The Way of the Cat

A System of Mindfulness for Humans Who Have Forgotten How to Sit

There is a cat asleep on a radiator somewhere. It has solved a problem you did not know you had. This book is about that problem.

The cat does not know it has solved anything. That is also part of the solution.

Part One: The Problem

You are reading this on a screen. You have at least two other tabs open. Somewhere in your house there is a cup of tea you made an hour ago and forgot about. You have not been fully in any room you entered today.

This is the human condition in the modern age. We are everywhere at once, which is a way of being nowhere at all. We have built a civilisation of remarkable convenience and we cannot enjoy any of it because we are checking whether we are enjoying it correctly.

The cat does not have this problem. The cat is in the room. The cat is in the only room the cat has ever been in, which is the room where the cat is.

For three thousand years, sages in robes have tried to teach us this. They built temples. They wrote sutras. They sat under trees until they understood. Meanwhile a tabby in Cairo was doing the same thing on a warm stone and nobody gave it a certificate.

The Way of the Cat is not new. It is the oldest path. We just need a teacher who is not trying to sell us a meditation app.

Part Two: The Eight Pillars

The First Pillar — The Sit

A cat sits. This is not a euphemism. The cat sits as a verb and as a destination. When a cat sits, it is not preparing to do something else. The sit is complete in itself.

The Zen tradition calls this shikantaza, which translates roughly as “just sitting.” The Soto school of Dogen built an entire philosophy around the idea that sitting is not a means to enlightenment but enlightenment itself. Dogen wrote at length about this. The cat skipped the writing and went straight to the sitting.

Practice: Sit somewhere for ten minutes. Do not sit in order to meditate. Do not sit in order to relax. Sit in order to sit. If your mind asks what the point is, notice that the cat never asks this and the cat seems fine.

The Second Pillar — The Box

The cat chose the box over the bed. The bed was designed, marketed, and purchased to make the cat comfortable. The box arrived by accident and contained a bed.

The cat understood something the Stoics also understood. Epictetus, a slave who became a philosopher, taught that desire is the source of suffering and that contentment comes from wanting what you already have. The Taoists put it differently. Lao Tzu wrote that he who knows he has enough is rich. The cat does not read either of these men. The cat is in the box.

We spend our lives upgrading the bed. The cat is asking why.

Practice: For one week, do not buy anything to improve your life. Use what you have. Notice when the urge to upgrade arises. The urge is not you. The urge is a small ghost that has learned your name.

The Third Pillar — The Sprint

At 11pm the cat runs. There is no reason. There is no destination. The running is the point and then the running is done.

This is the principle of wu wei from Taoist thought. Action without forcing. Spontaneous response to the moment without deliberation or strategy. The cat does not plan the sprint. The sprint happens through the cat. When the energy is gone, the cat stops without ceremony.

We have lost this. We schedule our spontaneity. We book our holidays and then spend them anxious about whether we are relaxing properly. The cat runs when running wants to happen and rests when running is done. There is no diary.

Practice: Once this week, do something with no purpose. Walk in a direction you did not plan. Sing in the kitchen. Lie on the floor. Stop when it is finished. Tell no one.

The Fourth Pillar — The Watch

A cat can watch a leaf for an hour. The leaf is not particularly interesting. The cat is not bored. Boredom is what happens when a human cannot tolerate the present moment. The cat has no such allergy.

This is samatha in the Buddhist tradition. Calm abiding. The capacity to rest attention on a single object without strain. Monks train for years to do what the cat does waiting for a pigeon.

The cat is not concentrating. Concentration is effortful. The cat is simply not doing anything else. There is a difference.

Practice: Look at something ordinary for five minutes. A tree. A cup. Your own hand. Do not analyse it. Do not photograph it. Do not think about how looking at it makes you a deeper person. Just look. The cat is watching too.

The Fifth Pillar — The Eat

The cat eats when hungry and stops when full. The cat does not eat its feelings. The cat does not eat while reading the news. The cat does not eat to fill the silence.

This is mindful eating in the Theravadan tradition, taught by teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, who would have us chew each bite thirty times and contemplate the rain that grew the rice. The cat does not chew the kibble thirty times. The cat does eat the kibble while eating the kibble, which is the part we keep missing.

Hunger is information. Fullness is information. We have learned to override both, and we are surprised when our bodies stop trusting us.

Practice: Eat one meal this week with no screen, no book, no conversation. Just the food. Notice when you are full. Stop then, even if food remains. The cat is unimpressed by your clean plate.

The Sixth Pillar — The Same Face

The cat does not perform. Alone or watched, the cat is the cat. There is no inner cat and outer cat. There is no cat for guests and cat for solitude.

The Confucian tradition speaks of cheng, often translated as sincerity or integrity, though it means something closer to wholeness. To be one thing all the way through. The Stoics called this living according to nature. The cat calls it nothing because the cat has not noticed there is anything else to do.

We wear different faces in different rooms. We have a work voice and a parent voice and a voice for the dentist. None of these is quite us. The cat is always the cat. This is not a refusal to adapt. It is a refusal to disappear.

Practice: For one day, notice when you adjust your face. Do not stop doing it. Just notice. Ask quietly who you would be if you stopped.

The Seventh Pillar — The Nap

The cat sleeps without guilt. The cat does not think it should be doing something more productive. The cat does not wake at three in the morning to rehearse old conversations.

Rest in our culture is a failure state. We rest only when broken. We have to schedule “self-care” because we cannot otherwise grant ourselves permission to do nothing. The Chinese tradition of jing, stillness as a source of strength, understood that rest is not the opposite of action but its foundation. A drawn bow is useless if it is never released and an undrawn bow is useless if it is never drawn. Both states are necessary. The cat knows when to be each.

Practice: Nap. Not because you are tired. Not because you earned it. Nap because napping is one of the things a body can do, and you have one.

The Eighth Pillar — The Indifference to Praise

You tell the cat it is a good cat. The cat does not care. You tell the cat it is a bad cat. The cat does not care. The cat’s sense of itself does not depend on you.

This is the deepest teaching and the hardest. The Bhagavad Gita instructs Arjuna to act without attachment to the fruits of action. To do the thing because the thing is right, not because it will be rewarded. The cat has read no scripture and reached the same conclusion through the simple expedient of not caring what you think.

We are shaped by approval from before we can speak. We learn to be good in order to be loved. We never quite unlearn it. The cat was never taught the lesson and so has nothing to unlearn.

Practice: Do one good thing this week that no one will know about. Do not post it. Do not mention it. Let it be a secret between you and the universe. The cat is watching, but the cat will not tell.

Part Three: Cross-References to the Old Ways

The Way of the Cat is not new. It is what every wisdom tradition has been pointing at, dressed in fur.

Zen Buddhism gave us shikantaza, just sitting, and the cat embodies it on every windowsill. The koan tradition asked what the sound of one hand clapping was. The cat asks nothing. The cat is the answer.

Taoism taught wu wei, effortless action, and ziran, naturalness or self-so-ness. The cat has never been anything other than its own nature. Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly and was unsure on waking which he truly was. The cat does not have this confusion. The cat is the cat in the dream and in the waking.

Stoicism taught the dichotomy of control. Some things are up to us and some are not. The cat does not bother with the things that are not. The rain comes and the cat watches it from inside. Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations to himself at night. The cat composes nothing and arrives at the same place.

Hindu Vedanta speaks of sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss, as the nature of the self when freed from illusion. The cat appears to spend a great deal of its time in this state, particularly when sunbeams are involved.

Sufi mysticism speaks of the nafs, the lower self of cravings and complaints, which must be tamed. The cat has a nafs. The cat has not tamed it. The cat has simply not given it the wheel.

Japanese aesthetics offer wabi-sabi, the beauty of impermanence and imperfection, and mono no aware, the gentle sadness of things passing. The cat embodies both. The cat is old and stiff and still climbs onto the radiator because the warmth is now and the now is what there is.

These traditions disagree on much. They disagree on gods, on souls, on what happens after. They agree on one thing. The mind that is here, fully here, in this place, in this body, in this moment, is the mind that is free.

The cat got there first.

Part Four: The Final Teaching

You will not become a cat. You have rent. You have email. You have a vague worry about your knees.

But you can borrow. You can take one pillar at a time and place it in your week. You can sit when you sit. You can eat when you eat. You can choose the box. You can run at 11pm with no reason and stop when the running is done.

The masters say the path is long. The cat says the path is wherever your feet are.

Pick a pillar. Begin today. The cat began this morning and will begin again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, with no sense that any of this is hard.

That, perhaps, is the final lesson. The Way of the Cat is not difficult. We have only made it so by looking everywhere except where we are standing.

Look down. The cat is at your feet. The cat has been waiting.

Begin.

Alan /|\

Inspired by last week’s post and Morganna, the black cat who shares her house with us,

In the last article, I mentioned “the cat”.

Which got me thinking.

The Cat as Zen Master

A cat sits on a windowsill. It watches a leaf. That is all.

You watch the cat and think about your inbox. The cat does not think about its inbox. The cat does not have an inbox. The cat has a leaf.

This is the first lesson.

On Sitting

A cat can sit for four hours. It does not check its phone. It does not wonder if it should be sitting somewhere better. The sitting is the thing. When the sitting is done, the cat will do the next thing. Until then, the sitting continues.

Humans cannot sit for four minutes without reaching for something. We call this productivity. The cat would call it nothing, because the cat does not call things anything.

On Eating

The cat eats when hungry. The cat stops when full. The cat does not eat standing at the counter scrolling through bad news. The cat does not eat its feelings. The cat has feelings and the cat has food and the cat keeps these separate, like a sensible creature.

Reflect on this the next time you finish a packet of biscuits without remembering the middle ones.

On the Box

You buy the cat a bed. It costs forty pounds. The cat sits in the box the bed came in.

The cat is not being ironic. The cat has assessed the box and the bed and chosen the box. The bed wants to be a bed. The box wants nothing. The cat understands this distinction better than you do.

On Sudden Sprinting

At 11pm the cat will run sideways down the hall for no reason. This is also mindfulness. The cat is fully committed to the running. The cat is not running because of a deadline or a guilt or a January resolution. The cat is running because running is happening.

Then it stops. Completely. As if running was a country it has now left.

On Being Watched

The cat does not perform. When you enter the room, the cat does not adjust its face. The cat is the same cat alone as in company. You should try this sometime. You will find it difficult.

On Naps

The cat does not feel guilty about the nap. The cat does not say “I’ll just rest my eyes for ten minutes.” The cat naps. The nap ends when the nap ends. There is no negotiation, no apology, no Sunday-evening dread.

The Lesson

You cannot become a cat. You have rent and emails and a vague sense that you should be reading more. But you can borrow from the cat. You can sit and only sit. You can eat and only eat. You can choose the box.

Try one thing today with the whole of your attention. A cup of tea. A walk to the bins. A conversation where you are not also thinking about the next conversation.

The cat is already doing it. The cat has been doing it the whole time you read this.

Go on. Pick your leaf.

Alan /|\

The Japanese Art of Not Losing Your Head

Something is on fire. The cat is missing. Your boss is on line two, and your toddler is on line one, and the line between them is dental floss.

You have two choices. You can flap. Or you can do what samurai, monks and slightly smug aikido teachers have spent a thousand years training for. You can have presence of mind.

The Japanese have rather a lot of words for this. They had to. When your day job involved swords, you did not get to panic twice.

Reisei Chinchaku (冷静沈着)

Cool, calm and collected.

This is the workhorse phrase. The one a Japanese newsreader uses to describe the pilot who landed the plane on the river. Reisei is cold and quiet. Chinchaku is sunk and settled, the way a stone sits at the bottom of a pond.

It is the bureaucrat of composure words. Reliable. Unflashy. Gets you home alive.

If your mind were a kitchen, reisei chinchaku is the friend who turns off the hob while everyone else is screaming about the smoke alarm.

Mushin (無心)

No mind.

Now we are in Zen territory and things get slippery. Mushin does not mean stupid. It means your head is finally quiet enough to let your body do its job.

You have felt it. The catch you made without looking. The sentence you typed before you knew you knew it. The reply you fired off in an argument that was, annoyingly, perfect.

A swordsman with mushin does not think block, parry, strike. He just is the sword. Which is wonderful for him and very bad for the other chap.

The trouble is you cannot try to have mushin. Trying is the opposite of mushin. It is like being told to fall asleep faster.

Zanshin (残心)

Lingering mind.

This one is glorious. Zanshin is the awareness that remains after the act. The archer who lowers the bow but stays alert. The chef who plates the dish and watches it leave the pass. The parent who hands over the toddler and does not actually let go for another half-second.

Most of us live in the opposite of zanshin. We send the email and close the laptop. We finish the sentence and reach for the phone. We are always already somewhere else.

Zanshin says the action is not over when the action is over. The arrow is still in flight in your mind. Stay with it.

Fudōshin (不動心)

Immovable mind.

Named after Fudō Myō-ō, a Buddhist deity who sits on a rock, wreathed in flames, holding a sword and a length of rope, and looks frankly unbothered by all of it. A useful patron saint for anyone with a full inbox.

Fudōshin is not stoicism, which is mostly about clenching. It is the still pond that reflects the moon clearly because nothing is rippling it. Tradition warns of four illnesses that ruin the pond. Surprise. Fear. Doubt. Confusion. The shikai. Get one and you get all four, usually in the wrong order.

Notice that fudōshin is not about being right. It is about not being moved. There is a difference. Plenty of people are wrong with great equanimity and they sleep beautifully.

Kiten (機転)

Quick-wittedness. Tact. The flick of the mind.

If reisei chinchaku is the calm and mushin is the silence, kiten is the cleverness that arrives in the gap. The waiter who turns a spilled wine into a free dessert. The teacher who catches a child’s lie and steers it into a story. The boardroom save.

Kiten literally suggests a turning point or a mechanism shifting. The mind pivots. The situation pivots with it. The English phrase presence of mind almost catches it, but English makes it sound passive. Kiten is active. It is a small bright move.

A culture that names this quality is a culture that rewards it. A culture without a word for it tends to call such people lucky.

Heijōshin (平常心)

Ordinary mind.

The last one is the quiet trick. Heijōshin means the mind you have on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing much is happening. The point of training, the old teachers say, is not to develop a special mind for emergencies. It is to make your everyday mind so steady that emergencies become Tuesdays.

This is the bit the self-help books usually skip. They want to sell you peak states. The Japanese tradition is offering something humbler and harder. Be the same person at the funeral that you are at the bus stop.

So what do you do with all this?

You do not need a sword. You probably do not even need a cushion.

You need to notice which kind of mind you actually have when the alarm goes off. Are you flapping? Are you frozen? Are you already three moves ahead of a problem that has not happened yet?

Try this. The next time something goes mildly wrong today, do not fix it for ten seconds. Just watch your own mind do its thing. That is zanshin in cheap shoes. That is where the work starts.

The samurai had a saying. Mental calmness, not skill, is the sign of a mature warrior. They were not talking about combat. They were talking about everything.

Including, presumably, the cat.

Alan /|\

The Tyranny of Either/Or

There is a particular pleasure in being right. It warms the chest. It straightens the spine. And in our age, it is available wholesale, for free, with no qualifications required beyond a phone and a pulse.

This is the bargain modernity offers. Pick a side. Any side. The aisle does not matter, only that you stand firmly on one of them, preferably shouting. The middle has been abolished. Nuance has been escorted from the premises by security. What remains is a country fair where every stall sells the same two flavours of ice cream, and the vendors hate one another with a fervour usually reserved for war crimes.

Welcome to the tyranny of either/or.

The oldest trick in the book

The false dilemma is not new. It is, in fact, embarrassingly old. Logicians have been waving their arms about it since the Greeks were still inventing column shapes.

The fallacy of presenting only two choices, outcomes, or sides to an argument as the only possibilities, when more are available — this is the move. It is also known, charmingly, as the all-or-nothing fallacy, black-and-white thinking, the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, bifurcation, excluded middle, no middle ground, polarisation. Quite the list of aliases. The fallacy travels under more assumed names than a small-time con artist, which should tell you something.

The trick works because thinking is hard. Properly hard. Holding two contradictory ideas in the head at once is, as Fitzgerald suggested, the test of a first-rate intelligence. The rest of us, sweating, would rather be told which jersey to wear.

George W. Bush, never knowingly subtle, gave us the canonical specimen: you are with us or you are with the terrorists. “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists” — note the elegance. Two boxes. No third. The man on the street, who might have preferred a fourth option involving lunch, was simply not on the menu.

The Dane in the room

Now, a slight inconvenience. The phrase “either/or” was made famous by Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who looked as if he had been assembled from sad weather. His 1843 book of that name has been blamed for two centuries of binary thinking. Unfairly.

There isn’t actually an either/or choice between the aesthetic and the ethical: both are necessary. The either/or choice hinted at by the title Either/Or is actually a choice between the aesthetic/ethical life and the religious life. Even Kierkegaard, the patron saint of the agonised decision, was not really offering you two doors. He was telling you that the doors you thought you saw were both painted on the same wall.

One criticism of Either/Or is that it can be a false dichotomy, as it is not made clear that the only ways of life are those portrayed in A and B. The Dane himself, it seems, suspected that life had more letters in it.

The lesson is awkward. Even the philosopher who put the slash between the words did not believe in the slash.

The cult of personal gnosis

Here is where things get interesting, and by interesting I mean grim.

There was a time, not long ago, when “I think” was the opening move of an argument. You said it, and then you had to do some work. You had to follow with a reason. Maybe a fact. Possibly, if you were ambitious, a source.

Today, “I think” has been replaced by something more potent. “My experience is...” And from this small phrase, all argument ceases. The drawbridge goes up. The moat fills. You have entered the cathedral of personal gnosis, where the only sacrament is the speaker’s autobiography and the only heresy is doubt.

Gnosis, from the Greek for knowledge, originally meant a kind of mystical insight available to the initiated. In the modern cult, initiation is simply being alive and paying attention to yourself. That is the qualification. That is the ordination.

The philosophical name for the polite version of this is standpoint epistemology. Feminist scholars working within a number of disciplines—such as Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar and Donna Haraway—have advocated taking women’s lived experiences, particularly experiences of (caring) work, as the beginning of scientific enquiry. There is something genuinely useful here. The view from the caring window is not the same as the view from the boardroom. To pretend otherwise is to be a fool, and not even an interesting one.

But useful starting points have a habit of becoming finishing lines. The modern descendant of standpoint theory has acquired a peculiar property. Insight into societal truths is available, by virtue of standpoint theory, to members of minoritized groups who are also critical theorists, but essentially nobody else. The starting point has become the only point. The epistemological humility — we should listen — has become an epistemological monopoly. Only those with the right experience may speak. The rest of us may applaud.

This is not, despite appearances, progress. It is the medieval guild system with better branding. The bricklayers know about bricks and only the bricklayers may pronounce on bricks. Fine. Until someone notices the building is on fire and we need someone, anyone, who can think about fire.

Rocks, water, and the brain that prefers cement

If Kierkegaard supplied the title, Edward de Bono supplied the diagnosis.

In 1991 he published I Am Right, You Are Wrong, a book whose cover promised a journey “from rock logic to water logic” and whose contents amounted to a polite, sustained, slightly cranky assault on the Western intellectual tradition. De Bono’s argument was simple enough to fit on a beer mat and unsettling enough to ruin the evening.

We do not think, he said. We pattern-match.

Modern thinking, including critical thinking and analysis built on the foundation of Western logic, is insufficient and incomplete. The status quo mode of thinking, which De Bono refers to as “Rock Logic” falls prey to the brain’s need for order and patterns. Consequently, we focus too much on what is or what has been. We argue, analyse, and criticise to explain, and we draw hard lines in the sand where, in reality, there may be none.

Rock logic is the logic of the boulder. It is hard. It is fixed. It sits where it sits, daring you to move it. It says a thing is what it is and not what it is not, and if you do not agree, it will sit on you until you do. Aristotle would have loved it. So would your worst uncle at Christmas.

Water logic is the other thing. Water logic, adaptive and imaginative, will replace our confrontational, repetitive rock logic. Water does not argue with the bowl's shape. It becomes the bowl. It does not insist on being right. It asks where it is going next. Where rock logic asks “what is this?”, water logic asks “what does this lead to?”.

The genius of the metaphor is that it diagnoses the disease without curing it. We do not have rock logic because we are stupid. We have rock logic because the brain is, on de Bono’s account, a self-organising system that generates patterns. The grooves form. The grooves deepen. Soon, the marble rolls down the same channel every time, and we mistake the channel for the truth.

This is the engine room of the either/or. Once a pattern is laid down, the brain reaches for it the way a hand reaches for a familiar mug in the dark. Two options arrive pre-cut. Choosing between them feels like thinking. It is not. It is recognition wearing a thinking coat.

De Bono was, it must be said, not always his own best advocate. The book reads, in places, like a motivational seminar handbook, full of catchy slogans, and he had a weakness for declaring civilisations finished before lunch. Critics noted, fairly, that he treated formal logic as a single monolith and then knocked it over with great satisfaction. The man invented the word “po” and expected the rest of us to use it. However, we did not.

But the central wound he opened has not healed. He saw, decades before the algorithm came for our attention spans, that a culture trained on argument would mistake the loudest groove for the deepest truth. He saw that the brain rewards us for being right far more reliably than it rewards us for being correct. He saw that the binary is not a feature of the world but a feature of the equipment.

The cult of personal gnosis, which we are about to meet, is rock logic with a personal pronoun bolted to the front. Myrock. My groove. My boulder, sitting in the middle of the conversation, refusing to be moved on the grounds that I, personally, put it there.

De Bono would have recognised it instantly. He might even have laughed.

The trouble with experience

Experience is wonderful stuff. It is also, on its own, almost completely useless for telling you what is true about the world. A man who has spent forty years convinced his neighbour is stealing his post is a man with forty years of experience. He is not, on this basis alone, correct about the post.

Experience without examination is just data without a hypothesis. It tells you what happened to you. It cannot, by itself, tell you why, or whether the same thing happened to anyone else, or whether your interpretation of what happened bears any relation to what actually occurred. For that, you need the unfashionable trinity: doubt, evidence and the willingness to be wrong.

The cult of personal gnosis dispenses with all three. Doubt is disloyalty. Evidence is what colonisers use to gaslight you. Being wrong is impossible because you are reporting an experience, and an experience cannot be wrong, only doubted by people who hate you.

Notice the move. The argument has been smuggled out of the realm of claims, where it could be tested, and into the realm of feelings, where it cannot. To disagree with the claim is now to deny the feeling. To deny the feeling is to commit a moral offence. The drawbridge stays up. The moat deepens.

Why we love the binary

The either/or and the cult of personal gnosis are not strangers. They are, in fact, married, and the reception is still going.

The binary tells you which team to be on. Personal gnosis tells you why you cannot be questioned. Together they form a closed system. You pick a side. Your side is correct because you experience it as correct. Anyone who disagrees experiences something different, which is fine, but obviously, they are also evil.

Over time, this pushes people away from nuanced thinking and into extremism. Extremism and polarisation have become a particular issue in recent years, as seen in the continued lament that our country is “more divided than ever.” False dilemmas only make that situation worse, undermining many of the systems and philosophies that make a society function in a healthy manner.

We love the binary because the binary loves us back. It flatters us. It tells us we are clever for having picked the right side, brave for defending it, and persecuted when challenged. It is the only system in the world where being shouted at proves you correct.

The pre-Socratics knew better. Heraclitus, that gloomy Ephesian, said you cannot step in the same river twice. Hegel, irritating as ever, made a career out of the idea that every thesis contains its own antithesis. Even Aristotle, who did love a tidy category, distinguished between contraries (hot and cold, with warm in the middle) and contradictories (alive and dead, with no third option). Most of life, it turns out, is the first kind. We just keep treating it like the second.

The exit

There is no clever escape. There is only the unfashionable work.

Notice when someone offers you two doors. Ask where the others went. Notice when someone replaces an argument with their biography. Ask what the argument was. Notice when you do it yourself, which you will, because you are a human being and not a logic gate.

Hold two ideas at once. Concede a point to someone you dislike. Withhold a point from someone you love. Read something written by a person who would not invite you to dinner. Be wrong, in public, on a Tuesday, and survive it.

The opposite of either/or is not neither. It is more. More options, more evidence, more patience, more thought. The opposite of the cult of personal gnosis is not the denial of experience. It is the humility to treat your own experience as a hypothesis rather than a verdict.

This will not make you popular. It will not get you retweeted. It may, however, make you a person who is occasionally right about something for reasons other than wanting to be.

That is the deal. Take it or leave it.

But notice, as you decide, that I have just offered you a false dichotomy. And smile.

Alan /|\

Note: This article was penned shortly after the announcement the creation of this “Board”

Trump’s Board of Peace: A Critical Assessment

I. What Is It, and How Did It Come About?

The Board of Peace (BoP) is an international organisation with the stated purpose of promoting peacekeeping around the world. Established by Donald Trump and led by the government of the United States, it was proposed in September 2025 and formally established on the sidelines of the 56th World Economic Forum in January 2026. It is named in UN Security Council Resolution 2803 as a body tasked with overseeing the processes of the Gaza peace plan.

Its genesis was the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair initially proposed placing the Gaza Strip under international administration in August 2025. Following the entry into force of the Gaza Peace Agreement, Trump declared “the war is over” and that the BoP would be formed quickly. What began as a narrow Gaza oversight mechanism rapidly ballooned into something far more ambitious — and far more controversial.

II. The Executive Board and Key Personnel

Apart from Donald Trump, who chairs the Executive Board, members include Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Robert Gabriel Jr., Tony Blair, World Bank President Ajay Banga, and Marc Rowan (CEO of Apollo Global Management).

Each member has been assigned a specific portfolio. These cover governance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilisation. Bulgarian diplomat and former UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov serves as High Representative for Gaza, acting as the on-the-ground link between the Board and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). Major General Jasper Jeffers has been appointed Commander of the International Stabilization Force (ISF).

It is also worth noting where the Board convened its first full meeting: the former premises of the US Institute of Peace — a nonpartisan think tank that Trump seized and fired almost all of the staff of — now renamed the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

III. Member States: Who Has Joined, and How Many Are Active Conflict Parties?

The confirmed member states are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cambodia, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mongolia, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam (Asia); Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Kosovo (Europe); Egypt and Morocco (Africa); Argentina and Paraguay (South America); and El Salvador (Central America).

The striking fact is how many members are themselves currently engaged in, or directly implicated in, live conflict zones:

Israel is the primary protagonist of the Gaza war, which killed over 71,000 Palestinians, and continues to occupy more than half the Strip. Netanyahu faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and has fumed at the inclusion of Turkish and Qatari officials on the Gaza Executive Board, yet Israel has joined regardless.

Turkey and Qatar were central diplomatic brokers and open critics of Israeli conduct throughout the war. Both are simultaneously Board members and parties with significant partisan interests in the outcome.

Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a US-brokered peace agreement that gave the US exclusive development access to a critical transit corridor — making their membership transactional rather than principled.

Belarus is under Alexander Lukashenko, widely described as Europe’s last dictator, and is closely aligned with Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Russia has been invited to join, and Putin has said his foreign ministry would “study the documents.”

Hungary under Orbán has consistently blocked EU sanctions on Russia and is the EU’s most Kremlin-aligned government.

Pakistan and Turkey both have longstanding internal security conflicts and regional entanglements.

Conspicuously absent are all other G7 nations. No other G7 state has joined. The UK and France have not joined, citing concerns about Russia’s potential membership and the board’s remit going beyond Gaza.

IV. The Cost of Membership: $1 Billion for a Permanent Seat

Member states serve for three-year terms, after which they must pay $1 billion for a permanent seat. The funds raised will, according to a US official, go toward rebuilding Gaza — but the move has been criticised as susceptible to corruption.

The White House pushed back on the characterisation of a “minimum fee,” saying the $1 billion contribution “simply offers permanent membership to partner countries who demonstrate deep commitment to peace, security, and prosperity.” One analyst compared it to joining Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

At the inaugural Washington meeting, Trump announced that member states had pledged $7 billion for Gaza reconstruction, and that the United States would contribute $10 billion to the Board’s efforts.

V. Policies and Planned Actions: What Actually Exists?

In formal terms, the stated mandate covers:

• Overseeing the NCAG (the Palestinian technocratic governance committee led by Ali Shaath)

• Deploying the International Stabilization Force (ISF) to Gaza

• Disarming Hamas

• Facilitating reconstruction

At the 19 February summit, Albania, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Morocco pledged to send troops for an ISF consisting of 20,000 soldiers, while Egypt and Jordan agreed to train the police, expected to number 12,000.

However, independent analysts are scathing about what actually exists on the ground. There is, at present, absolutely no connection between the diplomatic proceedings and any reality on the ground. Israeli forces occupy more than half of Gaza including almost all its arable land, Hamas governs the smaller western portion where most civilians live, and neither Israel nor Hamas appears inclined to cooperate in meaningful reconstruction. Reconstruction funds would not go to the area where Palestinians are currently living, but to areas under Israeli military control.

