razor.blog: where philosophy meets the road.

Where the Line Begins to Move

Free speech in Europe is under pressure. Not abolished, not extinguished, but increasingly managed.

In one sense, this is understandable. We do not live in the 1950s anymore. Political ideas no longer move slowly through leaflets, local meetings, or delayed broadcasts. A sentence written in irritation can now reach millions within hours. Social media rewards escalation, collapses context, and turns private speech into public events almost instantly. Governments did not create this environment, and pretending otherwise would be naive.

States are therefore confronted with a real problem: how to prevent rapid escalation and social destabilisation without governing permanently in emergency mode. That tension is not imaginary.

But history is unambiguous on one point. The fact that regulation feels understandable does not mean it is harmless. Periods of technological acceleration have always tempted governments to tighten control in the name of order. Once restrictions are normalised as reasonable responses to new conditions, lines begin to blur.

The Swiss Village That Did Not Argue

There is a village that looks, at first glance, exactly the way a Swiss village should look. The houses are tidy. The sidewalks are clean. People greet each other with restrained politeness. Nothing appears out of place. If you were to pass through it on a quiet afternoon, you might even think that conflict itself had been engineered out of existence.

At the center of the village stands the school.

On its website, the school explains its annual motto with gentle conviction: We pull on the same rope. The children are taught that disagreements should be minimized, that problems should be solved together, that harmony is not only desirable but expected. There is even a symbolic “peace rope,” tied with knots representing the proper order of reconciliation: name the conflict, express feelings, state wishes, apologize.

It is a beautiful idea.

Almost pastoral.

But while the children are learning how not to argue, something very different is unfolding a few administrative doors away.

Reality Is Nazi

There is a peculiar kind of person one encounters more and more often now. They enter the room composed, articulate, certain. They speak as if they have already crossed terrain the rest of us are still mapping. Then reality arrives, unscripted as always, and within minutes the structure collapses. What follows is rarely self-doubt. It is accusation.

Reality, they say, is the problem.

It is too harsh. Too backward. Too unjust. Too full of enemies.

A Middle Path for Navigating Modern Complexity with Wisdom and Grace

People in the West keep returning to Taoism and Buddhism the way city dwellers return to nature documentaries. Something in them knows that what they are living inside is no longer human-scale. The books feel calm. The language feels sane. The ideas feel older than the noise. And then Monday morning arrives, with emails, institutions, bills, deadlines, custody schedules, performance reviews, gas prices, and a phone that never shuts up. Whatever enlightenment felt possible on Sunday night collapses before breakfast.

The problem is not that Taoism or Buddhism are wrong. The problem is that they were never meant for a world like this.

The Epstein Distraction

The most corrosive effect of the Epstein obsession is not what it reveals, but what it immobilizes. The story functions as narrative glue. Once attention sticks to it, it does not move. Moral energy circulates in a closed loop of outrage that feels like awareness but operates as paralysis. People believe they are looking behind the curtain. In practice, they are kept busy staring at a single scene replayed without end.

Epstein no longer operates as a historical case. He has become a Rorschach test.

The Gym, Late Afternoon

The gym is bright in the wrong way. Fluorescent light. Mirrors everywhere. Bodies doing what bodies have always done. Pushing. Pulling. Sweating. You would expect something human to happen. It never does.

People arrive sealed. Headphones in. Eyes straight ahead. Everyone pretending not to look while looking constantly. Desire hangs in the air like stale perfume. Nobody touches it.

That tells you what kind of place this is.

Suicide of a Civilisation

Mental health is not the human default.

That uncomfortable fact was stated with icy clarity by Peter Wessel Zapffe and quietly ignored ever since. Psychological stability is an achievement, not a given. It is produced by filters, illusions, routines, shared stories, and limits. Remove those and you do not get liberation. You get exposure.

Modern society has done exactly that. Systematically. Proudly.

Émile Durkheim diagnosed suicide not as a private failure, but as a social symptom. When norms dissolve and integration fails, people die not because they are weak, but because the structure that once held them together no longer exists. His mistake was stopping at the individual. He did not push the logic to its institutional conclusion.

We are now watching suicide at the level of civilisation.

