Philosophy of the Dangerous Kind

Philosophy of the Dangerous Kind

Most philosophy behaves.

It stays in its lane, speaks in the approved tone, and leaves you exactly where it found you. You pass through it like a museum. Clean floors, labeled exhibits. Nothing touches you.

You leave with new words.

You leave intact.

Rick Roderick didn’t allow that.

He didn’t dim the lights. He cut the wiring and let you see what was feeding the room. And once you see that, the room doesn’t feel the same anymore.

Not the classroom.

Not the news.

Not your own thoughts.

He didn’t present Friedrich Nietzsche or Michel Foucault as intellectual property.

He treated them like contraband.

Live material. Unstable. Not meant to sit quietly in a syllabus. Something that leaks into how you speak, what you accept, what you don’t question.

That’s the difference.

Most philosophy gives you distance.

Roderick removed it.

Trumped

Trumped

There is a moment in certain games when the player stops reading the table and starts believing his own story.

The name already carries the logic.

Trump comes from the German Trumpf. In card games, the trump card outranks all others, the card that cuts through the rest. The word itself traces back to Triumph.

A move that overrides the game.

You can see it in compressed form in a circulating satirical timeline of Trump’s statements on Iran:

12:03pm: Trump wants ceasefire

12:05pm: Trump declares victory

12:07pm: Trump is sending marines

12:08pm: Trump says no boots on the ground

12:11pm: Trump does not want ceasefire

It goes on like that. Minute by minute. Assertion, reversal, escalation, denial.

It’s funny at first. Then something shifts.

The Spirits They Lost

The Spirits They Lost

In Switzerland, a traditional liqueur called Glarner Berggeist is under pressure.

Not because it changed.

Not because it harmed anyone.

But because its name is no longer precise enough. The word Berg suggests a geographic origin that cannot be verified cleanly. So the authorities step in. The label must be corrected.

A drink called “mountain spirit” is being reviewed by a system that seems to have lost a bit of its own.

It would be amusing if it were an isolated case.

It isn’t.

Because the same pattern shows up wherever the stakes are higher.

Take the country as it is.

The Funny Thing with Political Philosophy

The Funny Thing with Political Philosophy

The funny thing with political philosophy is that it usually begins with a high principle and ends with a preference wearing a robe.

Take Herbert Marcuse. In Repressive Tolerance, he makes a precise observation. A society can call itself free, tolerant, open, and democratic while the field is already tilted. Media, institutions, habits, economic structure, the whole machinery of ordinary life favors some voices over others. What looks like neutral tolerance can function as a way of managing dissent while preserving the basic order.

That part holds. It cuts through the liberal fantasy of a neutral arena where ideas simply compete on equal terms. The arena is not neutral. The tolerance is not neutral. The game is shaped before anyone speaks.

Then comes the turn.

If the system is already repressive, neutrality toward it becomes questionable. Perhaps freedom requires being intolerant toward forces that uphold domination. At that point, the critique shifts its role. What began as an exposure of hidden bias becomes a justification for selective exclusion. Your freedom is not real freedom. My freedom is the real one. Your position is not merely different. It is regressive, oppressive, or proto-fascist, and therefore not entitled to the same tolerance.

Marcuse does not state it crudely. But the structure is clear: the existing order is illegitimate, a better order is imaginable, and resistance to that order can be treated as morally suspect.

This is where political philosophy often reveals its pattern.

It does not simply argue. It upgrades preference into necessity.

Policy 2026: Waiting for the Right Story

Policy 2026: Waiting for the Right Story

We used to think there was a line between fiction and reality. Not always clear, but at least there.

That assumption is getting harder to defend.

Take a recent case in Germany. An actor builds his career on blurring boundaries. He plays a version of himself. His partner appears as herself. The format depends on ambiguity. Private life becomes material. Intimacy becomes content.

Then the allegation appears.

In real life, he allegedly used his partner’s identity for years. Fake profiles. Explicit chats. AI-generated images. A private world that follows the same logic as the performance.

At that point, the distinction doesn’t collapse.

It stops mattering.

The Man Who Could Read Everything

The Man Who Could Read Everything

Once, there was a man who believed that the world must first become readable before it could be understood.

His name was McNamara.

He did not trust impressions. He did not trust intuition. Those were shadows, unreliable, shifting. What he trusted were things that could be made clear, stable, legible. If something could be counted, it could be seen. If it could be seen, it could be managed.

And for a long time, he was right.

The Quiet Ponzi Feeling

The Quiet Ponzi Feeling

Sometimes a headline reveals more than it intends to.

In Switzerland, the idea of a future with ten million inhabitants is no longer abstract. Some want to cap it. Others warn that doing so would damage the economy. The argument quickly turns moral, cultural, emotional. But buried inside it is a colder truth.

Some unions warned that limiting population growth could drive health insurance premiums higher.

The logic is straightforward. If fewer young people enter the country, the population ages faster. Older populations consume more care. Fewer workers support more retirees. Costs rise.

That is the moment when something clicks.

The system depends on a steady inflow of younger people.

