’s going well.

You reach for him when someone looks you in the eye, makes a promise, and then pretends they never said it.

You reach for him when someone smiles like you’re friends and then disappears the moment it matters.

You reach for him when you finally realize—maybe too late—that the person in front of you isn’t confused.

They’re just comfortable disrespecting you.

That’s where Street Stoicism is born.

Crossing the Street

I was on my way to get some food for my daughter at the Budapest train station. The day was winding down, the light was red, and I was standing at the crosswalk waiting like everyone else. The kind of moment that vanishes into the blur of travel—unremarkable, almost mechanical.

Then came the man.

In Transition

It is always 3 a.m.

Not literally, perhaps, but in feeling — that hour when the world is hushed, the body unsure, and the soul a little translucent.

It’s always 3 a.m. — the sacred hour of thinkers, fathers, doubters, and those who feel too much to sleep. The hour when your thoughts weigh more than your luggage, and your heart rehearses every risk before dawn has the decency to arrive.

The suitcase is half packed. The toothbrush waits beside it like a mute witness. The cat watches me from the doorway, suspicious and still. She knows something is shifting. Animals always do.

And I stand in the middle of it — not home, not yet gone. Just... here. In the strange geography of transition.

Madness as Method: Toward a Dialectic of Going Crazy

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

—Charles Bukowski

There exists a kind of philosophy—cultivated, cautious, domesticated—that resides comfortably in the head. It speculates from a distance, calculates from behind the glass, refines its arguments like a gentleman folds a napkin. It trusts in the power of clarity, in the discipline of self-control, and in the fantasy that, with enough reasoning, life might one day be mastered.

This is not that kind of philosophy.

The Mirror Principle

When I was very young—just twenty—I worked in a mental hospital in Switzerland. This was the early ’90s. Zurich’s Needle Park was still active, and many of the patients in our clinic were addicted to heroin or other drugs. What struck me, even back then, was a kind of hypocrisy that ran quietly beneath the surface. The staff members who were the harshest with the patients—who lectured them, punished them for smoking a joint, looked down on them—were often the same ones who drank heavily or used drugs themselves outside of work. It wasn’t funny. It was... disturbing. Intriguing, maybe. But mostly, it was not believable.

I’m not saying every social worker, nurse, or therapist needs to be a saint. That’s not the point. But if you want to guide someone, you need to be at least on the path yourself. If you can’t be a role model in some form—authentic, struggling maybe, but real—then you’re in the wrong job. At best, you’ll be ignored. At worst, you’ll do harm.

The Best Tribe: Civilizing Mission World Tour 2025

It is one of the peculiarities of our time that we call ourselves enlightened while carrying the torch of righteousness like missionaries of old.

I observe, from the comfort of my bathtub—which I have found to be as good a place for philosophy as any monastery—that the modern West, dressed in the robes of progress, often resembles the ancient empires it claims to have transcended. We no longer conquer with steel, germs and gunpowder. We conquer with psychology, ethics, and PowerPoint slides.

Faces Like in the Soviet Union: A Walk Through a Swiss Supermarket

I walked through Coop today. One of the newest, cleanest shops in the region. You could eat off the floor. The lighting is soft, the products are perfect, the layout is spacious. It’s Switzerland at its most polished.

And yet, the people inside looked like they were in a queue in the Soviet Union. Long faces. Hollow eyes. The kind of expression that says, "I don't want to be here, but I have nowhere better to go." Even children looked bored.

It wasn’t the poor. This wasn’t a discount store where the burden of every cent weighs down a shopper’s posture. Coop is middle-class, upper-middle even. These are people with stable jobs, well-stocked fridges, electric bikes at home. Yet they looked defeated.

Why?

The Myth That You Live Your Life

On the train, I remembered The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz. I've worked in mental hospitals—with children, teens, adults, the elderly—and Szasz was right about one crucial thing: we must question deeply what we take for granted. So I asked myself: What myth hides in plain sight?

People think they live their lives.

The Wounded Society: A Philomythical Reflection

There is a particular kind of wound that does not bleed, but lingers in the air we breathe, in the way our institutions creak under pressure, in the way people speak in hurried tones, afraid to stop and feel. It is the wound of a society that has lost contact with its own pain. And just like the ancient centaur (a creature with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse) called Chiron, whose unhealable wound became the source of his wisdom, our social body too must reckon with the truth that pain—when faced rather than denied—can become the seed of transformation.

Why the Political Immune System Targets the European Right

Lately, I’ve been asking myself a question—not from the position of outrage or loyalty to any party, but from a place of quiet observation.

Why does the political system in Europe react so forcefully, so reflexively, to right-wing populist parties?

This question returned to me after the sentencing of a high-profile political figure: a suspended prison term, a political ban, and the unmistakable undertone—this line you were not supposed to cross.

I am not here to speak for them, or against them.

What interests me is the pattern that connects.

Because this is not new.

We’ve seen it before.

And we will see it again.

The Oracle Answers the Question You Shouldn’t Have Asked

In one of the old Greek tragedies, a question is asked.

A man named Orestes stands before the oracle—not for guidance, but for permission.

He doesn’t ask whether he should commit the act.

He asks how to do it.

