The myth of the institution is that it exists to serve the needs of the individual person — the unpleasant truth behind the myth is that it exists to serve the needs of the institutionalized person, which is to say, the person as they have been recreated or reconstructed by…

The problem with ‘stating the obvious’ is that when we do this we aren’t stating anything. We might think that when we take care to use practical, concrete, down-to-earth language to describe a situation then we’re nailing it, but we’re not. We might think that when we speak in a…

Entropy means that information has been lost from the system. Information in turn refers to what we might call the ‘surprise content’ of what’s going on such that when there is zero element of surprise then this means that the entropy content is at a maximum. ‘Maximum entropy’ means that…

Who we are really doesn’t need to be fixed and so what this means is that if we are trying to fix ourselves then what we’re trying to fix isn’t us. It’s some kind of idea, some kind of a formal construct, and so even if we were able to…

When we’re blissfully unaware of all the self-contradictions and paradoxicality that exist in our everyday lives then what this shows is that we’re not living in the real world at all. What this shows is that we’re living in a made-up world, a crassly oversimplified world. This crassly oversimplified world…

Our everyday type of ‘consciousness’ (so-called consciousness) is a prison. This sounds like hyperbole, but it isn’t — it’s a very straightforward statement and it’s not some kind of loose poetic metaphor. Our everyday consciousness functions exactly as a prison. If we were to think about it in any other…

The idea that we have of ourselves spends all its time dreaming of what it would do if it were real — not that it ever will be, of course. Not that it ever could be! Or perhaps we should say that the idea we have of ourselves spends all…

If we are to live in the Known World — the world that is made up of known things — then we have to do something first, something we all know how to do instinctively but which we can’t allow ourselves to know anything about. We have to put the…

The world we live in is not run for the benefit of actual human beings, but — rather — it’s run for the benefit of who we mistakenly think we are. We think that it is ‘designed for our benefit’ but it isn’t. If we could understand this then we’d…