Freedom Blocked at the “Freedom 250” Grand Prix

The Indy Car Series event, held on August 23, 2026 in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by delegates from the British colonies then officially in rebellion, ironically gave people visiting or living in the federal capitol a visceral experience of freedom blocked by governmental police and military authority. For not only the Mall, but also the entire route of the race was blocked by military and local police during the race such that public viewing was blocked. Entire city blocks separated the route from where tourists and local residents alike could drive and walk. Whether the federal government excessively pushed security at the expense of Americans being able to view the race without the luck of a lottery draw in advance for a ticket to be able to see the race at the Mall (roughly, between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument) is one question; the irony of being in such a visual, even overwhelming, militaristic police-city during a celebration of political freedom is more definite.

The full essay is at "Freedom 250."

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, given the salience therein of the will to power. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.

The full essay is at "The Stanford Prison Experiment."

A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion: The U.S. Senate Sanctions Russia after a Funeral

It is easy to point to instances in which elected government-officials stage political theater for effect, for in the domain of politics, perception has a political currency that can leave a real imprint almost as if the staged were actual rather than pretense. When the leader of one group takes over as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from a person of another partisan group, for example, it is customary for them for the mallet literally to be handed over. In the U.S. Senate, its president, who is also the Vice President of the U.S., may sit in the presider’s chair during a vote if a tie is expected; the Senate President can vote only to break a tie. A certain depth of political meaning can go along with the actual presider presiding. Sometimes, however, an arrangement can have a depth of meaning as well as carry actual political weight. The Senate’s vote on additional economic sanctions on Russia on July 28, 2026 is a case in point, for the synchronicity itself could have caused goose-bumps on exposed skin. Even so, even profound political meaning (and fulfilment) is a far shot from religious belief and experience. Distinguishing these is important in this case, for the day of the vote included a very relevant funeral at the National Cathedral that many senators no doubt attended, and could be expected to ponder their own mortality and what may lie beyond.

The full essay is at "A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion."

Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

The full essay is at "Eichmann."

San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

The full essay is at "San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival."

 

Downtown

Like the coronavirus in the early 2020s, HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s and for at least a decade after then paid little or no attention to national borders or even to nationalities. Even though coronavirus freely walked through the boundaries of our various group-identities with the implication being that they are actually artificial demarcated constructions, AIDS showed us that sub-societal cultural differences do exist. In fact, within a given sub-culture and thus group-identity, one set of values may be ethically and psychologically better than another set, so broad-strokes can be understood as over-simplifications.

The full essay is at "Downtown."

I Want Your Sex

The 2026 film, I Want Your Sex, is ostensibly about sex, for the film is saturated with that leitmotif, but the narrative is actually a critique of California culture, with European culture playing a minor role to provide a contrast. Generally, comedy can be used by screenwriters as a means by which audiences can accept, or at least acknowledge criticism that would otherwise be met with ferocious denial befitting a drug addiction. In 2026, the sheer dogmatism of ideologically-soaked imposing at will, as if with facts of reason rather than the gloss of merely subjective opinion, was the mentality of the day afflicting (young) adults under 40 years-old in California. Film can expose such banality to the light of day and thus serve as a self-correcting agent for a societal or sub-societal culture, for the human brain, standing on its own as arrogance on stilts, may be woefully and even unretrievably vulnerable to purblindness when  beliefs and values are in the grip of ideological idolatry.

The full essay is at "I Want Your Sex."

Israel in Lebanon: On the Hubris of Hatred

Hatred warps reasoning as well as ethical judgment along the lines of a warped time-space fabric around a large mass. In other words, the sheer gravitational pull of self-centeredness can bend both thought and judgment. As essentially egoist, this phenomenon can itself be considered to be unethical, for what are actually equivalent ethical harms are perceived as unequal at the expense of other people or peoples. Even though Israel’s military attacks in, and invasion of, Lebanon in 2026 could be said to be in violation of international law, Israel’s national security minister said on June 19^th that all of Lebanon must burn because four Israeli soldiers had just been killed in combat when their tank was hit near Kfar Tebnit. The official’s statement is significant in that it lays bare the false equivalence of the lives of four Israelis and the entire population of Lebanon. The warped judgment and related ratiocination behind such a baseless equivalence can be grasped from the standpoint of utilitarianism.