The NCAG is based in Egypt and has not entered Gaza. Furthermore, Palestinians have no direct representation on the Board of Peace itself. Hamas, while saying it supports the transitional committee, is critical of the Board as constituting “international guardianship.”

VI. Deeper Concerns: Structural Power Concentration

The charter itself is arguably the most alarming document. Trump chairs the board and can be replaced as chairman only through “voluntary resignation or as a result of incapacity, as determined by a unanimous vote of the Executive Board.” Member states serve no more than three years unless they pay the $1 billion fee.

The Board dissolves at such time as the Chairman considers necessary or appropriate, or at the end of every odd-numbered calendar year unless renewed by the Chairman. In other words, it is an international body that exists at one man’s pleasure and dissolves at his discretion.

Trump has stated that the BoP could potentially replace the United Nations, while also expressing continued support for the UN. The charter makes no direct mention of the UN, referring instead to “institutions that have too often failed.”

Senator Ed Markey’s letter to the administration formally asked: “What actual or potential conflicts of interest — including financial, business, or personal — have been identified for individuals involved in the Board’s development, particularly Kushner and Witkoff? What steps has the Administration taken to mitigate actual or apparent conflicts? Is President Trump advancing this initiative in his personal capacity or as an action of the United States government?” No formal answer has been publicly provided.

VII. The Conspiracy Theory Perspective — and Its Likelihood

Let us be precise here: the term “conspiracy theory” covers a spectrum from the delusional to the thoroughly evidence-based. In this case, several critiques deserve to be taken seriously on their merits.

Theory 1: The BoP is a vehicle for personal and financial enrichment

This is not really a fringe theory. Jared Kushner’s reconstruction “master plan” was presented at Davos complete with AI-generated renderings of glass towers and marinas — a vision that bears little relation to the humanitarian catastrophe facing 2.2 million displaced Palestinians. Kushner stated “there’ll be amazing investment opportunities.” The special Gaza Executive Board includes Israeli-Cypriot real estate mogul Yakir Gabay, a close friend of Kushner’s. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, manages assets almost exclusively from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE — the same petrostates central to the reconstruction deal. This is not speculation; it is documented in Congressional letters and investigative journalism. Likelihood of self-enrichment as a motive: HIGH.

Theory 2: The BoP is a deliberate mechanism to sideline and eventually replace the United Nations

A letter from Senator Markey described the Board as “a blatant power grab that will undermine both UN and US influence throughout the world,” noting that its charter “is designed to elevate one individual above all others and to concentrate power in his hands.” Trump himself said it would “almost be looking over the United Nations.” The charter’s broad, Gaza-free language supporting “stability, peace, and governance in areas affected or threatened by conflict” gives it a virtually unlimited global mandate. Likelihood: MODERATE TO HIGH — this appears to be a conscious parallel architecture, whether or not its ambitions are realisable.

Theory 3: The membership is a protection racket — join to avoid being targeted by US tariffs, sanctions, or diplomatic hostility

The membership list reads strikingly like a list of countries seeking US favour: autocracies seeking rehabilitation (Belarus under Lukashenko), Gulf monarchies seeking strategic cover, Central Asian states seeking American endorsement of their regional authority. There are no established liberal democracies from Western Europe. The $1 billion fee for permanence has been described explicitly as analogous to a club membership. Putin even floated using frozen Russian assets to pay the fee. Likelihood: MODERATE — correlation between geopolitical dependency on US goodwill and membership is striking, though hard to prove as explicit quid pro quo.

Theory 4: The entire Gaza “peace” dimension is a property development hoax

Kushner’s vision would “obliterate Gaza’s history and society by imposing a top-down economic and tourism model” and has been developed without consultation with Palestinians. ECFR analysts warn that “placing vast, unsupervised reconstruction funds and contracting decisions under the control of politicians and financiers risks profiteering and graft at the expense of a vulnerable population.” The fact that the NCAG has not entered Gaza, that Israel continues to restrict aid flows, and that Hamas remains in control of the areas where civilians actually live means reconstruction is, as one senior analyst called it, “a diplomatic hoax.” Likelihood that this functions primarily as a legitimising narrative for property speculation rather than humanitarian relief: MODERATE TO HIGH.

VIII. Overall Assessment

The Board of Peace is a genuinely novel and structurally troubling entity. It is real enough — it has a UN Security Council resolution behind it, a signed charter, pledged funds, and a peacekeeping force being assembled. But it is also extraordinary: an international organisation chaired in perpetuity by a sitting head of state, accountable to no legislature, with a global mandate of undefined scope, whose permanent membership carries a $1 billion price tag, and whose key personnel have undisclosed financial interests in the very reconstruction contracts it will award.

The conspiracy theories surrounding it are not wild extrapolations from thin evidence — they are logical inferences from the publicly documented structure, personnel, and financial arrangements. What separates analysis from conspiracy thinking here is simply the level of certainty one claims. The structure enables self-enrichment, UN circumvention, and geopolitical leverage. Whether that was the primary intent is harder to prove definitively — but it would be extraordinary naïveté to dismiss these concerns as merely conspiratorial.

Postscript: The Irony Intensifies

An Update on Peace Through Exclusion

Since the initial creation of this critique, events have rather magnificently vindicated the central thesis: that the Board of Peace has less to do with actual peace and rather more to do with... well, everything except peace.

Canada: The Peaceful Nation Too Dangerous for the Peace Board

In what must surely rank as one of the more exquisite ironies in recent diplomatic history, Trump withdrew Canada’s invitation to join the board.

Let us recap: Canada, a nation whose military operations are predominantly peacekeeping missions, whose international reputation rests largely on being polite and inoffensive, whose most controversial export is arguably poutine, and whose geese represent a greater international threat than its armed forces – this Canada was deemed unsuitable for the Board of Peace.

Meanwhile, Belarus – actively facilitating invasions of neighbouring countries – remains a welcome member. Azerbaijan – recently engaged in ethnic cleansing – perfectly acceptable. Egypt – with its massacre of 800+ protesters in a single day – absolutely fine. But Canada? Far too destabilising.

The stated reason appears to involve dairy tariffs and trade disputes. So the Board of Peace excludes nations based on... disagreements about cheese pricing. One struggles to imagine a more fitting encapsulation of the initiative’s priorities.

The $1 Billion Peace Fee

Let us also revisit the financial arrangements, which have become clearer since the Davos signing ceremony.

To secure a permanent seat on the board, which Trump is expected to chair for life, countries will have to pay at least $1 billion US. Other members receive three-year terms – rather like a country club membership, but with more autocrats and fewer golf courses.

Canada said it won’t pay to join, which may explain why their invitation was subsequently withdrawn. Apparently peace isn’t just priceless – it’s specifically priced at one billion dollars.

The message is clear: if you want permanent representation on the Board of Peace, you need either a billion dollars or a sufficiently authoritarian government that Trump finds acceptable. Preferably both. Democracy and human rights records are entirely optional; payment plans, less so.

The Wine Tariff Diplomacy

The president threatened France with 200% tariffs on French wine and champagne if the French don’t join the board</icate>.

Nothing encapsulates the spirit of peaceful international cooperation quite like threatening economic warfare against nations that decline your peace initiative. “Join our Board of Peace or we’ll devastate your wine industry” is certainly a novel approach to conflict resolution.

France, to its credit, appears unmoved by this oenological hostage-taking. One imagines French diplomats responding with a Gallic shrug and a muttered “Tant pis pour vous.”

The Permanent Chairman for Life

Trump is expected to chair the board for life, which raises fascinating questions about succession planning and democratic governance in an organisation ostensibly dedicated to peace.

Historically, “chairman for life” positions have been held by such peaceful luminaries as:

• Mao Zedong (Chairman for Life of the Chinese Communist Party)

• Kim Il-sung (Eternal President of North Korea)

• Saparmurat Niyazov (President for Life of Turkmenistan)

• Various other autocrats whose commitment to peace was matched only by their commitment to never relinquishing power

The pattern is unmistakable: lifetime appointments tend to correlate inversely with democratic governance and directly with authoritarian consolidation of power. That the Board of Peace follows this model tells you everything you need to know about its actual purpose.

Russia: The Invited But Absent Peace Partner

Russian President Vladimir Putin received an invitation to join Trump’s peace group but no representative was present at the signing event. Russia – currently engaged in a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, having annexed Crimea, and accused of numerous war crimes – was invited to join the Board of Peace.

The UK’s foreign secretary said Britain wouldn’t be a signatory over concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin “being part of something that’s talking about peace when we’ve still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be commitment to peace in Ukraine”.

This is rather like inviting an active arsonist to chair the Fire Safety Committee. Except the arsonist is still actively setting fires whilst you’re extending the invitation.

The fact that Putin was invited whilst Canada was disinvited rather crystallises the Board’s priorities: active military aggression against neighbouring states is negotiable; disagreements about dairy tariffs are not.

The Democratic Vacuum

The final count of Western democratic participation makes for sobering reading:

Major democracies that declined or were absent:

• United Kingdom

• France

• Germany

• Italy

• Canada

• Spain

• Belgium

• Sweden

• Norway

• Slovenia

• Australia (apparently invited but absent)

Major democracies that participated:

• [This space intentionally left blank]

When literally every major Western democracy looks at your “Board of Peace” and collectively decides “we’re good, thanks,” perhaps it’s time to reconsider either the composition or the name. Preferably both.

What This Actually Reveals

The updated membership list and exclusion criteria reveal the Board of Peace to be precisely what the initial analysis suggested: not a genuine peace initiative, but rather:

1. A Loyalty Test: Participation signals alignment with Trump’s geopolitical preferences, regardless of actual commitment to peace

2. A Revenue Stream: The billion-dollar membership fee suggests this is as much about fundraising as peacekeeping

3. An Autocrat’s Club: The membership composition – heavy on authoritarian regimes, light on democracies – speaks volumes

4. A UN Alternative for the Disgruntled: Not genuinely replacing the UN, but providing an alternative forum where inconvenient topics like human rights won’t arise

The Peace That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Here’s what the Board of Peace actually appears to be:

A coalition of nations willing to:

• Pay for access to Trump

• Align with US geopolitical priorities regardless of principle

• Ignore human rights concerns in pursuit of transactional diplomacy

• Accept authoritarian governance as legitimate

• Exclude democracies that question these premises

What it demonstrably is not:

• A genuine peacekeeping initiative

• Representative of peaceful nations

• Committed to democratic governance

• Concerned with human rights

• Interested in Canada’s dairy policies except as a pretext for exclusion

The Orwellian Achievement

In the annals of Orwellian double-speak, the Board of Peace deserves special recognition. It has managed to:

• Create a “peace” initiative that excludes peaceful nations

• Invite countries actively engaged in conflicts

• Charge membership fees for peace advocacy

• Appoint a chairman for life to promote democratic values

• Threaten economic warfare to encourage participation

• Exclude Canada whilst welcoming Belarus

This is performance art masquerading as diplomacy, geopolitical theatre staged for an audience that increasingly isn’t watching.

A Modest Proposal

In the spirit of accuracy in advertising, might I suggest some alternative names that better capture the initiative’s actual nature:

• The Board of Compliance (more honest)

• The Coalition of the Billing (acknowledges the fee structure)

• The Autocrats’ Affirmation Assembly (alliterative and accurate)

• The Anti-Dairy Alliance (at least Canada would understand)

• The UN, But Without All Those Annoying Democracies (unwieldy but precise)

The Final Irony

The most delicious irony of all is this: by withdrawing Canada’s invitation over trade disputes, Trump has inadvertently proven that the Board of Peace has nothing whatsoever to do with peace.

If it were genuinely about promoting global peace and stability, Canada – with its peacekeeping tradition, diplomatic reputation, and general inoffensiveness – would be precisely the sort of nation you’d want involved. But it isn’t about that. It never was.

It’s about creating a forum where Trump can be chairman for life, where autocrats can gather without facing uncomfortable questions about political prisoners, and where a billion dollars buys you a permanent seat at a table that most of the world’s democracies are actively avoiding.

The Board of Peace is the diplomatic equivalent of a members-only club where the entrance fee is either cash or authoritarianism, the dress code is “no democracy required,” and the mission statement bears no relationship whatsoever to the actual activities.

Conclusion: Peace in Our Time (Fee Required)

As this postscript goes to press, the Board of Peace remains chaired by Trump (for life), composed primarily of authoritarian regimes, absent most Western democracies, and distinguished primarily by having excluded Canada over cheese whilst inviting Putin despite Ukraine.

If you’d told a political satirist in 2015 to write the most absurdist version of international relations possible, they’d have struggled to top this. Reality has outpaced satire, leaving commentators in the awkward position of simply describing what’s actually happening and watching it sound increasingly implausible.

The Board of Peace stands as a monument to the principle that if you want to create an initiative with no relationship to its stated purpose, the key is audacity. Call it the opposite of what it is, charge people a billion dollars to join, appoint yourself chairman for life, exclude peaceful nations over trade disputes, and invite war criminals in the name of reconciliation.

It’s not peace. It’s not a board. But it is certainly something – even if that something bears no resemblance whatsoever to what it claims to be.

Canada, meanwhile, remains excluded from the peace process, presumably because their peaceful nature posed too great a threat to an organisation nominally dedicated to peace.

The irony would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly, devastatingly revealing.

Postscript to the Postscript: As of this writing, it remains unclear whether the Board of Peace will address any actual conflicts, promote genuine reconciliation, or simply serve as an expensive photo opportunity for autocrats. Early indicators suggest the latter. Canada, for its part, seems unbothered by its exclusion, which tells you everything you need to know about the initiative’s actual importance.

note: Being excluded from a “peace” board composed primarily of human rights violators might actually be the highest diplomatic honour Canada has received in recent memory.

Alan /|\

The New Thought Movement

Or: How a Maine Clockmaker Accidentally Invented the Self-Help Industry and Doomed Us All to Vision Boards

Origins: It All Started With a Man Who Couldn’t Stop Healing People

The New Thought Movement began, improbably, in the workshop of a Maine clockmaker named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a man who looked exactly as Victorian as his name suggests. Quimby was a sickly fellow obsessed with mesmerism, that fashionable nineteenth-century pseudoscience involving magnets, hand-waving, and the conviction that one’s bowels could be regulated through hypnosis.

Having mesmerised himself into apparent good health, Quimby concluded that all illness was essentially a misunderstanding. The body, he reasoned, was simply doing what the mind told it to, and the mind was, frankly, an idiot being misled by doctors and clergymen.

This was a remarkable theory, particularly in an era when medicine still involved bleeding people and prescribing mercury for headaches. Quimby’s diagnosis, that medicine was largely nonsense and people made themselves sick through wrong belief, was, depending on your perspective, either a profound spiritual insight or the foundational text of every wellness influencer who has ever sold you turmeric. Possibly both.

Quimby never wrote a book. He scribbled notes, treated patients in Portland, and died before anyone thought to make him famous. His ideas, however, did not die with him. They were carried off by his patients like spiritual head lice.

Mary Baker Eddy and the Schism That Wasn’t Quite

The most consequential of Quimby’s patients was Mary Baker Eddy, a frail New Englander whose subsequent founding of Christian Science represents one of history’s great acts of intellectual reattribution. Eddy insisted her ideas came directly from God; Quimby’s followers insisted they came directly from Quimby. The resulting century-long argument has produced more pamphlets than the Reformation.

Christian Science is technically not New Thought. Eddy’s followers will tell you this with the patient firmness of someone explaining for the fifth time that they don’t take aspirin. But the family resemblance is unmistakable: matter is illusion, mind is supreme, and your tumour is a thinking error. New Thought, by contrast, is the more permissive cousin who’ll let you take the aspirin AND visualise wellness AND book a reiki appointment, and who would never dream of forbidding you the chemotherapy.

The Founding Trinity: Hopkins, Trine, and the Wattles of Wealth

The actual New Thought Movement coalesced in the 1880s and 1890s around three figures who deserve more credit and more side-eye than history has given them.

Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925), often called “the teacher of teachers,” is the woman who took Eddy’s ideas, removed the requirement to worship Eddy, and franchised the result. She trained the founders of nearly every major New Thought denomination: Unity, Religious Science, Divine Science. Hopkins was, in effect, the spiritual venture capitalist of late-Victorian metaphysics, and she did this while being a woman in the 1880s, which is genuinely impressive and not at all funny, so we’ll leave her with her dignity intact.

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958) wrote In Tune with the Infinite (1897), a book Henry Ford pressed into the hands of every employee, friend, and probably his mechanic. Trine’s central claim, that there exists a “Universal Mind” with which one can align oneself for health, prosperity, and serenity, has been rebranded approximately four hundred times since, most recently as “manifesting.” The vocabulary changes; the proposition does not.

Wallace D. Wattles (1860–1911) wrote The Science of Getting Rich (1910), a title that tells you everything you need to know about where this is going. Wattles assured readers that the universe wanted them to be wealthy, that thinking in a “Certain Way” would attract money, and that poverty was essentially a failure of imagination. He died the following year, somewhat undercutting the case for his methods. The Science of Getting Rich would later be the explicit source material for Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which is to say that the entire 2006 cottage industry of magnetic visualisation was a 96-year-old book in a feather boa.

The Philosophy: Or, What Are These People Actually Saying?

Stripped of its variations, New Thought rests on a small, audacious set of claims:

• The universe is mental in nature. Mind is primary; matter is downstream of thought. This is an old idealist position dressed in American clothing, with traces of Hegel, Berkeley, and the Upanishads filtered through a cheerful Yankee optimism that wouldn’t take “the void” for an answer.

• Thought has causal power. Not merely on your mood or your circumstances. Believe the right things and the world rearranges. Believe the wrong things and you have arthritis.

• The divine is immanent, not transcendent. God isn’t up there judging; God is in here, and also in you, and also in the chair, and possibly in the cat. This is essentially Spinoza for people who don’t want to read Spinoza.

• Salvation is psychological. You aren’t saved from sin; you’re saved from wrong thinking. Hell is a mental state with poor furnishings.

The questions this raises are genuinely serious. If consciousness is causally efficacious, does the placebo effect become a window into something profound rather than a methodological nuisance? If divinity is immanent, what does ethics look like when there’s no external lawgiver? If your circumstances reflect your thinking, what do you say to someone born into famine? The movement has good answers, bad answers, and some answers that should be put in a drawer and never spoken of again.

Influence on Modern Philosophy and Culture

The reach of New Thought, once you start looking, is genuinely staggering. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), devoted serious attention to it under the heading “the religion of healthy-mindedness,” treating it as a legitimate American contribution to the philosophy of religion. James was too good a thinker to swallow it whole, but he recognised something authentic in the movement’s insistence that subjective experience matters and that meliorism — the belief that things can be made better — is not the same as naïveté.

From New Thought flow several distinct streams:

The prosperity gospel of figures like Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952) and his theological descendants Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland — a Christianised, often Pentecostalised, often deeply commercialised version. Peale, incidentally, was the pastor of Donald Trump’s family, which is one of those biographical footnotes that explains rather a lot.

The human potential movement of the 1960s and 70s — Esalen, est, Werner Erhard’s “you create your own reality” — which dropped the explicit theism but kept the metaphysics.

The self-help industrial complex — Tony Robbins, Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra, The Secret, every TED talk that mentions “mindset,” every LinkedIn post about manifesting Q4 targets. This is a multi-billion-pound global industry whose intellectual genealogy traces, with surprising directness, back to a clockmaker in Maine who thought magnets cured dyspepsia.

Even Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the dominant evidence-based psychotherapy of our time, shares some DNA here, though it would prefer not to be photographed at the family reunion. The CBT insight that distorted cognitions produce suffering is a clinically rigorous, empirically validated cousin of the New Thought claim that wrong thinking causes affliction. Aaron Beck would have words for the comparison; the philosophical resemblance is nonetheless real.

Politics and Religion: The Awkward Conversations

New Thought has always had a politics, even when it claimed not to. Its emphasis on individual mental sovereignty made it congenial to American libertarianism and hostile to structural explanations of suffering. If your thoughts make your reality, then poverty, racism, and illness become, in some uncomfortable sense, your fault. The movement has tried, with varying success, to wriggle out of this implication for over a century. Some of its leaders, particularly women and Black thinkers like the Reverend Johnnie Colemon, used New Thought as a tool for emancipation and dignity in a hostile society — a genuinely radical use. Others used it to sell people stuff.

Religiously, New Thought sits in the strange American space between Protestantism and pantheism — too theistic for atheists, too unitarian for evangelicals, too universalist for traditionalists, and too prosperous for monks. Its enduring appeal is that it offers spirituality without doctrine, transcendence without obedience, and meaning without metaphysical homework. Its enduring danger is that it can shade into a smug indifference to the genuine miseries of existence — what Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright-Sided (2009), diagnosed as the tyranny of compulsory optimism, the thing that tells cancer patients to think positively as though tumours were impressed by attitude.

What It Asks of Us

The questions New Thought poses are not silly, even where its answers occasionally are. Is consciousness fundamental? What is the relationship between belief and reality? Can a community organised around inner experience produce a coherent ethics? Is optimism a virtue, a vice, or a coping mechanism dressed up as either? Where is the line between agency and self-blame, between empowerment and delusion?

The movement’s deepest claim — that what happens inside our minds is not epiphenomenal, that subjective experience matters, that we are not merely passengers in our own lives — is one philosophy is still working through. The fact that this profound question arrives wrapped in a vision board does not make it less profound. It just makes it harder to discuss with a straight face.

And so we end where we began: with a clockmaker in Maine, who thought he had figured out the universe, and who turned out to have started a movement that would eventually convince millions of people that they could think themselves into a Tesla. He’d probably be horrified. Or he’d take credit. With New Thought, it’s genuinely hard to tell.

PS:

It’s not often I get the opportunity to reference Spinoza in an article and so I thought I’d offer a brief over view of the man and his ideas.

Spinoza’s Key Ideas: A Summary

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch-Portuguese Jewish philosopher whose ideas were so heretical that his own community excommunicated him at 23 with one of the most spectacular curses ever issued, and so influential that nearly every major thinker since has had to wrestle with him. He ground lenses for a living, refused a prestigious professorship to preserve his independence, and died at 44, probably from inhaling glass dust.

God, or Nature (Deus sive Natura)

Spinoza’s central and most explosive claim is that there is only one substance in the universe, and that substance is God, but God understood as identical with Nature itself. There is no transcendent deity sitting outside creation; God is the totality of what exists. Everything, stars, stones, thoughts, you, is a “mode” or expression of this single infinite substance.

This is pantheism, or arguably panentheism, and it cost him his community, got his books banned, and earned him the label “atheist” from people who couldn’t tell the difference between “no God” and “God is everything.”

The Two Attributes We Can Know

Substance has infinite attributes, but humans can perceive only two: Thought and Extension (mind and matter). Crucially, these are not two separate things interacting — they are the same reality viewed under different aspects. This dissolves Descartes’ famous mind-body problem by denying its premise. Your mind and body aren’t two substances mysteriously coordinating; they’re one thing seen two ways.

Determinism and Freedom

Everything that happens follows necessarily from the nature of God/Nature. There is no free will in the libertarian sense — choices feel free only because we’re ignorant of their causes. Yet Spinoza isn’t fatalistic. Freedom, for him, means understanding the causes that shape us. The free person is not the one who escapes necessity but the one who comprehends it and acts from their own nature rather than from confused passions.

The Ethics of the Passions

In his masterwork, the Ethics (1677, published posthumously), Spinoza analyses human emotions with the cool precision of a geometer — the book is literally structured like Euclid, with definitions, axioms, and propositions. Emotions are either active (arising from adequate understanding) or passive (arising from confused ideas). Suffering comes from being buffeted by passions we don’t understand. Joy comes from increasing our power of acting and thinking clearly.

The famous line — “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand” — captures the ethical project. Not Stoic suppression, but illumination.

The Intellectual Love of God

The highest human achievement is what Spinoza calls amor intellectualis Dei — the intellectual love of God. This isn’t worship; it’s the serene joy of understanding reality as it actually is, of grasping one’s place in the infinite causal web of Nature. It is, essentially, the experience of comprehending the universe and finding that comprehension itself blissful.

Politics and Religion

In the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza argued for freedom of thought and speech, the separation of religion from political power, and a historical-critical reading of the Bible — treating scripture as a human document rather than divine dictation. He was effectively the first modern biblical scholar and a foundational theorist of liberal democracy. He argued that the purpose of the state is to enable people to live freely and rationally, not to enforce orthodoxy.

Key Statements Worth Knowing

• Deus sive Natura — “God, or Nature.” The whole system in three words.

• “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” (the closing line of the Ethics)

• “Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”

• “He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return.” (Love of the universe is not a transaction.)

• “Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”

Why He Still Matters

Spinoza is the philosopher Einstein invoked when asked whether he believed in God (”I believe in Spinoza’s God”). He’s the hidden ancestor of much of modern thought: his immanent divinity prefigures pantheism in Romanticism, his determinism shapes neuroscience’s view of free will, his biblical criticism founded modern religious studies, and his political philosophy underwrites liberal democracy. Deleuze called him “the prince of philosophers.” Hegel said you were either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.

He was, in short, a quiet lens-grinder who saw the universe more clearly than almost anyone before or since — and who connects, not at all coincidentally, to that earlier conversation about New Thought, since his immanent God is the philosophical grandparent of nearly every “the divine is within you” claim made in the past 150 years.

Alan /|\

Mindfulness Is Not Just “Being Here Now”…

And Pretending It Is Will Wreck Your Life

You have seen the tote bag. *Be Here Now*. You have heard the app voice, smooth as warm honey, telling you to gently release thoughts of yesterday and tomorrow and return, just return, to the breath. You have probably sat cross-legged at some point and felt vaguely guilty for thinking about your tax return, or, as in my case, how really uncomfortable and impossible to attain this psoture is

Here is the good news: you can let the guilt go.

Not because mindfulness is rubbish — it isn’t — but because the version you’ve been sold is so ofen is!

Mindfulness has been flattened, in its journey from Himalayan monasteries to Instagram, into something that resembles a mild form of amnesia. *Don’t think about the past. Don’t think about the future. Just feel your toes.* It sounds soothing. It is also, as a description of what mindfulness actually is, almost exactly wrong.

A mindfulness that forbids memory and planning cannot help you save for retirement, apologise for something you did in 2009, spot a recurring pattern in your relationships, or decide what to do on Tuesday. Which is awkward, because those happen to be the things human life is mostly made of.

The good contemplative traditions knew this perfectly well. So does the actual research. Both say something more interesting: mindfulness is a *quality of attention*. You can bring it to the present, the past, *or* the future. The whole point is how you attend, not when the thing you’re attending to happens to live.

The word itself gives the game away

Let’s start with a small philological joke at the wellness industry’s expense.

“Mindfulness” translates the Pali word *sati* (Sanskrit *smṛti*). And *smṛti* originally means — this is going to hurt — “to remember.” To recollect. To bear in mind. It comes from the Vedic tradition of remembering sacred texts.

So the word the Buddha used for the practice we all now think means “don’t think about the past” originally meant, roughly, “keep it in mind”.

The philologist Bryan Levman has argued that without the memory component, mindfulness can’t really be understood or applied at all; that mindfulness *requires* memory to work.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the most respected living translators of the Pali canon, notes that sati occasionally still gets explained in a way that connects it to memory, and that even the famous early translation “bare attention” (by Nyanaponika Thera) was never meant as the whole story. Nyanaponika himself treated it as only the initial phase of proper mindfulness, which in full includes *sampajañña* (”clear comprehension”) and *apramāda* (”vigilance”).

None of which sounds like “empty your head.”

Think about what *sati* actually does when you read it this way. It’s the faculty that lets you hold something in mind: an intention, a value, a lesson, a promise you made yourself at 2 am, and bring it to bear on the moment you are currently in. That is not a holiday from thinking. It is thinking with the handbrake off the wisdom you’ve already earned.

A clinician walks into a therapy room…

This matters because clinicians have started noticing a specific kind of patient: the enthusiastic mindfulness practitioner who has quietly gone a bit strange.

The psychotherapist Steven Hendlin has written about three cognitive distortions that show up when pop-culture mindfulness meets a real person. The first is that people take a *formal meditation instruction* — “when your mind wanders, come back to the breath” — and generalise it into a rule for all of life. Any thought about yesterday becomes a failure. Any plan for tomorrow becomes a failure. You end up in a sort of attentional kettling, forever herding your own mind back into a one-second window.

The second distortion is a quiet contempt for memory. People start treating the past as suspect, constructed, biased, probably unreliable, and trust only what’s arriving through the senses right now. This feels very sophisticated until you realise you’ve just made it impossible to learn from anything that has ever happened to you.

The third is my favourite, and it is genuinely funny in a dark way. Hendlin recounts a neuropsychologist at a workshop on age-related cognitive disease cheerfully suggesting that Alzheimer’s patients, despite their difficulties, had at least achieved what the Eastern sages spent their whole lives working towards: consistent presence in the moment. Hendlin interrupted to point out that this is not, in fact, what the tradition meant. The enlightened present moment in Buddhist thought is a *hard-won* present, reached after the monkey mind has been tamed. A present with no past and no future isn’t nirvana. It’s a medical emergency.