Post-Legitimacy Governance

A cold winter in Europe. Snow in places where warmer, milder seasons were promised. Ice on the roads. On social media, people no longer debate climate models. They post jokes. Memes. “It’s winter.” “More CO₂ tax.” “Here we go again.” This is usually described as ignorance or denial. It is neither. Cold winters do not disprove climate change. Most people know that. The distinction between weather and climate has been explained for years. Long-term averages, anomalies, jet streams. The information is everywhere, repeated endlessly. What has collapsed is not understanding. It is credibility.

People no longer react to claims. They react to who delivers them and how. When scientific hypotheses are fused with moral imperatives, when urgency replaces persuasion, when dissent is treated as social deviance, content loses authority. Communication stops informing and starts performing. It becomes ritual. Ritual only works as long as belief exists. Once belief disappears, ritual becomes parody. Mockery follows. Not as resistance, but as withdrawal. Mockery signals disengagement.

Karen Is Not Just a Woman: This Should Not Be Happening to Me

For most of my adult life, the system has worked quietly in my favor.

Borders. Police. Offices. Forms. Queues. Officials.

I pass through without friction. Nobody hesitates. Nobody asks a second question. The machine hums, stamps the paper, waves me on.

You don’t consciously think, this is how the world works. That would be crude.

It settles lower than thought. In the nervous system.

And then one day, it doesn’t.

The police stop you.

Ontological Fragmentation and the Death of Mass Culture

What is happening around us is often described as polarization. That word is too small. Polarization assumes a shared axis. It presumes that people are still standing in the same world, merely facing in opposite directions.

What we are dealing with instead is ontological fragmentation. Not disagreement about opinions, but a fracture in the assumptions that make disagreement possible in the first place.

Large groups of people no longer share a moral universe. They do not merely differ on values. They differ on what counts as harm, what counts as truth, what history means, what authority is, what guilt is, what freedom is, what humor is allowed, and whether irony itself is legitimate. They inhabit different models of reality.

Once that happens, mass culture as it existed in the twentieth century becomes structurally impossible.

The Fantasy of the Meta-Position

Dieting is where a deeper political and philosophical lie becomes visible in everyday life.

On the surface, dieting looks trivial. Eat less. Choose differently. Apply willpower. If human beings really possessed the kind of sovereignty modern culture insists we have, dieting would be a technical adjustment, not a recurring failure. You would decide once, and the body would comply.

The fact that entire industries exist to manage repeated failure should already tell us something is wrong with the premise.

Diets fail not because people are ignorant or unmotivated. Most people know exactly what they are supposed to do. They intend to do it. They often begin doing it. And then, somewhere between intention and execution, something else takes over.

This is where the real problem appears. Most diets are built on an implicit fantasy: the fantasy of a meta-position.

2021: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Switzerland: “I Stand Here With You”

What follows is my report as it appeared in a small Swiss newspaper.

On Thursday evening, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw on social media that a demonstration had been announced for November 12, 2021, in Bern, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a speaker. It was organized by Public Eye on Science, aka the farmer Urs Hans from the Tösstal. At first I thought it was a joke. But other familiar names were also listed, including Dr. Thomas Binder and the pharmacist Kati Schepis.

As soon as I heard a Kennedy was coming, I asked the editor-in-chief whether he would travel to Bern. He said no. So we agreed I would go as a “reporter” for Die Ostschweiz and capture the mood. On Friday at noon, my daughter and I arrived in Bern. The demonstration was not at the Federal Palace, but in Wankdorf at Rosalia Wenger Square, a place I had never heard of despite having lived in Bern years ago. The location felt chosen to keep the event out of sight.

Radioactive Liability: Why the West Did Not Go After China

The Western response to the origins of COVID-19 only looks puzzling if you take official narratives at face value. Once you stop doing that, it becomes almost boringly obvious.

The West did not hesitate to accuse China because it lacked evidence.

It hesitated because accusing China would have forced Western governments to explain their own role in what was happening in Wuhan.

That was the real danger.

Social Work Without Being Social

There is a particular kind of unease that arises when form and content drift too far apart. I felt it recently in a job interview for a position in social work. On paper, social work is a profession built around human contact, sensitivity, judgment, and presence. In reality, I found myself sitting across from two people who felt more like accountants auditing a balance sheet.

To My Daughter on Her Twelfth Birthday

There is an old philosophy called Stoicism. It began more than two thousand years ago, with people who were trying to figure out how to live well in a world that is often unfair, confusing, and unpredictable. They were not trying to be cold or tough. They were trying to stay clear.

One of the main ideas of Stoicism is very simple:

Some things are up to you.

Some things are not.

