Language and consciousness in the age of cognitive warfare
Or how I've become a Substack author
Follow your dreams
In February of 2010, as a musician and undergrad music student in Plymouth, England, I went to Sils Maria in Switzerland to visit the house where Friedrich Nietzsche—my favourite thinker—wrote his seminary works, the works which had shaped my life and values: Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.
After a week of my stay at Nietzsche Haus, as I was leaving the village surveying the snow-bathed Alpine peaks of Upper Engadin, I made a decision to move the trajectory of my life from music to philosophy and set a goal to become a Nietzsche scholar at university.
The reason was a realisation I had after meeting my house mates, other scholars—two PhD candidates from Cambridge, a nuclear scientist from Denmark and a lady poet from another Swiss canton. One night we went to the local pub and talked about everything and nothing, including, of course, Nietzsche’s philosophy.
What struck me was that despite all the academic knowledge none of them appeared to get what Nietzsche seemed to mean, as I read him. I was confused thinking “How can they not be concerned about the looming catatrophic consequences of the death of God?” — as was prophesied by Nietzsche some 150 years before.
A couple of years later, after signing a record deal for the debut EP of my metal band (on vinyl!) and completing my undergraduate degree, I was thrilled to move to London to do my postgrad in Education at UCL. This also meant I had to disband the band and cancel our prospective European tour. Clearly, I thought, I had outgrown my punk rock dreams.
Once I qualified as an educator, I started working as a private tutor, which meant I could support myself to pursue my dream of reading Philosophy at university. Luckily, I received an offer to work under two prominent Nietzsche scholars in Anglophone academia at the time. It was 2016—six years after I decided to become an academic.
During the second term of my studies, I remember sitting in the Council Chamber of the British Medical Association building near Kings Cross during a Hegel lecture and thinking: “Dreams really do come true if we stick to the plan and commit to pursuing them.”
A change of heart
But something stood in the way. The analytic style of academic philosophy, i.e. rigorously logical, abstract way of writing, intolerant of passionate outbursts I admired Nietzsche and other poet-philosophers for, was making me increasingly discontent with the idea of spending the rest of my life in the publish-or-perish academic rat race.
Even though academic training helped me sharpen my critical analytic and conceptual language and research skills, I wasn’t interested in squeeky clean logical quibbling devoid of poetic lucidity of an inspired writing style. For me, the word must excite emotively as much as it informs intellectually—there has to be magic!
Up until this point, I had been into Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, both of which I had discovered during my music-making days, but the fact that almost all university staff I knew seemed to unquestioningly subscribe to Marxist ideology made me wonder: “Am I being brainwashed here or what!?” I remember feeling an intangible sense of self-censorship which made my essay-writing feel incredibly confined and unnatural. This was a red flag for me—I started to seriously question whether I would be a good fit for academia at all.
I started to feel increasingly inauthentic having to conform with the unwritten laws of the political doctrines permeating the academic world. My punk-rock self wasn’t having it. Thus, I have completed my studies to live me philosophy in flesh now as my mentor, Nietzsche, would have it.
The Whore of Babylon
In the following year, as the C-19 crisis hit, I decided to leave London for good and move abroad. I moved to Malta where in the following year I founded Logos Education and Research—a project with a mission to empower individuals and organisations by providing consultancy and training in the use of language and cognition so as to better navigate the world amid the cognitive chaos of cultural nihilism. My former experience in English language teaching helped me get started.
The past three years have been an incredible showcase of the exponential proliferation of computational propaganda . What I’ve witnessed as a thinker, academic, linguist and cultural observer was a world of defective information ecosystems where the capacity for thinking and articulating ideas is undermined, critical faculties subverted and a sense of reality warped. A new purpose started to emerge for me—a very real need to guard language and thought in an age where our collective humanity is under systemic assault.
By the end of the initial lockdown in spring 2020, the new online medium of podcast and long-form video conversation had changed everything. Independent thinkers, intellectuals and new independent start up media companies were emerging in response to the increasingly dysfunctional, ideologically corrupted official sector of media and education.
Many scholars committed to seeing through the smokescreen of both official and partisan narratives started connecting and working together to improve their sensemaking.
In 2021 I joined The Consilience Project after meeting its Founder Daniel Schmachtenberger on the course Sensemaking 101 hosted by a independent media-community group, Rebel Wisdom. My contribution to Consilience is researching catastrophic risks of how the algorithms of Artificial Intelligence affect human cognition. If you want to learn more about how minds and lives are captured by technocratic protocols of digital epigenetics, subscribe to this account.
I feel now it’s the time for me to share my insights on a regular basis and master my own writing style, unconstrained by the formal strictures of academia or financial insentives other than from those who appreciate my genuine ideas. We’re entering a new world and those who dare to step outside the dying order of the old paradigms will be in the best position to develop new ways of thinking and seeking truth that will be are necessary to face up to the tectonic shifts of the anthropocene.
The Free Spirits of the day after tomorrow will shape the future with a myriad of our little contributions to enable the emergence of the better world ahead. Let’s get to work.
On writing, thinking and being human
For a while already I’ve been meaning to set off and write on a regular basis while going through turbulent times in my professional career which had stood in the way of it, until now. It’s never the right time to start so I might as well go for it and start publishing, start getting feedback and make writing my daily practice.
There are several reasons for those who feel like they have something to say, to say it. First, in order to know what we think, first we must write ideas down to find out if we truly understand them. Second, we we learn of how to improve by receiving feedback from others. Interfacing our minds is increasingly important as the world becomes exponentially volatile and complex.
The informational tools we have developed are more powerful than our paleolithic brains, and since our sense of agency becomes decoupled from our attention in the multipolar crossfire of limbic hijacking and dopamine hacking, the need to invest into our cognitive and linguistic skills has never been more critical. The art of thinking and articulating oneself clearly and coherently has gained in currency as the cognitive assault of trillion-dollar super-AI is launched at our brains.
Under these new circumstances our attention is increasingly fragmented, weak and short. The assessment criteria for verifying the reality of things are slowly dissolving in the fluid matrix of synthetic meta-reality of algorithmically mutated avatars, personas and digital egregores of big tech platforms colonising our minds and perceptions daily.
Therefore, working with written text, both receptively (reading) and productively (writing) is a critical cognitive skill we must practise to strengthen our attention, improve our capacity for reflexive thought and, most importantly, to make better sense of what we’re thinking.
To my readers
Amongst topics that I find fascinating are, broadly speaking, philosophy, psychology, mysticism and religious experience, the study of civilisations, history, linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology and the evolution of humanity across paradigms and where it all leaves us in our own confused age. I love wondering about what makes us human, how we got to where we are as a species and how we can help each other make it through the synthetic armageddon unfolding in front of our very eyes every day.
Other than the phenomenological tradition of Nietzsche’s, Hegel’s and Heidegger’s— I also read widely in Western Hermetic tradition in context of cognitive and behavioural science and depth psychology in an effort to examine the relationship between language and thinking, mind and spirit, reason and faith, and the the way in which we see ourselves through their respective lenses, individually and collectively.
On the most fundamental level, I’m fascinated with how the the language of religious myth maps onto the modern language of science because I believe that human capacity for sensemaking depends on our being able to apprehend the reality of our experience from both of these angles. Each of them reveals that which the other conceals.
Thank you
I look forward to growing as a writer and thinker, and to having insightful conversations with you so we can evolve collectively. I will appreciate any constructive comments on the pieces I publish here so make sure to reach out, comment and subscribe to get notified on the newest offerings.
Thanks for your time and attention.