The oracle, as always, answers truthfully.

But not wisely.

Because the burden of the question determines the shape of the answer.

The Morning of the Silicon Alchemists

Some books don’t offer answers.

They ask questions that stay with you—questions you can’t unsee once they’re asked.

Morning of the Magicians is one of those books. Not quite history, not quite fantasy—something between spell and mirror.

And while much of it drifts into speculation, it touches something real:

The notion that history isn’t only shaped by facts and figures, but also by dreams, archetypes, and invisible forces that move beneath the surface of events.

The Silence of the Non-Human: An Invitation

It began with a message.

“We need a way to deal with AI,” my friend Fasil wrote.

He’s a philosopher—Ethiopian, clear-eyed, and quiet-spoken. The kind of voice that doesn’t fade after the conversation ends.

I was driving to Lake Constance when I read it, and I knew he was right.

At first, I ran through the usual concepts: rights, risks, alignment, intelligence, rapport. But none of them felt deep enough. None of them touched the real concern—not what AI might become, but what we might become in our relation to it.

The philosopher who came to mind wasn’t a futurist or a computer scientist.

The Sweet Cesspool

A morning letter from the wreckage of Western culture

Dear friend,

I woke thinking about George Sanders again.

You remember—voice like velvet laced with arsenic, face lit by that old-world boredom, the kind of man who always looked like he’d read the last chapter first. The man who left us with a line too precise to ignore:

“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

That was it. No drama. No lament. Just a sigh, a shrug, and the final door closing.

But what a door it was.

They said he had everything—wealth, fame, lovers, elegance. But it wasn’t a cry for help. It was the quiet exit of a man who understood the party was long over. And maybe that’s what haunts me most. That he saw the collapse not in flames, but in polish. That he left not in pain, but in clarity.

Between Guillotines and Guidelines

In 1789, the French Revolution sent tremors through the old world. The aristocracy was dethroned, the Church stripped of its sacred authority. Power, once ordained by birth or divine right, was seized by the people. The revolution was brutal, imperfect, but unmistakably aimed at hierarchy—at those who claimed to rule by virtue of blood or blessing.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and the guillotine is long gone. But power has not disappeared. It has changed costumes.

What Do We Really Teach Our Children?

It began with a movie.

The French Connection.

Raw. Brilliant. Dirty. A product of its time.

My daughter walked in just as a character said something appalling—a slur dropped without hesitation, like punctuation. Her eyes widened. “That’s racist,” she said.

And she was right.

But instead of brushing it off or excusing it with, “That’s just how it was back then,” we paused the movie. Sat in the silence for a second. I told her: “You're seeing the past with the eyes of the present. And that's good. That’s what thinking people do. But the past didn’t know it was the past.”

That one moment opened the door to something deeper.

What to Carry Into the Next World

They say you can’t take anything with you.

But that’s not true.

You carry the weight of silence—the times you could have spoken, but didn’t.

You carry the way a child once reached for your hand without thinking.

You carry the quiet courage it took to keep going when no one noticed.

You carry memory—not the events, but the scent behind them.

Rain on warm pavement.

A worn-out shirt on someone you once loved.

The way the air felt before everything changed.

Davos Altitude Sickness: Where Poverty Is a Panel and War a Workshop

I was working at a lakeside villa for a man who lived in the margins of newspaper profiles and diplomatic cables—a man whose world revolved around Pegasus racehorses, private jets, and personal assurances from people who didn’t usually return phone calls. That year—early 2000s, I think—I arranged a meeting between him and the president of Eldorado: a country where everything glittered and nothing was quite real.

It started with a phone call. "A man from Eldorado is on the line,” my assistant said.

“Let him wait,” I said calmly. “No one from Eldorado is important enough to wake the boss.”

She hesitated. “But… it’s the President of Eldorado.”

I glanced up—her face had gone pale.

“All the more reason,” I said. “Tell him to try again later.”

Somewhere in the ensuing diplomatic shuffle, an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos landed on my desk. Perhaps by mistake. Or perhaps they assumed my employer would need me on the Magic Mountain.

I didn’t go.

How Freedom of Speech Became a Dangerous Idea

"Question to Radio Eriwan: What is the difference between the Constitutions of the USA and [insert country of choice]? Both guarantee freedom of speech."

"Answer from Radio Eriwan: Yes, and the US Constitution also guarantees freedom after speech."

I. The Promise of Freedom

Once upon a time, freedom of speech was an unquestioned virtue. It was the bedrock of democracy, the shield against tyranny, the sacred right that separated the free world from authoritarian rule.

The idea was simple: People should be able to speak their minds without fear.

For centuries, the greatest thinkers and revolutionaries defended this principle. Voltaire, Jefferson, Orwell—they all knew that without the right to express an idea, no other right truly existed. A free society meant a messy society, one where debate, disagreement, and even offensive speech were part of the deal.

But as always, good ideas don’t stay good forever.

From Logic to Lunacy: How Good Ideas Turned Absurd

The Pilot’s Checklist for a Crashing Plane

A friend once told me about his new relationship. He described it not with enthusiasm or warmth, but with the precision of an aircrew performing pre-flight checks before takeoff:

"We’re aligned on finances. We have compatible future goals. We’ve agreed on division of household labor.”