NPCs Don’t Suffer

Late at night, dark trailers were placed across a highway in Germany. No lights. No warning. A truck driver barely stopped in time and warned others. Police treated it as attempted murder. Dozens of people could have been killed:

Families returning from a trip. Parents with children asleep in the back seat. Night workers driving home. People with no political power, no role in the conflict, no awareness that they had been drafted into it. One delayed reaction, one second less, and the road would have turned into a mass grave.

Days earlier, critical power infrastructure was sabotaged in Berlin’s winter grid. Tens of thousands of households were affected for a week.

In many high-rise buildings, elderly people were trapped in cold apartments without functioning heaters or stoves. Elevators stopped running. Some could not leave their homes. Hospitals were affected. Lives were put at risk, quietly and unevenly, behind closed doors.

All of this for a "political" cause.

What connects these events is not ideology.

It is perception.

Was Hitler Left or Right?

The claim that Hitler was “left-wing” does not come from historical study. It comes from present-day political irritation projected backward. It is an emotional sorting reflex masquerading as analysis: everything I dislike must belong to the other side.

That reflex does not clarify history. It erases it.

To understand where fascism belongs, you have to step out of contemporary culture war categories and return to intellectual lineage. The left-right distinction did not begin as a meme war. It emerged from a real philosophical split after Hegel.

After Hegel’s death, his legacy fractured.

State of the European Union

The European Union reaffirmed its commitment to unity.

Several member states expressed reservations.

The measures are temporary.

A review will follow after implementation.

There was no alternative.

All options remain on the table.

The decision was taken in the interest of citizens.

Public confidence remains a challenge.

National sovereignty is fully respected.

Compliance is mandatory.

The West in Stereo

If you put today’s America and today’s Europe next to each other, you don’t see harmony or balance. You see a structural failure unfolding in stereo.

On the American side, volatility has become a governing principle. Under Donald Trump, politics is performed as pressure. Threats are floated, withdrawn, re-floated. Tariffs appear and disappear. Alliances are questioned in public. NATO is treated less like a foundation than like a bargaining chip. Even Greenland is spoken about as if geopolitics were a real-estate listing. Nothing is fully committed to, nothing fully abandoned. The signal is permanent instability.

On the European side, the problem is the opposite. Not volatility, but rigidity. Institutions cling to procedure as reality shifts underneath them. Free speech is narrowed in the name of safety. Political competition is moralized instead of fought. In Germany, the largest opposition party is not confronted argument by argument, but fenced off as illegitimate. Migration is treated as an administrative inevitability rather than a political choice. Courts, regulators, and ministries respond to political stress with the same reflex: more rules, tighter language codes, longer processes. Debt rises, productivity stagnates, and the answer is always another layer of governance.

America moves too fast.

Europe refuses to move at all.

Donald Trump and the Price of Volatility

Donald Trump was in Switzerland last week, speaking in Davos at the World Economic Forum. By coincidence, I was there too, though nowhere near him. The closest I came was by mistake. I got lost while looking for a place to park, took a wrong turn, and suddenly found myself in front of his hotel, boxed in by barriers and about twenty masked policemen, with dogs and mirrors sliding under cars. I rolled down my window and put on the most innocent Swiss face I have. They didn’t make a fuss, but it was enough to feel the density of real-world power.

Davos has that effect. It compresses things. Influence, proximity, authority. Trump’s appearance there felt the same way. Not a new chapter, not a surprise, but a concentration. The style, the signaling, the reversals, the noise, all packed into a single appearance. If you want to understand what has been building throughout his presidency, Davos was not a detour. It was the moment when the pattern became visible at scale.

Seen that way, the confusion around Trump starts to make sense.

The End of Corrective Reality

The conversation broke down over a single word.

I was speaking with a fellow school social worker, a woman with more than fifteen years in the field. At some point, I said that learning can be painful. I added that sometimes the obstacle is the way. Not as metaphor. As a plain description of how people grow.

She froze.

Not in disagreement but in confusion.

Pain, in her frame, could only mean harm.

Why Some Men Want to Become Women

Something historically strange is happening in the West. Large numbers of men in Western societies are opting out of manhood altogether. Not rebelling against masculine norms. Not reshaping them. Leaving the category itself. This has not happened before. Not at this scale. Not in societies that are safe, wealthy, and obsessed with self-expression. History gives us eunuchs, ritual cross-dressers, third-gender roles, sacred inversions, carnival play. What it does not give us is mass abandonment of male identity in cultures that officially celebrate freedom and authenticity. That alone tells us this is not simply a timeless truth finally being allowed to surface. It is about incentives.

