Because the second volume of The Psychology of the Machine series is set to be released in a few days, we sat down for a brief workshop to discuss why such an undertaking is necessary and the potential gap that must be bridged along the way. In a curious way, the story leads back to the suppressed childhood questions of our history, which we encounter today in ghostly form as social puzzles that are difficult to decipher, if not even as a form of collective psychological inflation. When Nietzsche said that madness is rare in individuals, »but the rule among groups, parties, peoples, and eras,« this implies that people may, without realizing it, work themselves up into a form of collective delusion. And this disorder becomes all the more serious in that it can confront us not only in the form of an economy but also as a supposed reality principle. Deciphering this collective unconscious is the purpose of the Psychology of the Machine, which is an attempt to gain clarity regarding the prevailing Gesellschaftstriebwerk, or our Social Drive Mechanism. Strangely enough, this brings back that conceptual figure which Freud had relegated to the private boudoir with his superego, but originally, in Johann Christian August Heinroth’s Textbook on Disorders of Mental Life, was held to have a collective significance he’d termed the Über-Uns—as that shared fate affecting us all, whether it comes in the form of populism, artificial intelligence, or whatever else.

Weil in ein paar Tagen der zweite Band der Psychologie der Maschine herauskommen wird, haben wir uns hingesetzt und ein kleines Werkstattgespräch durchgeführt, das zum einen die Frage behandelt, warum ein solches Unterfangen nötig ist, zum anderen, was das Potenzialgefälle ist, das dabei überwunden werden muss. Auf eine kuriose Weise führt die Geschichte zu den ausgeblendeten Kinderfragen unserer Geschichte zurück, die uns heute, in gespenstischer Form, als schwer entzifferbare Gesellschaftsrätsel, wenn nicht überhaupt als eine Form der kollektiven psychischen Inflation begegnen. Wenn Nietzsche gesagt hat, dass der Irrsinn bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes ist, »aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel«, so impliziert dies, dass es Zeiten geben mag, die sich, ohne sich darüber im Klaren zu sein, in eine Form der kollektiven Verblendung hineinsteigern können. Und diese Störung ist umso gravierender, als sie uns in Gestalt einer Ökonomie und damit als vermeintliches ›Realitätsprinzip‹ gegenübertreten kann. Dieses kollektive Unbewusste zu entziffern ist der Sinn der Psychologie der Maschine, der Versuch mithin, sich über das obwaltende Gesellschaftstriebwerk Klarheit zu verschaffen. Auf eine kuriose Weise ist damit eine Gedankenfigur reaktiviert, die Freud mit seinem Über-Ich ins Boudoir des Privaten verlagert hat, die aber ursprünglich, in Johann Christian August Heinroths Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens, als Über-Uns eine kollektive Bedeutung besaß – als jenes gemeinsame Schicksal, das uns allen widerfährt, mag es nun als Populismus, als Künstliche Intelligenz oder als was auch immer daherkommen.

Related Content

As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a seemingly endless summer of globalization began—thirty golden years in which the only question worth asking was how to stimulate demand. But what happens when the world turns on its own axis and the problem is no longer finding consumers, but actually producing anything at all? David Baverez, a financial strategist who has spent the past decade observing China from Hong Kong, argues that 2022 marks precisely such a rupture: not only the return of geopolitical conflicts but also a fundamental shift from a peace economy to a war economy—an economy measured not by GDP per capita, but by who controls the supply bottlenecks. The question is whether Europe, caught between American financial hegemony and Chinese dominance in production, still has anything to offer—or whether the freedom to think is already a luxury of the past. Despite the somber topic, the conversation with David Baverez was laced with lightheartedness, due in no small part to Baverez’s exceptionally witty way of bringing big issues down to earth and driving the point home.

David Baverez is a forward-thinking French private investor and author who sometimes describes himself as a Business Angel/Demon on his Medium page. After spending 15 years between London and Boston — including a decade at Fidelity Investments managing European and Global Equity funds — he co-founded KDA Capital with Krishnan Sadasivam in 2005, returning all funds to investors at the end of 2010 in an early and contrarian bet against European sovereign debt. He has since lived in Hong Kong as a private investor and author who has written on the emergence of the New China on global economics, including Welcome to the War Economy! He is also a columnist for various media outlets, including L’Opinion, Les Echos, and Sans doute.

David Baverez has published

Related Content

There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job. But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that same executive ultimately decided that having another white person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies. What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination against young white men:

»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«

Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.