The past: there’s a difference between replaying and reflecting

Here is the distinction the wellness market has fumbled. There is rumination, the stuck, circular, self-chewing mode in which the same bad memory shows up at 3 am for the hundredth time and drags you under. And there is reflection. Looking back on something with a bit of distance, seeing what it has to teach, and going to bed.

Mindfulness is extremely good at turning the first into the second. It is not good at pretending the past doesn’t exist.

A major review of mindfulness research describes how mindfulness training appears to increase *metacognitive awareness*, the ability to notice your thoughts and feelings as passing mental events rather than as accurate reports from the front lines of reality.

This ability is sometimes called *decentering*, and it’s associated with reductions in rumination, which is itself a well-established risk factor for depression and other disorders. Preliminary evidence suggests that mindfulness training increases metacognitive awareness, decreases rumination, and that the decentering component specifically predicts better clinical outcomes, such as lower rates of depressive relapse.

Read that carefully. Nobody is saying the memory stops showing up. They’re saying your *relationship* to it changes. The thought arrives. You see it arrive. You don’t grab it by the lapels and wrestle it to the floor.

This is precisely the architecture of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale for preventing depressive relapse. The first half of the course teaches people to work skilfully with the thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations that make them vulnerable to slipping back into depression. The second half uses those skills to build — wait for it — a relapse prevention plan. This document outlines your past vulnerabilities, anticipated future difficulties, and what you intend to do about them.

You cannot write that plan by staring at your breath. You write it by *remembering*, *anticipating*, and then meeting both with the kind of open, non-reactive attention mindfulness actually is.

And in case this sounds like a clever therapist’s workaround rather than real mindfulness: a study on self-rumination and self-reflection found that people higher in self-reflection showed more decentering and fewer depressive symptoms, while ruminators showed less decentering and more symptoms. Reflecting on your own life, the right way, is itself an act of mindful awareness. It’s the stuck version, the replay loop, that’s the enemy.

Now the other side of time. Worry is the future-facing cousin of rumination: narrow, repetitive, catastrophic, and tends to strike at 4 am. Prospection, the cognitive ability to simulate what might happen and act accordingly, is something else, and without it you cannot function as a person.

Prospection research has shown that thinking vividly about the future helps us make better decisions now. It counteracts something called *delay discounting*, the lovely human tendency to choose a small reward today over a larger one next year.

In a UK study, asking people to vividly imagine spending £35 at a pub 180 days from now (rather than just estimating where they’d be) shifted their actual financial decisions. Describing the time until retirement in *days* rather than years nudged people to start saving earlier, because suddenly the future person who needed the money felt a bit more like them. A 2014 study showed that participants' realistic computer-generated images of their own future faces alone caused them to contribute more to a hypothetical retirement account.

Imagining the future, in other words, is not the enemy of a good life. It’s one of the ways we build one.

The psychologists Martin Seligman and Anne Marie Roepke have gone further and argued in *Homo Prospectus* that faulty prospection is a core driver of depression itself. Depressed people imagine more negative futures, overestimate risk, and expect worse outcomes. Which should give the “never think about the future” crowd at least one moment of pause. If your mindfulness practice is asking you to adopt a cognitive posture that resembles depression, something has gone sideways.

Here is where it gets genuinely practical. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has spent decades studying what actually works when humans try to reach their goals, and the answer is not — I’m sorry — “visualise your dream life.” That on its own is called *indulging*, and the research suggests it actively reduces goal-relevant effort. Your brain, charmingly, confuses vivid imagining with partial accomplishment and lets the motivation leak out.

What works is something called **mental contrasting with implementation intentions**, sold to the public as WOOP: **Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan**.

You picture what you want. You picture the best outcome. Then, and this is the bit manifestation books leave out, you look steadily and unflinchingly at the specific obstacle standing between you and it. And then you write down a concrete if-then plan.

In a physical activity study (Stadler, Oettingen, and Gollwitzer, 2009), participants who used the WOOP framework were roughly twice as active as those who received only an information session. In an eating-habits study (Adriaanse and colleagues, 2010), mental contrasting with implementation intentions produced about a 30% improvement in diet compared with controls. The trick is not the dreaming. It’s the dreaming *plus* the honest look at what’s in the way.

If that sounds suspiciously like a mindful way of engaging with the future, that’s because it is.

“But doesn’t mindfulness make you less ambitious?”

Fair question, and there’s actual research on it. A 2018 set of studies by Andrew Hafenbrack and Kathleen Vohs in *Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes* found that mindfulness meditation inductions reduced task motivation, and that this effect was mediated by reduced future focus and reduced arousal. So there is a real finding here: sit someone down, get them to do a focused breathing meditation, and in the minutes immediately after, they’ll be less hyped up to crush their inbox.

But notice what that finding is actually telling us. It’s saying that *one specific, short, calming induction* of *one specific kind of state mindfulness* will, briefly, take the edge off anticipatory arousal. Which, yes, obviously, that’s sort of what focused breathing is *for*. The mistake is sliding from “my ten-minute body scan chilled me out” to “a mindful life cannot be a planned or ambitious one.” Those are very different claims, and the research doesn’t support the second one.

In fact, a study in the *Journal of Cognitive Enhancement* on mindfulness and prospective memory found that brief app-based meditation *modestly increased* completion of time-based future tasks. The effect was small, but it was in the opposite direction from what the “present-only” folk theory predicts. You don’t forget to do your stuff because you meditated. If anything, you remember slightly better.

The actual picture, if we’re being grown-ups about it

Mindfulness is not a small reserved room at the centre of time labelled NOW, with the doors to past and future locked. It is a way of attending — open, steady, non-reactive, reasonably kind — that can travel in any temporal direction the mind wants to go.

Point it at the present and you get the classical breath-and-body awareness. Point it at the past and you get reflection instead of rumination: the memory shows up, gets acknowledged, gets learned from, gets released. Point it at the future and you get prospection instead of worry: the possible scenario gets examined, the obstacles get named, a plan gets made, and then you put it down.

Even Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famous definition of mindfulness — “the awareness that emerges through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience” — is doing something subtler than the tote bags suggest. “In the present moment” is where the attending happens. It’s not a rule about what the attention is allowed to be *about*. You can only ever think in the present, because there is no other time available to think in. A person mindfully remembering their grandmother is doing that remembering now. A person mindfully drafting next quarter’s budget is drafting it now. Mindfulness concerns the *how*, not the *when*.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

So, a slightly more grown-up version of the practice. You sit. You come back to the breath. You notice the body. A worry about Friday’s meeting floats to the surface. You do not scold it, or frantically shepherd it back to your nostrils as if it were a naughty sheep. You notice it. You let it be seen for what it is. And if it seems useful, you let yourself actually look at Friday’s meeting, calmly, without being bullied by it, and you ask: *what do I actually want here? what is genuinely in the way? what is one concrete thing I could do today that would matter?*

A painful memory surfaces. You don’t dive in, and you don’t flinch away. You meet it. You see what it has to teach. You let it go when it’s ready.

Later, off the cushion, you get up and you do some of the things. You write things down. You keep promises to your future self. You make the plan. You learn from the last time.

None of this is a departure from mindfulness. It’s mindfulness finally doing the full job it was designed for; the job the word *sati*, back when it just meant “remembrance,” always implied.

The mindfulness that exists only in the present, unmoored from memory and planning, isn’t a deeper practice. It’s a shallower one wearing deeper clothes. So next time someone tells you, in that slightly glassy voice, that mindfulness is really just about *being here now*, you are allowed to smile, breathe, remember this article, and plan a polite reply.

Alan /|\

An Evidence-Based Evaluation of Donald Trump’s Leadership: Second Term (January 2025 – February 2026)

I. Rhetoric and Governing Style

Trump’s second term has been characterised by a governing style that is, in the words of a 50-expert CEPR assessment, defined by “unpredictability,” “economic brinkmanship,” and “public confrontation.” By mid-May 2025, Trump had signed over four times more Executive Orders than he had in the equivalent period of his first term — surpassing even Franklin Roosevelt’s famous first hundred days — though policy reversals have occurred within days, courts have been flooded with litigation, and financial markets have reacted to what analysts describe as a reactive governance style.

His rhetoric has been deliberately combative, not merely towards political opponents but towards traditional allies. He has described Europe as a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people, and his administration’s National Security Strategy argued the continent had lost its “national identities and self-confidence.” He has upended long-standing alliances through trade disputes, sharp rhetoric toward allied governments, and shifts in military posture.

On domestic matters, his communication has centred on immigration, crime, and national strength — issues that resonate with his base but which, as we shall see, crowd out the economic concerns that most Americans actually prioritise.

II. Domestic Policy: What Has Genuinely Benefited Ordinary Americans?

Any honest assessment must acknowledge areas of genuine achievement or potential benefit.

Immigration enforcement: Trump’s headline-level promises on border control have achieved tangible results in terms of reduced illegal crossings. His approval ratings remain relatively stronger on immigration than any other policy area, with polling showing he does “reasonably well” on immigration and crime — the issues to which he has devoted most attention.

Tax cuts extended and expanded: The extension and expansion of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the One Big Beautiful Budget Act (OBBBA), will, according to Goldman Sachs, deliver a 0.4 percentage point bump in disposable income over the first half of 2026. For working families, this is a modest but real benefit.

Credit card interest cap proposal: In early January 2026, Trump called for capping credit card interest rates at 10%, against an average of over 19% that American consumers currently pay. This is a populist measure that, if enacted, would directly benefit lower-income borrowers — though Wall Street analysts regard its legislative prospects as slim.

Deregulation and capital access: Looser capital restrictions have contributed to investment activity, and the AI investment boom — which comprised around 40% of GDP growth for 2025 through August according to the St. Louis Fed — has been facilitated by a deregulatory environment.

Overall GDP: The economy grew 2.2% in real terms in 2025, somewhat above the Congressional Budget Office’s January 2025 projection of 2.1%, and relatively similar to 2024’s 2.4% growth — suggesting that while no great leap forward occurred, neither did the sharp downturn many had feared.

III. Domestic Policy: Where Ordinary Americans Have Been Harmed

The picture here is substantially more damning, particularly for those lower down the income scale — the very people Trump campaigned on behalf of.

Inflation and cost of living: Inflation has continued to run at around 3%, significantly above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. More specifically, food-at-home inflation accelerated from 1.7% in 2024 to 2.4% in 2025, and health care inflation also accelerated — two of the largest household expenditures after housing and transport.

Tariffs: Trump’s signature economic policy has been profoundly chaotic in execution. Average effective tariff rates changed from 2.4% to a high of 28% and then back down to 17% by January 2026 — a historically unprecedented scale of volatility in trade policy. The consequences have been significant: 75% of Americans, including 56% of Republicans, believe that tariffs are raising prices, and only 14% support imposing additional ones. Rather than reviving manufacturing as promised, the uncertainty and retaliatory actions from trading partners resulted in a steady decline in manufacturing jobs in 2025.

Healthcare premiums: 61% of Americans believe Trump’s policies have raised health insurance premiums, and his approval on healthcare sits at a dismal 32%. For lower-income people relying on exchange-based insurance, premiums have risen dramatically.

Widening inequality: Income and wealth gaps have widened under the second administration, and his policies are likely to widen the gap further. Only roughly 60% of Americans own shares, and most gains from the stock market boom have accrued to wealthier Americans. 65% of the public believes Trump’s policies favour the wealthy, compared to just 12% who think they are oriented towards the middle class.

Workers’ rights: Trump rolled back minimum wage increases for hundreds of thousands of federal workers, finalised regulations reducing farm workers’ wages, and mounted a sustained assault on labour enforcement agencies — weakening oversight bodies and appointing anti-worker officials to key positions.

Consumer confidence and economic expectations: A Pew Research survey conducted in January 2026 found that 52% of Americans say Trump’s economic policies have made conditions worse, with only 28% saying they have made them better. And only one-third of Americans believe their family’s finances will improve in 2026, down from 48% the previous June.

Rule of law: Perhaps most troubling institutionally: Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts described the rule of law as “endangered” in May 2025, as the administration pressed constitutional debates around the unitary executive theory and used presidential authority to influence businesses, academic institutions, law firms, the media, and foreign leaders.

IV. How the World Now Sees America

The international picture represents one of the most dramatic reputational collapses in modern American diplomatic history.

Decline among traditional allies: By April 2025, the US had plummeted to a net approval score of –5 globally, a fall of 22 points since the previous year. In Germany, the US scored –44; in Canada, –47; in Spain, –42. In Canada, 56% of respondents now describe the United States as a negative global force, compared to just 26% who see it positively.

Loss of confidence in Trump personally: A 24-country median of 67% lack confidence in Trump to handle global economic problems. In nine of eleven NATO allies surveyed, roughly six-in-ten adults or more say they do not have confidence in his handling of the Russia-Ukraine war. Majorities in almost every country surveyed describe Trump as “arrogant” and “dangerous.”

China as the principal beneficiary: China’s global net approval score rose to +14 in 2025, and China now outperforms the United States in terms of positive perceptions in 19 European countries — a remarkable inversion of the post-Cold War order. As ECFR’s analysis concluded, “Trump’s campaign to put America first has made it less popular among its allies and has helped put China in pole position.”

The fracturing of the Western alliance: Just one in five Europeans now say they view the US as an ally, down significantly from two years ago — half the proportion of Americans who view the EU as an ally. Ukrainians have shifted their gaze from Washington to Brussels. The liberal international order, already under strain, has been further destabilised.

Some exceptions: Trump retains strong approval in Israel (83% favourable) and Nigeria (78%). He is also popular among European populist movements, including 88% of Hungarian Fidesz supporters and 56% of Alternative for Germany supporters. Majorities in 18 countries still consider him a strong leader — even if they distrust his judgement. And his welcome in parts of the non-Western world reflects, as ECFR notes, a broader embrace of a more transactional, post-liberal international order.

V. Summary Judgement

Based on the available evidence, Trump’s second-term leadership presents a consistent pattern: rhetorical boldness combined with structural policy choices that have disproportionately benefited the already-wealthy, generated deep economic uncertainty for working Americans, and accelerated the erosion of America’s global standing.

Where he has delivered — immigration enforcement, modest tax relief, a broadly resilient (if underwhelming) macroeconomy — these gains are real but limited in scope. They have not translated into felt improvements for the majority of Americans, 66% of whom identify the economy, inflation, or health care as the top issue facing the country — the very areas where Trump polls most poorly.

The central paradox of his second term is captured neatly by Brookings: he was elected largely on a promise to help working-class Americans, yet his policies have systematically widened the gap between the wealthy and everyone else, while his chaotic governance style has created the kind of uncertainty that actively depresses investment, wage growth, and consumer confidence. Internationally, America is weaker, less trusted, and in relative terms losing ground to China — not through China’s strength, but through American self-sabotage.

Whether this constitutes a long-term restructuring of global power or a temporary disruption will depend largely on what comes next. But as Nobel laureate Michael Spence has written, the effects are likely to be “far-reaching and probably only partly reversible.”

Alan /|\

Emotional Regulation

What neuroscience says about managing difficult feelings

Somewhere inside your skull, right now, there is a small almond-shaped structure that is approximately two hundred million years older than your capacity for abstract thought, and it has opinions. Strong opinions. Opinions about that email you received this morning, about the driver who “cut you up” on the way to work, about the slightly ambiguous tone in which your manager said ‘fine’ when you asked if everything was all right. It has processed all of these events and filed its assessment before your conscious mind has finished reading the subject line.

This structure, called the amygdala, is, in the technical language of affective neuroscience, doing its job extremely well. The problem is that its job was specified during the Pleistocene, when the principal threats were large cats, rival tribes, and the general indifference of the Ice Age, and it has not been updated since. It is running, with great efficiency and absolute conviction, software that was designed for a rather different operating environment.

Emotional regulation — the capacity to manage, modulate, and meaningfully respond to our own emotional states rather than simply being detonated by them — is one of the most studied and practically important topics in contemporary psychology and neuroscience. It is also, in the view of this author, one of the few areas where ancient contemplative wisdom and modern brain science are saying essentially the same thing in completely different vocabularies, and where the conversation between them is genuinely more interesting than either tradition alone.

This article is a tour of that territory: what the brain actually does with difficult feelings, what the research says about managing them effectively, and why — quietly, without making a fuss about it — the mystics got rather a lot of this right long before we had fMRI machines to tell us so.

Part One: The architecture of feeling — what is actually happening in there

To understand emotional regulation, it helps to understand what emotions are doing in the first place — which is to say, it helps to understand them as solutions rather than problems. Emotions did not evolve to make your life complicated. They evolved to help you make decisions quickly.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, developed through his landmark work with patients who had damage to the prefrontal cortex, demonstrated something counterintuitive and important: patients without access to emotional processing became dramatically worse at making decisions, not better. Without the evaluative signal that emotions provide — the felt sense of this is good or this is dangerous — these patients were paralysed by choices that most people navigate automatically. Reason, it turns out, needs emotion. Without the somatic markers that tag options as promising or threatening, the rational mind has no basis for prioritising.

This reframes the entire problem of difficult emotions. The issue is not that we feel too much. The issue is that the emotional system, which is fast, associative, and operating largely below conscious awareness, does not always distinguish well between a genuine threat and a social threat, between a present danger and a remembered one, or between the lion in the grass and the deadline in the inbox. The signal is real. The signal is often disproportionate. Both things are true simultaneously, and the tension between them is where emotional regulation lives.

The Neuroscience Bit: The Triune Brain — Useful Fiction or Useful Framework?

The popular ‘triune brain’ model — the reptilian brainstem, the limbic mammalian system, and the rational neocortex — was developed by neuroscientist Paul MacLean in the 1960s and has had an enormous influence on popular psychology, stress management training, and corporate leadership development. It is also, in its strong form, largely wrong in neuroscience.

Modern neuroimaging has established that the brain is not neatly divided into evolutionary layers operating in competition. Emotional and cognitive processing are deeply integrated; the amygdala has direct reciprocal connections with the prefrontal cortex; ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are not anatomically separable in the way the triune model implies. The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ‘theory of constructed emotion’ (2017) goes further, arguing that emotions are not fixed, pre-programmed responses located in specific brain regions, but actively constructed predictions — the brain’s best guess about the meaning of incoming bodily sensation given current context and prior experience.

For practical purposes, the older model retains some descriptive usefulness: we do experience what feels like a faster, more visceral emotional response, followed by a slower, more reflective one. But the clean ‘emotional brain vs rational brain’ framing should be treated as a metaphor rather than an anatomy.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam. Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The window of tolerance

One of the most clinically useful concepts in contemporary trauma and affect regulation theory is what the psychiatrist Dan Siegel calls the window of tolerance: the zone of emotional activation within which we can function effectively. Inside this window, we experience and process emotions without being overwhelmed or shutting down. Outside the window, in either direction, our capacity for integrated functioning degrades.

Outside the window upward is hyperarousal: anxiety, panic, rage, hypervigilance — the amygdala at full volume, the threat-response system in overdrive. Outside the window, downward is hypoarousal: numbness, dissociation, collapse, the emotional flatness of a system that has stopped processing rather than risk being overwhelmed. Both are defensive responses. Neither is pathological in itself. Both become problems when they are chronic, disproportionate, or the only tools available.

The goal of emotional regulation is not to eliminate difficult feelings, which is both impossible and undesirable, given what Damasio showed us about the decision-making value of emotional signals. The goal is to widen the window: to increase the range of emotional experience within which we can remain present, responsive, and functional. Everything that follows in this article is, in some form, about widening the window.

Part Two: The six strategies — what the research actually recommends

James Gross at Stanford University has produced what is probably the most comprehensive and well-validated framework for emotional regulation currently available in the literature.

His process model identifies the major strategies people use to regulate emotion, organised by where in the emotion-generation process they intervene. Some strategies work by changing the situation before an emotion is generated. Others work on the meaning attributed to a situation. Others work on the emotional response itself once it has arrived. The timing matters, and the evidence on which strategies work best is rather more nuanced than most popular psychology accounts suggest.

Strategy 1: Situation selection and modification

The simplest and often most effective form of emotional regulation is also the one we most stubbornly resist: not putting yourself in situations that reliably generate difficult emotions you cannot manage. This sounds obvious. It is, in practice, systematically ignored by a remarkable proportion of the adult population, many of whom know exactly which relationships, environments, and conversations reliably produce a specific flavour of emotional distress and return to them with the dedication of field researchers.

Gross’s model distinguishes between situation selection (choosing, where possible, environments and relationships that support rather than undermine emotional stability) and situation modification (changing the aspects of an unavoidable situation that drive the difficult emotion). Both are antecedent-focused strategies — they intervene before the emotion is generated, which makes them considerably more efficient than trying to manage an emotion that has already arrived at full intensity. They also require self-knowledge, honesty about one’s own patterns, and the willingness to make changes that may be inconvenient. This is, naturally, why they are the least popular strategies available.

Strategy 2: Attentional deployment

Where we direct our attention within a situation substantially determines the emotion we experience. Attentional deployment involves deliberately directing attention toward or away from emotionally evocative features of a situation. Distraction — directing attention away from a difficult stimulus — is one of the oldest and most studied forms of this strategy, and the evidence suggests it is genuinely useful in the short term: it reduces emotional intensity, allows physiological arousal to diminish, and creates space for more considered response.

The important caveat is that distraction is a short-term regulation strategy, not a long-term one. Chronic avoidance of emotional material — persistently refusing to attend to difficult feelings — is associated with a range of poor outcomes, including increased intrusive thoughts, emotional blunting, and the accumulation of unprocessed material that tends to surface at inconvenient moments, usually during important meetings or just before sleep.

The constructive version of attentional deployment is not avoidance but mindful attention: the deliberate, non-judgemental direction of awareness toward emotional experience. The capacity to observe one’s own emotional state — to notice anger as anger, grief as grief, anxiety as anxiety, rather than simply being those things without meta-awareness — is one of the most consistently supported emotional regulation skills in the research literature. We return to this in some depth shortly.

Strategy 3: Cognitive reappraisal

If there is a single strategy that the emotional regulation literature endorses most strongly, most consistently, and across the widest range of contexts, it is cognitive reappraisal: changing the meaning attributed to a situation or stimulus in order to change the emotional response it generates. This is not positive thinking, which involves replacing an accurate appraisal with an inaccurate but comforting one. Cognitive reappraisal involves finding a different accurate interpretation of events — one that generates a less destructive emotional response without requiring self-deception.

The classic experimental paradigm: show participants distressing images — medical procedures, accidents, scenes of suffering. Instruct some to view them with detachment, as a clinician would; instruct others to reappraise the meaning of the scenes (focusing on recovery rather than injury, for instance). Compared with controls, reappraisers show reduced emotional reactivity and physiological arousal, and — crucially — report no sense of suppression or inauthenticity. They do not feel they have denied their emotional response. They have genuinely changed it, by changing the cognitive frame.

The Neuroscience Bit: What Reappraisal Does to the Brain

Neuroimaging studies of cognitive reappraisal consistently show a characteristic pattern: increased activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (associated with cognitive control and conflict monitoring), coupled with reduced activation in the amygdala and insula (associated with threat processing and visceral emotional response).

This pattern is the neural signature of top-down regulation: once engaged, the prefrontal cortex sends inhibitory signals that dampen amygdala reactivity. The brain is, in the most literal neuroanatomical sense, thinking itself calmer — not by suppressing the emotional signal, but by revising the meaning that generates it.

Importantly, Gross and colleagues found that cognitive reappraisal, unlike suppression, does not increase physiological stress markers, does not impair memory for the regulated event, and does not reduce social closeness when used interpersonally. It is, by most metrics, the cleanest regulation strategy available.

Ochsner, K.N. & Gross, J.J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249. Gross, J.J. & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Strategy 4: Response modulation — the suppression trap

Emotional suppression, the attempt to inhibit emotional expression and experience after the emotion has been generated, is probably the most commonly used emotion regulation strategy in the adult population of countries where emotional display is culturally discouraged, which is to say, most of them. And it is, the research suggests with admirable consistency, one of the worst available.

Gross’s studies found that habitual suppressors show increased physiological stress responses, reduced well-being, impaired cognitive performance (suppression is metabolically expensive — it takes working memory resources that would otherwise be available for thinking), and, critically, increased subjective emotional intensity rather than reduced. The emotion does not go away because you have declined to express it. It goes underground, where it does its worst work undisturbed.

The cultural pressure toward suppression — the injunction to keep a stiff upper lip, to be professional, to not make a scene — is therefore, from a neuroscientific perspective, a set of instructions for generating chronic stress while maintaining the social appearance of having things under control. The British national character, one cannot help but observe, has been conducting a long-term experiment in precisely this strategy, with results that are arguably visible in the national rates of anxiety, alcohol consumption, and the peculiar emotional tone of conversations on public transport.

Part Three: Mindfulness, acceptance, and the wisdom the mystics had first

We arrive now at the part of the article where the neuroscience and the contemplative traditions have a slightly awkward but ultimately very productive meeting. The awkwardness is that the contemplative traditions got here about two and a half thousand years earlier, and have been waiting with a mixture of patience and mild exasperation.

The Buddhist concept of dukkha , often translated as ‘suffering’ but more precisely meaning something like ‘unsatisfactoriness’ or the fundamental friction of existence, is, in one of its key formulations, about the relationship between experience and resistance to experience. The suffering, in this framework, is not the difficult feeling itself. The suffering is the resistance to the difficult feeling: the demand that it not be happening, the story we construct about what it means that it is happening, the energy we expend trying to make it stop. The original pain plus the resistance to the pain equals, as the contemporary mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young memorably formulated it, total suffering. Remove the resistance and you are left with the original pain, which is usually considerably more manageable than the compound experience.

This is not a claim about enlightenment or spiritual transcendence. It is a psychologically testable proposition about the relationship between meta-cognitive stance and emotional intensity, and it has been tested extensively by the research programmes that grew out of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s development of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts in 1979. The results are, by the standards of psychological interventions, remarkably robust.

The Research Bit: Mindfulness and Emotional Regulation

The evidence base for mindfulness-based interventions in emotional regulation is now substantial. Key findings:

Mindfulness training increases activity in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex while reducing amygdala reactivity — the same neural signature as cognitive reappraisal, achieved through a different route. The meditating brain is not suppressing emotional response; it is changing its relationship to it.

A landmark study by Farb et al. (2010) found that MBSR training produced a shift in how participants processed emotional experience: less narrative elaboration (telling stories about the feeling), more direct sensory awareness (experiencing the physical components of the feeling without adding interpretation). This decoupling of sensation from story is associated with reduced emotional reactivity and faster recovery from negative affect.

Hölzel et al. (2011) found that eight weeks of MBSR training produced measurable increases in grey matter density in the hippocampus (associated with learning and memory), the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporoparietal junction’, and measurable decreases in amygdala grey matter density, correlated with self-reported reductions in stress.

The brain, in short, is physically changed by sustained mindfulness practice. This is not a metaphor.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. Delacorte Press. Hölzel, B.K. et al. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43.

Affect labelling — naming the beast

One of the most practically useful and deceptively simple findings in the emotional regulation literature is what UCLA researcher Matthew Lieberman and colleagues call affect labelling: the act of putting feelings into words reduces their neurological intensity. When participants in Lieberman’s studies were shown images of emotionally expressive faces and asked to label the emotion depicted, amygdala activation decreased relative to conditions where participants simply viewed the faces or named non-emotional information about them. Naming the feeling at the neural level turns it down.

The mechanism appears to involve the prefrontal cortex: verbalising an emotional state activates language-processing regions that have inhibitory connections to the amygdala. Putting the feeling into words — even silently, even in a single word — engages the cognitive system in a way that modulates the threat-response system. The act of naming is itself a regulatory intervention.

For the Rational Mystic, it is difficult not to notice that this mechanism has a remarkably close parallel in the esoteric traditions of naming and knowing. In numerous magical traditions, to know the true name of something is to have power over it. Rumpelstiltskin loses his power when his name is spoken. Demons in exorcism rites are commanded to name themselves before they can be expelled. In Kabbalah, the power of language to shape reality is foundational. The traditions arrived at the insight through mythology and spiritual practice. Neuroscience arrived at it through fMRI. The insight is the same: naming is not merely descriptive. Naming is an act of power over the named thing.

Part Four: The body in the room — somatic approaches to regulation

The neuroscience of emotion has undergone something of a revolution in recent decades in its understanding of the relationship between the brain and the body. The older model — in which the brain perceives a situation, generates an emotion, and the body responds — has been substantially revised. The newer model, drawing on the work of Antonio Damasio, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the neuroscientist Stephen Porges, understands the relationship as far more bidirectional: the body sends continuous signals to the brain, and a significant portion of what we experience as emotion is the brain’s interpretation of those bodily signals rather than a top-down response to external events.

This has practical implications that are both scientifically robust and, for a certain kind of rationalist, mildly inconvenient. Because if emotion is partly constituted by bodily state, then changing the body is a direct route to changing the emotional experience — a route that bypasses the cognitive system entirely and operates on the source material.