For most of Western history, being a man was not an identity but an achievement.

Asleep at the Wheel

None of this was a surprise.

The demographic collapse unfolding across Europe, East Asia, and much of the developed world was not discovered last week. It was not an unforeseen side effect of smartphones or dating apps or bad vibes. It was mapped, modeled, and warned about decades ago by demographers and sociologists who understood a simple constraint: societies that stop reproducing themselves do not continue by rhetoric alone.

This was already clear in the mid-twentieth century. Industrialization detaches work from family. Urbanization raises the cost of children. Education delays adulthood. Sexual liberation separates intimacy from reproduction. Individual autonomy replaces obligation. Fertility falls. Not maybe. Not occasionally. Structurally.

The warnings were not moral. They were mathematical.

Sanctioning Neutrality

I didn’t follow Jacques Baud closely. I don’t live inside the daily churn of war commentary, expert panels, or Telegram prophets. I know there is a war. I worked with Ukrainian refugees. I know there is propaganda on all sides. I also know that in every conflict, reality is usually more tragic and more ambiguous than the slogans suggest.

So when I heard that the European Union had sanctioned a Swiss citizen, a former intelligence officer, I paused.

Sanctions are not symbolic gestures. They are not an argument. They are a financial and civic execution.

The Death of Arthur

Arthur did not die at Camlann.

He died later, quietly, under layers of good intentions.

From a distance, the Arthurian legend looks irresistible: a round table instead of hierarchy, a just king rising from chaos, a Britain suspended between Rome and something new. It has all the ingredients of a great myth. But move closer and the spell breaks. The story does not deepen. It frays. It starts contradicting itself, apologizing for itself, explaining itself away. What you discover is not a myth that evolved, but a myth that was edited to death.

Arthur is the victim of a genre collision.

Identity Without Skin

We like to think of ourselves as free. Especially in modern societies. Free to choose, free to define ourselves, free to become. And yet there is a quiet paradox at the heart of this promise: the more freedom we are told we have, the more rigid people seem to become.

What looks like liberation increasingly behaves like conformity with better marketing.

Modern identity no longer grows out of lived experience. It is selected. Chosen from a shelf. Adopted as a complete package. Political identity, gender identity, professional identity, moral identity. Each arrives fully assembled, with approved vocabulary, approved concerns, approved blind spots. The role answers the questions before you have had time to form them.

This produces something that looks like diversity but feels like sameness.

Hierarchy Theater

Job interviews like to pretend they are conversations. They are not. Most of the time they resemble a low-budget television format with a rigid script and a passive audience. The interviewer sits back, relaxed, waiting to be entertained. The candidate is expected to perform: narrate a life, confess weaknesses disguised as strengths, radiate motivation on command. The ritual is familiar, soothing, and mostly empty. Everyone knows the lines. Nobody learns much.

The trouble begins when you refuse to play along.

Too Late to Be Here

Nobody has ever been where they thought they were.

Quantum Rhetoric and the Collapse of Political Meaning

Schrödinger’s cat was invented to expose nonsense. A dead-and-alive cat was never meant to be taken seriously. It was a warning: if your theory leads you here, your theory is broken.

Politics discovered that nonsense can be operationally superior to truth.

What we live with now is Schrödinger speech: statements that are said and unsaid at the same time, positions that exist in two mutually exclusive states until an audience forces them to collapse. Not because reality is complex, but because accountability is inconvenient.

A German politician says something explosive live on television about the possible censorship of alternative media. Strong enough to signal virtue. Sharp enough to draw blood. The media amplifies it. Outrage follows. Then consequences appear. Allies flinch. The wrong people benefit.

Suddenly, nuance is discovered.

Skip the Ad

Three scenes. Different places, different people. One shared mistake.

The first took place at a university, maybe ten years ago. An amok alarm went off. No one knew whether it was a drill, a malfunction, or something real. I was older than most students, having arrived late to academia after years elsewhere. Instinct kicked in the way it used to: identify exits, move people, reduce risk.

What happened instead felt unreal. A group of young female social work students ran away from me laughing, giggling, turning the uncertainty into a kind of game. The alarm became background noise. The possibility of real danger was treated like a role-play nobody had agreed to, but everyone mocked anyway. It was later declared a false alarm. That detail is irrelevant. In real life, you never know that in advance.