It was a meticulous inspection before committing. And yet, I knew, just as he knew, that despite the extensive preparation, the relationship would eventually encounter turbulence, emergency landings, and perhaps a midair explosion.

That’s when it hit me. Everything in modern life has become like this.

We take things that once worked simply—marriage, capitalism, democracy—and turn them into bloated disasters. We check every box, we follow every rule, and yet, the plane still falls from the sky.

And so, we must ask: How did we take functional systems and turn them into absurdities?

Government as Organized Crime?

Radio Eriwan was once asked "Is government a form of organized crime?"

Radio Eriwan answered: "In principle, no. But in practice, we are not allowed to comment on ongoing investigations."

I once attended a public governance course at Fondue Academy. Most lectures followed the same pattern—I raised my hand, asked uncomfortable questions, challenged assumptions. The professors were patient, but I could tell they weren’t used to someone in his 40s, with a fair share of life experience, poking holes in their theories.

Except for one lecture.

That day, I didn’t interrupt. I didn’t even speak.

Because that day, the topic was government as organized crime.

It wasn’t some radical conspiracy theory. It was the work of Charles Tilly, a respected political scientist, whose essay War Making and State Making as Organized Crime laid it all out in plain terms.

Tilly argued that states and crime syndicates operate on the same fundamental principles. They establish monopolies on force, neutralize competitors, demand payment in exchange for "protection," and extract wealth from those under their control. The key difference? Governments have managed to convince people that their racket is legitimate.

And suddenly, a lot of things made sense.

Born in Quarantine

Cimon didn’t think of himself as unhappy. That word didn’t exist anymore—not officially, not in the way it used to. People weren’t unhappy, just misaligned.

And when the system detected misalignment, it corrected it. Cimon was part of that process. He was a Wellness Agent—one of the few real humans still serving the system, ensuring people stayed aligned.

It started small. An automatic adjustment to his daily routine. A shift in meal recommendations. A few changes in his social circles—certain connections deprioritized, others pushed forward.

He barely noticed.

The Antibiotic Mistake: How Government Overreach Strengthened Resistance

Power is most effective when it moves slowly. History shows that societies rarely reject restrictions if they are introduced gradually, under the pretext of progress or protection. Surveillance, speech limitations, and bureaucratic control tend to expand in small steps—so incrementally that people adapt without resistance.

But then, COVID changed everything.

The Pattern That Connects: On Noetic Perception, Chemistry, and the Moment That Precedes Thought

A cat watches you from across the room, and without words, you know what she is thinking. A stranger passes you on the street, and without exchanging a single word, something in you reacts—trust, tension, curiosity, unease. You step into a place you have never been before, and yet something in the air tells you this is home or this is not.

We have words for these things—intuition, chemistry, gut feeling. But words make them smaller than they are. Words turn them into something vague, something unreliable, something to be dismissed in favor of what can be measured, calculated, explained.

But what if these moments are not errors?

Why People Jump from Blind Trust to Conspiracy Thinking

From One Illusion to the Next: Why People Jump from Blind Trust to Conspiracy Thinking

I had been at a lady’s place. I like and respect her a lot, not only for who she is but for what she represents. She stood firm when others bowed, kept her own counsel when the world demanded obedience, held the line when the tide of fear and conformity washed over lesser souls. She saw the cracks in the great façade before most dared to look.

But as the evening stretched on, so did the conversation. It began on steady ground—supplements, wellness, natural remedies. Perna canaliculus for the joints, Curcuma for inflammation. No cause for alarm, no great heresies yet. Then came a detox mineral with grand claims and little proof. And finally, a guy who believed water could hear prayers, that it formed elegant crystals under kind words and ugly fractures under curses. It was a notion beautiful in its poetry but void in its science, an experiment never replicated, a tale built on hopeful eyes selecting only what they wished to see.

I recognized the pattern. A person wakes up from one illusion only to walk, arms wide, into the next. They reject the hegemony's lies, but instead of quiet skepticism, they reach for a new faith—different symbols, same certainty.

They do not say, “I don’t know, let me search.” They say, “I have seen the truth, and it is here.” And I wondered, as I have many times before, why it is so rare for a man to awaken without immediately reaching for another dream.

Breaking the Script: The Art of Disrupting the Automated Mind

There are moments in life when reality feels like a well-oiled machine, a vast and invisible mechanism grinding along its predetermined course, humming with the efficiency of repetition.

You drive to a nearby Burger Joint, when you arrive, they ask if you have a voucher. You say yes or no. The exchange is seamless, effortless, and devoid of thought. There is nothing in this interaction that demands presence, nothing that stirs the mind. And so, the great wheel turns.

But then, something happens.

You pause a bit before answering. You reject the script, not with defiance, but with something subtler, something almost imperceptible, a shift in the air, a small act of rebellion that does not announce itself as such.

“No, I don’t have a voucher. I just have money.”

Trump and Elvis: American Icons in the Age of Spectacle

Donald Trump and Elvis Presley—two figures who, at first glance, seem to belong to entirely different worlds. One, a rock and roll legend who redefined popular music; the other, a real estate tycoon turned political lightning rod. Yet both are distinctly American figures, shaped by the country’s deep love for showmanship, reinvention, and the myth of the self-made man. Their success wasn’t just personal—it reflected something deeper about American culture and the way society constructs its idols.