Breathing: the most ancient regulation technology

The breath is the only component of the autonomic nervous system that is simultaneously involuntary and fully available to conscious control. You cannot decide to slow your heart rate by thinking about it. You can decide to slow your breathing, and your heart rate will follow. This is not a metaphor or a wellness industry claim. It is a physiological fact with a specific mechanism: slow, extended exhalation activates the vagus nerve, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system — the physiological counterpart to the sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ response — producing genuine, measurable reductions in heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol levels.

The physiological sigh — a double inhale through the nose followed by a long, slow exhale — has been identified by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and colleagues as one of the fastest available routes to reducing acute physiological stress. A single physiological sigh, they found, produces statistically significant reductions in anxiety within sixty to ninety seconds. It requires no equipment, no training, no subscription, and no understanding of neuroscience to deploy. It is also, the Rational Mystic observes, what humans naturally do when they are very distressed — the involuntary double inhale of someone who has been weeping is the body’s own attempt to recalibrate. We knew how to do this. We just needed a neuroscientist to explain why.

The Neuroscience Bit: The Polyvagal Theory and Emotional Regulation

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory (1994, 2011) proposes a hierarchical model of the autonomic nervous system’s response to threat, with three levels: the ventral vagal system (associated with social engagement, safety, and connection), the sympathetic system (associated with mobilisation — fight or flight), and the dorsal vagal system (associated with immobilisation — collapse, shutdown, dissociation).

In Porges’ model, the most powerful regulator of emotional state is the perception of safety — specifically, safety signalled through social connection. The face, voice, and proximity of a calm, attuned other directly activates the ventral vagal system and downregulates the threat response. This is why co-regulation — the calming effect of being with a regulated other — is so powerful, and why isolation under stress is physiologically as well as psychologically damaging.

The practical implication: when you are dysregulated, one of the most effective things you can do is seek the company of someone who is calm. This is not weakness. It is your nervous system using the social engagement system it evolved for exactly this purpose.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.

The body as emotional memory

Bessel van der Kolk’s influential work on trauma — summarised in his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score — documents the extensive evidence that unresolved emotional experience is stored not just psychologically but somatically: in patterns of muscular tension, postural habit, autonomic regulation, and proprioceptive experience. The body is not a passive vehicle for emotional experience. It is an active participant in generating, storing, and perpetuating it.

This is consistent with the contemplative traditions’ longstanding emphasis on the body as a site of spiritual and psychological work. Yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, and the somatic components of many meditation traditions are not primarily exercise systems, though they have physical benefits. They are, in their original conception, practices for working with the relationship between bodily state, emotional experience, and conscious awareness. The fact that neuroscience is now providing the mechanistic account of why these practices produce the effects they do is, from the Rational Mystic’s perspective, exactly how it should work: the map and the territory converging, each validating the other.

Part Five: Self-compassion — the strategy we resist most

There is a regulation strategy that has accumulated one of the strongest evidence bases in contemporary psychology, produces robust improvements in emotional well-being, resilience, and recovery from failure, and is resisted with particular determination by exactly the kinds of people who most need it: high achievers, academics, perfectionists, and the British. It is self-compassion, and it has nothing to do with self-indulgence, lowered standards, or the consolation of the mediocre. The evidence suggests that it is, in fact, the opposite.

Kristin Neff, whose research programme at the University of Texas has defined the field, describes self-compassion as having three components: self-kindness (treating oneself with the same care one would offer a good friend in similar difficulties), common humanity (recognising that suffering, failure, and inadequacy are part of the shared human experience rather than evidence of personal uniqueness in one’s inadequacy), and mindfulness (holding one’s painful experience in aware, balanced attention rather than over-identifying with it or suppressing it). All three components are required for the full effect. Kindness without mindfulness tips into wallowing. Mindfulness without kindness tips into cold observation. Common humanity without either is merely philosophical consolation.

The research findings are consistent and counterintuitive to those who mistake self-compassion for weakness. Self-compassionate individuals show greater emotional resilience following failure, faster recovery from negative affect, increased motivation to improve after setbacks (not decreased — the common fear is that self-compassion will produce complacency; the evidence shows the opposite), and lower rates of anxiety, depression, and rumination. They are also, importantly, no less likely to maintain high standards — they are simply less devastated when they fail to meet them, and therefore quicker to learn from the failure and try again.

Part Six: Putting it together — the Rational Mystic’s emotional regulation toolkit

We have covered a considerable amount of ground. Let us consolidate it into something practically useful. A description of what an evidence-based, psychologically literate approach to difficult feelings actually looks like in practice.

The first and most important shift is one of orientation rather than technique: from suppression to regulation. These are fundamentally different projects. Suppression attempts to eliminate the emotional signal. Regulation attempts to stay in relationship with it — to be present to it, to allow it the space it needs, to understand what it is asking, and to respond to it in ways that are proportionate and constructive rather than simply reactive.

The goal is not a life with fewer difficult feelings. It is a life in which difficult feelings are less likely to ambush you, overwhelm you, or make decisions on your behalf.

In practice, this means: when a difficult emotion arrives, the first move is to name it — not with a narrative (I’m anxious because of the meeting and the meeting matters because my career is at stake and my career is at stake because...) but with a label (this is anxiety). Then, to locate it in the body — where does this feeling actually live? What are its physical components? The somatic attention itself is regulatory; it activates the observing self and interrupts the narrative escalation that turns manageable feelings into consuming ones.

Then, if the emotion is intense, to regulate the physiology — breathe slowly, particularly extending the exhale. If possible, seek the company of someone calm. Move, if the emotion is one of mobilisation. Rest, if the system has collapsed into shutdown. Give the nervous system something concrete to do with the activation rather than simply sitting with it at full intensity.

Then, once the acute physiological arousal has reduced sufficiently for the prefrontal cortex to re-engage, to reappraise — not to minimise or dismiss, but to look for alternative accurate interpretations that generate less destructive emotional responses. What else might this mean? What is the version of this situation that does not require me to be catastrophically threatened? What would I say to a friend who came to me with this?

And throughout, to bring self-compassion — the recognition that being a mammal with an ancient emotional system navigating a complicated modern world is genuinely difficult, that emotional difficulty is not a character flaw, and that the capacity to be kind to oneself in the midst of struggle is not weakness but the most efficient available route back to functioning.

The Practical Bit: A Regulation Sequence

When a difficult emotion arrives at full intensity:

1. NAME IT: ‘This is anger/grief/anxiety/shame.’ One word, not a story.

2. LOCATE IT: Where in the body? Chest, throat, stomach? What are the physical sensations specifically?

3. BREATHE: Double inhale through the nose, long slow exhale through the mouth. Repeat three to five times.

4. OBSERVE: You are having this feeling. You are not this feeling. There is a difference.

5. REAPPRAISE: What else might this mean? What is the least catastrophic accurate interpretation?

6. RESPOND: From this slightly more regulated place, what does the situation actually need from you?

This sequence takes approximately two to four minutes and requires no equipment, no special training, and no belief in anything that cannot be verified by a suitably equipped laboratory.

The mystic would add: and when you have done all of that, sit with what remains. Not everything that arises needs to be resolved. Some feelings are simply asking to be witnessed.

Conclusion: The feeling is the message

The amygdala, to return to where we began, is not your enemy. It is a structure that has been keeping your ancestors alive since before the invention of language, fire, or agriculture, and it is very good at its original job. The fact that its original job and your current life are a poor fit is not the amygdala’s fault. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, in an environment it was not designed for, with the urgency and conviction of something that is absolutely certain it is saving your life.

Emotional regulation is not the project of silencing that system. It is the project of learning to be in relationship with it — to receive its signals with the seriousness they deserve, to understand what they are actually saying beneath the melodrama of their delivery, and to respond to them with the combination of care and discernment that the situation requires. To feel, in other words, without being entirely at the mercy of the feeling. To be moved without being swept away.

The neuroscience provides the mechanism. The contemplative traditions provide the map. The practice is yours to develop, and it is lifelong. The brain is plastic; the window of tolerance can be widened; the relationship between the observing self and the felt sense of emotional experience can be genuinely transformed with sustained, compassionate attention.

There will still be ambushes. The amygdala is not going to retire. The difficult feelings will continue to arrive with their characteristic confidence that they know exactly what is happening and exactly what you should do about it. But — and this is the thing that both the neuroscientist and the mystic agree on, from their very different vantage points — you are not obliged to believe everything you feel. You are invited to listen to it, understand it, and then decide what to do with it from the clearest part of yourself you can access in that moment.

Which is, as it turns out, exactly what wisdom has always looked like. Just with better brain imaging now.

Alan /|\

Further Reading & References

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.

Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gross, J.J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.

Gross, J.J. & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Ochsner, K.N. & Gross, J.J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249.

Siegel, D.J. (1999). The Developing Mind. Guilford Press.

Lieberman, M.D. et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. Delacorte Press.

Hölzel, B.K. et al. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W.W. Norton.

van der Kolk, B.A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

Neff, K.D. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.

Huberman, A.D. et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1).

Young, S. (2016). The Science of Enlightenment. Sounds True.

Tarot as a psychological tool

The case for rational divination

There is a woman at a table in a candlelit room, and she is about to tell you something important about yourself.

She is not psychic. She is not in contact with the spirits of the departed, the whisperings of the cosmos, or the particular celestial committee that has apparently been meeting about your career prospects since 1987.

She is, however, extremely good at asking questions. She holds a tool that has been helping people ask better questions about themselves for the better part of three centuries, even though almost everyone involved has consistently described it as something else entirely.

The tool is a tarot deck.

Seventy-eight cards, divided into twenty-two Major Arcana and fifty-six Minor Arcana, decorated with images so richly symbolic that psychologists have been quietly excited about them since Carl Jung noticed, in the early twentieth century, that they appeared to map onto something he was calling the collective unconscious. Jung had a habit of noticing things and then attaching very large concepts to them. In this case, however, he was onto something.

The argument of this article is not that tarot predicts the future. It does not. The argument is not that tarot cards carry magical energy, channel spiritual forces, or represent a direct line to the universe’s customer service department. They do not. The argument is considerably stranger and, I would suggest, considerably more interesting: that a shuffled deck of illustrated cards, drawn at random and interpreted through the lens of a person’s current situation, can be a genuinely powerful psychological instrument. Not despite the absence of supernatural mechanisms, but because of the presence of very ordinary psychological ones.

Put differently: the tarot works. Just not the way anyone tells you it works.

Part One: A brief and somewhat undignified history of the cards

The tarot began its career not as a mystical oracle but as a card game. This is the kind of fact that makes occultists uncomfortable, and historians quietly pleased. In fifteenth-century northern Italy, a game called tarocchi was played by wealthy aristocrats using a deck of illustrated cards. The standard four suits supplemented by a set of elaborate trump cards depicting allegorical figures: the Emperor, the Empress, Death, the Tower, the Fool. These were not spiritual symbols. They were game pieces, used in a trick-taking game not entirely unlike whist, with considerably better artwork.

The earliest known decks, the Visconti-Sforza tarots, commissioned by the Duke of Milan around 1450, were hand-painted by professional artists and cost approximately as much as a small house. They were not instruments of divination. They were status symbols, used to play an expensive game by people who could afford expensive games. The mystical associations came later, largely through a process of enthusiastic misattribution.

The critical moment of reinvention arrived in 1781, when the French occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin published a treatise claiming, entirely without evidence, that the tarot was the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt, preserved in symbolic form after the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. This claim was false in every particular. Egypt had nothing to do with the tarot. De Gébelin had made the whole thing up, or more precisely had convinced himself of it through the kind of enthusiastic pattern-matching that is the intellectual equivalent of deciding you can see a dog in a cloud formation and then writing a paper about dogs.

It did not matter. The claim took root, spread, mutated, and eventually produced the entire edifice of Western esoteric tarot tradition — Etteilla, Lévi, the Golden Dawn, Waite, Smith, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909 that remains the visual template for almost every tarot deck published since.

The History Bit: The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

The deck most people picture when they think of tarot was designed in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar of Western esotericism, and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist and fellow member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Smith, frequently omitted from the credit, in the way that women who did the actual creative work of history often were, introduced something genuinely novel. Fully illustrated pip cards, where previously the minor arcana had featured only the relevant number of suit symbols arranged geometrically.

These illustrations were not arbitrary decoration. They depicted scenes, emotions, and situations. Figures in moments of triumph, grief, decision, isolation, community. Smith was essentially creating a visual vocabulary of human experience, drawing on her background in theatre, folklore, and symbolism. Whether she intended it or not, she was producing the world’s most widely distributed set of projective stimuli.

She was paid a flat fee and received no royalties. The deck sold millions of copies.

Part Two: Projective psychology — the science that explains the magic

In 1921, a Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach published a paper describing his ink-blot test. The principle was elegantly simple: show a person an ambiguous image and ask them what they see. The person, faced with visual material that has no definitive interpretation, will project the contents of their own mind onto it. What they see in the blots reveals, with more or less reliability, depending on which subsequent decade of research you consult, something about the structure of their inner world.

This is projective psychology: the use of ambiguous stimuli to elicit material from the unconscious that might not be accessible through direct questioning. Alongside the Rorschach, the tradition includes the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan in 1935, in which subjects are shown ambiguous scenes and asked to tell a story about them. The theory is that the stories people construct about other people in ambiguous situations reveal the narratives, preoccupations, and emotional patterns that organise their own interior lives.

Now look at a tarot card.

The Ten of Swords from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck depicts a figure lying face-down, ten swords plunged into their back, under a black sky with a thin line of dawn on the horizon. Ask a hundred people what this image means, and you will receive a hundred answers, all of them revealing. Some will see catastrophic defeat. Some will see the end of a painful situation — note the dawn. Some will see self-inflicted suffering. Some will see drama and exaggeration. Some will notice that ten swords is considerably more than necessary and will have thoughts about that.

Each of those responses is a projection. And each projection is data about the person’s current emotional state, their habitual narratives, their relationship with adversity, and the stories they tell themselves about suffering and survival. The card did not cause these responses. It invited them. The distinction is important, and it is the entire point.

The Psychology Bit: Projective Tests and Their Limits

The scientific status of projective tests is genuinely contested. The Rorschach in particular has had a turbulent century: periodically attacked as pseudoscience (Wood et al., 2003) and periodically defended with updated scoring systems that restore modest predictive validity (Meyer et al., 2011). The TAT has similar problems with reliability and standardisation.

The honest position is that projective tests are more useful as clinical conversation-starters than as standardised measurement instruments. They generate material — narratives, associations, emotional responses — that a skilled clinician can work with productively. They are poor at diagnosing specific conditions but considerably better at opening up a person’s inner world for exploration.

This is exactly what tarot does well. It is not diagnosing anything. It is generating material for reflection. The standards we apply to it should therefore be the standards of a clinical conversation tool, not a psychometric test — and by those standards, it performs rather well.

Relevant references: Exner, J.E. (2003). The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System. Wiley. Murray, H.A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Harvard University Press.

Part Three: Jung, archetypes, and the suspiciously convenient Major Arcana

Carl Jung — who appears in this series of articles with the regularity of a recurring character in a novel, which is either a coincidence or a synchronicity depending on your philosophical commitments — became interested in tarot as early as the 1930s. His interest was not in prediction. It was in symbolism, and specifically in what he called archetypes: universal patterns of human experience that recur across cultures, mythologies, and dreams, and which he believed were encoded in what he called the collective unconscious — a layer of the psyche shared across humanity, containing the accumulated experiential wisdom of the species.

The Major Arcana of the tarot maps onto archetypal experience with a coincidence so thorough that it would be suspicious if we did not already know about the Italian card game.

Consider: The Fool (new beginnings, the leap into the unknown, the untested self). The Magician (will, agency, the capacity to shape circumstances). The High Priestess (intuition, hidden knowledge, the unconscious itself). The Tower (sudden disruption, the collapse of false structures). Death (transformation, ending, the thing we resist that turns out to be necessary). The World (completion, integration, the journey arrived at).

These are not arbitrary images. They are a map of the kinds of situations, transitions, and experiences that every human life contains. Not every life is in the same order, or with the same emphasis, or with the same outcome, but every life encounters the Fool’s precipice, the Tower’s collapse, the Hermit’s necessary withdrawal, the Wheel’s unwelcome reminder that circumstances change whether we are ready or not. The Major Arcana endures because it describes experiences that are genuinely universal. Jung would have called these archetypal. An anthropologist might call them cross-cultural. A cynic might call it vague enough to apply to anything. All three positions contain some truth.

The Psychology Bit: Archetypes and Analytical Psychology

Jung’s concept of archetypes has had a complicated reception in academic psychology. The specific claim — that archetypes are inherited psychological structures encoded in a collective unconscious — is not scientifically testable in its strong form and has not been adopted by mainstream psychology.

However, the weaker version of the claim has fared better: that certain narrative patterns, character types, and experiential themes recur with remarkable consistency across cultures, mythologies, and individuals. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (1949), the narrative structures identified by Vladimir Propp in folk tales (1928), and more recent work in evolutionary psychology on universal emotional themes all suggest that there are indeed recurring patterns in human experience that transcend cultural particularity.

The tarot’s Major Arcana functions as a catalogue of these recurring patterns. Whether their origin is Jungian collective unconscious, evolutionary psychology, or the accumulated folk wisdom of European culture is, for practical therapeutic purposes, largely irrelevant. What matters is that the patterns resonate — and they do, with striking consistency, across very different people and situations.

Jung, C.G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press. Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.

Part Four: The art of asking better questions

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly, without mystical dressing.

Most of the time, most of us are not thinking very carefully about our lives. We are reacting, habituating, following established patterns, and telling ourselves the same stories we have always told ourselves about who we are and what is happening to us. We are, in the cognitive science term, operating on System 1 — the fast, automatic, associative thinking that handles most of daily life with admirable efficiency and almost no genuine reflection.

What interrupts System 1 is novelty, incongruity, or deliberate effort — the three conditions that activate what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2: slow, deliberate, effortful thinking that can actually examine assumptions, notice contradictions, and generate new perspectives. The problem is that System 2 is metabolically expensive and fundamentally lazy. It resists activation. It requires a prompt.

A tarot reading, whatever else it is, is an extremely effective prompt. It works in several distinct ways, and it is worth separating them.

The random card as unexpected mirror

You draw the Three of Swords — three swords piercing a heart, a sky full of rain — in a position nominally representing your current emotional state. You are, consciously, absolutely fine. You have been telling people you are absolutely fine for three months. You are extremely fine, thank you.

And now there is this card, sitting on the table, and something in your chest does something involuntary.

The card has not diagnosed you. The card is a piece of illustrated cardboard. What has happened is that the image has bypassed your habitual narrative, the protective story of being fine, and landed somewhere that the protective story had been carefully covering. The randomness was essential. If someone had sat across the table and said “I think you might be grieving something,” you would have deflected. The card cannot be deflected in the same way, because you drew it, and because the interpretation is yours to make or refuse. Both the agency and the ambiguity serve the psychological function.

This is the tarot’s most important property: it can say things that other people cannot say to you, and that you cannot easily say to yourself, because it arrives from outside your habitual self-narrative while being interpreted entirely within it. The card is the stranger who tells you what your friends have been too kind to mention.

Constraint as creative liberation

There is a well-established phenomenon in creativity research sometimes called the paradox of choice: the observation that unlimited options frequently produce paralysis, anxiety, and worse decisions than a constrained set of possibilities. Barry Schwartz documented this extensively in his 2004 book of the same name. When everything is possible, nothing feels right, because the cost of choosing one thing is the loss of every other thing, and that loss feels permanent.

A tarot reading introduces productive constraint. You drew these cards, not those cards. These specific images, in these specific positions, represent the frame within which you are being asked to think about your situation. This is not a limitation. It is a liberation. Instead of facing the open ocean of all possible ways to think about a problem, you are given a specific inlet; navigable, bounded, with a particular character. The constraint directs attention in ways that unconstrained reflection frequently fails to.

Poets know this. Sonnets work not despite the constraint of fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme, but because of it. The form forces particular choices, particular compressions, particular connections that would never have been made in free verse. The tarot spread is, in a very real sense, a thinking form a structured constraint that produces insights that open-ended rumination does not.

Externalisation and the third-person advantage

One of the most consistently robust findings in cognitive-behavioural therapy is the therapeutic value of externalisation: placing a problem, pattern, or part of oneself outside the self where it can be examined with something approaching objectivity. Narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990) built an entire modality on this principle. When a problem is externalised — given a name, a form, a location outside the person — the person can relate to it rather than simply being it.

A spread of tarot cards on a table externalises your situation with remarkable efficiency. Your circumstances, relationships, fears, and possibilities are represented by objects outside yourself — objects you can look at, rearrange mentally, argue with, and approach with the slightly greater objectivity that physical distance provides. The problem is no longer entirely inside you, where it is warm and dark and comfortable and has had years to make itself at home. It is out there, on the table, in the light, looking rather smaller and more manageable than it did a few minutes ago.

The Psychology Bit: Externalisation and Narrative Therapy

Michael White and David Epston’s Narrative Therapy (1990) developed the therapeutic practice of externalisation as a core technique: helping clients understand that they are not their problems, but rather people in relationships with problems that can be examined, named, and re-narrated. The therapeutic impact of this simple reframe has been extensively documented.

Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk’s research on ‘self-distancing’ (2011, 2017) demonstrates that adopting a third-person perspective on one’s own experiences — even linguistically, by referring to oneself by name rather than ‘I’ — significantly reduces emotional reactivity, improves decision-making, and increases the capacity for constructive self-reflection.

A tarot layout accomplishes something similar spatially: your situation is now represented by objects at arm’s length. The psychological benefit of this distance is real and measurable, even if the mechanism by which a playing card represents ‘your current emotional state’ involves no forces detectable by physics.

White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. Norton. Kross, E. & Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81-136.

Part Five: The randomness is a feature, not a bug

This is the part where the committed sceptic objects, and the objection is worth taking seriously. If the cards are drawn at random, how can the reading be meaningful? The image on the card bears no causal relationship to your actual situation. The universe has not arranged the deck. The cards do not know who you are. You might as well read tea leaves, examine the flight patterns of birds, or consult the relevant passages of a dictionary opened at random.

To which the answer is: yes, and those things also work, for exactly the same reason.

The randomness is not a flaw in the mechanism. It is the mechanism. Here is why.

When you draw a random card and are told it represents your current situation, you do not simply stare at it and wait for information to arrive. You engage with it. You ask, actively and often urgently: how does this apply to me right now? That question — forced by the combination of the card’s meaning and the position in which it was drawn — searches your actual experience for relevant material. The search is real. The material it retrieves is real. The connection you make between the card and your life is real. The card itself is random, but the psychological activity it prompts is anything but.

This is closely related to what psychologists call the generation effect: the well-replicated finding that information we generate ourselves is remembered more effectively and processed more deeply than information we receive passively. A therapist who tells you something about yourself is useful. But you arriving at the same insight yourself — prompted by a question, a card, an image, a conversation — is considerably more powerful, because the insight is now genuinely yours.

The tarot reading, at its best, does not deliver wisdom. It provokes the discovery of wisdom that was already present, waiting for the right question to bring it to the surface. The card's randomness is the question's randomness. And the right random question, it turns out, is often more useful than the most carefully considered one.

“The question the card asks is not one you would have asked yourself. That is precisely why it is useful. You have been asking the same questions for years. The answers have not improved noticeably.”

Part Six: What a rational tarot practice actually looks like

Having argued that tarot is a legitimate psychological tool, it is only honest to describe what using it that way actually involves — because it looks somewhat different from the midnight reading in the candlelit room with which we began.

The question is everything

Tarot used predictively asks: what will happen? Tarot used psychologically asks: what is happening in me right now, and what might I be failing to see about it? The second question is the useful one, because it is answerable. Nobody knows what will happen. You know rather more than you think about what is happening in you — but that knowledge is often buried under habitual narrative, defended against by ego, or simply not translated into language yet.

Good questions for a rational tarot practice include: What am I not allowing myself to see about this situation? What am I afraid this decision means about me? What story am I telling myself that might not be accurate? What am I avoiding, and what is the avoidance protecting? What would I advise a friend who brought me this situation? These questions are useful with or without tarot. The cards make them harder to dodge.

Interpretation as dialogue, not decree

The rational reader treats the card’s meaning not as a verdict but as a proposition — an opening move in a conversation with oneself. The traditional meaning of the card is the starting point, not the conclusion. What matters is not what does this card mean but what does this card mean to me, right now, in this situation? If the image resonates, the resonance is the data. If it does not resonate, that non-resonance is also data — worth examining, because sometimes the cards we most want to dismiss are the ones we most need to hear.

Hold the interpretation lightly

A reading is a snapshot, not a verdict. The appropriate response to a difficult card is not dread but curiosity: what does this pattern suggest? What might I do differently? Where is the agency in this situation that I have not yet claimed? The tarot is not issuing instructions from on high. It is prompting reflection. The difference matters enormously, both psychologically and ethically.

Used this way, tarot is not fortune-telling. It is a structured form of self-examination — one that uses the richness of symbolic imagery, the productivity of constraint, the mechanics of projection, and the surprising power of the random question to access parts of the mind that direct introspection frequently misses. It requires no supernatural claims. It produces real psychological value. And it is considerably more interesting than it looks from the outside.

Conclusion: The honest oracle

Let us return to the woman at the table with the candlelight and the cards.

She is not communicating with spirits. She is not reading the future in the fall of the cards. She does not have access to information about you that you have not provided through your expression, your posture, your responses, and the card that is now lying face-up between you, which you drew at random and which happens to depict exactly what you have been trying not to think about for the past six months.

What she is doing. if she is skilled and honest, is facilitating a conversation you could not easily have had with yourself. She is using the images on the cards as projective stimuli, the structure of the spread as a constraint that organises thought, the randomness of the draw as an interruption to your habitual self-narrative, and the interpretive framework of the tarot tradition as a shared vocabulary for experiences that are otherwise difficult to name. She is doing, in short, something that has genuine psychological utility — and she is doing it with a tool that was invented for an Italian card game.

The tarot is not magic. It is something considerably rarer and more useful: a technology of self-examination that has survived five centuries because it works, and that works because it is built — however accidentally — on a remarkably sophisticated understanding of how the human mind generates insight.

You do not have to believe in anything supernatural to use it. You do not have to abandon your scepticism, your scientific training, or your well-developed sense of the ridiculous. You just have to be willing to sit with an image, ask a genuine question, and pay attention to what comes up.

Which is, when you think about it, what good therapy asks you to do. The cards just have nicer pictures.

Alan /|\

Further Reading & References

Dummett, M. (1980). The Game of Tarot. Duckworth. [The definitive scholarly history of tarot as a card game.]

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jung, C.G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.

Murray, H.A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Harvard University Press.

Exner, J.E. (2003). The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System (4th ed.). Wiley.

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.

White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W.W. Norton.

Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Ecco Press.

Kross, E. & Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81–136.

Wood, J.M., Nezworski, M.T., Lilienfeld, S.O. & Garb, H.N. (2003). What’s Wrong with the Rorschach? Jossey-Bass.

Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Red Wheel/Weiser. [Accessible Jungian tarot scholarship.]

Pollack, R. (1980). Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Thorsons. [The standard reference for Rider-Waite-Smith symbolism.]

Jones, A. (2024). The Fool’s Journey: A History of the Tarot. [Available on my website)

Synchronicity

Jungian accident or meaningful coincidence?

You are thinking about someone you have not spoken to in years. A university friend, a former colleague, the cousin who moved abroad and the phone rings. It is them. Or you encounter the same obscure word three times in a single day, in three unrelated contexts. Or you dream about a death, and the next morning learn that someone has died. You tell the story later. You search for an explanation and find yourself, to your own mild surprise, reluctant to call it a mere coincidence.

Carl Gustav Jung had a word for this. He had a word for most things, which is either a virtue or a warning sign, depending on your relationship with Swiss psychiatrists. His word was synchronicity: the meaningful coincidence of events that have no causal relationship but are connected by their significance to the observer. He spent 30 years developing the concept, enlisted Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli as intellectual sparring partners, and published his definitive account in 1952, a work that delighted mystics, baffled physicists, and irritated sceptics in roughly equal measure. He was, it must be said, extremely good at this.

The Rational Mystic’s position on synchronicity is, characteristically, neither straightforward acceptance nor comfortable dismissal. Jung’s most controversial idea is also, I think, one of his most interesting. Not because it is correct in the way he believed it to be, but because it is pointing at something real about human experience that purely mechanistic accounts of the mind consistently fail to capture. The question is what, precisely, it is pointing at.

Part One: What Jung actually meant — and why he thought it mattered

Jung first articulated the concept of synchronicity in the 1920s, though he sat on it for decades before publishing, partly because he knew perfectly well how it would be received. The formal definition, from his 1952 essay: synchronicity is “an acausal connecting principle” — a meaningful coincidence between a psychic state and an external event that cannot be explained by conventional causality.