The second scene was worse.

The Changing Poles

For a long time, race was a word you expected to hear from the political right. It came wrapped in crude hierarchies, biological myths, and talk of superiority and decline. Race functioned as a blunt instrument, a way to simplify a complicated world by sorting people into fixed categories. Liberal societies pushed back against this, and rightly so. The lesson was hard-earned and clear: judging people by race leads nowhere good.

What is striking is how quietly the poles have shifted.

Race has not disappeared from our moral language. It has migrated. Today, it sits comfortably within progressive discourse, only flipped upside down. Where the old right ranked races in terms of superiority, the new moral framework assigns value through victimhood. Race has become a form of moral currency. Some identities arrive with built-in credibility, others with an assumed deficit. The categories have changed. The moral story has inverted. But the structure feels eerily familiar.

In this new system, belonging to a historically disadvantaged group confers automatic authority.

Thin Ice Politics

We live in a time where politics no longer feels like a contest of ideas but like a test of psychological endurance. The old coordinates still exist, left and right, but they no longer explain what is happening. They describe positions, not dynamics. What we are watching now are two different kinds of breakdown, moving in opposite directions, each dangerous in its own way, each feeding the other.

The radical right is easier to recognize. Its impulse is restoration. It wants solidity, hierarchy, rules, borders, certainty. It looks backward, convinced that order once existed and can be reinstalled if only the right people are strong enough. The psychology is rigid, sometimes brutal, often resentful, but coherent. The world is simplified until it becomes legible again through force. The danger is obvious. Cruelty justified as strength. Exclusion framed as necessity. Power mistaken for competence. History has already run this experiment, and the results are not ambiguous.

Cultural Power and the Megaphone Effect

One of the quiet mistakes of modern life is believing that visibility equals relevance.

Take veganism. Not because it matters so much in itself, but because it exposes a mechanism. A position held by a small minority becomes omnipresent. Menus change. Advertising follows. Corporate language adjusts. Media coverage multiplies. The impression forms that society is undergoing a decisive moral shift.

It isn’t. What is happening is amplification.

The Revolution That Never Ended

History is rarely written by liars.

But it is almost always written by winners. And winners, even when they tell the truth, tell it selectively. Over time, their version hardens into moral common sense. Certain events become untouchable. Certain judgments feel settled. One of those events is the French Revolution.

Ask almost anyone today and the reflex is automatic: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Progress. Emancipation. The birth of modern democracy. The Revolution is remembered not merely as a historical rupture, but as a moral awakening. Its excesses are acknowledged politely, framed as unfortunate side effects of an otherwise necessary transformation. The Terror becomes an accident. The old order was rotten, and it had to go.

But that framing already assumes the verdict.

A Sports Hall and the Desire to Do Everything Right

In a small town in Switzerland, officials are debating whether a newly built sports hall may have to be demolished and rebuilt. This is not satire. A project conceived as a model of sustainability may end up being constructed twice.

If reducing resource use and CO₂ emissions was the aim, it has been missed in the most literal way possible. Few things are less sustainable than tearing down a new building because it cannot be trusted to stand.

That is where astonishment sets in.

From Punk to Pariah

There was a time when criticizing the establishment made you unfashionable, irritating, perhaps unemployable for a while. You were loud, badly dressed, and likely wrong about several things. But you were legible. You were a punk. Everyone knew what that meant.

Today, criticizing the establishment still makes you unfashionable, irritating, and potentially unemployable. The difference is that it also makes you morally suspicious.

This is progress.

In the 1970s and 80s, dissent was expected to be crude. Anti-establishment voices were tolerated precisely because they were marginal. They existed outside the system, shouting at it from the pavement. Institutions could afford to ignore them, mock them, or occasionally repress them, because they did not claim moral perfection themselves. Power justified itself through authority, stability, and order. If you challenged it, the conflict was visible and external. You fought the system; the system pushed back.

At some point, that structure changed.

The establishment stopped presenting itself primarily as powerful and started presenting itself as good. Control learned to speak gently. The baton was replaced by the diagnosis. Once that happened, dissent ceased to be disagreement and became pathology. You were no longer wrong; you were problematic. You didn’t hold a position; you embodied a flaw.

This was more efficient.