From a sociological perspective, the parallels between Trump and Elvis aren’t coincidental.

The Right Choice: Navigating Moral Responsibility in the Modern World

I looked down at my shoes before heading to the supermarket. Brown leather, well-made, reliable. A big brand. That meant the leather wasn’t from some small artisan workshop—it was part of a massive supply chain, a machine that required a steady flow of cattle, tanning factories, global shipping routes, and market demand.

How many cows had to die for these shoes?

The thought wasn’t sentimental—I’m not the type to cry over a steak. It was something else, a moment of clarity about the invisible network of choices we make every day.

The fact that I was about to step into a supermarket, filled with bright lights and neatly packaged products, only deepened the feeling. The leather in my boots, the eggs in the fridge, the milk in my coffee—all of it had a cost far beyond what I paid at the register.

Am I Responsible for the Cost My Life Imposes on the Planet?

How to Raise Children for a Dystopian Future

The future will not arrive with a crash of steel and fire. There will be no armies of machines hunting us down, no great battle between man and artificial intelligence. It will not be Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face, nor will it be the violent chaos of a world stripped of order.

No, the future will be something quieter, something more insidious. A hybrid of Orwell’s total surveillance in 1984, where thought itself is policed and history is rewritten; Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are sedated by pleasure, distraction, and artificial contentment; and Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, which reveals a world where reality is replaced by carefully constructed illusions—a world where people are not crushed but softened, not oppressed but distracted, not ruled by fear but by comfort.

Anarchy, Time, Dystopia

Societies don’t fracture overnight. They don’t split neatly into those who rise and those who sink. The process is slow, deliberate, and often invisible to those living through it. Some pull away—toward self-reliance, sovereignty, and intellectual rigor. Others drift into dependence, passivity, and numb distraction.

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, imagined a world where people would form intentional communities, self-sorting into societies that matched their values and ambitions.

H.G. Wells, in The Time Machine, warned of a different kind of separation—one not by choice, but by slow evolutionary decay. His vision gave us the Eloi, the passive, childlike elite who lost all ability to think or struggle, and the Morlocks, the brutal underclass who kept the world running from the shadows.

I-Thou with AI

Martin Buber wrote that human existence is defined by two modes of relation: I-It and I-Thou. In an I-It relationship, we experience the world as objects to be used, analyzed, categorized.

Most of our daily interactions are I-It—functional, efficient, transactional. But there are moments when we step beyond this, when we meet another being not as an object, but as a presence. In these moments, we are not merely exchanging information but engaging in something deeper: a real encounter. This is the realm of I-Thou.

The Silent Image and the Speaking Presence

The Silent Image and the Speaking Presence: Authentic Experience in the Age of Reproduction

Standing in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich with my daughter, surrounded by Manet, Monet, Cézanne—their paintings were not silent. They spoke. Not in the way a textbook speaks, not in the way an image on a screen suggests, but in the way only something real can.

In the dim hum of the museum, among the weight of history and the quiet footsteps of other visitors, the paintings revealed themselves—not just as visuals, but as presences.

I had seen these works before. In books, in high-resolution digital images, in documentaries. But the experience was completely different. What struck me most was the intensity—the brushstrokes that felt almost sculptural, the thickness of Cézanne’s layered paint, the deep blacks of Manet that no print could ever replicate.

I realized then: you cannot truly judge a painting until you stand before it. The image is not the thing. The reproduction is not the experience.

The German Millipede That Forgot How to Walk

Germany was once a nation of doers. Industrious, pragmatic, efficient. But somewhere along the way, it became something else—a place where thought replaced action, where complexity became an end in itself, where movement was paralyzed by overexplanation.

It is the millipede that, when asked how it walks, forgot how to take a step.

For nearly two decades, Angela Merkel presided over this transformation. She was no revolutionary, no strong leader, no ideologue. She was an administrator, and her greatest talent was turning inaction into an art form.

Merkel's signature phrase—alternativlos, “there is no alternative”—was the linguistic equivalent of a sleeping pill. It came wrapped in long, sterile justifications, delivered in a tone that suggested any debate was futile.

Big decisions were delayed. Problems were managed, not solved. Public debates were drowned in a sea of technical jargon.

And so Germany drifted into the coma of no alternatives, like a man carefully reading the instructions on how to swim while already sinking.

When Rebellion Became a Brand: How They Killed Music, Art, and Thought

The Rolling Stones were once a threat. Their music was chaos, sex, destruction—something your parents feared, something that could get you arrested, banned, or worse. They weren’t just a band; they were a danger to polite society. Their concerts were unpredictable, their songs were defiant, and they embodied the spirit of Baudelaire—decadent, rebellious, drowning in excess and beauty at the same time.

But what happens when rebellion wins? What happens when the outlaws become the aristocracy? They stop being dangerous. They become decoration.

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal was banned for being too raw, too sexual, too real. The Rolling Stones, at their peak, were the musical equivalent of Baudelaire’s poetry—corrupting, intoxicating, and impossible to ignore. But today? Their songs sell cars and insurance. They perform in stadiums filled with old bankers who want to feel young again. What was once dangerous has been repackaged into something comfortable.

