Illumination in dark times
A genealogy of modern Western selfhood and a post-Western world

"Smith ... outlines a genealogy of modern Western selfhood: a radically individual, hypermasculine character that was formed during the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering, and altogether assertive,” it was “dedicated to action,” hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing, Smith writes, an “undeveloped heart,” a term borrowed from E. M. Forster’s assessment of the British elite." "

" “We must alter our very relations with the world around us.” This means giving up the exalted and exaggerated idea of the West that boosts a masculinist self-image but severely constricts thought and feeling. “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties,...the not-knowing of how the post-Western story will come out.” Smith’s final warning—that “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer”—should resonate today, as nineteenth-century individualism reasserts itself in the degraded Nietzscheanism of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller." >>

* Mishra, P. (2026, April). "The Authority of Thought". Harper's Magazine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/the-authority-of-thought-pankaj-mishra/

* Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Patrick Smith. 2010 >>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/169395/somebody-elses-century-by-patrick-smith/
#TheWest #WhiteSupremacy #masculinity #ImpulseControl #EthnoNationalism #WesternCivilization #AngloAmerican #parochialism #individualism #subjectivity #SettlerSociety #Culture #RacialInequality #war #EastWest #PostWesternWorld #DarkTimes #illumination #narrative #environment

Image: Double Bay War Memorial, Steyne Park, Sydney

Subjectivity is subjective?

#Subjectivity

“some #Asianthinkers (including Watsuji) even go so far as to say that this fixed, essential conception of #subjectivity is delusional b/c it suffers from a propensity to view each #human as a ‘self-sustaining #being’, abstracted or removed from their social, historical and climatic/natural groups”

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5zca2ola2zxpkw37w4f3wxtu/post/3me75e466pk2k

A quotation from Josh Billings

Love iz sed tew be blind, but i kno lots ov phellows in love, who kan see twice az mutch in their sweethearts as i kan.
 
[Love is said to be blind, but I know lots of fellows in love who can see twice as much in their sweethearts as I can.]

Josh Billings (1818-1885) American humorist, aphorist [pseud. of Henry Wheeler Shaw]
Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax, 1870-12 (1870 ed.)

More about this quote: wist.info/billings-josh/81588/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #joshbillings #blindness #enthrall #faults #insight #love #obscurity #passion #perception #perspective #rapture #subjectivity

Billings, Josh - Josh Billings' Farmer's Allminax, 1870-12 (1870 ed.) | WIST Quotations

Love iz sed tew be blind, but i kno lots ov phellows in love, who kan see twice az mutch in their sweethearts as i kan. [Love is said to be blind, but I know lots of fellows in love who can see twice as much in their sweethearts as…

WIST Quotations

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.” — Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
#BOTD #JulianBarnes #QOTD #Quotation #Quote #identity #memory #selfnarrative #subjectivity #aging #selfdeception

https://yahooeysblog.wordpress.com/2026/01/19/quote-of-the-day-5405/

Quote of the Day

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our l…

Yahooey's Blog
Is It Time To Redraw Our Maps? / ‘Free The Map’
(From migration to ecology, new knowledge makes new cartographic demands)
--
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/14/is-it-time-to-redraw-our-maps <-- shared media article
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https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1676031 <--shared paper
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https://freethemap.org/ <-- shared ‘Free The Map’ page, where “Prof. Henk van Houtum makes a compelling case for a new cartography…”
--
[this post should not be considered an endorsement of any particular viewpoint or book/product]
#cartography #cartopolitics #geography #visualisation #humanimpacts #mapping #mapmaking #GIS #spatial #interpretation #history #borders #internationalborders #jigsawpuzzlemaps #neutrality #objectivity #mappingrevolution #uncertainty #subjectivity #multiplicity

#CBT #Hegel #Subjectivity Twenty-one seconds to Nirvana: a Hegelian critique of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Original article by Ricky DeSantis

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41286-025-00223-3

Twenty-one seconds to Nirvana: a Hegelian critique of cognitive-behavioral therapy - Subjectivity

Cognitive behavioral therapy is not only the most widely practiced form of therapy in the world, but its treatment methods—particularly mindfulness—have come to saturate self-help literature, human resource departments, and military training programs. I argue that despite its pretensions to scientificity, there is reason to think that CBT has become an ideology. I make this argument by returning to the two founding sources of second-wave CBT—Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck—to show that the core of CBT lies in a revitalization of a Stoic theory of subjectivity. From here, I argue that while Ellis and Beck find inspiration in Stoicism’s theory of emotions, they both miss the teleological metaphysics underlying Stoicism’s therapeutic project. Drawing on Hegel’s reading of Stoicism, I argue that this elision leads CBT to reproduce the same problem of empty formalism that plagued Roman Stoicism, leaving it susceptible to ideological co-option.

SpringerLink
In the segment I talk about Transductive Subjectivity, what it means, and how I use AI to help my thought process in absence of human beings who aren't as available
https://youtu.be/SsOvTj46qFY
#video #philosophy #youtube #thinking #ai #meow #blog #podcast #Solutions #sharingiscaring #humancondition #subjectivity #psychology #sociology #ontology, #epistemology #raccoons