The full essay is at "Israel in Lebanon." 

Fifty Shades of Grey

A sadist is a person who feels pleasure in inflicting emotional and physical pain on another person. For the sadistic personality, the emotional pain that is inflicted on another person for the sadist’s own pleasure need not be associated with sex because emotional or physical pain is broader than that which can be inflicted sexually. Hence, the bottom-line for the sadist psychology is that pleasure that is felt by harming another person, who thus feels pain as a direct result of the sadist, lies in the making suffer. A sadist who does not permit oneself to feel emotion is particularly dangerous because no sympathy or compassion operates as a constraint on how much hurt is inflicted. In such a case, the sadist is like one of the androids in the film Ex Machina as the knife is coldly inserted into the torso of the programmer who built the intelligent machines. Indeed, the narcissistic sadist can be very intelligent in knowing precisely how to inflict emotional pain especially in an emotionally vulnerable victim. Once discovered, such a sadist will endeavor to avoid such a victim, but not because such an unemotional sadist has a conscience and feels guilty. In the film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Anastasia Steele’s life changes forever when she meets the emotionally-tormented billionaire, Christian Grey. She falls in love with the sadist, and, because she wants to be with him, at some point she willingly assumes the masochist role even though she does not feel pleasure from physical (or emotional) pain being inflicted on her person. She loves him so much she wants to enter his deviant world; she even embraces that world. I could see myself doing that were I to fall deeply in love with a sadist, for accepting a person even in spite of that person’s flaws is part of love— unless, of course, lies, sidelining, and emotional betrayals are too much for any trust to be possible. Anastasia may come to treat Christian’s dungeon as a playroom of sorts in which she is his so they can be a couple with an opportunity to connect even more, rather than as a place where he acts out his severe emotional issues in which violence and sex are too closely related in his brain, whether psychologically or physically. Love is to a certain extent blind, or at least purblind. Given how toxic and unpleasant life can be, can we be blamed for valuing deep connection so very much even in cases in which meaning-from-personality comes with such a high cost?

The full essay is at "Fifty Shades of Grey."

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

According to Rousseau, we are born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society, Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1] Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2] Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.

The full essay is at "Free Will and Moral Responsibility."

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.
2. Ibid.

Organizational Man: Refined or Repressed?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal is the courageous, ancient Greco-Roman nobility, including the unashamed conquerors replete with self-confident will to power rather than shame at having vanquished formidable resistance. Rather than actually advocating that we return to the raping and pillaging that took place back then, Nietzsche wanted to depict modern, emaciated man as a contrast in order to turn the weakening of man around in Europe. Similar to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote his satirical novel, Babbit (1922) to showcase the utter vacuity of the middle-class businessman in America, Nietzsche laments “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal . . .”[1] By that he meant us: modern, enervated, and cultured incarnations of human nature relative to the full, untamed, and resilient lives of the ancient Greco-Roman conquerors. Having no knowledge of the lives that they lived in terms of full, unashamed and unconstrained will to power as will to living life with gusto, we scarcely realize the extent to which our societal institutions and vocational organizations box up our nature to that which is inoffensive and even polite even to competitors.

The full essay is at "Organizational Man."

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 478.

No Time to Die

Bond, James Bond. 007. A very successful and long-lasting movie franchise, in spite of or because of there being so many long action-scenes in the films. Bond’s relationships with M, Moneypenny, and Q-branch can be meaningful for viewers, even though the spy’s relationships with women are superficial and of short duration. So, the scenes of No Time to Die (2021) prior to the opening credits stand out because they provide more than a glimpse of Bond in an emotionally intimate, substantive romantic relationship that is to be longstanding, at least until Bond discovers that the woman has betrayed him. That even such a film that is so action-oriented would start out so very deep from the standpoint of human relationships is important because technological special-effects can be so seductive to filmmakers of action films that deep narrative can easily be left out.

