“Donald Trump Is Like an Old Friend”: Parasocial Relationships and Politics
Walking down a New York City street while still in my teens, I spotted a television film critic I admired walking in the opposite direction. I said, “Hello, Gene.” He…
Psychology
41 posts
Bureaucracy as Secular Spirituality
The Origins of Bureaucratic Spirituality: Administration, Religion and Writing Bureaucracy evokes and depends on secular spirituality, as it gives us a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves. It…
Transhumanism and the Death of Human Exceptionalism
Every few decades, a new ism comes along that many people see as a threat to the bedrock principles of Western civilization. Communism was one of the big ones, and…
Virtue Signal or Piety Display? The Search for Cognitive Identity and the Attack on Social Bargaining
The accusation of virtue signaling has become a standard rhetorical device in recent years. There are at least three major problems with this. First, there is not a lot of…
Resisting the Transcendental Temptation
Throughout history, suffering and death have always followed when people have succumbed to the transcendental temptation. Today, it may be luring us to the brink of disaster yet again.
Five Lessons from the Trial of Socrates
In 399 BCE, Socrates was on trial on two charges—impiety and corrupting youth. With nearly 2,500 years of hindsight, his self-defense serves as a goldmine of lessons to be learned.…
Living with the Grim Reaper Can Make You Happier
Death is everywhere. Trees die. Cows die. We die. Even inanimate objects like batteries and projects die. Abstract concepts like dreams and aspirations can die, too. But these latter deaths…
Post-Truth in an Age of Authenticity
Something really weird is happening in our culture. Two seemingly contradictory trends are taking place side by side, and no one seems to have noticed. We live in an age…
Triggered: A Defeatist Metaphor
In recent years, the word trigger has become freighted with significance, evoking a high-stakes emotional activation. The term is difficult to avoid in everyday conversation and on social media, and…
Of Rats, Voles and Online Porn
Rats in a Skinner Box Rats wired up to electrodes, housed in an experimental Skinner box, continually press a button to give themselves powerful, pleasurable sensations. The rats go into…
Happiness Versus Meaning
The pursuit of happiness has become controversial — so much so that many will read this text and vehemently disagree with my pontifications. Happiness as a concept seems to have fallen out…
What’s Missing From Call-Out Culture: The Opportunity to Change
Call-out culture, the act of publicly and collectively reprimanding someone for a past misstep, has longstanding roots in anthropological history. In our online society, in which the past cannot readily…
Who or What Are We Human Mammalia, Really?
Warning Assimilation of the concepts herein may lead to mental anxiety if the external world is believed to be reality. Who or What Are We? We have an unbroken lineal…
Ancient Stoicism, Human Rights and The Dignity of the Individual
In August 2018, I published an article in Quillette, in which I defended Roman Stoicism from its Christian critics. The article examined the ethical possibilities of Christianity as compared with…
Aping Around: The Importance of Our Animal Nature
Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species more than 150 years ago, in 1859, to share the discovery that the slow processes of evolution have shaped us, along with all…
In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s Happy. Book Review.
Stoicism has got a bad rap lately. In the popular imagination, it is associated with reluctance—particularly male reluctance—to show vulnerability or talk frankly about emotions. The new APA guidelines on…
We Need Stoicism More Than Ever: A Response to the New APA Guidelines
Recently, the American Psychological Association took aim at “traditional masculinity,” when they released their “first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys.” They summarize these as follows: Once psychologists began…
Replacing Religion: How Secularism Has Failed and How It Can Succeed
Imagine a world in which individuals based their opinions on reason. Now, it is all but a certainty that human beings will at times fail to use logic in their…
