This Is It (1/3)

This Is It

A woman in a book from the 1970s describes the strange exhaustion of her generation.

She had done everything.

Psychoanalysis. Meditation. Encounter groups. Transactional analysis. Gestalt therapy. Guided LSD trips. Silva Mind Control. A forty-day ARICA training. She even ran naked in a marathon somewhere along the way.

Around her, America was doing the same thing on a larger scale.

The country became richer. Freer. More psychologically expressive. More sexually liberated. More experimental.

Old authorities collapsed. Rules were broken. Structures dissolved. Walls came down everywhere.

And for a while it felt exhilarating.

People believed they were finally becoming fully alive.

But underneath the liberation another feeling slowly appeared: restlessness.

The Softer Weapon

People usually imagine control as something obvious.

Police. Censorship. Threats. Prisons. Visible force.

But most human beings are not conquered that way.

They are conquered through ego.

Krylov understood this perfectly in The Crow and the Fox. The fox does not threaten the crow. She flatters her. She tells the crow she is beautiful, gifted, exceptional. The crow, intoxicated by the reflection of herself, opens her mouth and drops the cheese willingly.

That is the important part: willingly.

The mechanism is ancient.

People become defensive when attacked. They become suggestible when admired.

Vanity lowers defenses more effectively than coercion.

Modern systems understand this instinctively.

The clever system no longer says:

obey.

The Necessary Devil

There is a tension running through civilization that never disappears.

On one side stands order: limits, continuity, obedience, moral restraint, the attempt to stabilize life against chaos and excess.

On the other side stands something more dangerous: ambition, restlessness, curiosity, creative aggression, the refusal to remain within inherited boundaries.

Civilization itself seems to emerge from the unstable interaction between these forces.

Without order, societies disintegrate. Without transgression, they stagnate.

This tension appears repeatedly in Western mythology. Prometheus steals fire from the gods. Lucifer rebels against heaven. Faust reaches beyond permitted knowledge. Icarus flies too close to the sun.

These are not merely stories about evil. They are recognitions that the same force capable of elevating humanity is also capable of destroying it.

The fire-bringer is always dangerous.

And yet without such figures, civilization itself would likely never have advanced beyond survival.

Apocalypse in Switzerland

A man in Zurich recently discovered that his Migros supermarket sandwich weighed 14 grams less than indicated on the packaging. Not once, but repeatedly. According to reports, he bought and weighed the sandwich around ten separate times.

This is Switzerland, so naturally the story became national news.

Not war. Not economic collapse. Not political unrest.

Sandwich discrepancies.

The reactions were immediate and emotionally devastating.

“Migros is not what it used to be.” “This should never happen.” “Measures must be taken.”

At least one person was spiritually three comments away from declaring a federal state of emergency.

And honestly, this may be the most Swiss story ever told.

The Managed Life

There is a version of life that works.

It runs on time. It eats well. It doesn’t overreach. It keeps its impulses contained and its moods within acceptable range. Nothing spills. Nothing derails. It is calm, efficient, respectable.

From the outside, it looks like success.

From the inside, something slowly disappears.

Not dramatically. Nothing breaks. There is no crisis to point at, no obvious wound. Just a gradual thinning of experience. The world loses its gravity. Things that once carried weight now pass by almost frictionless. Attraction becomes observation. Hunger becomes routine. Desire becomes manageable.

Everything is fine.

That is the problem.

Moralized Epistemology

I recently read a sentence by the German labor minister:

“Nobody immigrates into our social welfare systems.”

What struck me about the sentence was not primarily whether it was technically true or false. Reality is obviously more complicated than that. Some migrants come for work, some for safety, some for family, some for opportunity, and yes, some are undoubtedly influenced by welfare structures and economic security. Anyone who has worked in the social sector understands this instinctively.

But the interesting thing is not the migration debate itself.

The interesting thing is the epistemology underneath the sentence.

Against Dead Morality

William Blake was not simply a poet or painter. He was one of the earliest and most radical critics of moral systems that, in his view, had quietly turned against life itself.

Born in London in 1757, Blake was deeply spiritual yet profoundly suspicious of organized religion. He believed Christianity had gradually hardened into something cold and administrative, a structure concerned less with awakening the soul than with managing behavior through guilt, fear, and obedience. What disturbed him was not morality itself, but morality detached from vitality.

Blake saw an inversion at the center of the society around him. The forces that make human beings feel intensely alive — imagination, sexuality, anger, ambition, desire, creative energy were increasingly treated as dangerous things to suppress. Meanwhile obedience, restraint, conformity, and passive submission were elevated into virtues. To Blake, this did not produce holiness. It produced psychological distortion.