This definition is more carefully constructed than it might appear. Jung was not claiming that mind causes matter, or that the universe rewrites its own physical laws in response to the contents of individual psyches. He was making a philosophical claim about meaning as a real feature of experience, one that cannot be fully accounted for by a purely causal model of the world. The coincidence, for Jung, was not explained by the meaning; it was constituted by it. Meaning, in his framework, was not merely something minds projected onto events. It was something that events and minds participated in together.

His most famous example — one he used repeatedly because it was genuinely striking — involved a patient recounting a dream about a golden scarab when, at that precise moment, a scarabaeid beetle (the closest European equivalent) flew into the consulting room window. This, for Jung, was not proof that the universe was responding to his patient’s unconscious. It was an instance of a pattern he believed he had observed throughout his clinical practice: that psychologically charged moments — moments of breakthrough, transition, or deep emotional significance — seem to draw meaningful coincidences toward them.

The History Bit: Jung, Einstein, and the Pauli Effect

Jung’s intellectual engagement with synchronicity was not confined to clinical anecdote. In 1909, he had a formative conversation with Einstein — then a frequent dinner guest — about the possibility of a relativity of time and space that might accommodate acausal connections. Einstein later encouraged Jung to publish his ideas.

More remarkable was Jung’s twenty-five-year collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli had a legendary reputation among physicists for causing laboratory equipment to malfunction simply by entering a room — the ‘Pauli Effect,’ taken half-seriously by colleagues who had seen too many coincidences to dismiss it entirely. Pauli brought mathematical rigour and genuine scepticism to the collaboration; Jung brought clinical depth. Their joint publication, Naturerklärung und Psyche (1952), remains one of the more unusual documents in the history of either psychology or physics.

Pauli’s contribution was not an endorsement of synchronicity as Jung conceived it. It was an exploration of whether the emerging science of quantum physics — with its own deeply counterintuitive features of non-locality and observer-dependence — might provide a framework for thinking about acausal connections. The answer, ultimately, was: not in the way Jung hoped. But the conversation was genuinely interesting.

Part Two: The sceptical case — what is actually going on

The sceptical account of synchronicity is well-developed, well-evidenced, and, I think it is only honest to say, largely correct as far as it goes. Let us walk through the main mechanisms.

Apophenia: the pattern-making machine

The human brain is, at its core, a prediction machine. Its primary function is not to perceive reality accurately but to construct the most useful model of reality as quickly as possible, using the minimum available data. An essential component of this system is apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. This is not a malfunction. It is the system working as designed.

In evolutionary terms, a brain that spots non-existent patterns — hearing a predator in rustling leaves that is actually just the wind — pays only a small cost. A brain that fails to spot real patterns — not hearing the predator that is actually there — pays a much larger one. Apophenia is the result: a cognitive system tuned toward false positives, because the cost of a false negative is catastrophic. We see faces in clouds, intentions in random events, and narratives in sequences that have no narrative structure. We cannot help it. We were built this way.

The Psychology Bit: Apophenia and Patternicity

Michael Shermer (2011) coined the term ‘patternicity’ for the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise, identifying it as a fundamental feature of human cognition rather than an aberration. The neural basis is well-established: the brain’s default mode network — active when we are not engaged in specific tasks — is heavily involved in narrative construction, self-referential thought, and the attribution of meaning to events.

Klaus Conrad (1958) introduced ‘apophenia’ in a clinical context to describe the early stages of psychotic episodes, in which patients begin to perceive an overwhelming sense of significance in random events. The crucial distinction is one of degree and flexibility: healthy apophenia produces the feeling that a coincidence is meaningful but remains open to revision; pathological apophenia produces unshakeable certainty that resists disconfirmation.

Most synchronicity experiences sit firmly in the healthy range. This does not make them evidential. It makes them interesting.

The law of large numbers — and why we are terrible at statistics

Here is a thought experiment. If you have a social network of two hundred people — a modest figure for most adults — and each of them thinks about you on average once a month, that generates roughly 2,400 person-days per year on which someone is thinking of you without your knowledge. The probability that one of those instances coincides with a moment at which they happen to contact you is not negligible. Given the full population of such events across your entire social network and your entire life, the probability that this never happens even once is extremely small.

This is the law of large numbers applied to human social life, and it explains a great deal of what presents as synchronicity. We live in an extraordinarily large event-space.

Coincidences — even striking ones — are not merely possible but statistically inevitable, given the sheer volume of events, encounters, and thoughts that constitute a human life. The problem is not that coincidences happen. The problem is that we selectively remember the ones that astonish us and forget the vast sea of non-events that surround them.

The statistician’s version: we are not surprised that the lottery is won; we are surprised when we know the winner. The coincidence feels personal because it is personal — it happened to us, or someone we know. But personalness is not evidence of causation. It is a feature of how we experience probability.

Confirmation bias and the retrospective narrative

A dream about a death that precedes an actual death is remembered as prophetic. The dozens of dreams about death that preceded no such event are forgotten or not coded as significant. A chance encounter with a name or word that then recurs feels like a pattern. The thousand times that name or word was present in the environment without registering consciously are simply not part of the story.

This is confirmation bias operating on the raw material of experience: we notice and retain what confirms the hypothesis (this was meaningful) and discard what disconfirms it (this was random). The story of the synchronicity is constructed after the event, using selectively retained material, and then narrated as though the pattern was always there to be noticed. It was not. The pattern was assembled in the telling.

Part Three: What the sceptical account misses

So far, so debunking. Apophenia, large numbers, and confirmation bias: these three mechanisms account for the overwhelming majority of synchronicity experiences at the mechanistic level. A sceptic can close the file here with a clear conscience and move on.

I am not closing the file here. Not because I think the sceptical account is wrong — it is largely right — but because it is answering a different question than the one Jung was actually asking.

The sceptical account addresses whether synchronistic events have a cause beyond cognitive bias. Jung’s question was about what role the experience of meaningful coincidence plays in the life of the psyche. These are genuinely different questions, and conflating them produces a satisfying debunking that nonetheless walks past the interesting problem.

The phenomenology is real even when the mechanism is not supernatural

Something happens to people when they experience synchronicity. Not physically — no new causal force is detected, no quantum field is disturbed, no supernatural mechanism is at work. But psychologically, the experience of meaningful coincidence can be genuinely transformative. It can interrupt a fixed pattern of thinking, open a possibility that was previously foreclosed, or provide the felt sense of permission that allows a decision to be made.

Jung’s clinical insight — and it was genuinely clinical, grounded in decades of working with patients — was that synchronistic events tend to cluster around moments of psychological transition: individuation, crisis, bereavement, falling in love, or the breaking of a long-established pattern. It is at precisely these moments that the psyche is most activated, most attentive, and most primed to find significance in the environment.

The sceptical explanation for this clustering is straightforward: at moments of emotional intensity, we are more attentive, more primed to notice significance, and more likely to code events as meaningful. The synchronicity is not more frequent; it is more noticed. This explanation is probably correct. It does not, however, make the experience less real or less significant as a psychological event.

The Psychology Bit: Meaning-making and psychological transition

Research on post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996, 2004) consistently finds that the experience of finding meaning in adverse events, of perceiving a narrative or purpose in what has happened, is one of the strongest predictors of positive psychological outcomes following trauma. This does not require the meaning to be objectively ‘there’ in the events themselves; the act of meaning-making has effects that are independent of the accuracy of the meaning made.

Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, developed from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, places the drive toward meaning at the centre of human psychology. For Frankl, the capacity to find meaning in suffering was not a cognitive error but a fundamental human capacity, and one that had survival value in the most literal sense.

Synchronicity, viewed through this lens, is a meaning-making mechanism — one of the ways the psyche constructs narrative coherence from the raw material of experience. Whether that narrative accurately describes an acausal connection in the fabric of reality is a separate question from whether the construction is psychologically valuable.

The unus mundus and the hard problem — a suspicious coincidence

Jung grounded his theory of synchronicity in a concept he borrowed from medieval alchemy: the unus mundus, or ‘one world’. The idea that mind and matter are not two fundamentally separate substances (as Descartes proposed) but two aspects of a single underlying reality. Synchronicity, in his framework, was evidence of this underlying unity: moments at which the boundary between psyche and world becomes temporarily transparent.

This sounds like mysticism. It may be. But here is the suspicious coincidence that a Rational Mystic cannot simply walk past: the hard problem of consciousness — the question of why any physical process gives rise to subjective experience — remains entirely unsolved by contemporary science. We have no satisfactory account of how matter becomes mind.

The philosophical position known as panpsychism. This is the idea that everything has “a mind” or “consciousness”. The view that some form of experience or proto-experience is a fundamental feature of reality, not an emergent product of sufficiently complex brain states. It is no longer the fringe position it once was. Philosophers, including David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, and Galen Strawson, have advanced serious arguments in its favour.

Jung was not right about synchronicity in the specific way he thought he was right. The universe is not reorganising itself in response to the contents of individual psyches. But the broader intuition underlying his theory, that the relationship between mind and world is more intimate, more complex, and less fully captured by Cartesian dualism than mainstream science has assumed, is not obviously false. It is, in fact, a live question in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Part Four: How to live with synchronicity — practically

We have established that synchronicity experiences are real as psychological phenomena and largely explicable by well-understood cognitive mechanisms. The question that remains is the practical one: what, if anything, should we do with them?

As a diagnostic, not an oracle

Jung’s clinical use of synchronicity was not predictive — he was not using coincidences to tell people what would happen next. He was using them as diagnostic material: what does it mean that this person, at this moment, finds this particular coincidence significant? What does the felt meaning of the event reveal about the contents and preoccupations of the unconscious? What is the psyche drawing attention to by flagging this as important?

This is, I think, a genuinely useful reframe. When you notice a synchronicity — when a coincidence strikes you as meaningful — the interesting question is not “Is the universe sending me a message?” The interesting question is “What does it mean that I am finding this meaningful? What does my response to this coincidence reveal about what I am currently thinking, fearing, hoping, or working through?”

The coincidence becomes a mirror rather than a message. This preserves what is valuable in the synchronicity experience — the sense of being in a significant moment, the invitation to attention and reflection — without requiring the abandonment of a coherent epistemology. You do not have to believe the universe arranged the coincidence to find it useful.

As permission, not instruction

Many of Jung’s patients reported that synchronistic events gave them the courage to act on decisions they had already reached but felt unable to act on. The coincidence functioned not as new information but as permission — an external confirmation of an internal conviction they were not yet ready to own.

This is psychologically legitimate and, I would argue, not particularly mysterious. When we are in conflict about a decision, we often need something — a conversation, an event, a felt sense of rightness — to tip the balance from ambivalence to action. A coincidence that feels meaningful can serve this function perfectly well. It does not need to be supernatural to be useful. It needs to be experienced as significant, and the human capacity for significance is, as we have established, extensive.

The caveat is obvious but worth stating: permission is not always wise counsel. A synchronicity that feels like permission to make a decision you have been avoiding should prompt reflection, not immediate action. The question is whether the coincidence is revealing a genuine readiness you could not previously acknowledge, or whether it is providing a convenient rationalisation for something you want to do but know you should not.

Part Five: The honest position — sitting with the mystery

Let me say what I actually think, which is something slightly different from what either the committed Jungian or the committed sceptic would say.

I think Jung was wrong about the mechanism. The universe is not a sympathetic consciousness that arranges events to mirror the contents of individual psyches. The scarab beetle was coincidence. The dream about the death was coincidence. The friend who called at exactly the moment you were thinking of them was coincidence. Large numbers, apophenia, confirmation bias, and the selective architecture of human memory account for essentially all of the reported phenomena, and the burden of proof for anything beyond that has not been met.

I also think that coincidence is genuinely strange. Not magically strange, but philosophically strange in ways that a purely materialist account of the world tends to wave past rather quickly. The fact that consciousness exists at all — that there is something it is like to be you, reading this sentence, finding it meaningful or not — is not explained by any current scientific framework. The fact that the universe is comprehensible — that the mathematics that describes subatomic particles also describes the structure of galaxies, that the same physical laws obtain in every corner of the observable cosmos — is, if you look at it steadily, extraordinary.

Jung’s instinct that the relationship between mind and world is more intimate than Cartesian dualism suggests may be more prescient than his critics have acknowledged. Not in the specific way he thought. Not through an ‘acausal connecting principle’ that links psychic events to external ones, but in the broader sense that the neat division between observer and observed, between the experiencing mind and the experienced world, may be more philosophically porous than the common sense view assumes.

This is not a satisfying conclusion, if you were hoping for one. The Rational Mystic does not traffic in satisfying conclusions where the evidence does not support them. What it offers instead is the more uncomfortable and more honest position: Jung’s question was better than his answer. The experience of synchronicity is real and psychologically significant. The mechanism he proposed was not. The philosophical territory the concept gestures toward — the relationship between consciousness and reality — remains genuinely, fascinatingly open.

And if, in the meantime, you find yourself astonished by a coincidence — if the phone rings and it is the very person you were thinking of — you are permitted to find that strange. You are permitted to pause, to attend, to ask what this moment is asking you to notice. You do not have to call it a message from the universe. You can call it an opportunity to pay attention to your own life, which is, all things considered, exactly what Jung was trying to get his patients to do all along.

Conclusion: The meaningful accident

Synchronicity is, in the end, a word for the experience of finding meaning where science says there is none. It describes the moment at which the human meaning-making apparatus — running its ancient, elegant, deeply unreliable pattern-recognition software — flags an event as significant, and the psyche responds to that flag with something between wonder and recognition.

Whether there is anything in the universe corresponding to that flag is a question that remains open and is likely to remain open for some time. The hard problem of consciousness is not going to be solved this week. The relationship between observer and observed in quantum mechanics is not going to achieve consensus interpretation before Tuesday. The question of whether meaning is something minds project onto an indifferent universe, or something minds participate in with a universe that is rather more interesting than standard materialism assumes, is not going to be resolved by a blog article, however well-written.

What we can say is this. The experience of synchronicity is part of what it is to be human. It is woven into the texture of consciousness — into the way we construct narrative, seek pattern, and orient ourselves in time. Dismissing it as mere cognitive error misses what is interesting about it. Embracing it as evidence of a universe responsive to human desire mistakes the feeling of meaning for its confirmation.

The better path, and this, I admit, is easier to advocate for than to walk, is to hold the experience with curiosity and the explanation with humility. To find the coincidence genuinely astonishing without concluding that you know what it means. To use it as a prompt to pay closer attention to your own interior life, without outsourcing your decisions to the arrangements of beetles.

Jung spent a lifetime at this edge — between the explicable and the mysterious, between clinical rigour and genuine wonder. He did not always keep his balance. Neither will we. But the edge itself, I think, is exactly where the interesting questions live.

Alan /|\

Further Reading & References

Jung, C.G. (1952). Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Princeton University Press (1973 translation).

Jung, C.G. & Pauli, W. (1952). Naturerklärung und Psyche. Rascher Verlag, Zurich.

Shermer, M. (2011). The Believing Brain. Times Books.

Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.

Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.

Frankl, V. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Tedeschi, R.G. & Calhoun, L.G. (2004). Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.

Atmanspacher, H. & Fach, W. (2013). A Structural-Phenomenological Typology of Mind-Matter Correlations. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 58(2), 219–244.

Mansfield, V. (1995). Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making. Open Court Publishing.

Beitman, B.D. (2016). Connecting with Coincidence. Health Communications Inc.

I Think, Therefore I Am Confused:

A Manifesto for the Rational Mystic

On Why the Universe Probably Doesn’t Exist — But You Should Probably Still Pay Your Council Tax

The Problem With Reality (Besides Everything Else)

Let us begin, as all good philosophical investigations must, with an admission of profound uncertainty. Not the fashionable uncertainty of the postmodern dinner party, where everyone agrees that nothing is knowable and then argues passionately about where to order the takeaway. but genuine, rigorous, epistemologically-grounded uncertainty about the nature of reality itself.

I have spent the better part of three decades oscillating between scepticism and mysticism with the determined enthusiasm of a pendulum that has read too much Kant. The result of this rather unusual intellectual journey is what I call the position of the Rational Mystic: the view that the universe is simultaneously explicable through reason and irreducibly mysterious — and that anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling something or hasn’t thought about it hard enough.

This is not a wishy-washy ‘everything is valid’ relativism. This is a rigorous, carefully considered philosophical position with serious intellectual ancestors. It is the tradition that says: yes, let us apply the scalpel of reason to the world, but let us not be surprised when the scalpel discovers it is also being applied by the world to itself.

Welcome. Try to remain calm.

The Founding Fathers (and Occasional Mothers) of Rational Mysticism

George Berkeley and the Universe as a Very Convincing Idea

Our story begins — as so many of the best stories do, with an eighteenth-century Irish bishop who decided that matter doesn’t exist.

George Berkeley (1685–1753), Bishop of Cloyne and arguably the most cheerful nihilist in the history of the Church of Ireland, proposed what he called esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived. In Berkeley’s view, the physical world is not a collection of independently existing objects bumping about in the dark; it is a collection of ideas sustained in the mind of God and perceived by minds such as ours. Matter, in the Berkeleyan universe, is rather surplus to requirements.

Now, most people’s first response to this is the celebrated one attributed to Dr Samuel Johnson, who, upon hearing Berkeley’s argument, kicked a large stone and declared, ‘I refute it thus!’ Johnson’s foot, one suspects, had a different view on the matter. But here is the thing: kicking the stone proves nothing whatsoever. The resistance you feel, the hardness, the pain in your toe, is precisely the kind of perceptual experience Berkeley said reality consists of. He wasn’t claiming stones feel soft. He was claiming that ‘soft’, ‘hard’, and ‘stone’ are all mental constructs. Johnson’s bruised foot was Exhibit A.

Berkeley’s idealism. The view that mind is primary and matter is derivative forms the bedrock of what philosophers call Mentalism. Not the performance art of reading minds at corporate conferences (though that is also rather good), but the metaphysical position that the universe is, at its most fundamental, mental in nature. This is the first pillar of Rational Mysticism.

Immanuel Kant and the Thing You Can Never Actually Know

If Berkeley gave us the radical idea that reality might be mind-dependent, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) gave us the slightly more terrifying idea that even if there is an objective world out there, we can never actually know what it is really like. Kant, who reportedly never left his home town of Königsberg and yet managed to revolutionise Western philosophy from a modest flat, argued for a distinction between the phenomenal world — reality as we experience it, filtered through the apparatus of our senses and cognition — and the noumenal world — the thing-in-itself, das Ding an sich, which lurks behind experience like a philosophical bouncer refusing all entry.

To clarify: Things as they are in themselves, not mediated through perception by the senses or conceptualisation, and therefore unknowable.

According to Kant, space, time, and causality are not features of the world that we discover; they are features of the mind that we impose on raw sensory data. We don’t perceive a world and then categorise it. We categorise it first, and then perceive it. Our cognition, in other words, actively constructs what we take to be reality.

This is enormously important for the Rational Mystic position. It means that the mystical experience, the sense of transcending ordinary categories, the dissolution of subject and object, the feeling of touching something beyond conceptual thought, may not be delusional at all. It may be a glimpse, however brief and disorienting, of what lies on the other side of the Kantian partition. Not the phenomenal world we habitually inhabit, but the noumenal ground we habitually can’t.

Kant himself was Prussian and disciplined to follow this thought into mysticism. But the door he opened is wide enough to walk through.

Ernst von Glasersfeld and the Radical Constructivist’s Guide to Building Your Own Universe

Which brings us to Radical Constructivism, perhaps the most epistemologically subversive school of thought to emerge from the twentieth century without anyone outside academia noticing.

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010), Austrian-born polymath and intellectual provocateur, took Kant’s insight and sharpened it into something considerably more unsettling. Where Kant suggested our minds shape experience, von Glasersfeld argued that knowledge itself is not a representation of an independently existing reality, but a construction — a functional model built by the organism to navigate its environment. The word ‘reality,’ in radical constructivist terms, refers not to an external world we discover, but to constraints that push back on our constructions.

This is the crucial distinction: von Glasersfeld did not say the world does not exist. He said we can never know whether our model of it is true in the sense of corresponding to it. We can only know whether our model is viable — whether it works well enough to keep us alive, thinking, and capable of writing mildly ambitious philosophical blog posts.

The implications are profound. Science, in this view, does not discover truth; it constructs increasingly viable models. Religion does not describe cosmic reality; it constructs meaning-making frameworks. Mystical experience does not penetrate metaphysical reality; it disrupts and expands the boundaries of the constructed model. And the Rational Mystic occupies the peculiar but defensible position of regarding all of these activities as legitimate. None of them as definitively final.

Jean Piaget and the Developmental Architecture of the Knowable

Von Glasersfeld’s constructivism drew heavily on the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget (1896–1980), the Swiss polymath who spent decades observing children build increasingly sophisticated models of the world through their interactions with it. For Piaget, cognition is not the passive reception of information; it is active construction through cycles of assimilation (fitting new experience into existing schemas) and accommodation (revising schemas when experience refuses to fit).

What is charming, and deeply relevant for our purposes, is that Piaget’s framework is essentially mystical in structure. The most significant cognitive development happens not through confirmation but through disruption — through the experience of meeting something that does not fit, that exceeds the current model, that cannot be assimilated without something in you fundamentally changing. This is, as any contemplative practitioner would recognise immediately, precisely the phenomenology of genuine mystical experience.

The infant who discovers that objects persist when hidden — that the world doesn’t vanish when mother leaves the room — is experiencing a small but structurally identical version of the contemplative’s discovery that consciousness persists beneath and beyond the narrative self. Piaget called it object permanence. The Zen tradition calls it something rather more dramatic, but the epistemological structure is remarkably similar.

William James and the Pragmatic Case for Taking Mysticism Seriously

No account of Rational Mysticism would be complete without William James (1842–1910), American philosopher, psychologist, and the first person to apply genuinely rigorous intellectual tools to mystical experience without either dismissing it as pathology or uncritically accepting it as revelation.

In his landmark work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James identified four key characteristics of mystical states: noetic quality (the sense of genuine insight or knowledge), transiency (they don’t last, which is both a relief and a disappointment), passivity (they happen to you rather than being willed), and ineffability (language fails them, which is inconvenient for blog posts).

James’s philosophical framework — Pragmatism — argued that the meaning of any concept lies in its practical consequences. If a belief works: if it generates insight, reduces suffering, enhances function, expands one’s sense of what is possible — then it has a claim on our attention. The Rational Mystic endorses this wholeheartedly, while adding the important caveat: works for what? A belief can be pragmatically useful for emotional regulation while being epistemically hazardous if mistaken for literal truth. The art is in holding both simultaneously.

The Mentalist’s Position (Not the One With the Playing Cards)

Philosophical Mentalism: The Mind-First Universe

Let us be precise about what philosophical Mentalism claims, since it is frequently confused with a variety of less defensible positions — including the view that the universe is literally a thought in the mind of some cosmic being sitting in a celestial armchair, which is both theologically ambitious and rather unfalsifiable.

Philosophical Mentalism, in its most rigorous form, asserts that mental phenomena are ontologically primary — that mind, consciousness, experience, or some analogous category is more fundamental than the material structures we ordinarily take to be the building blocks of reality. This is distinct from idealism in that it need not posit a single divine mind sustaining everything; it is compatible with a spectrum of views from panpsychism (the view that consciousness is a basic feature of everything, rather as mass is) to neutral monism (the view that mind and matter are both expressions of some more fundamental substrate that is neither).

The hard problem of consciousness — David Chalmers’ formulation of the apparently unbridgeable explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience — lends unexpected contemporary support to the Mentalist position. We can explain, in principle, why neurons fire in particular patterns in response to red light. We cannot explain, in any currently available framework, why there is something it is like to see red. The ‘what it is likeness’ — qualia, in the technical vocabulary — stubbornly resists reduction to physics.

This is not, as materialists sometimes suggest, merely a gap in current knowledge that will eventually be plugged by better neuroscience. It is, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued in his celebrated 1974 paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, a structural feature of the problem. You could have a complete physical description of bat echolocation — every neural pathway, every sonar calculation, every millisecond of processing — and still have said nothing whatsoever about what it is like to experience it from the inside. This, for the Rational Mystic, is not an embarrassment to be explained away. It is a clue.

The Constructivist Meets the Contemplative: An Unlikely but Productive Friendship

Here is where things get genuinely interesting — and where the Rational Mystic position distinguishes itself from both unreflective scepticism and credulous mysticism.

If Radical Constructivism is correct that our models of reality are constructions rather than representations — if what we take to be ‘the world’ is a viability-tested edifice built by cognition from raw sensory data — then the contemplative traditions’ claim to access states beyond ordinary conceptual construction becomes not a retreat from reason but an extension of it. Meditation, in this framework, is not superstition. It is a systematic methodology for exploring the architecture of the constructed world from the inside.

The phenomenology of advanced contemplative practice maps, with striking precision, onto the constructivist’s account of how models work. The initial stages of meditation practice — concentration, relaxation of habitual thought patterns, the quietening of the narrative self — correspond precisely to the suspension of assimilation processes. The deeper stages — the dissolution of subject-object distinction reported consistently across traditions — correspond to something like a direct encounter with the process of construction itself, prior to the construction. And the insights that emerge: impermanence, interconnection, the contingency of the self — are not mystical fantasies. They are observations about the constructed nature of the model that any serious constructivist would recognise.

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch made this connection explicit in their remarkable 1991 work The Embodied Mind, which brought Buddhist phenomenology into direct dialogue with cognitive science and enactivism. Their argument — that cognition is not the processing of information about a pre-given world but the enaction of a world through the living body’s engagement with its environment — is Radical Constructivism with a contemplative nervous system.

So What Does a Rational Mystic Actually Believe?

Good question. And I shall answer it with the caveat that any answer is itself a construction and should be held accordingly.

The Rational Mystic holds the following positions; tentatively, provisionally, and with the perpetual willingness to revise in the face of better evidence or more compelling argument:

1. Reality is real enough. We are not solipsists. The constraints that push back on our constructions — the stone that hurts when kicked, the cancer that kills, the grief that overwhelms — are not invented. But our model of what those constraints fundamentally are is precisely that: a model.

2. Consciousness is not reducible to matter. This may mean consciousness is more fundamental than matter, or that both are expressions of something else, or that the categories themselves are insufficiently precise to capture what is actually going on. The honest position is not certainty but carefully maintained uncertainty.

3. Mystical experience is evidence of something. Not necessarily what the mystic reports it to be evidence of — the interpretation is always culturally shaped and conceptually mediated. But the experience itself — the dissolution of ordinary conceptual boundaries, the noetic quality, the profound sense of significance — is real, consistent across cultures and centuries, and deserves serious investigation rather than dismissal.

4. Reason is necessary but not sufficient. The rationalist tradition has given us science, medicine, democracy, and the ability to get from Cornwall to London in a mere four hours if we choose to believe the train schedule. These are not nothing. But reason operates on models, and the models are constructed, and the construction process itself lies beyond the reach of purely conceptual analysis. This is not anti-rational. It is what careful reasoning, followed far enough, reveals.

5. Mystery is not a deficiency. The Rational Mystic’s response to the genuinely inexplicable is not to paper it over with premature explanation, nor to retreat into comfortable irrationalism, but to sit with it. The mystery is not a problem to be solved. It is an invitation to a more honest and capacious relationship with what is.

In Conclusion: A Prescription for the Philosophically Bewildered

We live in an age that has largely abandoned the middle ground between two equally inadequate extremes: the hard-nosed materialist who dismisses any experience that cannot be measured as mere sentiment, and the credulous spiritualist who accepts any claim that cannot be measured as profound wisdom. Both positions involve a failure of intellectual courage: one refuses to look at the full range of evidence, and the other refuses to apply the necessary critical scrutiny.

The Rational Mystic occupies the uncomfortable, draught-prone, philosophically honest middle ground — the position that says: here is what reason can do, and here is what it cannot, and the boundary between those two territories is not a cause for despair but for genuine wonder.

George Berkeley said matter is mind. Kant said we can never know what’s behind the curtain. Von Glasersfeld said the curtain is something we made ourselves. Piaget said we made it by bumping into things. William James said the bumping sometimes produces transformative states that deserve serious attention. And somewhere, down the ages, in caves and cathedrals and Zen gardens and the occasionally baffling space between a perfectly executed piece of mentalism and an audience that cannot quite explain what just happened, something that might be called the ground of experience has been quietly present throughout.

That is the Rational Mystic’s position. Not comfortable, not complete, and certainly not finished. But honest. Rigorously, carefully, stubbornly honest.

And if you find that unsatisfying — if you would prefer a cleaner answer, a neater system, a philosophy you could summarise on a motivational poster — I understand entirely.

But I’m afraid the universe doesn’t do motivational posters.

It does, however, do extraordinary.

Alan /|\

Further Reading for the Philosophically Reckless

Berkeley, G. (1710). A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason

James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience

von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning

Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind

Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Philosophical Review, 83(4)

Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child

What quantum physics actually says and why the New Age got it wrong

Let us begin with a confession.