The full essay is at "No Time to Die."

Nietzsche on Promise-Keeping: Sex and Relationships

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote on promise-keeping in Genealogy of Morals as being a result of a refined, and thus cultivated “breeding” of our species, rather than as an innate part of human nature that can be taken out for a spin on day one. In contrast, lying is more expedient and thus primitive in our nature, as if an instinctual urge that is more reflex than refined. In terms of romantic relationships, whether marital or not, “cheating” sexually is definitely a sign of weakness because it places momentary pleasure above being held as reliable (i.e., trustworthy) in terms of promise-keeping. A boyfriend who admits that he might hurt his girlfriend emotionally by engaging in infidelity is really telling her that he is weak-willed and thus not good boyfriend (or husband) material. To be sure, a couple could agree that both can have sex separately with other people, so not being monogamous need not involve violating a promise. I don’t think Nietzsche’s philosophy goes so far as to embrace such an arrangement (especially if romantic feeling or connection is allowed in the separate sex), but neither is monogamy advocated, given the nature of Nietzschean strength that should be allowed out of the cage of societal convention periodically (but not on a regular basis). The concept of strength plays such a powerful role in Nietzsche’s philosophy that even the occasional raw expressiveness of strength beyond a societal straitjacket of moral convention would not be viewed as violating promised monogamy. 

The full essay is at "Nietzsche on Promise-Keeping." 

The String

The original title of the 2009 film, The String, is Le Fil, which actually translates as thread rather than string. These two English words have different connotations and this bears on the film’s leitmotif. Whereas a person can string another person along, a thread has a connotation of linking people emotionally. The thread that ultimately succeeds in the film is that of caring, which is antipodal to hurting, emotionally speaking. In this sense, the film is like The Holiday (2006), another romantic drama in which the good guys (and gals) wind up on top. In terms of the theme of caring and not hurting other people, that The String centers on two gay men who fall in love whereas The Holiday is about two heterosexual couples matters little, though the resistance to homosexuality in The String is an additional hurdle. I contend that like The Holiday, The String can provide audiences with how falling in love can proceed naturally without exploding because one person hurts the other. In other words, the ethical wins out in both films in regard to emotionally intimate romantic relationships, and in this respect the medium of film has value in terms of ethics.

The full essay is at "The String."

The Imitation Game

Films in which philosophy of mind is salient may, like films in which metaphysics is reconfigured, run the risk of not being understood. The Matrix (1999), however, depicts solipsism (or, “mind in a vat”) in a way that viewers could grasp the philosophy without much difficulty. Dialogue, image, and narrative all contribute to give audiences a coherent sense with which they can go on to look at their daily lives as if they were illusory rather than real. Sixteen years later, The Imitation Game (2015) brought to audiences a salient question that would become more pressing during the AI revolution: How does the human brain’s thinking differ from a computer’s thinking?

The full essay is at "The Imitation Game."

Turkey on Gay Obscenity

On 8 April, 2026, eleven leaders of a Turkish gay-rights group faced a judicial trial on charges of “obscenity” and “violating the protection of the family.”[1] These charges are of course heavily subjective and even controversial, especially well into the twenty-first century by which time gay and lesbian couples were raising children in family units so the issue in Turkey could be said to be which type of family warrants protection. The obscenity charge had to do with the fact that two men or two women kissing romantically in public still made a significant proportion of people uncomfortable in Turkey. Turkish authorities had deemed photos showing gay couples kissing and put on social media to be obscene. That homosexuality was not illegal there at the time rendered the trial perplexing to many in the gay community in Turkey and elsewhere in the world. Perhaps even more perplexing is the fact that the constitution of Turkey contained an article on protecting family values and that gay couples raising children were exempted from even being deemed families.