What We Can Learn from Benjamin Netanyahu and Where It Becomes Dangerous

Benjamin Netanyahu is not an accident of history, nor a deviation from democratic politics. He is what political power looks like when it is exercised for a long time under permanent pressure. To understand him is not to excuse him. It is to understand the conditions under which a system tolerates, and eventually prefers, a certain kind of leader.

Netanyahu’s central achievement is not popularity. It is indispensability. He positioned himself not as a visionary or reformer, but as a stabiliser in a hostile environment. His message is not “I will improve your life,” but “Without me, things will get worse.”

This lowers expectations and raises tolerance.

Rethinking Addiction

My father drank himself to death.

Not metaphorically. Not slowly fading. He destroyed his body until it stopped functioning, then kept drinking anyway. Toward the end, he broke his hip in his apartment. He could no longer stand. He could not walk. He refused doctors. He refused hospitals.

He lay immobilised in his bed, in his own filth. Friends brought him alcohol so he could dull the pain. Even his guardian from social services supplied it, something I still find deeply unsettling. Even then, unable to move and lying in his own excrement, my father did not stop drinking. He died there, drinking until the end.

This was not a loss of control.

It was persistence.

Watching that kind of alcoholism from the inside forces a question most people never have to ask seriously: what, exactly, is being treated by the substance?

On Against All Odds

Against All Odds is often remembered as a stylish neo-noir, all sun-bleached surfaces, doomed romance, and moral decay. But beneath the glossy fatalism, the film stages a quiet philosophical conflict between two modes of being in the world. Not good and evil. Not innocence and corruption. But presence versus exposure.

The conflict is embodied in two men who never quite belong to the same reality.

Jeff Bridges plays Terry Brogan as a man who moves through the world without illusion, yet without aggression. He sees corruption, understands power, recognizes manipulation, but does not organize his life around dismantling it. His clarity is lived, not weaponized. He does not rush to judge or dominate events. He absorbs them, stands his ground, and accepts the cost of staying intact.

Opposite him stands Jake Wise, played by James Woods, a man for whom seeing is never enough. Jake needs exposure. He needs leverage. He needs truth not as something to live with, but as something to use. Where Brogan remains inside the world, Jake positions himself above it, scanning for contradictions, weaknesses, pressure points.

This is not simply a contrast between calm and intensity. It is a contrast between two philosophies of truth.

After the Dice Rolled

Once you look at Christian Church history long enough, belief stops feeling like standing on rock and starts feeling like standing on the outcome of a thousand quarrels.

People are told “the Church teaches” as if the teaching arrived intact, like a sealed crate delivered from heaven. But the Church did not receive a crate. It assembled a library while arguing about which books belonged in it. It developed a vocabulary while fighting over what words were allowed to mean. It built an institution while insisting it was merely guarding something timeless. Then, after the smoke cleared, it called the surviving version inevitable.

That is where belief begins to feel like a roll of the dice.

Freedom Without a Compass

Women’s liberation began as a sober project. Its original aim was simple enough to sound almost banal today: women should not be legally, economically, or socially trapped by their sex. They should be able to work, to study, to choose partners freely, to leave bad situations, and to exist as full subjects rather than supporting characters in someone else’s life.

Early feminist thinkers were not interested in spectacle. They were interested in freedom in a classical sense: autonomy, responsibility, and the capacity to shape one’s own life without being assigned a predefined role. Sexual liberation was part of this, but it was never meant to be the center. It aimed to remove moral panic from intimacy, not to turn sexuality into a career path.

Then something quietly shifted.

When Sheep Eat People

Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, is often misunderstood as a naive blueprint for a perfect society. It is nothing of the sort.

Utopia is framed as a dialogue between Thomas More himself, the humanist Peter Giles, and a seasoned traveler named Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday claims to have journeyed with Amerigo Vespucci and to have spent years living on a distant island called Utopia. The name itself is a provocation. It means both “no place” and, by a near-homonym, “good place.” From the start, More signals that what follows is not a literal proposal but a thought experiment.

Hythloday describes Utopia in meticulous detail.

After the House Was Torn Down

The Enlightenment did something extraordinary.

It tore down the house we had been living in.

That house was old. Some of its rooms were dark. Some were unjust. Some hid cruelty behind tradition and authority. Its foundations were not rationally designed, and its structure could not always justify itself. The Enlightenment was right to open the walls, to let light in, to ask dangerous questions.

And it succeeded.

The house was dismantled piece by piece.

Hierarchy was flattened.

Authority was questioned.