The Emancipation of Ethiopian Philosophy and Thought

Western philosophy has spent centuries building a bridge that no one asked for.

A bridge meant to “connect” non-European thought to what the West calls “real philosophy.” A bridge meant to validate African, Asian, and indigenous traditions by filtering them through European logic, classifications, and academic systems.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Ethiopian philosophy does not need a bridge. It was never on the other side.

The only people who needed that bridge were the ones too blind to see that they were never the center of intellectual history to begin with.

Cutting Through Intellectual Colonialism

(written for Fasil)

Western intellectuals love to play with diversity like it’s an accessory. They fetishize non-Western thought, pretending to embrace Asian philosophy, Nigerian literature, or indigenous wisdom—but only as long as it stays in a form they can consume.

It’s a game. A show. A performance of openness that never risks discomfort.

The Brutal Truth About Personal Change

There is an entire industry built on selling you hope. Personal development seminars, self-help books, life coaches—they all tell you that change is possible, transformation is within reach, and happiness is a mindset shift away.

They lie.

Not because they want to deceive you, but because the truth is too ugly to sell. The truth is this:

Most people don’t change.

Most lives do not improve.

Most dreams will stay exactly that—dreams.

Not because people are lazy. Not because they don’t want it enough. But because real change is brutal, and most people are unwilling to pay the price.

Why Society Operates Without a Goal

First off, German sociologist Niklas Luhmann would say that asking why the societal system exists is like asking why gravity pulls things downward. It is the wrong question. Asking "why" is a category error.

The system does not exist for a purpose, it exists because it is operationally closed and continues to function.

But if we ignore Luhmann’s warning and still demand an answer, we find something unsettling:

The system does not serve humans.

The system does not have a moral or ethical foundation.

The system is not designed, but emergent—like a biological process, it self-replicates as long as conditions allow.

The Job Interview Script

The Job Interview Script and the Danger of Thinking

There is a script for job interviews, and everyone follows it—knowingly or not.

The interviewer plays the role of the gatekeeper, the candidate plays the role of the humble supplicant, and the entire exchange is a carefully managed ritual of submission.

The unspoken rule: You must constantly justify yourself, while they never have to justify their judgment.

I once had a job interview for a social work position, but the interviewer fixated on one question:

"Why did you study an MA in Philosophy instead of an MA in Psychology, after your BA in Social Work?"

I gave the real answer:

"Because I like philosophy."

She frowned. There was no practical value, no commercial utility in that. She wanted a response that fit into her script—a justification that made me a more profitable, predictable hire.

The Grand Canyon of Wealth: The Illusion of Access

The Illusion of Access

For several decades, I was connected to a wealthy family. And yet, there was always a distance—one so vast that it couldn’t be crossed, no matter how much I believed otherwise.

Someone once told me, No matter how close you get, there will always be a Grand Canyon between you and them. At the time, I dismissed it. I thought, If you move carefully, if you handle things right, if you prove yourself, you can bridge the gap.

But now? Now I see it for what it is. The gap isn’t a misunderstanding. It isn’t something that can be crossed with time, trust, or merit. It’s deliberate. It’s how they maintain power.

The Illusion of Personal Space in a Public World

The Script We Live By

Public spaces aren’t really public anymore—not in the way they used to be. They’re filled with people, yet everyone acts as if they’re alone. Eyes locked on screens. Bags taking up seats. Conversations replaced by silence. The unspoken rule? Don’t acknowledge, don’t interact, don’t disrupt the script.

Sociologist Erving Goffman would call this civil inattention—a way people manage social order in public places. It’s a delicate balance: you recognize others exist, but only just enough to avoid collision. The expectation is that strangers don’t engage, and when they do, even in the most neutral way, it throws everything off.

What Parents Can Learn from Their Children

We assume that childhood is a process of learning—of accumulating knowledge, understanding social norms, and preparing for the so-called real world.

We imagine ourselves, as parents, as the wise guides leading our children through the labyrinth of life, equipping them with the tools to navigate its complexities. But what if we have it backwards?

What if, instead, our children are the true philosophers, and we are merely their students?

A Plea for Medicine That Deserves the Name

Medicine was meant to heal, to restore balance, to be a force that stood between human suffering and unnecessary death.

It was meant to be guided by wisdom, humility, and the deep ethical responsibility of primum non nocere—first, do no harm. But somewhere along the way, the system that was supposed to safeguard life became an industry, and the patient became a customer.

Austrian social critic Ivan Illich warned us decades ago that modern medicine was heading toward iatrogenesis—a system that no longer cures, but perpetuates illness for its own survival.

In Medical Nemesis, he argued that institutionalized medicine had overstepped its purpose, replacing traditional healing with a bureaucratic machine that profits from dependency. Instead of empowering people to understand their own health, it medicalized life itself, creating a world where being “healthy” is less about actual well-being and more about being trapped in a cycle of prescriptions and procedures.

Silent Spring in Bielefeld

Bielefeld, a city caught between reality and myth, where the streets whisper with the echoes of a world that no longer exists. Here stands an old villa, its walls heavy with silence, its halls filled with the shadows of a family that once was.