Somewhere out there, on a healing retreat, in a glossy bestseller, or in a TED talk delivered by someone with magnificent hair, a person is explaining quantum consciousness to a rapt audience. They are saying things like “the universe is fundamentally made of consciousness” and “quantum physics proves that your thoughts create reality.”

The audience nods.

Someone at the back weeps softly. A crystal is probably involved.

This article is for that audience.

Not to mock them, the hunger for meaning that drives people toward quantum mysticism is genuine, profound, and entirely human. But also, respectfully: no. Just... no.

Quantum physics is the most precisely tested scientific theory in human history. It does not say what it seems to say. And the gap between what it actually says and what is being sold under its name is so vast you could lose several parallel universes in it.

What follows is a tour of the real physics. Genuinely strange, genuinely wonderful, and in no need of embellishment, alongside a guided dissection of quantum quackery: the specific claims, why they are wrong, and what is actually interesting underneath them.

Bring your scepticism. Leave your crystal at the door for now…

Part One: What quantum physics actually is (and is not)

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behaviour of matter and energy at the smallest scales. Atoms, electrons, photons, and their even tinier cousins. It emerged in the early twentieth century when physicists discovered, to their considerable horror, that the universe at subatomic scales refuses to behave sensibly.

Things at the quantum scale do not have definite positions until they are measured. They exist in superpositions. multiple possible states simultaneously, and collapse into a single definite state only when observed. Particles can be entangled, meaning the measurement of one instantly determines the state of another regardless of the distance between them. Energy comes in discrete packets called quanta, not in smooth continuous flows. None of this makes intuitive sense. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, famously said that nobody understands quantum mechanics. He did not mean this as an invitation to make things up.

The Science Bit: Superposition

Superposition does not mean a particle is in two places at once in the way a person might be metaphorically ‘torn between two choices.’ It means the particle’s state is mathematically described by a wave function — a probability distribution of possible outcomes. When measured, that wave function collapses to a specific value. The particle was never definitely anywhere until then. This is deeply strange. It is, however, not a metaphor for human indecision.

The measurement problem — and the part that gets mangled

The aspect of quantum mechanics most enthusiastically abused by the New Age is the observer effect. In quantum mechanics, ‘observation’ — or more precisely, measurement — causes the wave function to collapse.

The New Age interpretation: human consciousness creates reality.

The actual physics: any physical interaction that carries information constitutes a ‘measurement.’

An ‘observer’ in quantum mechanics is not a meditating human with pure intentions. It is any physical system that interacts with the quantum system and becomes entangled with it — a photon, a detector, a stray air molecule. The word ‘observer’ was a regrettable choice of terminology by early physicists, and we have been paying for it in wellness retreats ever since.

Part Two: The Quantum Quackery Hall of Fame

Let us examine the greatest hits of quantum mysticism — not to be unkind to those who promote them, but because each one contains a genuinely interesting scientific idea that gets lost in the translation. The quackery, it turns out, is almost more interesting than the nonsense being sold.

Exhibit A: ‘Quantum consciousness’ — thoughts create reality

The claim, made most famously in the film What the Bleep Do We Know? and in Deepak Chopra’s extensive bibliography, is that quantum consciousness means human thought directly influences the physical world at the quantum level — and therefore, by extension, at every level. Think positive thoughts: manifest positive reality. Think negatively: collapse your own wave function of abundance. Or something.

The actual physics: quantum effects occur at scales of 10⁻³⁵ metres (the Planck scale) or at minimum in subatomic particles. The human brain operates at scales billions of times larger. At biological temperatures and scales, quantum coherence — the fragile condition necessary for quantum effects — collapses almost instantaneously due to a process called decoherence. The brain is warm, wet, and noisy. From a quantum perspective, it is a catastrophically messy environment.

The Science Bit: Decoherence

Quantum coherence — the maintenance of quantum superpositions — is destroyed almost instantaneously when a quantum system interacts with its environment. At room temperature in a biological system, coherence times are on the order of femtoseconds (10⁻¹⁵ seconds). Neural signals operate on millisecond timescales — roughly a trillion times slower. Any quantum effects in the brain would be washed out by thermal noise long before they could influence cognition.

The Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orchestrated Objective Reduction’ (Orch-OR) hypothesis does propose quantum processes in neuronal microtubules as the basis for consciousness — and while it is a legitimate scientific hypothesis worthy of investigation, it remains highly speculative and contested. The mainstream neuroscientific view is that consciousness arises from classical, not quantum, neural processes.

This is not to say the question of consciousness is uninteresting — it is arguably the most interesting question in all of science. The hard problem of consciousness: why subjective experience exists at all, why there is something it is like to be you reading this sentence — remains genuinely, beautifully unsolved. We do not need quantum mysticism to appreciate that. The mystery is already profound enough without borrowing the vocabulary of particle physics and hoping nobody notices.

Exhibit B: Quantum entanglement and psychic connection

Quantum entanglement is perhaps the strangest confirmed phenomenon in all of physics. Two particles, once entangled, share a quantum state such that measuring one instantaneously determines the state of the other — regardless of the distance between them. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” and spent a considerable portion of his later career trying to prove it did not exist. Experiments have confirmed that it does.

The New Age extrapolation: entanglement proves that all things are connected, that psychic phenomena are real, and that distant healing, telepathy, and the power of prayer have a scientific basis.

The actual physics: entanglement is real, but it cannot be used to transmit information. This is known as the no-communication theorem. The correlations between entangled particles are only visible when you compare measurements, which requires a classical, slower-than-light channel. You cannot send a thought, a healing intention, or a lottery number via quantum entanglement. Physicists have checked. Repeatedly. With some frustration.

Exhibit C: The law of attraction as quantum physics

The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 publishing phenomenon, proposed that a “Law of Attraction” — rooted, it claimed, in quantum physics — means that like attracts like at an energetic level, and that focusing on what you desire will cause the universe to provide it. The book sold 30 million copies. Quantum physicists were not consulted.

The physics: there is no quantum law of attraction. None. The closest thing in physics is the exchange of virtual particles between charged particles — which is emphatically not what is being described. What the Law of Attraction actually describes, to the extent it describes anything real, is a collection of well-documented cognitive phenomena: confirmation bias, attentional priming, goal-directed behaviour, and motivated cognition. These are real, studied, and interesting. They just do not require a misappropriated theory of subatomic physics to explain them.

The Science Bit: What the Law of Attraction actually is

Goal-setting research (Gollwitzer, 1999; Locke & Latham, 2002) shows that clearly articulated intentions genuinely improve goal attainment — not because the universe rearranges itself, but because conscious focus changes what we notice, attend to, and act upon. The Reticular Activating System — the brain’s relevance filter — prioritises information related to current goals. This is why buying a red car suddenly makes red cars visible everywhere. The universe has not filled up with red cars. Your brain has started counting them.

This is genuinely useful psychology. It does not require quantum anything.

Part Three: What quantum physics actually tells us about reality (and it is strange enough)

Here is the deeply ironic thing about quantum quackery: the actual physics is more philosophically challenging, more genuinely weird, and more resistant to comfortable interpretation than anything the wellness industry has invented.

The Copenhagen interpretation — the dominant framework for most of the twentieth century — holds that quantum systems do not have definite properties until measured, and that asking what the electron was doing before measurement is literally meaningless. The universe, at its foundations, is probabilistic, not deterministic. There is no hidden clockwork beneath the quantum foam.

The Many Worlds interpretation, developed by Hugh Everett in 1957, proposes that every quantum measurement causes the universe to branch — all possible outcomes occur, each in its own branch of reality. You are reading this in one branch. In another, you put it down after the first paragraph to make tea. This is a legitimate, seriously held interpretation of quantum mechanics, with adherents among working physicists. It is also, frankly, extraordinary.

The pilot wave theory (de Broglie-Bohm) restores determinism by proposing a hidden wave that guides particle trajectories — but at the cost of absolute non-locality. The universe, in this view, is instantaneously, irreducibly connected at every point. Choose your discomfort.

What quantum physics genuinely tells us is this: reality at its foundations is not the solid, deterministic, locally causal thing your intuition assumes it to be. This is a real philosophical revolution — one that should humble us, delight us, and make us profoundly cautious about confident metaphysical claims. The universe is stranger than we supposed. This is a reason for wonder, not for certainty.

Part Four: Can there be a rational mysticism of quantum reality?

Here is where The Rational Mystic must come clean about something. The impulse behind quantum consciousness — the sense that mind and matter are not radically separate things

Descartes imagined that consciousness is not an embarrassing passenger in a mechanical universe — it is not obviously wrong. It is just not something quantum mechanics has proven.

The hard problem of consciousness — coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995 — remains entirely open. We have no satisfactory account of why any physical process gives rise to subjective experience. We can describe the neural correlates of seeing red.

We cannot explain why there is something to it; it feels like seeing it. This is a genuine gap in our understanding, large enough to accommodate serious philosophical inquiry into the relationship between consciousness and the physical world.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his controversial 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, argued that the standard materialist account of evolution cannot adequately explain the emergence of consciousness, not because of God, but because consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality that requires new frameworks to understand. This is a philosophical argument worth taking seriously, not a quantum woo claim.

The rational mystic’s position: we do not yet know what consciousness is or how it arises. This is a genuinely open question. It does not license speculation dressed in the vocabulary of particle physics. But it does mean that wonder, humility, and a willingness to sit with mystery are not irrational responses to the universe. They may be the most rational responses available.

Conclusion: Put down the quantum and step away slowly

Quantum physics is not a spiritual tradition. It is not a metaphor for personal transformation. It is not a mechanism for manifesting parking spaces, healing crystals, or the love life you deserve. It is the most successful predictive theory in the history of science, accurate to eleven decimal places, and responsible for lasers, semiconductors, MRI scanners, and the screen on which you are probably reading this.

The people who invoke quantum mechanics in the service of quantum consciousness and cosmic manifestation are not engaging with physics. They are borrowing its authority — its cultural prestige as the hardest, most counterintuitive science — and attaching it to ideas that have nothing to do with it. This is understandable. Science is the dominant source of epistemic authority in the modern world, and meaning-seeking is deeply human.

But here is what I will offer in place of quantum woo: the actual physics is stranger, richer, and more philosophically profound than anything being sold at the consciousness conference. A universe that is fundamentally probabilistic. That is non-local. That may be branching into infinite versions of itself with every quantum event. That contains a hard problem of consciousness that no materialist theory has solved. That nobody — not a single physicist alive — fully understands.

That is a universe worth being mystified by. No misrepresentation required.

Further Reading

Feynman, R.P. (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press.

Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press.

Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford University Press.

Carroll, S. (2019). Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. Dutton.

Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos. Oxford University Press.

Baggott, J. (2013). Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth. Pegasus.

Alan /|\

The Science of Why You Cannot Trust Your Own Memory: and What Mindfulness Actually Does About It

The human brain, that three-pound monument to evolutionary compromise, is extraordinarily good at a great many things. It can recognise a face in a crowd, solve differential equations, compose symphonies, and simultaneously worry about whether it left the gas on. What it cannot do, despite its considerable confidence on the matter, is accurately store and faithfully replay past events. It does something considerably more creative than that. It reconstructs them. Every single time. From whatever materials happen to be lying around.

Think of it less as a recording device and more as a theatrical production company with a very small budget, an unreliable cast, and a director who has strong feelings about narrative arc. The show that gets performed is always based on true events.

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The Filing Cabinet That Rewrites Its Own Files

The foundational villain in this story is a process called reconstructive memory, and the person who did the most to ruin everyone’s comfortable assumptions about it is Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist who has spent five decades demonstrating, with escalating thoroughness, that human memory is roughly as reliable as a rumour passed through a village pub on a Saturday night.

In her most celebrated experiments, Loftus showed people footage of traffic accidents and then asked them leading questions. Participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when they ‘smashed’ into each other recalled significantly higher speeds than those asked about cars that ‘contacted’ each other. Subsequently, in a detail that should concern anyone who has ever been an eyewitness to anything, some confidently remembered seeing broken glass that was not, in fact, in the footage at all. The word ‘smashed’ had manufactured a memory from nothing but implication and goodwill. The brain, eager to be helpful, had filled in what it assumed must have been there. This is, if you think about it, either wonderful or absolutely terrifying, depending on how much faith you have historically placed in your own recollections.*

The mechanism responsible is called post-event information incorporation, and the reason it works so seamlessly is that the brain does not store memories the way a library stores books, fully formed, catalogued, retrievable and intact. Instead, different elements of an experience are encoded across multiple brain regions simultaneously. The hippocampus indexes the event, the amygdala saturates it with emotional tone, the sensory cortices retain fragments of texture, sound, and smell, and the prefrontal cortex imposes narrative meaning. When you recall something, these elements are collected, assembled, and delivered to consciousness as a coherent experience. What actually gets assembled, however, depends enormously on the contextual cues available at the moment of recall; ncluding things that were not present at the original event at all. New information gets woven in. Gaps get filled. The plot is tidied. The story improves.

THE NEUROSCIENCE, BRIEFLY

Memory storage and retrieval are not the same process running in reverse. Encoding distributes fragments across the cortex. Recall is active reconstruction, co-ordinated by the hippocampus, coloured by the amygdala, and narrativised by the prefrontal cortex — a process during which the memory itself temporarily becomes unstable and susceptible to revision. Every time you remember something, you are also, in a small but measurable way, changing it.

There is a process called memory reconsolidation that makes this even more vertiginous. When you recall a memory, it briefly becomes chemically labile — literally re-editable at the synaptic level. The brain then re-saves it, but in whatever state it was in at the moment of retrieval, incorporating the mood you are in, the conversation you were just having, the story you have been telling yourself about what kind of person you are. Repeated recall does not preserve memories. It preserves an increasingly revised edition of memories. You are not remembering the thing that happened. You are remembering the last time you remembered it, which was a memory of the time before, which was already an interpretation of the original, which was itself an incomplete encoding of a reality filtered through your pre-existing assumptions and mild indigestion.

It is turtles all the way down. Some of them are lying. Most of them mean well.

The Source Monitoring Problem, or: Was That Me or Radio 4?

Memory not only distorts content. It is also, with magnificent consistency, rather bad at remembering where information came from. Cognitive psychologists call this source monitoring failure, and it explains why you will periodically offer someone an idea as if it were your own, having entirely forgotten that you read it in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room four years ago. This is not plagiarism by intent. It is plagiarism by neurological architecture, and there is essentially no defence against it except to read less widely and become considerably more boring.

The brain assigns source labels — ‘I experienced this,’ ‘I heard this,’ ‘I imagined this’ — using contextual cues: sensory richness, spatial detail, emotional texture. When those cues are weak, because the original encoding was shallow or distracted or simply not very interesting, the source attribution breaks down. The brain files the information under ‘mine’ because it cannot find a more specific folder. This is also one of the more credible explanations for déjà vu. A probable accidental misfiling of a new experience under ‘already processed,’ producing the unsettling sensation that you have been here before, in this exact conversation, with this exact slightly baffled look on your face. You have not. Your hippocampus has simply sent the wrong notification.

Source monitoring failures are also, in a less charming register, one of the mechanisms behind the formation of wholly false memories — memories of things that never happened at all, held with complete subjective certainty, sometimes in vivid detail. This has had consequences of genuine gravity in legal contexts, where eyewitness testimony remains stubbornly persuasive despite decades of evidence suggesting it warrants considerably more scepticism than it generally receives from juries, judges, and viewers of crime dramas.

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Your Family Has Been Corrupting Your Memory For Decades and Everybody Did It by Accident

Here is where it gets personally uncomfortable at Christmas. Not only is your memory susceptible to distortion from your own internal processes, but it is also exquisitely, almost chivalrously vulnerable to distortion from other people simply telling you things. The misinformation effect. Loftus again, having apparently decided that one career spent ruining people’s confidence in their own minds was not sufficient, demonstrates that exposure to misleading post-event information reliably corrupts how people subsequently remember the event itself.

Every family gathering is, from this perspective, a slow-motion memory corruption exercise being conducted with entirely affectionate intentions by people who are simply mistaken. Your aunt insists your grandfather said something inspiring. Your mother insists he said something rather different. Your brother is absolutely certain the whole episode happened in the kitchen, whereas you have a vivid and specific memory of the garden, including the particular quality of the light. Over several retellings, a composite version emerges — a kind of averaging of confabulations — that does not precisely match anyone’s original experience but that everyone eventually converges upon and defends with mild aggression if challenged.

This is called memory conformity, and it is accelerated when one person in the group is more confident, more emphatic, or simply louder. The socially dominant version of a shared memory tends to win, not because it is more accurate, but because brains find social consensus more metabolically convenient than sustained disagreement. Your memories are, in a meaningful sense, partly collaborative fictions you have written with your relatives. This explains quite a lot about families, if you let it.

Emotion Does Not Preserve Memory. It Gives It a More Convincing Costume.

You might reasonably suppose that highly emotional memories, the ones that feel seared in, the ones you would swear by, would at least be faithfully stored. The brain would not be cavalier with the things that mattered most, surely? The brain is cavalier with precisely these memories. What emotion does is not improve accuracy. It improves confidence, vividness, and the sense of narrative inevitability. These are entirely different qualities and considerably less useful ones, epistemologically speaking.

Flashbulb memories, those luminously clear recollections of exactly where you were when something momentous happened, complete with sensory detail and emotional texture, are remembered with extraordinary subjective certainty. They are also demonstrably inaccurate in many specifics in repeated studies when checked against contemporaneous accounts. The vividness is real. The accuracy is optional. The amygdala, in its enthusiasm for flagging important events, turns up the subjective signal strength without in any way checking the content for factual precision. It is the neurological equivalent of a very confident person who is completely wrong but says so loudly.

ONE RATHER BRACING IMPLICATION

The memories you feel most certain about, the ones you would stake your reputation on in an argument, may be precisely the ones most worth examining with a raised eyebrow. High emotional salience produces high confidence. High confidence produces very poor calibration. The certainty is genuine. The accuracy is a separate and largely unrelated question.

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So What Does Mindfulness Actually Do About Any of This?

At this point, you may be experiencing a mild existential wobble, which is entirely appropriate. The correct response to learning that your memory is an enthusiastic creative writer rather than a court stenographer is not, however, paralysis. It is the cultivation of what we might call epistemological lightness, a willingness to hold your own recollections with somewhat less conviction, combined, if you are feeling constructive about it, with some actual cognitive practices that address the structural problems. This is where mindfulness comes in, provided we are talking about the real thing and not the version involving scented candles and an app that costs £12.99 a month.

What the research actually addresses is a specific combination: attentional regulation and non-judgmental present-moment awareness. The deliberate, sustained, curious noticing of what is actually happening right now, without immediately converting it into a story about what it means, who is to blame, and how it relates to something that happened in 1987. Not enlightenment. Not bliss. Just: paying attention, on purpose, with something resembling honesty.

The first thing this does for memory is improve what researchers call metacognitive awareness, the capacity to observe your own mental processes rather than being entirely subsumed by them. This is directly relevant because most of the memory’s distortions are invisible from the inside. Recalling something feels like receiving a transmission from the past. Metacognitive awareness introduces a small but structurally significant gap between the experience and the assumption. A moment of noticing that what is happening is reconstruction, not replay. ‘I am building a story about the past right now’ rather than ‘the past is informing me of facts.’ The gap is modest. The implications are rather large.

Neuroimaging research has found that sustained mindfulness practice increases grey matter density in the prefrontal cortex and strengthens its connectivity with the hippocampus — two of the main players in memory accuracy and contextual labelling. More practically, mindfulness practitioners show improved performance on source-monitoring tasks, making fewer confident false attributions and demonstrating greater tolerance for the genuinely uncomfortable sensation of not being sure where something came from. It turns out that sitting quietly with uncertainty is not just a contemplative virtue. It is also, somewhat unexpectedly, a cognitive skill that makes your memory less wrong.

Presence as a Prophylactic: The Dull but Important Part

Memory research consistently demonstrates that the single greatest predictor of accurate later recall is the quality of attention at the moment of original encoding. A poorly attended experience — and most of our experiences are, if we are honest, rather poorly attended, owing to our habit of simultaneously living our lives and narrating them internally — produces a thin, detail-poor memory trace that is maximally vulnerable to subsequent distortion. The brain, presented with a patchy original to reconstruct, fills in the gaps enthusiastically and incorrectly.

A richly attended experience, by contrast, produces a more detailed trace with better contextual anchoring. The brain has more actual material to work with and less need to confabulate. Being genuinely present in your life. Attending to the texture of what is actually happening rather than the ongoing internal commentary about what it means — produces experiences that are more accurately stored and, subsequently, more faithfully retrieved.

There is something almost entertainingly paradoxical about this. The best thing you can do for the accuracy of your memories of the past is to spend considerably less time in the past (and the future, where your mind also spends a great deal of time that the present moment did not ask for), and considerably more time in the immediate now. The hippocampus does not care about your plans for Thursday or your ongoing retrospective analysis of a conversation from 2019. It cares about what is actually happening in front of you, right now, encoded richly, with context intact.

The Buddha, so far as we can tell, did not frame it in terms of hippocampal consolidation mechanics. But the prescription — be here, attend fully, notice without immediately editorialising — maps onto the neuroscience with a neatness that is either deeply satisfying or faintly suspicious, depending on your priors.

The Amygdala, Emotional Regulation, and Why Calming Down is Cognitively Productive

Mindfulness also addresses memory distortion through its effects on emotional regulation, which sounds like a secondary concern but is, in practice, rather important. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, threat detector, and enthusiastic dramatiser of experience, is one of the main mechanisms by which memories are over-saturated with emotional intensity during encoding, producing the false confidence and vivid inaccuracy described above. Practices that reduce amygdala reactivity reduce this interference.

Mindfulness demonstrably reduces amygdala reactivity, as measured by both self-report and neuroimaging. Reduced reactivity at the moment of encoding means memories are stored with less emotional amplification, less narrative distortion applied by a panicking alarm system, and better contextual integrity. You still feel things, which is generally desirable. You simply feel them at a slightly more calibrated volume, which turns out to be better for epistemological accuracy even if it occasionally makes for less gripping dinner party anecdotes.

THE PRACTICAL SUMMARY, FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN PATIENT

Mindfulness practice addresses memory’s structural unreliability in four broadly supported ways: it improves encoding quality through better present-moment attention; it strengthens source monitoring to reduce false attribution; it enhances metacognitive awareness of the constructive nature of recall; and it reduces the amygdala-driven emotional amplification that makes vivid memories so confidently inaccurate. This will not make you omniscient. It will make you slightly less confidently wrong. In the current epistemic climate, this qualifies as an achievement.

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A Modest Proposal for Holding Your Past More Lightly

None of this is an argument that memory is useless, or that the past is unknowable, or that we should all become insufferable epistemological agnostics who refuse to commit to a version of events at social occasions. Memory is a remarkable and largely functional system that has served the species well for an impressively long time. Its creative tendencies are not bugs. They are features. The capacity to generalise from incomplete data, to extract patterns from fragmentary experience, to construct a continuous narrative of selfhood from a series of poorly-encoded moments — these are enormously useful capabilities. The filing system is creative, not broken. It simply needs to be used with appropriate humility rather than aggressive certainty.

What the science suggests, in the end, is this: hold your memories with a somewhat lighter grip. When you feel absolutely certain about what was said, what happened, and whose fault it all was, treat that certainty as reliable data about your emotional state rather than documentary evidence of fact. When someone else remembers it differently, entertain the genuine possibility — not just as a rhetorical concession, but as a real hypothesis — that both versions are confabulations assembled from incomplete material, and that the interesting question is not who is right but what each version reveals about how you have each made meaning from experience.

And perhaps, occasionally, be present. Not in a mystical sense, though there is nothing wrong with a little mysticism handled responsibly. Just: here, now, attending to what is actually in front of you, with something approaching genuine curiosity rather than continuous internal commentary. Not because it will produce enlightenment, but because your hippocampus will have better material to work with, and future-you will be able to reconstruct it more faithfully.

Or at least will reconstruct it. With considerable confidence. Which, as we have now established at some length, is emphatically not the same thing.

But it is, given the alternative, rather the best we can do.

❖ ❖ ❖

Alan /|\

How a forgotten 1980s satire became the most accurate political forecast since Nostradamus — and considerably funnier

“The button is... where exactly?” — A question never far from the minds of satirists, screenwriters, and, one suspects, several sitting heads of state.

The Show Nobody Remembers (But Should)

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1982. Margaret Thatcher was busy inventing modern misery, Ronald Reagan was cheerfully confusing film scripts with foreign policy, and somewhere in the ITV schedules, tucked between a quiz show and a programme about caravanning, a six-episode satire called Whoops Apocalypse was quietly predicting everything that would go wrong with the world for the next four decades.

Written by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, the same gentlemen later responsible for One Foot in the Grave, which tells you everything about their cheerful worldview, Whoops Apocalypse depicted a world stumbling toward nuclear annihilation through a combination of political idiocy, military incompetence, religious fanaticism, and leaders whose grip on reality was, at best, approximate.

The American President, ‘Sonny’ Montague (played with magnificent vacancy by Barry Morse), had undergone experimental brain surgery that left him quoting Batman comics during international crises. The Soviet leadership was barely more coherent. A fundamentalist religious group held the balance of geopolitical power. Various third-party actors pursued agendas that served no rational purpose whatsoever.

It was, of course, a comedy. The question now is: was it also a manual?

A Brief and Alarming Plot Summary

For the uninitiated and given that Whoops Apocalypse has never received a proper streaming release, the uninitiated are most of you, the series follows the chain of catastrophic misunderstandings, ego-driven miscalculations, and outright stupidity that propels the superpowers toward mutually assured destruction. There is a missing nuclear warhead. There are incompetent intelligence services. There is a fictional Middle Eastern nation whose oil wealth makes it the pivot of everyone’s foreign policy. There is a British Prime Minister so monumentally useless that he makes previous incumbents look like Pericles.

The 1986 film adaptation (a loose sequel of sorts, starring Peter Cook, Michael Richards, and Alexei Sayle) pushed the absurdism further, adding a secret weapon called the ‘Deathhead Scramble’ and a Ayatollah figure of magnificent implausibility. It flopped at the box office, which is what tends to happen when reality starts competing with satire on roughly equal terms.

The core satirical engine of both the TV series and the film, however, remains as relevant today as a newly sharpened pencil: leaders who are not fully in possession of their faculties, making decisions of apocalyptic consequence, whilst surrounded by advisors too frightened, too ambitious, or too stupid to say ‘I beg your pardon, but have you actually thought this through?’

Fiction Meets Reality: A Comparative Study in Horror

Let us now perform the slightly uncomfortable exercise of holding the script of Whoops Apocalypse up against the current geopolitical landscape and seeing how much light shines through. I warn you: rather a lot.

The Cognitively Impaired Superpower Leader. In the series, President ‘Sonny’ Montague’s brain operation has left him incapable of distinguishing between geopolitical reality and the plot of a 1960s comic book. His aides manage his public appearances with a combination of medication and optimism. The comedy arises from the terrifying gap between the gravity of his office and the vacancy behind his eyes. Marshall and Renwick wrote this as absurdist exaggeration. The past decade of Western politics has treated it as a character brief.

The Unpredictable Ideologue. The show’s fundamentalist religious leader, the ‘Deacon’, pursues goals intelligible only within a theological framework shared by almost nobody else. He is immovable, certain of divine mandate, and entirely unconcerned with the practical consequences of his actions. The writers clearly intended him as a portrait of dangerous irrationality in positions of power. They did not intend him as a job description for multiple actual world leaders, and yet…

The Missing Weapons. A significant portion of the plot hinges on a nuclear warhead that nobody can quite locate. This was satire in 1982. Since then, we have had genuine international incidents involving missing radioactive material, lost nuclear codes, mislaid classified documents, and, in one memorable case, a US Senator who required a map to locate Ukraine. The warhead remains, metaphorically speaking, unaccounted for.

The Pivotal Small Nation. The series features a fictional oil-rich state whose internal politics become the trigger for superpower confrontation. The great powers blunder about, each convinced that controlling this relatively minor territory will tilt the global balance definitively in their favour. Replace the fictional nation with any of a half-dozen real ones — your choice, we are quite spoilt for options — and you have the foreign policy of the past thirty years summarised with impressive economy.

The Intelligence Services That Aren’t. Both the CIA analogue and the KGB equivalent in the series are depicted as organisations of elaborate incompetence, generating vast quantities of intelligence that consistently points in the wrong direction. They brief with total confidence. They are wrong with extraordinary consistency. The tragedy, or the comedy, depending on your proximity to the warheads, is that competent intelligence assessment has never been the bottleneck. The bottleneck has always been whether anyone in power wished to hear what the intelligence actually said.

The Current Situation, Such As It Is

As of the spring of 2026, the world finds itself in the peculiar position of managing several simultaneous conflicts. In Ukraine, across the Middle East, and in the simmering tensions of the Indo-Pacific. Whilst the principal architect of the post-war international order appears to be engaged in a systematic attempt to redesign it along lines that would have struck even the most imaginative satirist as implausible.