One of his deepest insights was that repression does not eliminate human impulses. It transforms them. Suppressed drives return indirectly as hypocrisy, fanaticism, voyeurism, cruelty, obsession, secret vice, or displaced aggression. This is the meaning behind one of his most famous lines which are something like: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”

Running Out of Ideas

There was something clean about The Devil Wears Prada.

Not because of fashion. Not because of New York. But because it still believed in a line you could cross and then step back from. A young woman enters a world she doesn’t belong to. She adapts. She sharpens. She becomes efficient, impressive, almost indistinguishable from the system she once observed from the outside.

And then something simple happens.

She notices the cost.

Not in slogans. Not in speeches. In a quiet internal shift. A recognition that competence can become submission. That fitting in can mean dissolving. That success, if it requires the wrong kind of transformation, is just another form of loss.

So she walks away.

That was the point. Not rebellion, not triumph. A line held.

The film worked because it assumed something that now feels almost antique: that a person might have an internal reference point. A sense of self that does not fully negotiate with the environment. A limit beyond which adaptation becomes betrayal.

That assumption carried the story.

Now look at what comes after.

The Devil Wears Compassion Now

“First of all, my dear friend, I think we should calm down a little with the word ‘evil.’ It’s a very medieval framing.

I don’t really make people do things anymore. That model is outdated. Too crude. Too obvious. Fire, possession, sulfur, spinning heads. Honestly, it gave me terrible branding.

No, today I work much more delicately.

I adjust interpretation.

That’s all.

A little shift of emphasis here, a small reframing there, tiny calibrations.

Someone gets ignored at work. I help them interpret it as systemic humiliation.

A failed relationship becomes proof that intimacy itself is exploitation.

Loneliness becomes superiority.

Confusion becomes identity.

Weakness becomes ideology.

Resentment becomes moral insight.

You would be amazed how little force is required once people begin narrating themselves incorrectly in exactly the right way.

After that, they do the rest alone.

The Missing Key

I spent nearly an hour looking for a motorcycle key.

I searched the apartment, the hallway, outside the house, every jacket, every table, every surface. Gradually the search stopped being practical and became psychological. Not just: “Where is the key?” but: “What did I do wrong?”

That is usually where the mind goes.

We assume the explanation must lie somewhere inside our own visible chain of actions.

Where was I? What did I touch? Did I forget something? Did I leave it outside? Was I distracted?

The brain begins constructing a closed narrative system. A private detective story in which we ourselves become both suspect and investigator.

The strange thing is that the frame feels complete precisely because it is the only one we can see from inside our own head.

Even when we try to step back and observe ourselves from a meta-perspective, the focus usually remains trapped inside the same circle:

my decisions, my mistakes, my motives, my responsibility.

We become highly sophisticated observers of ourselves while remaining largely blind to everything operating outside our field of awareness.

Then my twelve-year-old daughter came home.

Spiritual Bureaucracy

One of the strangest transformations in Western history is the distance between the world of the Gospels and the atmosphere of modern Christianity.

The New Testament is full of unstable energy.

Deserts.

Visions.

Mad prophets.

Demons.

Mystics.

Fishermen abandoning their lives overnight.

Men hearing voices.

A God who appears in dreams.

A Messiah wandering from town to town saying things radical enough to get himself executed by the state.

The whole thing feels dangerous.

Superficial Diversity

Modern institutions speak endlessly about diversity.

Diversity of backgrounds. Diversity of identities. Diversity of expression. Diversity of lifestyles. Diversity of perspectives.

The posters are diverse. The brochures are diverse. The websites are diverse. Every annual report looks like a United Nations commercial directed by a human resources department.

And yet many people quietly notice something strange:

The more an institution talks about diversity, the narrower the acceptable human range underneath often becomes.

Not externally.

Internally.

Psychological Gym Membership

There was a time when therapy meant something had actually gone wrong.

A divorce. Panic attacks. Depression. Trauma. Addiction. The kind of things that make a person stare at the ceiling at three in the morning wondering how reality quietly slipped out of alignment.

Now therapy increasingly resembles a boutique lifestyle subscription somewhere between Pilates and artisanal coffee.

People no longer whisper:

“I’m in therapy.”

They announce it with the calm pride of somebody saying:

“I’ve started reformer Pilates.”

Interrupting the Drift

There’s a way people talk about Atomic Habits that never quite lands.

As if it’s a philosophy of life.

It isn’t.

Or at least, that’s not where it earns its keep.

Taken as a worldview, it’s thin. Life is not a sequence of optimized micro-actions. Meaning doesn’t emerge from brushing your teeth 1% better. The deeper questions don’t bend to habit design. You can structure behavior, but you don’t resolve existence that way.

But that doesn’t make the book weak.

It just means it’s being used in the wrong domain.

Where it actually works is much narrower. And much more practical.

It’s a cleanup strategy.

Accidental World Power

The strange thing about power is that sometimes the people who possess it do not fully understand it until somebody else accidentally explains it to them.