Related Content

Given that we’re said to live in an Information Society, the idea that an entire Nation could succumb to a form of mass hysteria similar to medieval delusions of sacrilege and infanticide would normally be unthinkable. The Canadian scandal involving the Kamloops child deaths, which kept all of Canada on edge for quite some time, exemplifies such an incident—a moral panic that led the Canadian Prime Minister, in a display of national shame, to lower the country’s flags to half-mast. And because the public held the Catholic Church responsible for the alleged murders, Pope Francis was also asked to apologize—a request he humbly fulfilled during a six-day penitential pilgrimage to Canada. The fact that the affair eventually faded away did not, of course, lead to a full reckoning—and this is precisely why we should turn our attention to this question of how such a moral panic could have emerged in the Information age. It was Tom Flanagan who caught our attention because, as a political scientist, he has published two books on the subject (along with others); additionally, he is not only a recognized expert on Canadian colonial history but also has a deep familiarity with how politics operate, thanks to his long tenure as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Tom Flanagan taught political science at the University of Calgary until his retirement. His academic interests centered on Canadian Indigenous peoples, especially the Métis, who, led by the millenarian Louis Riel, initiated a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885. Alongside his academic pursuits, Flanagan also served as a political consultant and columnist for major Canadian newspapers.

Tom Flanagan has recently puplished

Related Content

What do you do when you’re a public relations spokeswoman sitting in a BBC studio, being grilled by a relentless host who is insisting that you defend Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam’s absurd claim that climate change will claim billions of lives in just a few years? In actuality, her answer would have been simple — she needed only to follow the group’s creed, drilled into her before the broadcast: just break down in tears. »People need to see crying mothers...« That Zion Lights didn’t bow to the activists’ peer pressure in this situation is a sign of great intellectual integrity — which may have something to do with her family’s history: her parents were Indian rice farmers before moving to the UK, a background that taught her energy poverty is even worse than CO2 emissions — and how technology has done more to liberate women than any hand-wringing or crocodile tears ever could. And this was precisely what prompted us to start a conversation with her, tracing the path of this woman who went from being the press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion—perhaps the most radical of all Environmental Movements—to becoming an advocate for Nuclear Power: a coming-of-age story that highlights the internal doctrine of this cult — as Zion Lights herself now calls it — while reminding us that demonizing technology is a luxury belief that few people can afford — and one that, as off-grid societies have shown, leads to the worst cognitive dissonance imaginable.

Zion Lights is a writer who was an early environmental activist and press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion from 2018 to 2020. After parting ways with the group, she shifted toward a pragmatic, technology-oriented environmental movement. She recently published her journey from »grassroots activism to becoming one of the UK’s leading advocates for nuclear energy,« titled Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She has contributed to the Huffington Post for several years and has recently begun writing for Quillette and Human Progress.

Zion Lights has published

Related Content

What happens when, in a society that considers itself free of all intellectual taboos, you pursue a question perceived as highly embarrassing, even awkward? This is exactly what happened when Fiona Girkin (after a disturbing personal experience) decided to write a doctoral thesis exploring how female narcissism manifests in the workplace. While male narcissism is well known as the Napoleon complex and even as a form of delusions of grandeur, the female variant is a much more psychologically complex issue, with many candidates portraying themselves as pitiful victims—a strategy that makes deciphering their behavior extremely difficult and even a social taboo. After all, who would want to accuse such a pitiful person of being the real culprit, namely the workplace bully? That Fiona Girkin was prepared to juxtapose the male hero’s journey with a »victim’s journey« was an institutional scandal for the Tasmanian police force, for which she worked as a trainer and consultant. Even though all the stories the police officers told her while on duty supported her version, merely mentioning the possibility of dark personalities in women touched on a long-held social taboo.

Dr. Fiona Girkin is an Australian counselor who studies and teaches about female narcissism. In addition to her counseling practice and consultation services, she also runs a YouTube channel.

Related Texts:

If the term Caste has recently entered the Human Sciences, this may be taken as evidence that European-style universalism has lost its appeal, and even as evidence that the idea has spread that here we’re dealing with an injustice that’s only been cloaked in a human, universalistic guise. When Indian theorist B.R. Ambedkar, ranked as the greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi in surveys, described the Indian caste system as »unknown to humanity in other parts of the world,« this finding becomes even more puzzling. This observation has given us the opportunity to speak with Suraj Yengde, who has not only addressed the caste system in two books but also experienced it firsthand as a member of the untouchable Dalit community—despite its prohibition under Indian law. Making this conversation even more interesting is his critical stance towards today’s culture of outrage, identifying Victim Olympics as a discipline that downplays or denies actual discrimination for its own benefit.

Suraj Yengde received the 2019 Canadian Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award and is a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center, where he teaches and serves as a research associate in its Department of African and African American Studies. He was named one of the 25 Most Influential Young Indians of 2021 by GQ India.

Related Content