The Trump administration’s second term has produced a foreign policy that Whoops Apocalypse would have struggled to script. Proposals to absorb allied nations as American territories, open hostility toward longstanding alliances, back-channel negotiations with adversaries conducted in ways that leave traditional allies uncertain of their status, and a rhetorical style that conflates transactional commerce with international diplomacy. Marshall and Renwick would have been told to tone it down. Too broad, the producers would have said. Nobody will believe it.

Meanwhile, the European response has achieved a level of coordinated hand-wringing previously thought impossible outside of a Whitehall farce. NATO members, having spent decades gently declining to meet their defence spending commitments on the grounds that nothing very serious would ever really happen, are now discovering that something very serious is, in fact, happening and that several of their armed forces are equipped approximately as one might expect after forty years of budget parsimony. Germany has rediscovered an enthusiasm for rearmament that it is approaching with characteristic thoroughness. France has rediscovered an enthusiasm for strategic autonomy that it never actually lost. Britain has rediscovered that it is an island, which is at least something.

Russia continues its war in Ukraine with the peculiar certainty of a power that has conclusively demonstrated it cannot win quickly, apparently in the hope that it can win slowly. The ceasefire negotiations that have dominated headlines in early 2026 combine all the diplomatic elegance of a car boot sale with all the moral clarity of a business merger. Territory is discussed in terms of square kilometres and negotiating leverage. The people who live on it are largely incidental to the arithmetic.

In the Middle East, a region that has been in various states of catastrophic crisis throughout most of living memory, the post-Gaza landscape is being renegotiated in ways that serve almost no one’s long-term interests whilst appearing to serve several parties’ short-term ones. This is not a new situation. It is the same situation, with updated participants.

The Comedy of Escalation

What Whoops Apocalypse understood, and what distinguishes genuine satire from mere mockery, is the mechanics of how rational actors produce irrational outcomes. Nobody in the series wants nuclear war. Everybody is trying to avoid it. The catastrophe emerges not from malice but from miscalculation, misreading, institutional momentum, and the unwillingness of any individual to be the person who says ‘I think we may have made a terrible mistake.’

This is sometimes called the ‘comedy of errors,’ though it is perhaps more accurately described as the ‘tragedy of systems.’ Each player behaves according to their own internal logic. Each decision, locally rational, contributes to a globally disastrous outcome. The audience watching can see the shape of the catastrophe assembling itself, piece by piece, whilst the characters within it cannot. This is the source of the dramatic irony. It is also, if we are being honest with ourselves, a reasonable description of where we are.

The nuclear arsenals of the world’s powers have not diminished. They have, in several cases, been modernised. The arms control frameworks that once — imperfectly, creakingly — provided some structural constraint on the deployment of these weapons have largely been dismantled. The New START treaty has expired. The INF Treaty is long dead. The multilateral institutions that might provide forums for de-escalation are weakened, underfunded, and subject to the veto of precisely those parties most likely to need de-escalation.

And sitting above it all, on various national equivalents of the ‘nuclear football,’ are the authorisation codes. Held by people who are — and here the ghost of Barry Morse’s vacant presidential smile becomes distinctly unsettling — human beings, subject to human errors, human vanities, human rages, and human miscalculations. The button is not metaphorical. It is, in various forms, quite real. And the hands near it are no more reliably steady than they have ever been.

What Satire Can and Cannot Do

There is a view, popular in certain circles, that satire is a form of resistance — that by laughing at power, we somehow diminish it, expose it, make it more legible and therefore more accountable. This is a comforting view. It is also, the historical record suggests, somewhat optimistic. Satire did not prevent the policies it mocked in Weimar Germany. That Was The Week That Was did not fundamentally alter the trajectory of British politics. The Thick of It — perhaps the finest political satire in the history of British television — documented the dysfunction of New Labour and the coalition years with forensic brilliance, and changed precisely nothing.

What satire can do is name things. It can say: look at this. Look at how absurd this is. Look at how the mechanisms that are supposed to protect us are failing, and how the people who are supposed to lead us are not quite adequate to the task. It cannot compel anyone to look. It cannot force the acknowledgement. But it can put the absurdity on record, so that future generations — if there are any, Whoops Apocalypse being what it is — will know that someone noticed.

Marshall and Renwick noticed in 1982 that the system by which nuclear-armed superpowers managed their rivalry was held together largely by good fortune, institutional inertia, and the reluctance of any individual to be the one to break it. They noticed that the leaders of those superpowers were, in various ways, unequal to the responsibilities they held. They noticed that the supporting cast of advisors, generals, intelligence chiefs, and diplomats was largely optimised for career survival rather than geopolitical wisdom.

They made it funny because the alternative was to make it something else entirely, and nobody would have commissioned that.

A Modest Proposal for the Archive

Some cultural artefacts belong in the museum. Some belong in the curriculum. Whoops Apocalypse belongs, I would argue, in the briefing packs distributed to incoming heads of state, as a kind of illustrated warning. A picture book for people who have recently acquired access to weapons capable of ending civilisation and who may benefit from a gentle reminder of how easily things can go very wrong.

The series is, of course, available in the usual grey-market ways that television from this era tends to be available — grainy transfers, inconsistent audio, the unmistakable quality of something recorded off-air in 1982 by a man in Wolverhampton whose video recorder was set to the wrong speed. It is worth the effort. It is funnier than the current situation, and marginally less frightening, which is something of an achievement.

Andrew Marshall and David Renwick did not know they were writing prophecy. They thought they were writing comedy. The distinction, in the fullness of time, has proved less robust than one might have hoped.

The best satire is the kind that ages badly because the thing it was satirising has stopped happening. Whoops, Apocalypse has not aged badly. It has aged, if anything, rather too well.

Alan /|\

Schrödinger’s Brain: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Understanding Reality (But Feeling Very Clever About It)

Or: How Physicists Accidentally Proved Your Grandmother Was Right About Everything

There is a particular kind of headache that only quantum physics can produce. It sits somewhere behind the eyes, throbs gently whenever you try to think too hard, and is accompanied by the unsettling sensation that the universe is laughing at you. Philosophers have had this headache for roughly two and a half thousand years. Physicists only caught it in 1900, but they’ve been making up for lost time with extraordinary enthusiasm.

Welcome, then, to a guided tour of the two great traditions of human bewilderment: quantum physics and the nature of reality. Bring paracetamol.

What Is Reality, Anyway? (Spoiler: Nobody Knows)

Philosophers got there first, which physicists have never quite forgiven them for. As far back as the ancient Greeks, thinkers were cheerfully dismantling the notion that the world was what it appeared to be. Plato suggested we were all cave-dwellers mistaking shadows for substance. Heraclitus announced that everything was in constant flux — you can’t step into the same river twice — which made bathing philosophically awkward. Democritus proposed that everything was made of tiny indivisible particles called atoms, which was so right it took two thousand years for anyone to believe him, and then another century to discover he was also slightly wrong.

The Enlightenment brought Descartes, who decided to doubt everything he possibly could — rather like a seventeenth-century internet commentator — until he arrived at the one thing he couldn’t doubt: that he was doing the doubting. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. This remains the most famous philosophical conclusion ever reached whilst sitting in a heated oven-room wearing a dressing gown, which is either inspiring or a cautionary tale about work-from-home productivity.

Then came Kant, who calmly informed everyone that the world as we experience it — the phenomenal world — is not the world as it actually is. The noumenal world, the thing-in-itself, is fundamentally inaccessible to human perception. We are, in effect, wearing reality-spectacles we can never take off, and we have no way of knowing what reality looks like without them. Kant was German, which explains the vocabulary, and also the thoroughness.

This was the philosophical equivalent of someone announcing mid-dinner party that the food is probably fine, but we can’t actually taste anything — we only taste our impression of the taste. The resulting silence was, historians report, quite considerable.

Enter the Physicists, Stage Left, Looking Confused

For most of the nineteenth century, physics was going rather well. Newton’s laws were ticking along nicely. Maxwell had sorted out electromagnetism. Everything seemed to be moving towards a pleasing conclusion in which scientists explained the universe, collected their prizes, and went home early on Fridays.

Then Max Planck noticed something annoying.

Hot objects were not radiating energy the way the equations said they should. This was called the “ultraviolet catastrophe,” which sounds like a particularly bad sunburn but was actually the prediction that any warm body should emit infinite energy — clearly not happening, since physicists were still alive to be embarrassed by it. Planck fixed the equations by suggesting, somewhat reluctantly, that energy came in discrete chunks rather than a smooth flow. He called these chunks quanta.

Planck himself later admitted he’d introduced the idea as a mathematical trick, not a physical reality, and spent years hoping it would go away. It did not go away. Instead, it became quantum mechanics, the most accurate scientific theory in human history and simultaneously the most baffling thing anyone has ever thought of.

Einstein, not to be outdone, used Planck’s quanta to explain the photoelectric effect, proving that light behaved like particles as well as waves. He won the Nobel Prize for this, which was something of a consolation since his relativity papers were considered too controversial for the prize committee’s blood pressure. The irony of Einstein being considered too radical whilst casually dismantling the concepts of absolute time and space should not be lost on anyone.

The Quantum Bestiary: A Field Guide to Weird Things

Quantum mechanics, at its heart, is a collection of deeply uncomfortable facts about the universe delivered in impeccable mathematical language. Here are the most important ones, presented with the reassurance that your confusion is not only understandable but essentially mandatory.

Wave-particle duality holds that quantum objects — photons, electrons, and so forth — behave like waves when you’re not looking at them and like particles when you are. This is not a limitation of our instruments. It is a property of reality. The universe, it seems, is fundamentally coy.

The uncertainty principle, courtesy of Werner Heisenberg, states that you cannot simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle with perfect precision. The more precisely you pin down one, the more uncertain the other becomes. This is not because our measuring equipment is clumsy. It’s because the universe has decided that particles simply do not have perfectly defined position and momentum at the same time. They are, in a technical sense, fuzzy. Philosophers nodded vigorously at this, as it sounded enormously like what they’d been saying for centuries, whilst physicists looked quietly horrified.

Superposition is the principle that quantum systems exist in multiple states simultaneously until measured. The famous illustration is Schrödinger’s cat, wherein a cat in a sealed box with a radioactive trigger is theoretically both alive and dead until observed. Erwin Schrödinger devised this scenario in 1935 to demonstrate how absurd it was to apply quantum principles to everyday objects. The world responded by making it the most recognisable thought experiment in science, putting it on mugs, t-shirts, and motivational posters, which was definitely not what he intended.

Quantum entanglement occurs when two particles interact in such a way that their quantum states become correlated, no matter how far apart they subsequently travel. Measure the state of one particle and you instantly know the state of the other, even if it’s on the other side of the galaxy. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and spent the remainder of his life insisting there must be hidden variables that explained it sensibly. Experiments have since confirmed that no, there aren’t, and it really is that spooky. Einstein was wrong, which he would have found insufferable.

The Interpretation Problem, or: Seven Ways to Be Confused

Having established the equations of quantum mechanics and confirmed them to extraordinary precision, physicists then got into a furious row about what any of it actually means. This row has been going on since approximately 1927 and shows no signs of resolution, which rather vindicates the philosophers who’ve been managing similar rows since at least 500 BCE.

The Copenhagen interpretation, associated with Niels Bohr and his colleagues, essentially says that quantum systems don’t have definite properties until measured, and that asking what’s happening in between measurements is meaningless. This is sometimes summarised as “shut up and calculate,” which is practical advice but not entirely satisfying to anyone with metaphysical ambitions.

The Many Worlds interpretation, proposed by Hugh Everett III, suggests that every quantum event that could go either way actually goes both ways — but in different branches of a constantly splitting universe. Every time Schrödinger’s cat is observed, reality splits into a universe where it’s alive and a universe where it’s dead. There are versions of you who made every decision you’ve ever not made, married everyone you didn’t marry, and ordered the fish when you chose the pasta. This interpretation is mathematically elegant and existentially terrifying.

The Pilot Wave theory of de Broglie and Bohm restores determinism by suggesting particles do have definite positions at all times, guided by a quantum wave that contains information about the entire universe. This sounds reassuringly sensible until you realise the wave is non-local, instantaneous, and invisible, at which point it sounds like something from a particularly well-researched esoteric text.

There are several other interpretations, all plausible, all mutually exclusive, and all supported by exactly the same experimental evidence. This would be a scandal in any other field. In quantum physics, it’s called Tuesday.

Where Physics and Philosophy Finally Shake Hands (Awkwardly)

The convergence is rather lovely once you stop wincing. The Copenhagen interpretation strongly echoes the philosophical idealism of Bishop Berkeley, who argued in the eighteenth century that objects only exist insofar as they are perceived — esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. Berkeley was roundly mocked. Quantum mechanics has not entirely vindicated him, but it’s certainly made his mockers look less confident.

The wave-particle duality resonates with ancient philosophical traditions that saw reality as fundamentally relational — things defined not by what they are in isolation but by how they interact. Process philosophy, associated with Alfred North Whitehead, proposed that reality was fundamentally about events and processes rather than static objects. Quantum field theory, wherein what we call “particles” are really excitations in underlying fields, would have struck Whitehead as oddly familiar.

The measurement problem — the question of what constitutes an observation, and whether consciousness plays any role — has dragged physics into the philosophical territory of mind and subjectivity whether it wanted to go there or not. Some serious physicists, including Eugene Wigner, have argued that consciousness is genuinely implicated in wave function collapse. Others have responded that this is precisely the sort of thing that happens when you skip lunch and think too hard.

And the question of non-locality — the fact that quantum entanglement connects particles across space in ways that defy classical notions of causation — rattles the very foundations of what we mean by separate objects existing in separate locations. The universe, at the quantum level, appears to be rather more interconnected than common sense suggests. Which is, if nothing else, philosophically interesting territory for anyone who has spent time thinking about the nature of consciousness, spiritual experience, or the peculiar intuition that everything is somehow related to everything else.

Conclusions, Such As They Are

Reality, it turns out, is simultaneously more precise and more uncertain than we imagined. The universe operates according to equations of extraordinary elegance that describe probabilities rather than certainties, waves that become particles only when observed, and correlations that stretch across space without any signal travelling between them.

The philosophers were right that ordinary perception doesn’t give us unmediated access to reality. The physicists confirmed this in painstaking mathematical detail and are still arguing about what it means. The mystics, meanwhile, have been pointing at interconnectedness and the observer’s role in reality for rather a long time, and are perhaps entitled to a small measure of vindication, even if their terminology leaves something to be desired.

What we can say with confidence is this: the universe is far stranger than intuition suggests, far more beautiful than it has any right to be, and fundamentally resistant to the comfortable conviction that we’ve got it all sorted out.

Schrödinger’s cat remains in the box. The headache remains behind the eyes.

And somewhere, a philosopher and a physicist are sitting in a pub arguing about what either of them actually means by “pub.”

Reality is not what it seems. But then, it never was.

Alan /|\

I came across these examples of “Social Experiments” over three decades ago, having been exposed to them in my first psychology courses. The “headline’ conclusions of each were as impressive as they were disturbing. I remember revisiting the Asch experiments and conducting the same experiment, with similar results.

I think I was really looking for behaviourist reasons as to why “good” people do “evil” things. Looking back, I can admit my naivety. I was looking for reasons and so failed to engage fully my critical faculties.

A few years ago, the Stanford Prison Experiment was recycled as a “bad taste” TV reality show. That is when I sought to look again at these “sacred cows” of Human Psychology experimentation.

The Emperor’s New Lab Coat: A Critical Look at Psychology’s Holy Trinity of Conformity

Or: How Three Experiments Convinced a Generation That Everyone Except Psychologists Are Sheep

In the pantheon of psychology’s greatest hits, three names tower above all others when it comes to explaining why humans are terrible: Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo. Their experiments have become the psychological equivalent of folk wisdom. Endlessly repeated, rarely questioned, and absolutely brilliant at making undergraduate students feel simultaneously superior to and terrified of their fellow humans.

Let’s examine these sacred cows, shall we? And perhaps give them a bit of a prod with a cattle stick whilst we’re at it.

Solomon Asch and the Line Judgement Task: When Being Wrong Feels So Right

Solomon Asch’s 1951 conformity experiments are beautifully simple: show people two cards, one with a single line and another with three lines of different lengths. Ask which line matches the first. Even a concussed pigeon could get this right. Now add some confederates who deliberately give wrong answers, and suddenly a third of participants start agreeing that a line clearly several inches longer is actually the same length.

Psychology gasped. “Look!” they cried. “People will deny the evidence of their own eyes rather than stand out from the crowd!”

The Textbook Version: Humans are conformist sheep who will abandon truth itself to fit in.

The Slightly More Nuanced Reality: Well, hold on a moment.

First, let’s acknowledge what Asch actually found. Yes, about 75% of participants conformed at least once across twelve trials. Terrifying stuff. Except, that means they were correct about 63% of the time overall. And 25% never conformed at all. The classic framing focuses on the failures whilst ignoring that the majority of responses were accurate despite extreme social pressure in an utterly bizarre situation.

Moreover, when Asch interviewed his participants afterwards, many reported they knew the confederates were wrong but didn’t want to “spoil the experiment” or thought perhaps they’d misunderstood the task. This isn’t mindless conformity. It’s people trying to be polite in a weird social situation with a bloke in a lab coat taking notes.

The effect also largely disappeared when participants could write down their answers privately. So much for the power of conformity to override basic perception. Apparently, it just overrides the desire to be that person who argues about line lengths in public.

And here’s the kicker: the effect varied enormously across cultures. Collectivist societies exhibited higher conformity rates, whereas individualist societies exhibited lower rates. Almost as if conformity isn’t a universal human weakness but a culturally mediated social strategy that’s sometimes adaptive.

But that’s not nearly as punchy as “People will deny reality to fit in,” is it?

Stanley Milgram: The Man Who Proved We’re All Nazis (Or Did He?)

Milgram’s obedience experiments (1961-1963) are psychology’s crown jewel of human awfulness. Participants were told to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a “learner” (actually a confederate) whenever they got a word-pair wrong. Despite hearing screams of pain (all faked, but the participants didn’t know that), 65% went all the way to 450 volts—marked “XXX” and potentially lethal.

The Textbook Version: Given sufficient authority pressure, ordinary people will torture and potentially kill complete strangers.

What Actually Happened: It’s complicated.

First, let’s talk about what Milgram didn’t tell us for decades. The original published account suggested smooth compliance, but archival research by Gina Perry revealed extensive variation across the 23 experimental conditions Milgram ran. The widely cited 65% figure derives from a single condition. In others, compliance dropped to 10% or lower. Milgram cherry-picked his most dramatic results.

More damningly, the transcripts reveal something rather uncomfortable: many participants clearly didn’t believe the shocks were real. They were right, of course, but not in the way Milgram intended. Some laughed nervously, others asked pointed questions about the learner’s safety that suggested they’d cottoned on to the deception. When you listen to the actual recordings, you don’t hear the sounds of reluctant torturers; you often hear people who seem to be performing compliance while being deeply uncertain about what’s actually happening.

Then there’s the matter of the prods. When participants hesitated, the experimenter gave a series of scripted responses, escalating from “Please continue” to “You have no other choice, you must go on.” Except that last one is bollocks. They absolutely had a choice, and participants knew it. When the experimenter used that final prod, participants almost always refused to continue. Hardly the picture of blind obedience.

Psychologist Megan Birney’s recent analysis suggests that participants largely understood they were in an experiment (obviously) and assumed—not unreasonably—that the experimenters wouldn’t let them actually hurt anyone. They were engaged in trust, not obedience. They thought they were helping science, not committing atrocities.

Oh, and Milgram’s claim that he was investigating the Holocaust? Convenient post-hoc justification. His initial proposals made no mention of genocide. That framing came later, when it became clear how much moral gravitas it lent to shocking people in a basement at Yale.

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment: The Study That Launched a Thousand Textbook Errors

And now we arrive at the pièce de résistance: Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students were randomly assigned to play prisoners or guards in a mock prison. Within days, the “guards” became sadistic, and the “prisoners” had emotional breakdowns. The study was terminated after six days, rather than the planned two weeks.

The Textbook Version: Put people in positions of power, and they’ll inevitably become tyrannical. Situational forces trump individual character.

What Actually Happened: One of the most methodologically dodgy studies in psychology’s history, followed by decades of mythmaking.

Let’s start with the selection bias. Zimbardo advertised for participants willing to participate in “a psychological study of prison life.” The people who signed up weren’t a random sample of humanity. They were people who thought playing prison sounded interesting. And indeed, personality testing suggested they were slightly higher in aggression and lower in empathy than average.

Then there’s the coaching. Far from observing naturally emerging behaviour, Zimbardo and his team actively encouraged the guards to be harsh. One guard later reported being instructed to be “a real guard” and to prevent boredom. Another said Zimbardo told them to create fear. The “prisoners” were subjected to genuinely humiliating treatment that had nothing to do with emergent situational forces and everything to do with experimental manipulation.

The most enthusiastic “guard”, the one whose behaviour has been cited as evidence of how power corrupts, later revealed he was consciously play-acting, inspired by a character from the film Cool Hand Luke. He was performing cruelty, not genuinely transformed by his role.

And those emotional breakdowns? One “prisoner” later admitted he faked his distress to get released early because he had an exam to prepare for. Others have described feeling pressured to perform emotional responses they didn’t genuinely feel.

The study wasn’t stopped because of ethical concerns about emergent behaviour. It was stopped when Zimbardo’s girlfriend (and future wife), Christina Maslach, visited the “prison” and expressed horror at what was happening. Even then, Zimbardo initially resisted, only relenting after she threatened to end their relationship. His own behaviour, defending the study whilst his participants were genuinely distressed, rather undermines his claim about situational forces, doesn’t it?

Recent archival work by French researchers Thibault Le Texier has revealed the extent to which the “experiment” was less a scientific experiment and more a performance art piece, with Zimbardo as director. His published accounts bear little resemblance to what actually occurred.

So Why Do These Studies Persist?

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: these experiments tell us a story we desperately want to hear.

They allow us, educated, enlightened, psychologically literate folk, to feel superior whilst simultaneously explaining why the world is rubbish. We would never conform/obey/abuse power, because we know about these experiments. But everyone else? Helpless puppets of situational forces.

It’s also a get-out-of-jail-free card for human evil. The Holocaust wasn’t perpetrated by people who chose hatred and cruelty; it was situational forces and obedience to authority! Much less troubling than confronting the reality that ordinary people can consciously choose extraordinary evil.

These studies support a particular worldview in psychology, behaviourism’s darker cousin, that sees humans as infinitely malleable, passive respondents to environmental contingencies rather than active meaning-makers. It’s a view that empowers psychologists (who understand these forces) whilst diminishing everyone else.

What Did We Actually Learn?

Strip away the mythology, and these experiments still tell us something valuable, just not what we thought.

Asch showed that people use social information to navigate ambiguous situations and will sometimes prioritise social harmony over objective correctness, especially in collectivist cultures. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature of successful social living.

Milgram demonstrated that people trust scientific authorities not to let them hurt others, and that they’ll comply with requests that seem to serve a legitimate purpose—until that legitimacy is challenged. This is mostly sensible. A world in which people refused every request from an authority figure would be chaotic.

Zimbardo... well, Zimbardo mostly showed us that if you select aggressive participants, coach them to be cruel, and place them in a situation with few constraints, some of them will behave badly. Hardly earth-shattering.

None of this means humans can’t be conformist, obedient, or corrupted by power. We obviously can be—history provides ample evidence. But these particular experiments don’t prove what they’re claimed to prove, and the mythology surrounding them has done more to obscure than illuminate human behaviour.

The Real Conformity

The delicious irony? The uncritical acceptance and endless repetition of these flawed studies in psychology textbooks is itself a demonstration of conformity. Generations of psychologists have adhered to the received wisdom about conformity research without closely examining the evidence.

Perhaps the real lesson is this: we’re all susceptible to good stories that confirm our biases, whether we’re undergraduates in Asch’s line study or professors teaching Milgram. The difference is that the undergraduates were at least honest about being confused.

So the next time someone invokes these experiments to explain why people are sheep, gently remind them that the real sheep might be the ones who uncritically accept what they’re told about these studies.

After all, if there’s one thing psychology has definitively proven, it’s that we should probably be a bit more sceptical of what psychology has definitively proven.

References Worth Reading:

Perry, G. (2012). Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments

Le Texier, T. (2019). “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment,” American Psychologist

Griggs, R. A. (2014). “Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in Introductory Psychology Textbooks,” Teaching of Psychology

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2012). “Contesting the ‘Nature’ of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show,” PLoS Biology

Alan /|\

Going with the Flow: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zone

There’s a peculiar irony in writing about flow states: the very act of analysing them tends to interrupt them. It’s rather like trying to examine your own shadow whilst standing directly beneath a lamp—the moment you turn to look, it shifts away. Nevertheless, armed with decades of psychological research, a dash of neuroscience, and the kind of stubborn determination that would make a British queue-jumper blush, let’s dive into this paradoxical state of consciousness.

What Actually Is Flow?

In 1975, Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (whose surname is pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high,” which sounds rather more cheerful than most psychological terminology) introduced the concept of flow to the academic world. He described it as a state of complete absorption in an activity. That magical zone where time becomes elastic, self-consciousness vanishes, and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing that you’d probably ignore a fire alarm.

Csíkszentmihályi didn’t discover flow whilst meditating on a mountaintop or during a particularly intense game of chess. Instead, he stumbled upon it whilst researching creativity and happiness, interviewing everyone from rock climbers to surgeons, from artists to assembly line workers. He found that across cultures, professions, and activities, people described remarkably similar experiences when performing at their best.

The key characteristics of flow include:

Complete concentration on the task at hand. Not the sort of concentration where you’re vaguely aware you should be doing something whilst scrolling through social media, but the kind where nuclear war could break out and you’d only notice when you finished the paragraph.

A merging of action and awareness. You’re not thinking about doing the thing; you are the thing. There’s no little homunculus in your head operating the controls—you’ve become the controls.

Loss of reflective self-consciousness. That annoying internal narrator who usually provides running commentary on everything you do (”Are you really going to eat that? Do you think they noticed your grammatical error? Why did you say that thing in 1997?”) has temporarily clocked off.

A sense that you can control the situation. Not in a megalomaniacal “I am master of the universe” sense, but rather a quiet confidence that you have the skills to handle whatever the activity throws at you.

Time distortion. Hours feel like minutes, or occasionally, minutes feel like hours. Essentially, your internal clock has had a bit too much to drink and can no longer be relied upon.

The activity becomes intrinsically rewarding. You’re not doing it for money, fame, or to impress anyone—you’re doing it because the doing itself is the reward. It’s what philosophers call an “autotelic” experience, from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal). The journey isn’t just as important as the destination; it is the destination.

The Goldilocks Principle: Not Too Hard, Not Too Easy

Here’s where flow gets interesting from a practical standpoint. You can’t simply decide to enter a flow state any more than you can decide to fall asleep—the harder you try, the more elusive it becomes. However, you can create conditions that make flow more likely.

The crucial factor is the balance between challenge and skill. If a task is too difficult for your current abilities, you experience anxiety. If it’s too easy, you’re bored. Flow exists in that narrow channel between the two, where the challenge slightly exceeds your comfort zone but remains achievable. It’s the Goldilocks zone of human performance—not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

This explains why scrolling through social media rarely induces flow (unless you’re a particularly dedicated social media manager). The challenge level is essentially nil. Conversely, asking a beginner pianist to sight-read Rachmaninoff won’t produce flow either—just tears and possibly broken piano keys.

The sweet spot occurs when you’re stretching yourself about 4% beyond your current skill level. Not so much that you’re floundering, but enough that you need to fully engage. It’s why video games are so effective at inducing flow—they’re brilliantly designed to constantly adjust difficulty, keeping players perpetually in that challenging-but-achievable zone.

The Neuroscience Bit (Where We Pretend to Understand Brain Chemistry)

Modern neuroscience has provided some fascinating insights into what’s actually happening in your grey matter during flow states, though I should warn you that the brain is complicated enough to make a tax return look straightforward.

Flow states appear to involve a phenomenon called “transient hypofrontality,” which is neuroscience-speak for “parts of your prefrontal cortex temporarily quiet down.” The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher-order thinking, including self-reflection, temporal awareness, and that voice that tells you you’re making a fool of yourself. When it dials down during flow, you lose track of time, stop worrying about how you look, and generally get out of your own way.

Research using fMRI scans and EEG measurements has shown that during flow, there’s increased activity in areas associated with focused attention whilst other regions associated with self-monitoring decrease their chatter. It’s rather like your brain deciding that some departments can take an extended tea break whilst the essential services run the show.

The brain also releases a cocktail of neurochemicals during flow states, including:

Norepinephrine and dopamine, which sharpen focus and pattern recognition. Endorphins, which block pain and create a sense of wellbeing (though possibly not enough to ignore that fire alarm we mentioned earlier). Anandamide, named after the Sanskrit word for bliss, which promotes lateral thinking and those “aha!” moments. Serotonin, which contributes to the sense of satisfaction after the flow state ends.