Not just the labour market. Not just pensions. Increasingly the whole social architecture seems to rely on demographic renewal from the outside. And once you see that, an uncomfortable thought appears: this starts to feel like a treadmill.

Don’t Do Your Own Research

Don’t Do Your Own Research

There was a moment during the pandemic when a strange sentence entered everyday language:

Don’t do your own research.

It sounded practical. Sensible, even. A warning against confusion, misinformation, amateur mistakes. And yet, if you listen closely, it carried a different tone. Not advice. Instruction. Almost liturgical.

Do not interpret.

Do not question.

Receive.

Of course, the sentence did not come out of nowhere. It belongs to an older pattern.

Religion has always moved in phases.

The Convenient Exception

The Convenient Exception

Modern medicine and the supplement world like to pretend they are enemies. In reality, they often use the same trick.

They just apply it in opposite directions.

When a blockbuster treatment fails, the script is familiar. The treatment still works. The studies still stand. The protocol remains sound. You, unfortunately, are the exception. Your body was difficult. Your case was unusual. The machine is not questioned. The patient is.

When a supplement or some low-status intervention actually works, the script flips. Now the burden is reversed. The benefit does not really count. It is anecdotal. It is placebo. It is coincidence. It may have helped you, but that only proves that you are, once again, the exception.

Notice the symmetry.

The Foot-Kiss Problem

The Foot-Kiss Problem

There is an old story from the early Middle Ages. Maybe it happened exactly this way, maybe not. History likes to improve a scene after the fact. But this one is too good to waste.

Rollo, the Viking who would become the first ruler of Normandy, was supposed to submit to Charles the Simple, king of West Francia. The ritual called for him to kneel and kiss the king’s foot. A tidy little spectacle. One man on the chair, another below it, and everyone pretending that staged humiliation was the natural grammar of order.

Rollo was not in the mood.

Emancipation for Women, Expectations for Men

Emancipation for Women, Expectations for Men

Revolutions rarely move in straight lines. They move like old streetcars. A lurch forward here, a stop there, sometimes a long pause while everyone argues about the tracks.

The transformation of gender roles in the West followed a similar route.

During the last half century, the social position of women changed dramatically. Doors that were once closed swung open. Universities filled with female students. Professions that once belonged almost exclusively to men suddenly looked different. The cultural message became clear: a woman should be able to build a life that is not confined to the old domestic script.

In many ways, that project worked.

Women entered the public sphere in numbers that would have been unthinkable two generations ago. Independence became not just possible but expected. The language of autonomy replaced the language of limitation.

That part of the story is well known.

The other part receives less attention.

The Luxury of Being a Communist

The Luxury of Being a Communist

There is a quiet paradox in many Western societies.

The loudest denunciations of capitalism often emerge in places where capitalism functions so well that most people rarely notice it at all.

Take a walk through a city like Zurich. The trains arrive within seconds of schedule. The lights stay on. The streets are clean. Public offices move with a calm procedural rhythm. Cafés are full even on a grey Tuesday afternoon.

Life runs on a remarkably well-oiled machine.

Inside that machine you sometimes hear a familiar refrain. Capitalism must go. Markets must be dismantled. The system is corrupt from top to bottom.

It has a certain theatrical quality.

Because the same system being condemned is also quietly paying for the stage.

Psychology and Philosophy

Psychology and Philosophy

Psychology stabilizes.

Philosophy destabilizes.

This difference is rarely discussed, but once noticed it explains a surprising amount about how people relate to the world.

Psychology, in its everyday function, is a stabilizing force. Human beings need a workable sense of reality in order to function. We get up in the morning assuming that the world will behave roughly as expected, that institutions mostly operate according to recognizable rules, that cause and effect remain predictable enough for planning a life.

Without that background stability ordinary existence would become almost impossible. Families could not be raised, careers could not be pursued, societies could not coordinate themselves. The human mind therefore performs a quiet but essential task. It constructs narratives that make the world coherent enough to live in.

These narratives simplify complexity. They divide reality into categories. Safe and dangerous. Responsible and irresponsible. True and false. Once these frameworks take shape the mind begins to defend them. Information that fits the framework is easily absorbed. Information that contradicts it is softened, ignored, or explained away.

The goal of this process is not abstract truth. The goal is equilibrium.

Philosophy begins somewhere else.

When Geopolitics Opens the Door to Fairy Tales

When Geopolitics Opens the Door to Fairy Tales

Some of the most dangerous ideas do not come from obvious fools. They come from people who are clearly intelligent.

I noticed this recently while watching the videos of Jiang Xueqin.

When I first encountered his work, I was genuinely impressed. The early videos seemed calm, structured, and intellectually serious. He spoke about geopolitics using the language of incentives, strategic behavior, and historical patterns. Game theory appeared frequently. Civilizations were treated as actors responding to pressures, much like players in a strategic model.

For a while, the experience felt refreshing. In a digital landscape filled with shouting and simplistic commentary, here was someone speaking in a measured tone about systems, strategy, and long-term dynamics.