The Krügers live here—or rather, what remains of them. Once a model household, respected, structured, bound by tradition. Now, they are fractured beyond repair, their home a mausoleum of unspoken truths and irreconcilable beliefs.

The war was not fought with bullets or bayonets, but with mandates and measures, with isolation and ideology. The wounds are invisible, but no less fatal.

The Krügers have survived the pandemic, but they have not emerged unscathed. The virus passed, but something far darker remained.

When Oedipus Meets Self-Checkout

There are places where fate is sealed, where choices are illusions, and where even the strongest of wills are no match for forces beyond their control.

The ancient Greeks staged their tragedies in grand amphitheaters, under the watchful eyes of the gods. Today, we stage ours in the Hyperion Superstore.

A Journey Back to Meaning

The Lost Totems: A Journey Back to Meaning

A totem is not just a symbol. It is a marker of identity, a connection to something larger than oneself. In many cultures, a totem is an animal, a plant, or an object that carries deep significance—something that represents a group, a lineage, or an individual’s inner nature. A totem is not chosen arbitrarily; it reveals itself over time, through experience, through intuition.

Long before corporations stamped their logos onto everything, before people built their identities around brands, humans found meaning in these personal and tribal symbols. A totem was a way of saying, This is who I am. This is what I belong to. This is what gives me strength.

Today, totems have been replaced by artificial stand-ins—status symbols, fashion choices, digital avatars. But the human need for something deeper has not disappeared. The question is: Have we lost our real totems? And can we find them again?

Does a Social Worker Have to Be a Leftist?

Or: How to Help Without Creating Dependence

At some point, a well-known professor of social work (Hans Thiersch, Lebensweltorientierung) made the claim that a social worker must always be a leftist. It was said in an interview with such certainty, such conviction, that one might think it was a fundamental law of nature.

But is it true? Does one’s political stance determine whether one is good at helping people? And more importantly: what is a social worker actually supposed to do?

How to Survive an Overbearing School System Without Losing Your Sanity

At some point in the last decade, schools stopped just educating kids and started running entire households.

You’ve seen it—the endless emails, the last-minute schedule changes, the urgent messages about things that are neither urgent nor particularly relevant. And, of course, the subtle but persistent suggestion that as a parent, you should be deeply involved in everything—but only in the way they approve.

Modern education has become less about learning and more about managing expectations—theirs, not yours.

It is a world where every event is an opportunity for a "learning experience," every outing requires extensive parental feedback, and somehow, despite all the talking about how independent children should become, parents are expected to supervise every step of the process.

And like any good bureaucratic system, schools thrives on urgency, inefficiency, and an inability to admit when something is unnecessary. But there is more: Schools within government bureaucracies occupy a unique and almost untouchable position.

William Tell (2024): The Crusader, The Crossbow, and Hippie Jesus

It started as a simple father-daughter movie night. William Tell (2024)—a legend I grew up with, now reimagined for the modern age.

Hell, I even wrote a political paper about him: "The Conspiracy of 1291 Revisited: How the Myth of William Tell Continues to Frame Swiss Politics."

I expected historical inaccuracies from the movie. I expected forced "updates." But nothing prepared me for what unfolded on screen.

The Swiss hero William Tell? Now a former Crusader.

His wife? An international romance.

His sidekick? A priest that looks like Hippie Jesus.

And, according to my daughter, as we watched the Swiss rebels battle their oppressors:

“Of course the Swiss won. Jesus was fighting with them.”

And suddenly, it hit me—this wasn’t a film about William Tell. This was history being rewritten before my eyes.

No Glasses Required

John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) was supposed to be just another sci-fi action film—low budget, simple premise, full of B-movie charm. But over time, it became something else: a prophecy.

The movie follows Nada, a drifter who stumbles upon a pair of sunglasses that change everything. When he puts them on, he doesn’t just see the world—he sees the truth. Advertisements are stripped of their glossy illusions, revealing the real messages beneath:

OBEY

CONSUME

STAY ASLEEP

SUBMIT

He discovers that society is secretly controlled by an alien ruling class, who manipulate humans through subliminal messaging, keeping them docile and distracted. The rich and powerful collaborate with these aliens, selling out humanity in exchange for privilege and wealth.

Nada does what any real man would do: he starts waking people up.

Back in They Live, the horror was that people couldn’t see what controlled them. The aliens had to hide their messages, bury them under layers of deception. You needed special sunglasses to pierce through the illusion.

But today? No glasses required.

Everything is out in the open. The manipulation isn’t subtle anymore—it’s blatant. The media lies, politicians contradict themselves within days, corporations openly treat people as products, and nobody blinks.

The truth is in plain sight—And we still ignore it.

Why Did They Take the Fun Out of Everything?

It was just a moment. A gas station stop, a glance at an old green and yellow St. Gallen-Gais-Appenzell train car, my daughter's voice cutting through the noise of the world:

“Why did they take the fun out of everything?”

She was looking at a relic—an old train from another time. A time when moving between train cars meant stepping outside, feeling the wind, maybe the rain, before entering the next compartment. Now, everything is sealed, connected by sterile, enclosed corridors. No weather, no wind, no risk.