It’s essentially your brain’s way of rewarding you for operating at peak efficiency, rather like getting a bonus for excellent work, except the bonus is neurochemical and you can’t spend it on a holiday in Spain.

Flow in the Wild: From Operating Theatres to DJ Booths

Flow states aren’t limited to traditionally “creative” pursuits. Whilst artists, writers, and musicians frequently report flow experiences (usually right before someone interrupts them to ask if they want a cup of tea), the state can occur in virtually any activity that meets the right conditions.

Surgeons report entering flow during complex operations, where hours pass unnoticed and the world narrows to the surgical field. One neurosurgeon described it as “becoming the scalpel”—though this raises disturbing questions about what happens if you’re operating on a scalpel.

Athletes call it being “in the zone,” and it’s during these periods that seemingly superhuman performances occur. Everything slows down, reactions become effortless, and the basket/goal/target appears impossibly large. Michael Jordan’s legendary performances often involved flow states, though he probably didn’t call it transient hypofrontality.

Programmers experience it during particularly engaging coding sessions, emerging bleary-eyed hours later with no memory of the intervening time but with several hundred lines of elegant code. Musicians and DJs describe it during performances when they’re so locked into the music that they’re not so much playing as channeling it.

Even seemingly mundane activities can induce flow. The right gardening task at the right skill level can produce it. So can cooking, woodworking, or organising your spice rack alphabetically (though if you’re in flow whilst alphabetising spices, you might want to consider getting out more).

The Dark Side of Flow (Or: When Going with the Flow Becomes a Problem)

Before we get too misty-eyed about flow states, it’s worth acknowledging that they can be problematic. Like many good things, flow can become addictive. Video game addiction, workaholism, and extreme sports obsession all involve people chasing flow states at the expense of other life areas.

There’s also the question of what you’re flowing towards. Flow is value-neutral—you can experience it whilst creating beautiful art or whilst doing something thoroughly unproductive. A burglar can enter flow whilst burgling, which is excellent for the burglar’s performance but less than ideal from society’s perspective.

Furthermore, the loss of temporal awareness that makes flow so appealing can lead to neglecting basic needs. Flow doesn’t pause for meals, sleep, or social obligations. Many creative professionals have horror stories of emerging from flow states at 3 AM, ravenously hungry, having missed dinner with friends hours earlier.

There’s also evidence that constantly seeking flow can make normal, non-flow activities feel unbearably tedious by comparison. If you’re used to the neurochemical cocktail of flow, ordinary consciousness can seem rather dull, like switching from champagne to lukewarm tap water.

Cultivating Flow: Can You Force Spontaneity?

Given flow’s benefits for performance, happiness, and productivity, considerable effort has been devoted to figuring out how to induce it more reliably. This presents a paradox: flow is characterised by effortlessness, yet achieving it requires effort and deliberate practice.

Several conditions seem to promote flow:

Clear goals and immediate feedback. You need to know what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’re doing. Ambiguous tasks with delayed feedback are flow killers.

The right challenge-skill balance. This requires honest self-assessment and willingness to adjust difficulty. If you’re bored, increase the challenge. If you’re anxious, build more skills or reduce complexity.

Minimising interruptions. Flow requires unbroken concentration to develop. Modern life, with its constant notifications and interruptions, is essentially flow’s nemesis. Turning off your phone isn’t just good advice; it’s a flow prerequisite.

Deep familiarity with the domain. Whilst you need challenges, you also need a foundation of automatised skills. A jazz musician can improvise in flow because they’ve practiced scales for thousands of hours. The flow comes from creative recombination, not from struggling with basic techniques.

Intrinsic motivation. Flow is far more likely when you’re doing something because you want to, not because you should. External rewards can actually interfere with flow by shifting focus from the activity to the outcome.

Some researchers suggest that regular meditation practice may increase flow frequency by training the ability to maintain focused attention. Others point to physical exercise, adequate sleep, and even specific breathing techniques as flow facilitators.

The Philosophical Bit (Or: What Flow Tells Us About Being Human)

Flow states raise intriguing questions about consciousness and the self. If the optimal human experience involves losing self-consciousness, what does that say about our normal state? Are we spending most of our lives in a suboptimal mode of being, pestered by that internal narrator who won’t shut up?

Eastern contemplative traditions have long suggested that the sense of separate self is illusory and that its dissolution leads to greater wellbeing. Flow states seem to support this—we’re happiest when we forget ourselves and merge with our activities. The Taoist concept of wu wei (effortless action) bears a striking resemblance to flow, as does the Buddhist notion of mindfulness.

Yet there’s also something distinctly modern about Csíkszentmihályi’s framing. Flow in his research is tied to achievement and performance—getting better at things, reaching goals, increasing complexity. It’s a very Western, progress-oriented interpretation of states that contemplative traditions might frame differently.

Perhaps flow represents a bridge between these perspectives. It’s the space where striving and surrender meet, where focused effort paradoxically produces effortlessness, where the goal-oriented West encounters the process-oriented East.

Conclusion: The Flow Must Go On

Understanding flow doesn’t necessarily make it easier to achieve, rather like how understanding the chemistry of attraction doesn’t make dating any simpler. But it does provide a framework for structuring our activities and lives to create more opportunities for these peak experiences.

The real insight from flow research isn’t that we should be constantly chasing optimal experiences (that way lies burnout and obsession). Rather, it’s that meaningful engagement—being fully present in activities that stretch our abilities—is fundamental to human wellbeing. Flow is what happens when challenge, skill, and purpose align.

In our distracted, notification-saturated age, flow states have become simultaneously more valuable and more elusive. Creating space for deep, uninterrupted engagement isn’t merely a productivity hack; it’s a form of resistance against a culture that profits from fragmenting our attention.

So the next time you find yourself completely absorbed in an activity, time slipping away unnoticed, perhaps you’re not wasting time or procrastinating. Perhaps you’re experiencing one of the most valuable states available to human consciousness. Just remember to set an alarm, or you might flow right through dinner.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been so absorbed in writing this article that I’ve completely lost track of time, which is either beautifully ironic or proof that I should have set an alarm. Either way, I believe there was something about a fire alarm earlier...

Alan /|\

Sport and Politics: An Intimate and Inescapable Union

The Pretence of Political Neutrality

The International Paralympic Committee’s decision to allow six Russian and four Belarusian athletes to compete under their national flags at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics, the first time a Russian flag has flown at a Paralympic Games since Sochi 2014, has reignited one of the oldest and most uncomfortable arguments in international sport: can competition and conscience be separated?

The answer, examined with any intellectual rigour, is clearly no.

Sport has never been politically neutral. The claim that it is functions as a form of institutional gaslighting. A convenient fiction that serves the interests of governing bodies more than it serves athletes, victims, or the truth.

The Russian case is particularly egregious not merely because of the scale of the Ukrainian invasion, but because of a detail that deserves far greater scrutiny. The president of the Russian Paralympic Committee stated that about 500 participants in the war against Ukraine are already part of Russia’s Paralympic teams. In other words, some of the athletes competing under the Russian flag at a Games designed to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit over adversity may themselves be veterans of the very war that has created hundreds of thousands of new disabled people in Ukraine.

The moral grotesquerie of that situation cannot be overstated.

The Historical Record: Sport as Political Theatre

The Third Reich and the 1936 Berlin Olympics

No examination of sport and politics can avoid the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the foundational case study in how a regime can weaponise international sporting events for propaganda purposes. Adolf Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to showcase Aryan supremacy and present a sanitised, hospitable face to the world. Anti-Jewish signs were temporarily removed from public spaces. The Nazi state invested enormously in infrastructure and spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia was commissioned as a propaganda film.

The sporting bodies of the time made precisely the same arguments that the IPC and IOC make today: that sport transcends politics, that athletes should not be punished for the sins of their governments, and that participation and inclusion are preferable to isolation. Jesse Owens’ magnificent defiance, winning four gold medals and undermining the ideology of the hosts from within the arena, provided a compelling counter-narrative.

But it did not stop the Holocaust.

The international community’s willingness to sit in the stands of a Nazi stadium in 1936 arguably lent legitimacy to a regime that would, within three years, engulf the world in war. The boycott argument lost; the consequence was catastrophic.

South Africa and the Apartheid Exclusion

The exclusion of apartheid South Africa from international sport between 1964 and 1992 represents perhaps the strongest evidence that sporting sanctions can function as genuine political instruments. South Africa was banned from the Olympics in 1964 and subsequently excluded from most international competition across cricket, rugby, and athletics. The argument that sport should be kept apart from politics was made vigorously by many, particularly in Britain and New Zealand, whose sporting establishments maintained unofficial ties with South Africa for years, to widespread condemnation.

Yet the exclusion worked, at least in part. The cultural and psychological isolation created by sporting bans contributed meaningfully to the internal and external pressures that ultimately dismantled apartheid. Nelson Mandela himself acknowledged the power of sport as both a tool of oppression and a vehicle for liberation, most memorably in his decision to embrace the Springboks after his release — an act of political genius that used rugby to build a fragile national unity.

The lesson is not simply that sporting exclusion hurts regimes, but that sport carries profound symbolic weight that can be deployed in the service of justice.

The Cold War Boycotts: When Sport Became Open Warfare

The mutual boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics demonstrated that sport had become a fully integrated component of Cold War statecraft. The United States led a boycott of Moscow in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with 65 nations refusing to attend. The Soviet Union and its allies retaliated by boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Games, citing security concerns that were transparently political. In both cases, athletes, many at the peaks of their careers, paid the price for their governments’ diplomatic manoeuvring. The Games themselves were diminished; the political points scored were, in retrospect, negligible.

What these boycotts reveal is not that sport should be kept free from politics, but that sport is already a political arena, and the question is only whether its political dimensions are acknowledged honestly or obscured behind a rhetoric of inclusion and fair play.

China and the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing despite China’s ongoing human rights record, including its treatment of Tibet, its suppression of political dissent, and its detention of activists, repeated the structural logic of 1936. The argument was that engagement was preferable to exclusion; that the Games would open China to the world and liberalise its political culture. It did not. China used the spectacular opening ceremony as a global advertisement for its model of authoritarian efficiency, and has subsequently tightened political control rather than loosened it. The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, held while the Uyghur genocide was ongoing, offered a second opportunity to make the same mistake.

The IPC Decision: A Study in Moral Bankruptcy

The Specifics of the 2026 Decision

The IPC unexpectedly lifted its suspension on Russian and Belarusian athletes at its General Assembly in September 2025. The partial suspension — introduced in 2023 to replace the full ban imposed after Russia’s invasion in 2022 — had allowed athletes to compete only as neutrals.

Following a successful appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Russia and Belarus were able to apply for bipartite slots, and Russian and Belarusian athletes will compete under their national flags at the 2026 Winter Paralympics for the first time since Sochi 2014.

The reaction from Ukraine was unambiguous. Valeriy Sushkevych, president of the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee, described himself as “very, very angry and outraged” by the decision. The British government was equally critical. British Culture Minister Lisa Nandy wrote that “allowing athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete under their own flags while the brutal invasion of Ukraine continues sends a terrible signal,” urging the IPC to urgently reconsider.

The IPC’s response has been to retreat behind the language of institutional neutrality. IOC President Kirsty Coventry explained that the organisation’s fundamental responsibility is to sport, not geopolitics, and maintained that every athlete worldwide should have the opportunity to compete without restriction, unhindered by the political conflicts or disagreements of their governments.

This argument warrants examination with the scepticism it deserves.

The “Innocent Athlete” Argument and Its Limits

The most sympathetic case for inclusion rests on the individual athlete: the Paralympic competitor who has dedicated years to their sport, who may personally oppose the war, and who is being denied the opportunity to compete because of decisions made by a government over which they have no control. This argument has genuine moral force. It is not nothing.

But it has significant limits. In a liberal democracy, the claim that an individual citizen bears no responsibility for their government’s actions has at least a structural basis: citizens can vote, protest, organise, and speak. In Russia, meaningful opposition to the war has been criminalised, but hundreds of thousands of Russians have nonetheless refused to fight, fled the country, or found ways to signal dissent at personal risk. The Russian athletes competing under their national flag are not being asked to bear responsibility for Putin; they are being asked to consider whether carrying that flag is an act they can conscience whilst the war continues. Some may feel they cannot. Most, it appears, are content to compete.

More importantly, the argument from individual innocence ignores what national flags and anthems mean. They are not mere administrative labels. They are symbols of collective identity and, in this context, instruments of state legitimacy. When a Russian athlete stands on a Paralympic podium beneath the Russian flag during an active military invasion of a neighbouring country, the image is not of an innocent individual transcending politics. It is an image that the Russian state will use, and has already used, as evidence of international normalisation.

The Staggering Hypocrisy of Selective Exclusion

The IPC decision becomes even harder to defend when set against the treatment of Ukrainian athletes. Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from the skeleton event at the Olympics for wanting to wear a helmet depicting Ukrainian athletes killed during Russia’s invasion of his country. The contrast is almost too stark to process: a Ukrainian athlete is banned for a commemorative gesture honouring his compatriots killed by Russian forces, whilst Russian athletes march under their flag at the same Games. The message this sends — whether intended or not — is that institutional rules protect the aggressor and punish the victim.

The Principled Case for Exclusion of Aggressors

Sport as Moral Language

International sport operates, at its best, as a form of global moral language. Inclusion signals acceptance; exclusion signals condemnation. This is not an unfortunate contamination of sport by politics. It is an inherent feature of competitive events organised along national lines. The moment you sort competitors by nation, you make national identity relevant. You cannot then claim that national behaviour is irrelevant.

The argument for excluding aggressors and human rights abusers from international competition rests on this foundation. It is not about punishing individual athletes. It is about refusing to allow the symbolic machinery of international sport to be used by states to purchase legitimacy they have not earned and do not deserve. The South African case demonstrated that this principle can have a practical effect. The Russian case. involving an ongoing war, documented war crimes, and the deliberate targeting of civilians, it is, if anything, a stronger case for exclusion.

The Argument from Complicity

There is also an argument from complicity that deserves consideration. Sport generates enormous revenue, visibility, and prestige. When a state at war is permitted to compete, it derives benefit from that participation — in soft power, in domestic propaganda, in international standing. The governing bodies that permit this participation are not neutral parties in that transaction. They are, whether they acknowledge it or not, contributors to the conditions that make the war easier to sustain.

This is not a small point. The Russian government has demonstrated repeatedly that international engagement — in sport, diplomacy, and commerce — is valuable to it precisely because it signals that the world has not reached a consensus that Russian behaviour is beyond the pale. Every accommodation made by the IOC or IPC is harvested for domestic propaganda. Every flag flown at an international Games is a small victory in Putin’s information war.

The Counterargument: Engagement Over Isolation

The contrary position — that engagement is preferable to isolation, that sport can be a bridge, that exclusion merely hardens attitudes and denies athletes their rights — deserves a fair hearing.

There is a legitimate concern that sporting boycotts and bans rarely change the behaviour of authoritarian governments and may even strengthen nationalist sentiment domestically by fostering a siege mentality. China did not liberalise after 2008. Russia’s sense of grievance has not diminished under sporting sanctions.

There is also the genuine practical difficulty of drawing consistent lines. Saudi Arabia hosts LIV Golf tournaments and has been permitted to use sport as soft power through its investment in English football, Formula One, and boxing, despite a human rights record that includes the murder of journalists and the oppression of women. Israel has competed at every international sporting event during ongoing military operations in Gaza. The charge of inconsistency levelled at those who demand Russian exclusion is not entirely without merit.

But inconsistency in the application of a principle does not invalidate the principle. The failure to apply standards consistently is an argument for applying them more broadly, not for abandoning them altogether. And there is something uniquely consequential about the Russian case: an invasion of a neighbouring sovereign nation in Europe, with an established record of war crimes, involving a nuclear state that has explicitly threatened escalation. If this situation does not meet the threshold for exclusion, it is worth asking honestly what situation would.

The Paralympic Movement’s Special Obligation

There is a particular poignancy — and a particular betrayal — in the IPC’s decision because the Paralympic movement exists precisely to celebrate the human capacity to transcend suffering, to find dignity and achievement in the face of profound physical challenge.

The Ukrainian Paralympic athletes competing at Milan-Cortina include people who have lost limbs, sight, and function to Russian weapons. Some compete, having lost family members to Russian strikes. They will now share a stage, and possibly a podium, with athletes competing under the flag of the state responsible for those losses.

Sushkevych, himself 71 years old and the president of the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee, said there was no question of Ukraine boycotting the Games: “If we do not go, it would mean allowing Putin to claim a victory over Ukrainian Paralympians and over Ukraine by excluding us from the Games.” That statement, in its quiet courage and bitter pragmatism, captures everything the IPC should have considered and evidently did not.

Conclusion: The Fiction of Political Neutrality

International sport is political. It always has been. The organisations that govern it are not above politics; they are participants in it, whether they acknowledge this or not. The language of inclusion, fair play, and the rights of individual athletes is not inherently problematic, but it can function—and, in this case, does function—as a rhetorical shield behind which governing bodies avoid the moral accountability that their global influence demands.

The decision to allow Russia and Belarus to compete under their national flags at the 2026 Winter Paralympics, whilst an active war grinds on in Ukraine and whilst some of those very athletes may have served in the forces conducting that war, is not a triumph of sport over politics. It is a triumph of institutional cowardice over moral clarity. History, as it did in 1936, will judge it accordingly.

The South African precedent remains the most instructive. Exclusion, maintained consistently and supported by genuine international consensus, can contribute to change. Accommodation, dressed in the language of universalism, tends to serve the interests of those whose behaviour has put them beyond the moral pale. The IPC has chosen accommodation. Those who care about the integrity of the Paralympic movement — and about the Ukrainian athletes who will line up beside the descendants of the army that maimed them — should say so loudly and clearly.

Alan /|\

The Archetypal Adventures of Everyday Life: A Jungian Guide to Creative Living

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shadow

Picture this: You’re standing in the supermarket, furiously debating whether to buy the sensible own-brand cereal or the ridiculously overpriced granola with the fancy packaging that promises to “awaken your inner goddess.” Congratulations. You’ve just encountered the eternal struggle between your Caregiver and your Rebel archetypes, and Carl Jung would be absolutely delighted.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) gave us many things: the concepts of introversion and extraversion, the notion of synchronicity, and, most relevant to our cereal crisis, the idea of archetypes. These are universal, primordial images and patterns that exist in what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” a sort of psychological inheritance shared by all humanity. Think of them as the Greatest Hits of the human psyche, the recurring characters in the cosmic soap opera that is our species.

But here’s the beautiful thing: archetypes aren’t just abstract psychological concepts gathering dust in academic journals. They’re living, breathing patterns that play out in your life every single day, from the moment you wake up (Hello, Hero archetype, ready to conquer the day!) to the moment you binge-watch another episode when you should be sleeping (Oh, there’s the Trickster, making mischief again).

The Main Players in Your Internal Theatre Company

Jung identified several core archetypes, though scholars have expanded the list considerably. The essential ones include:

The Self: The central organising principle of the psyche, representing wholeness and integration. This is the director of your internal theatre company, trying desperately to get all the other archetypes to work together coherently.

The Shadow: Everything you’ve repressed, denied, or hidden away—your psychological attic full of uncomfortable truths. Jung famously said, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

The Anima/Animus: The feminine principle in men (anima) and masculine principle in women (animus). These represent the contrasexual elements of our psyche—basically, your internal understanding of the “other” gender, which Jung would admit needs serious updating for our current understanding of gender.

The Persona: Your social mask, the face you present to the world. It’s not necessarily fake—more like your public relations department.

Then there are the character archetypes that populate human stories across cultures: the Hero, the Wise Old Man/Woman, the Trickster, the Mother, the Child, and dozens more. These aren’t just fictional constructs—they’re patterns of behaviour, motivation, and meaning that we all embody at different times.

Your Morning Routine as Archetypal Drama

Let’s examine how archetypes show up in ordinary life, starting with that most sacred of rituals: the morning routine.

You wake up to your alarm. The Hero archetype stirs, ready to face the dragon of Monday morning. You hit snooze. There’s the Trickster, undermining your noble intentions with the seductive logic of “just five more minutes.”

In the shower, you might access the Sage, contemplating the meaning of existence under the hot water (or plotting how to solve that work problem). Getting dressed activates your Persona; you’re literally putting on the costume you’ll wear in the world today. Business suit? Casual Friday attire? Each choice signals something about which archetypal energy you’re channelling.

The Shadow might make an appearance when you feel inexplicably irritated at your partner for doing that thing they always do (which, upon reflection, might be something you dislike about yourself). And when you make breakfast for your family despite being rushed, there’s the Caregiver archetype, ensuring everyone’s needs are met.

All of this before 9 AM. Exhausting, isn’t it?

Creative Applications: The Archetypal Toolkit

Here’s where it gets properly useful. Once you recognise these patterns, you can work with them creatively rather than being unconsciously driven by them.

1. Problem-Solving Through Archetypal Perspective-Shifting

Stuck on a problem? Try looking at it through different archetypal lenses.

• The Hero asks: “What challenge needs conquering here?”

• The Sage asks: “What wisdom can I gain from this situation?”

• The Trickster asks: “What if we completely flip this on its head?”

• The Caregiver asks: “Who needs support here, including myself?”

• The Creator asks: “What new possibility can I build from this?”

Let’s say you’re facing redundancy. The Hero might see it as a quest to find better employment. The Sage might view it as an opportunity for learning and growth. The Trickster might suggest starting that ridiculous business idea you’ve always joked about. The Creator might use it as a chance to completely reinvent your career.

None of these perspectives is “right”—they’re different lenses that reveal different aspects of the situation. The magic happens when you integrate multiple viewpoints.

2. Shadow Work: Making Friends with Your Inner Villain

Jung believed that the Shadow—all those bits we’ve rejected about ourselves—contains tremendous creative energy. The problem isn’t that we have a Shadow; it’s that we try to pretend we don’t.

Your Shadow might contain:

• The ambition you’ve hidden because you were taught it’s not polite

• The anger you’ve suppressed because “nice people don’t get angry”

• The creativity you’ve dismissed because “you’re not artistic”

• The laziness you deny whilst working yourself into exhaustion

Creative Shadow work isn’t about indulging every dark impulse (please don’t start a fight club). It’s about acknowledging these aspects and finding constructive outlets.

Jealous of someone’s success? That’s your Shadow showing you what you actually want for yourself. Feel inexplicably annoyed by someone’s cheerfulness? Perhaps you’ve repressed your own joy. The people who irritate us most are often showing us our own disowned qualities.

Try this: Make a list of people who really wind you up, and note what qualities they possess that bother you. Then, with brutal honesty, ask yourself: “Am I possibly rejecting this quality in myself?” The results can be uncomfortably illuminating.

3. Persona Management: Choosing Your Masks Consciously

We all wear different personas in different contexts—you’re not the same “you” at a job interview, a family dinner, and a pub quiz. The problem arises when we either:

a) Identify too completely with one persona and lose touch with our authentic self b) Have no conscious control over which persona we’re wearing

Creative persona work means:

• Recognising when you’re in “work mode” versus “home mode” versus “creative mode”

• Choosing appropriate personas for different situations (maybe don’t bring your “aggressive negotiator” persona to your child’s parents’ evening)

• Ensuring no single persona completely dominates your life

• Allowing yourself to take the mask off sometimes

I know someone who literally has different playlists for different personas. “Corporate Warrior” for work presentations, “Nurturing Parent” for family time, “Wild Child” for nights out. It sounds contrived, but it’s conscious archetypal work in practice.

4. The Hero’s Journey in Miniature

Joseph Campbell, building on Jung’s work, identified the monomyth or Hero’s Journey—a pattern found in stories across all cultures. But you don’t need to sail to Troy or fight Voldemort to live this pattern.

Every creative project, career change, or personal challenge can be framed as a Hero’s Journey:

1. The Ordinary World: Your comfortable starting point

2. The Call to Adventure: The new opportunity or challenge

3. Refusal of the Call: Your initial resistance (”I’m not qualified/ready/brave enough”)

4. Meeting the Mentor: Finding guidance (teachers, books, or your own inner Sage)

5. Crossing the Threshold: Committing to the journey

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies: The messy middle where you learn and struggle

7. The Ordeal: The biggest challenge or crisis point

8. The Reward: What you gain from facing the ordeal

9. The Return: Bringing your new wisdom back to ordinary life

Recognising this pattern helps you navigate challenges with more grace. When you’re in the “Tests and Trials” phase of learning a new skill and everything feels impossible, you can recognise: “Ah, this is just the bit where the hero struggles. It’s supposed to be hard. This is where the transformation happens.”

5. Archetypal Creativity Blocks and Solutions

Different archetypes can both enable and block creative work.

The Perfectionist (Shadow side of the Creator/Artist archetype) might prevent you from finishing anything. Solution: Invoke the Trickster or the Child—give yourself permission to play and make “bad” art.

The Saboteur (another Shadow manifestation) might convince you you’re not talented enough. Solution: Call in the Warrior or Hero to face this internal critic directly. What evidence does the Saboteur actually have?

The Eternal Student (Shadow side of the Sage) keeps you perpetually preparing and learning but never doing. Solution: The Creator or the Fool can help you just start, imperfectly.

The Caregiver Gone Rogue makes you put everyone else’s needs first until you’ve no energy for your own creative work. Solution: The Sovereign archetype can help you set boundaries and claim your own time and space.

Archetypal Dialogue: Talking to Yourself (Productively)

One of Jung’s techniques was active imagination—engaging directly with archetypal figures in your psyche. This sounds absolutely barmy until you try it, and then it’s either still barmy but useful, or it’s genuinely transformative.

Try this exercise:

1. Identify an internal conflict you’re facing

2. Personify the different sides of this conflict as archetypal figures

3. Let them have a conversation (writing it out or speaking aloud)

For example, if you’re torn between staying in a stable job and pursuing a risky creative venture:

The Caregiver: “But what about security? What about the mortgage? What about your family’s needs?”

The Creator: “What about dying with your music still inside you? What about showing your children that passion matters?”

The Sage (mediating): “Both of you raise valid points. Perhaps the question isn’t either/or but how to honour both values?”

This isn’t just whimsy—it’s externalising internal psychological processes so you can work with them more objectively. You’re giving voice to different aspects of yourself that might otherwise just create vague anxiety or paralysis.

Living Archetypally in a Post-Jungian World

Jung’s work has its limitations. His views on gender were very much of his time, and the collective unconscious isn’t a scientifically verifiable concept. Modern psychology has moved beyond some of his frameworks whilst incorporating others.

But the practical power of archetypes lies not in whether they’re “real” in some objective sense, but in whether they’re useful. And they’re incredibly useful as:

• A vocabulary for discussing complex psychological patterns

• A framework for understanding recurring patterns in your behaviour

• A toolkit for creative problem-solving and personal development

• A map for navigating life transitions and challenges

The key is to hold archetypes lightly. You’re not possessed by them; you’re dancing with them. Some days you lead, some days they lead, and the dance is richer when you know the steps.

Practical Archetypal Experiments

Want to play with this in your own life? Try these:

Week 1: Shadow Spotting. Notice what qualities in others really irritate you. Journal about whether you might possess these qualities yourself and have repressed them.

Week 2: Persona Inventory. List the different roles you play (parent, employee, friend, creative, etc.). Which personas do you wear most? Which have you neglected? What happens if you consciously embody a neglected archetype for a day?

Week 3: Archetypal Problem-Solving. Take a current challenge and examine it from four different archetypal perspectives. Notice what new solutions or insights emerge.

Week 4: Hero’s Journey Mapping. Identify a current challenge or project and map it onto the Hero’s Journey framework. Where are you in the journey? What’s the next stage?

The Integration Invitation

Jung’s ultimate goal wasn’t to identify archetypes but to integrate them—to achieve what he called individuation, becoming a more whole, conscious, authentic self. The archetypes aren’t separate entities; they’re facets of your complete psyche.

Creative living, in this framework, means:

• Recognising which archetypal energies you’re embodying

• Choosing consciously which to amplify in different situations

• Integrating your Shadow rather than projecting it onto others

• Balancing different archetypal needs (security and adventure, structure and spontaneity, caring for others and caring for yourself)

• Ultimately, answering to your Self—that central, organising principle that’s bigger than any single archetype

And here’s the beautiful paradox: the more you understand these universal patterns, the more uniquely yourself you become. Because you’re not just unconsciously playing out archetypal scripts—you’re consciously choosing how to embody these eternal patterns in your own particular way.

So next time you’re facing a decision, a challenge, or even just choosing breakfast cereal, you might ask yourself: Which archetype am I embodying right now? Which one might serve me better? And is there a way to honour multiple archetypal needs simultaneously?

The cast of characters is already there, inside your psyche. You might as well get to know them, invite them to tea, and let them help you write a more creative, conscious, and integrated life story.

Just don’t be surprised if the Trickster spikes the tea with something unexpected. That’s rather the point.

Alan /|\