But after several videos something began to shift.

The analytical framework remained the same. The language of strategy and incentives was still there. Yet slowly another layer began to appear. References emerged to hidden historical sects, secret alliances between obscure religious movements, powerful financial dynasties shaping global events, and networks operating behind the visible structures of modern politics.

The tone remained calm. The lecture style remained intact.

Yet the content gradually drifted away from analysis and toward something else.

At some point the line between argument and narrative began to blur.

A Simple Way to Raise a Kid

A Simple Way to Raise a Kid

Philosophers have a funny habit. Very often they take something that is almost embarrassingly obvious and wrap it in complicated language until it sounds like a discovery. Sometimes they really are the first person to say it, and they get famous for putting words on something everyone vaguely sensed. And sometimes the philosopher simply says something out loud that people quietly knew but nobody quite dared to say.

I had one of those moments when I started thinking about how I actually raise my daughter.

I’m a single parent, a father, and my child spends about ninety percent of her time with me. At some point I caught myself wondering what my “method” really was. Not in the academic sense, but in the practical sense: what am I actually doing every day? When I later looked at a few educational theories, I noticed something funny. A lot of what I was doing already had names. Psychologists and philosophers had been writing about it for years.

So here it is. My so-called secret recipe. Feel free to steal it.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

Once, the thousand eyes of Dr. Mabuse belonged to a villain.

In Fritz Lang’s world, Mabuse is not merely a criminal. He is something colder than that. He watches, studies, waits. In The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, the walls themselves are watching. Cameras hidden behind mirrors turn hotel rooms into little theatres of surveillance. Every gesture becomes information.

But the cameras are not his true weapon.

His real instrument is the human mind.

Mabuse hypnotizes. He does not always force people. He suggests. He plants an impulse so delicately that the victim experiences it as his own. A man walks into a room thinking he is acting freely, not realizing that somewhere earlier a command has already been placed inside him.

That is the real horror.

Not brute force. Not open terror. Invisible influence.

For a long time Mabuse remained where he belonged, inside cinema. A dark fantasy of total observation and psychological control. A madman with too many eyes and an intimate knowledge of human weakness.

Then history began to imitate the old nightmare.

The Mixtape

The Mixtape

When I was young, people made mixtapes.

You sat with a cassette recorder and chose songs carefully. One from here, one from there. Maybe something from a rock album, maybe a strange track you discovered late at night on the radio. You recorded them in a certain order because the order mattered. A good mixtape had a rhythm. It said something about the person who made it.

Society used to work differently.

For most of history people did not compose their own tapes. They received a finished album. Religion was that album. It came with a complete tracklist: creation, morality, suffering, redemption, death, salvation. You could argue about interpretation, but the structure was given.

Then something happened.

The End of Convincing

The End of Convincing

The thought did not come to me while reading a book.

It came during a conversation.

A pen friend of mine lives in Florida. We talk politics from time to time. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we do not. But on one point we both share a certain uneasiness.

The West, as we know it, feels increasingly unstable.

Yes, I know. The trains still run, the supermarkets are full, the institutions still exist. But culturally something feels different. The center that once held things together seems to be dissolving.

And what replaces it looks less like consensus and more like fragmentation.

When you look back forty years, the world was divided differently. Not more peaceful perhaps, but clearer.

Ideological systems were separated geographically.

The Comfort of Being Run Over by a Tram

The Comfort of Being Run Over by a Tram

Southern Germany had somewhat of a meteor shower last night. Swiss newspapers reported on it: The good news is that the probability of being hit by a meteor is extremely small. Experts reassure us that such events are rare. Even when fragments fall, they usually land somewhere harmless. Sometimes they create a hole in a roof, occasionally they even land in a bedroom, but injuries are very unusual.

This is reassuring. The Swiss Confederation can relax.

Because for a moment there was a disturbing possibility: that we might be struck by something completely beyond our control. Something from space. Something that does not respect insurance policies, municipal regulations, or building permits.

Fortunately, we still have the tram.

On the Comfort of Tidy Lives

On the Comfort of Tidy Lives

The encounter began with a small act of neighbourhood etiquette.
She had left the light on in her car. I noticed it in the evening and walked over to her house to tell her. A couple of days later we met again. She wanted to thank me with a jar of honey.

She is a young teacher and lives in a house that belongs to a Christian association. When I first heard that, I asked half-jokingly whether she was a priest. She laughed and said no, she was simply a believer.

From there the conversation moved quickly into familiar territory. Religion. Values. People we both knew.

It was a friendly conversation. She was warm, polite, completely pleasant. Yet I felt something subtle underneath it. A kind of quiet moral clarity. Not aggressive, not judgmental, but very certain.

The world seemed to fall naturally into place for her.

Some people are believers.
Some people are not.
Some people live properly.
Some people do not.

There was also a tone of optimism in the way she spoke about life. As if a good and orderly life were not only desirable, but also fairly attainable if one simply lived correctly.

And that is where I noticed a strange reaction in myself.

Part of me admired it.

Another part of me recoiled.