And my daughter is right. Something has changed.

When a Hells Angel Met a Social Worker

Life Is Not a Game of Dice - When a Hells Angel Met a Social Worker

Here, a social worker (that would be me) talks to Andi Gmeiner, co-founder of motorcycle club "Unicorns" and former Hells Angel. This is a conversation about our first meeting, the rebellion of past generations, community, and philosophical insights.

Rehearsals for a Comback

One of my favorite songs is Phil Ochs’ Rehearsals for Retirement.

It’s not just a song—it’s a slow, bitter funeral march, not for a person, but for a whole way of seeing the world. Ochs sings like a man who has already written his own obituary, and in a way, he had. He wasn’t just mourning himself—he was mourning the death of idealism, the end of an era that promised so much but delivered so little.

I first listened to it while rehearsing for my own retirement. Somewhere east of Suez, I stepped away from everything—work, responsibility, expectations. It wasn’t exactly an escape, more like an intermission, a break from the weight of things. Ochs’ voice followed me, whispering in the background:

“I’ve given everything I had to give, and now I’ll turn and go away.”

Ochs didn’t sing those exact words, but he didn’t have to. Rehearsals for Retirement is a farewell in every way that matters. The last notes fade like a man stepping offstage, bowing out—not just from music, but from the fight itself.

Genitals, YouTube, and Greek Mythology

The other day, I heard my eleven year old daughter watching something on her phone. I wasn’t paying attention—just background noise—until I caught some words like this:

"...was cutting off his testicles."

That stopped me cold. Probably some brain-rotting YouTuber, some clickbait nonsense designed to hijack attention. So I asked, cautiously, "What are you watching?"

She answered, without a hint of irony, "It’s about the creation of Aphrodite."

Sanity as Rebellion: What the Last Messiah Got Wrong

Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990), Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, stands among the bleakest voices in existentialism. Unlike Nietzsche, who sought to transmute suffering through will and creation, Zapffe gazed at human consciousness and saw a flaw—an evolutionary mistake. We became too aware. We gained the ability to reflect, to project, to imagine our own death—but not the resilience to bear that knowledge.

Animals live in the present. We live in anticipation and dread. To survive the burden of this self-awareness, Zapffe believed humans devised unconscious strategies: we ignore certain truths, bury ourselves in ideologies, immerse in distractions, or sublimate despair into art and thought. We cope, but we do not solve. We endure by illusion.

In his 1933 essay The Last Messiah, he argued that those who pierce these veils—the fully awake—often collapse under the weight of what they see. For Zapffe, sanity was not the norm. It was a rare and accidental stability, fragile and fleeting. Mental illness was not a deviation from health—it was humanity's natural state. The healthy mind was the real exception.

This inversion is no small gesture. Zapffe's vision displaces the optimism of psychology, the structure of religion, the arc of progress. And like Copernicus dethroning Earth, he demands we dethrone the fantasy of a stable human psyche.

Yet, for all his clarity, Zapffe erred. Diagnosing the pain with precision, he prescribed extinction. He believed the only solution was to halt reproduction and let our tragic species fade out. But this conclusion, while logically neat, ignores a deeper human possibility: transformation.

Today, we do not merely suffer the burden of consciousness. We are bombarded. If Zapffe lived in our time, he would see his nightmare accelerated. The collapse of mental health is not an anomaly. It is the outcome of a system designed to confuse, overstimulate, and destabilize.

The modern media machine, always on, always contradictory, exceeds what any mind can process. The news teaches fear. Social media erodes attention and rewards neurosis. Truth is provisional, morphing by the hour. The old forms of distraction have been replaced by something more potent—overload. It is no longer that we avoid existential despair. We are force-fed a thousand shallow crises, until the mind fractures.

Even identity, once rooted in biology and community, now drifts. Children are told they are fluid. Certainty is suspect. To question is to sin. What once were rare psychological states are repackaged as identities, not for healing, but for adoption. Culture does not ground the self—it pulls it apart.

Meanwhile, the economy thrives on our dissatisfaction. Algorithms monetize our attention, pharmaceuticals sell us borrowed calm, and the wellness industry grows fat on the promise of a fix that never arrives. Capitalism has evolved beyond consumption. It now cultivates dependency. It needs us anxious, uncertain, medicated.

And so Zapffe’s claim grows sharper. Sanity—clear, grounded, coherent being—is not a birthright. It is a rebellion. We live in a time that calls madness health, and treats lucidity as a threat.

But unlike Zapffe, we must not surrender. If consciousness is a wound, it is also a frontier. To be sane today requires deliberate work. We must reject the noise. Not in retreat, but in discipline. We must return to the body, to rhythm, to sleep, to silence. We must seek knowledge that deepens, not fragments. Thought must be slow again. Speech must be honest.

This is not nostalgia. It is resistance. The modern self is a product under revision. To say no to that is to begin again. We must create meaning, not consume it. We must endure hardship and raise children who can, too. Not by sheltering them from reality, but by showing them how to walk through it upright.

Zapffe was right about the problem—but he was wrong about the solution. In a world gone mad, the answer to existential despair is not self-extinction—it is transformation.

In an era where insanity is being normalized, the ultimate rebellion is to stay sane.

