The Mystery of Malevolence

As you might note, I haven’t written an essay in quite a while. That is because I’ve been busy with the publication of my new book, “The Paranoid Vision: Deciphering the Mystery of Malevolence.” It is now available. Here is a blurb and some reviews, from the

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The Deeper Meaning of the Winter Blues

Four years ago, I wrote a short essay on the winter blues. I posted it on my other websites, www.deeperquestions.com and www.platosattache.com, but not here on my blog. If I had more time

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The Devolution of Erotic Love into a Battle to Prove Moral Superiority

About 2500 years ago, somewhere in ancient Athens, there was a drinking party. As Plato tells it, each of the guests was required to give a speech

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The Symbolic Appeal of Hatha Yoga & the Problem of Symptom Substitution

How can one explain the ever-growing popularity of hatha yoga? What does it reveal about the zeitgeist that millions of people are seeking to bend, turn and twist themselves, like a pretzel, into a variety of odd positions? There ..

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The Unfortunate Influence of Kant’s Epistemology on Men’s Suits & Ties

Executive Summary: What is real? Is it matter or is it form? To be masculine is to owe one’s allegiance to form, identity, law, essence and structure. The subscription to form as the real is reflected everywhere, including in

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A Clue to the Motivation of the Colorado Killer

An enraged lunatic, who goes on a killing spree, doesn’t murder randomly. On the contrary, there is a method to his madness; he targets a certain group of people. His choice of victims offers an important clue to his particular psychopathology. For example,..

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The Mystery of Chief Justice John Roberts

Often the best way to understand a person is by contrasting him with someone who faced a similar type of crisis. Consider Sir Thomas More, who lived during the early part of the Sixteenth Century. He was, in addition to being a writer and philosopher..

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The Psychological Fascination with Batman

How very different are the world’s of Superman and Batman. Superman inhabits the heavenly realm of Apollo, assuggested by the iconic image of him flying through the sky. He even comes to Earth, from somewhere in the heavens, the planet Krypton. Superman ..

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The Seven Most Dangerous Insights

“Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.”— Friedrich Nietzsche Summary: In the pages that follow, you will encounter the seven most dangerous insights: 1. The Conservation of

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But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who
loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?