For decades, the world liked its power structure clean and cinematic.

America. China. Russia.

Maybe India waiting politely in the lobby while the adults talked.

The usual superpower menu.

Aircraft carriers. Nuclear weapons. Massive GDP charts. Satellites. Intelligence agencies with names sounding like villains in airport thrillers.

Then reality once again behaved disrespectfully toward theory.

Because the world suddenly remembered that an absurd amount of industrial civilization squeezes itself through a narrow strip of water called the Strait of Hormuz.

And Iran, sitting there like a man holding a wrench next to the main water valve of the apartment building, quietly realized:

“Wait a second. If we turn this thing sideways, the whole world starts screaming.”

That is the birth of the accidental world power.

Back to Reality

For a long time, the West behaved as if history had quietly ended.

Borders became psychological rather than physical. Energy was assumed to be permanent. Demography became an abstraction instead of destiny. Politics turned therapeutic. Every tension was treated as a communication problem, every structural limit as something that could eventually be negotiated away through the correct language, sufficient empathy, and administrative management.

Reality itself began to feel optional.

And because daily life still worked, because supermarkets remained full, pensions still arrived, flights still departed on time, people mistook stability for inevitability.

But stability is not inevitability.

It is maintenance.

It is energy flows, birth rates, functioning infrastructure, trust, institutional competence, social cohesion, and millions of people quietly carrying systems every single day without applause.

Modern Europe slowly drifted into a posthistorical dream state.

The Refusal to Grow Up

There is something strangely adolescent about modern elite culture.

Not youthful in the good sense. Not adventurous, energetic, exploratory, alive. Not the kind of youth that builds things, risks things, tests itself against reality.

Something softer.

A permanent extension of the emotional logic of late adolescence.

A culture increasingly organized around the belief that discomfort is harm, criticism is violence, identity is destiny, and emotional vulnerability confers moral authority.

That is the psychological core of wokeness.

Not compassion. Not justice. Infantilism.

You see it everywhere once you notice it.

The obsession with emotional safety. The inability to tolerate ambiguity. The expectation that institutions should regulate ordinary human friction. The transformation of disagreement into trauma. The constant appeal to administrators, HR departments, moderators, reporting systems, speech codes, and therapeutic language.

It is the emotional architecture of children calling for the teacher.

And the deeper irony is that this mentality emerged inside the safest and wealthiest societies in human history.

Not among people working on oil rigs, fishing boats, construction sites, farms, or factory floors. Not in places where reality answers quickly and brutally. It emerged inside managerial and academic environments where physical hardship has largely disappeared and psychological interpretation becomes the primary battlefield.

That matters.

Because human beings do not simply become peaceful once material survival is secured. The energy moves elsewhere.

Atlas Logging Off

There is a quiet bitterness spreading through parts of modern society. Not revolutionary bitterness. Not mobs in the streets. More like exhaustion slowly turning into detachment.

People still wake up in the morning.

They still go to work.

They still pay taxes.

They still keep systems running.

The trains still move.

The shelves are still stocked.

The lights still turn on.

The roads still get repaired.

But underneath the functioning surface, something has started to shift.

A growing number of people no longer feel like citizens. They feel like infrastructure.

Load-bearing structures.

Expected, but not appreciated.

Needed, but not respected.

Germany; The Stranded Whale

Is this still reality, or has it already slipped into parody?

A whale strands itself on the German coast. A sick animal in the wrong water. Sad, unusual, but understandable. What becomes harder to understand is everything that follows.

Within days, a single animal turns into a national psychodrama. Not a short report. Not an evening headline. An ongoing spectacle. Live tickers. Camera crews. Endless updates. Emotional commentary delivered with the gravity of a state crisis. The whale becomes the main character.

You look at it and wonder whether modern societies have lost the ability to scale emotion proportionally to reality.

There are fences. Not really to protect the whale, but to contain the public performance orbiting around it. People rush into the water. People take boats out. People cry. People desperately want contact with the animal. Not necessarily to help. To participate. That distinction matters.

Then the teams appear. Naturally.

“Team Hope.”

interpunctuation

Interpunctuation

Conflicts rarely begin where people say they begin.

Ask two sides to tell the same story and you won’t get two versions of the facts. You’ll get two versions of where the facts start. Fix that starting point, and everything else falls into place. Motives align. Roles settle. One side reacts, the other initiates. The script writes itself.

Watzlawick called this interpunctuation. Not the events themselves, but the way we carve them into a sequence. Where we place the first stone. What we decide counts as the beginning.

In the Ukraine conflict, the split is not only political. It is grammatical.

This Is It (1/3)

The Softer Weapon

The Softer Weapon

The Necessary Devil

Apocalypse in Switzerland

The Managed Life

Moralized Epistemology

Against Dead Morality

Running Out of Ideas