The Cover Stories
‘Well may we walk in blacks, but not complain.’ (John Donne, To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy) The term “cover story” has two…
Fooling the Intellect: Davos
There are places that are more places than others, because they exist in reality and on maps, but even more so in the pages of the novels…
Three Times Gnostic Olympics
Like a Magus, he tortures, enrages, soothes, fills us with false terror. ~ Horace Gnosticism is an overall term for a syncretic intellectual influence, mostly Eastern and…
Out Went Horror Vacui: On No Longer Being Afraid of the Nothingness of the Void
That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui; it…
One Tower: On the Mercantile Feudalism of the Media
The most vast and ambitious commercial enterprises of all times are the contemporary media conglomerates, an existing but not tangible corpse of powers. Predators of faces, dates,…
The Diseased Mind
What is the state of a controlled mind? It is certainly a diseased one, as the mind cannot stand another authority over its own; its faculty is…
Political Alchemy: The Dangers and Temptations of Transformation to Perfection
The choice is as judicious as it is provocative in a time when all of us are threatened in our humanity, if not in our physical existence,…
Virus Magic, or about the amplification of an unknown factor
The unknown factor is a variable in a conditional equation in mathematics; it is the quantity which is to be discovered by solving an equation (This is…
Moribund Algorithm, or “How to learn the magic word that evokes the shape of things to come?” On Modalities of Sorcery
Operations with Algorithms are at the heart of disease prevention technologies. This is a follow-up article of those published in the 20 September, 13 October, and 6…
(Without) the Reason of State, with the Autonomous Technicality of Disease Prevention
Can we arrive through reason at knowing what is the reason of state? For if unreason should come into conflict with reason, we shall then reason and…
The Soul and the Mind-building potentates, or on the irrationality of Artificial Intelligence
This is a follow-up article to the one published in VoegelinView on 20 September 2021. The question concerned whether a sudden emergency situation can lead to or…
Instrumentalizing Politics by Secreting Delirious Effluences
When we pose the question whether a sudden emergency situation can lead to or bring about permanent changes in politics, the seemingly evident answer would be ‘yes’…
The Perspective of Liminality
Liminality and the Modern. Bjørn Thomassen. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. This new book by the Danish scholar Bjørn Thomassen is organized around the term liminality, an anthropologically based…