Tradition lost its automatic legitimacy.

Inherited roles were exposed as contingent rather than sacred.

What remained was an open space.

Analogy of a Catastrophe

I normally avoid commenting on news stories. Not because they do not matter, but because most commentary replaces thinking with reflex. Outrage is cheap. It creates noise, not clarity.

This case is different.

Over New Year’s, a fire broke out in a bar in the canton of Valais, quite far from where I live in Switzerland. Forty people died. As the facts emerged, it became clear that nearly half of them were minors. Some were fourteen years old. The fire started shortly after one in the morning.

For a country like Switzerland, this is deeply unsettling. We are used to assuming that layered safety regulations, inspections, and institutional responsibility make disasters of this scale nearly impossible. That assumption has now collapsed.

So the real question is not what happened, but how it was allowed to happen.

Heresy Without God

Scholasticism was the dominant intellectual method of medieval Europe. It was how educated people were trained to think, argue, and reason. Its purpose was not free exploration, but internal coherence. Truth was assumed to already exist. The task of the thinker was not to discover new foundations, but to clarify, systematize, and defend the given ones through disciplined argument.

Scholasticism was not stupidity.

It was order.

In medieval Europe, it emerged as a rigorous way of thinking inside a fragile civilization. Truth was given. God existed. Scripture was authoritative. Salvation mattered. Within those assumptions, thinkers were encouraged to argue fiercely. They dissected concepts, listed objections, refined distinctions, and reconciled contradictions with extraordinary precision. The method was serious, logical, and exacting.

But it had limits.

Yes and No

In the twelfth century, Peter Abelard wrote a strange little book called Sic et Non, Yes and No. It did not tell readers what to believe. Instead, it placed authoritative Christian texts side by side that flatly contradicted each other. One Church Father said yes. Another said no. Both were respected. Both were orthodox. Abelard offered no resolution. His point was not to solve the contradiction but to force the reader to think.

What made this radical was not disagreement itself. Disagreement had always existed. What shocked people was the refusal to harmonize it. Abelard quietly implied that moral and theological certainty was not handed down fully formed. It had to be worked out in the mind and conscience of the individual. That was dangerous. It shifted responsibility away from authority and onto the person reading.

That small medieval exercise turns out to be uncannily modern.

Inner Economy

At some point, something shifts. Not with a bang or a dramatic decision, but with a quiet refusal. You realise that continuing to participate costs more than it gives. Not just time or energy, but something harder to replace. Attention. Integrity. Calm. Once that realisation settles in, the old questions lose relevance. The question is no longer how to win, or how to fix the system, or how to be heard. It becomes how to remain intact.

Understanding how power actually operates has a sobering effect. It does not automatically make you cynical, nor does it turn you hungry for dominance. It strips away illusion. You see that institutions are not guided by their stated values but by incentives, visibility, fear, and internal politics. You see that competence offers no protection, that good intentions generate no leverage, and that results matter only when someone powerful chooses to recognise them. This knowledge is not corrosive. What corrodes is pretending otherwise.

A Different Kind of New Year

You expect New Year to be a celebration.

Fireworks. Music. A brief agreement to feel hopeful.

This year showed something else.

My twelve-year-old watched the ball drop in New York.

The crowd cheered. The singer did her job, standing alone on a stage meant to carry meaning for millions.

Beneath the lights ran a live ticker of words.

Not wishes.

Not joy.

Mockery. Cheap cruelty from strangers paying nothing for attention.

It unsettled her.

The Cost of Carrying What Is Not Yours

Helping someone professionally is not the same as helping a friend.

A friend asks for support.

A client often arrives because everything has already collapsed.

Many professional helpers are driven by a quiet hope. They want to repair a part of themselves by repairing others. They want to be useful. Needed. To believe that effort can still turn chaos into order.

Edible Entertainment

Most of what we call food today is not food.

It is entertainment that happens to be edible. Designed in laboratories, refined in marketing departments, calibrated to hit the brain’s reward circuits harder than hunger ever could. We keep eating not because the body needs more, but because the dopamine loop has not yet closed. Appetite ends. Stimulation does not.

So perhaps the simplest form of rebellion left is this: eat real food. Food that grew somewhere, lived somewhere, died somewhere. Food that exists outside spreadsheets and branding decks. Real food does not chase you. It does not negotiate with your impulses. It supports the body quietly, builds instead of hijacks, and produces energy that lasts longer than the buzz.

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