The full essay is at "Turkey on Gay Obscenity."

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Turkey Puts 11 Leaders of LGBTQ+ Rights Association on Trial for ‘Obscenity,’” Euronews.com, 8 April, 2026.

Religion Overreaching: Euthanasia

The Nazi program of inflicting euthanasia on the severely mentally ill in the twentieth century can be distinguished from cases in which suffering people with incurable diseases desire to die voluntarily sooner rather than later. In cases in which such people are mentally ill, the question is more complex, especially if the cause of the suffering is mental. In 2026, the Roman Catholic Church castigated a court ruling allowing the euthanasia of a mentally-ill person whose suffering stemmed in part from severe bodily pain and an incurable diagnosis other than that of the mental illness. Ironically, the Church discounted the element of compassion in putting someone out of one’s misery that would only get worse, and instead focused on “the culture of death” even though Jesus is silent on that issue, as well as homosexuality and abortion, in the Gospels. This is a case, I contend, of religion overstepping onto another domains—ethics and medicine in particular—while shirking its native fauna.  

The full essay "Religion Overreaching." 

Sexual Abuse in Churches: A Turn to Healing

When Sarah Mullally was formally installed in a historic ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25, 2026, a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her vocational background highlights the importance of healing, which was appropriate because her predecessor, Justin Welby, had stepped down because he had failed to address a serial sexual-abuse scandal. It had been important most of all to the victims—boys at a church camp who were sexually molested by a gay man volunteering at the camp—that Welby go. Close to the day of the ceremony, Mullally promised explicitly to attend to such victims, as is fitting and proper for a Christian cleric to do. It is what Jesus Christ would do, whereas he would not recognize the sexual predators or their enablers in the hierarchies of Christian denominations. The contrast itself bears witness to just how far some denominations had fallen from being justified in claiming to follow the principles preached by Jesus in the Gospels. That those sects had been able to do so even while representing themselves as distinctly Christian institutions shows just how power clerics have in beguiling laity.

The full essay is at "Sexual Abuse in Churches." 

My Man Godfrey

If there is a time and context that shows dramatically how stark economic inequality can be, the years immediately following the Wall Street crash of 1929 cannot be beat. Wealthy men in the financial sector saw their wealth disappear overnight; the sudden move to the street from comfortable housing doubtless triggered many suicides. The 1936 film, My Man Godfrey, demonstrates the mental and reputational depravity of even once-wealthy investors (and stock brokers) relative to the still-rich, who look down with disdain such men as if they were no longer human beings. The stark change in the economic-determined normative stance is artificial and yet in terms of getting a job, it was very real.  In the film, Godfrey maintains good graces in using his low status even in the employment of a rich family as an opportunity to practice humility. He even saves the family, financially, and marries one of the daughters. Godfrey, she knows, is her man even in spite of his lowly station.

The full essay is at "My Man Godfrey."

Young Adult

Can meaning be extracted merely from living out an ordinary life in an ordinary town? Must a person be among the literary, political, entertainment, or business elite to feel fulfilled? Are the popular kids in school the happiest? If so, why does a sense of over all contentment and ongoing enjoyment seem to come easily to some people while being arduously difficult for people leading ordinary lives to attain? Are people in the elites necessarily or even just usually happier than people who live out ordinary lives by earning enough to put bread on the table and simply enjoy friends and family. Would so many people be content to live such lives without any publicized accomplishment that will outlast them if ordinary life itself were not very satisfying? The 2011 film, Young Adult, is notable for how it deals with these questions in a non-formulaic way. Aside from contrasting ordinary living in a small town with being an accomplished, albeit flawed, writer (and person) in a way that puts accomplishment above a life centered on local events like high-school football games on Friday nights and family birthday parties, the film can be read as providing a statement on how not to write a novel. That the screenwriting is so good makes this dimension possible even though the medium is film. 

The full essay is at "Young Adult."