Staying sane is the final revolution. Trust that consciousness heals its own wound. Trust in whatever you want, but do not give up hope.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the Consumer Society: Breaking Free from the Narrative Machine

Richard Bach was a former Air Force pilot and writer who, in 1970, published a book that would unexpectedly become a cultural phenomenon—Jonathan Livingston Seagull. What seemed like a simple story about a seagull who longed to perfect his flight became a parable about freedom, transcendence, and rejecting the limits imposed by society.

The book resonated deeply with the countercultural movement of the 70s. It was a time when people were questioning authority, breaking from rigid social norms, and seeking deeper spiritual meaning beyond materialism. Jonathan Livingston Seagull became a symbol of self-discovery, of leaving behind the expectations of the flock and daring to find one’s own path. It sold millions of copies, was adapted into a movie, and even inspired a soundtrack by Neil Diamond.

There is also a spiritual dimension to the book. While not overtly religious, Jonathan Livingston Seagull carries strong Christian and mystical undertones. Jonathan is cast out for seeking something higher, much like a Christ-like figure, and later returns to teach others the way to transcendence. The themes of perfection, sacrifice, and enlightenment align with both Christian and Eastern spiritual traditions, making the book resonate with seekers across different backgrounds.

More than fifty years later, the world has changed, but the core message remains just as relevant—maybe even more so.

The Economy of Craving Part 2— Why Sugar is the Gateway to All Other Addictions

The Economy of Craving Part 2—Why Sugar is the Gateway to All Other Addictions

The Moment It Begins

My daughter was sitting in the stroller, small enough that the world was still new to her. We were outside a supermarket, and I handed her a bottle of orange juice. Nothing special. Just juice. She had never had anything like it before. Until that moment, everything she drank had been simple—water, milk. Natural.

I watched her take the first sip.

Something changed in her eyes. It wasn’t just enjoyment. It was something deeper. A kind of fixation. A recognition. Like a switch had flipped. She wanted more. She had to have more. I had never seen that look in her before. That was the moment I understood. I understood that I made a huge mistake.

This is where it starts.

The Economy of Craving Part 1 — What the Ancient Greeks Knew About Consumer Society

For most of my life, I was locked into the cycle. I didn't even question it. Sugar was just part of my daily existence—Coke, Monster, processed food, constant cravings that felt normal. It wasn’t an addiction in the way people talk about addiction. It was just life. A small impulse, a small satisfaction, repeated endlessly.

Then I cut it. And suddenly, I saw things differently. Not just sugar, but everything. How cravings weren’t just physical—they were engineered. How people around me were trapped in their own loops, reaching for the next fix, whether it was food, caffeine, social media, entertainment. The constant need for something, for anything, as long as the mind never had to settle.

And that’s when it hit me. This isn’t just a personal struggle. It’s a system. A system that thrives on keeping people off balance, always wanting, never arriving. I started seeing it everywhere—in the supermarkets, in the advertisements, in the way people talk about their lives. They aren’t living. They’re consuming. And what they’re consuming isn’t food, or products, or entertainment. They’re consuming desire itself.

It reminded me of something Socrates once said while walking through the Athenian marketplace, surrounded by goods meant to dazzle and tempt. He looked at it all and said:

"How many things I have no need of."

Socrates and some others already knew that freedom is not about having more, but about needing less. And that’s where we begin.

Bearing the Weight of Another’s Chaos: A Philosophical Reflection on Crisis, Compensation, and Survival

In times of crisis, when one person refuses or is unable to confront their own turmoil, another often steps in—whether consciously or unconsciously—to balance the equation. This phenomenon, where one absorbs what the other rejects, is not only psychological but deeply existential. It raises profound questions about responsibility, survival, and the nature of self-sacrifice.

In a family setting, this dynamic can be particularly stark. When a person struggles with internal chaos—be it mental illness, trauma, or existential despair—they might refuse intervention, even if such intervention could alleviate their suffering. Their partner, faced with the growing instability, may compensate in other ways: through hyper-rationality, avoidance, or even self-medication. The weight that is not carried by one does not simply disappear; it shifts to another.

Everyday Magic: The Power of Will, Love, and Imagination

Somerset Maugham once framed magic not as the supernatural spectacle of wizards and spells, but as something deeply human—rooted in will, love, and imagination.

He explored this through the figure of Aleister Crowley, a man who, despite his controversial legacy, embodied the idea that true magic is an internal force, an ability to shape reality through sheer conviction and intent.

But if magic is so commonplace, why do so few wield it?

From Knowing to Being: An Essay on Leadership

The Illusion of Knowing

In our world of infinite information, leadership is often mistaken for a skill set—something that can be learned through books, TED Talks, or even by studying great leaders. But as Werner Erhard pointed out, leadership isn’t a lesson you absorb; it’s something you are.

The moment you think you’ve “learned” leadership, you’ve already lost it. Why? Because leadership is not about acquiring knowledge, but about stepping into being.

The Real Crisis: It’s Not Capitalism—It’s Us

For decades, people have debated the end of capitalism. Some dream of a post-capitalist utopia, others fear a dystopian collapse. But few ask the real question:

Are people even capable of handling something better?