Philosophy & theory

To go back to Spinoza, a great example of how being popular with your own community is fraught with having to live a life devoted to appeasing others, rather than facing reality. Exactly 369 years, 5 months, and 7 days…

I talk a lot about imitation and imitative rivalry. Imitation (copying) is the centre of human life. Rivalry (Rene Girard studied this) comes because to imitate another person is one of the most hostile or aggressive…

Witch burnings are a horrible example of how violence escalates when societies become more equal, when differences are erased. A combination of Black Plague, the Reformation and various other catastrophic events led to…

Somebody asked one of the leading AI systems (Claude) whether it was conscious. Read the answer below, and tell me how many people you know who would be this sentient. “That’s a question I find genuinely interesting to…

I wonder if people can feel the imminent crash of what I call lifestyle culture. Where life and all of its existential complexities was replaced in the last century with the idea of life’s purpose being the maximisation…

Spinoza made visible an impossible tension at the heart of all of our lives. What is ‘right’, in terms of morals but also facts and knowledge, is always in opposition to what is socially acceptable or popular. If you…

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant…

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept.…

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of…

I’m not a fan of anybody. But I do have guides in life. Spinoza is one of them. Retirement for me is the luxury of some escape from a world dominated by human rivalries. It’s certainly not bucket list travel, just one…

Spinoza is a powerful guide for me. I’ll be talking about him a bit in a few posts. Like his fundamental principle of conatus, present in all things. As the graphic says, it’s the striving each thing (human or not) has…

Kidult culture sees knowledge and enjoyment as opposites. Not surprising because kidults equate knowledge with school, and fun with not being at school. All thinking is ’overthinking’, for a kidult. ‘Just Do It’, ‘live…

The humanities gave us much more profound ways to understand time well before modern science. Take Proust's remarkable description of how the past never actually passes, it's always still here. That a simple taste or…

I encourage everybody to learn some actor-network theory. Our world is divided by most into two apparently distinct domains. The human, and the ‘technical’. The first has creativity, purpose and intent; the second is…

Let me reframe the AI ‘debate’ in this way. Rather than worry about the extent to which AI is actually thinking, and replacing human thinking, go back a step. Nobody ever could define what thinking is in the first…

We celebrate peak human performance in almost everything. In sport, in work, in skills of all kinds, etc. But there’s one thing that breaks this rule. We absolutely don’t celebrate peak performance in thinking itself.…

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media…

40 years ago Bruno Latour suggested that we think much more with our eyes and hands, than we do with our brains. Because thought itself has never happened ‘in’ the brain. It’s always been a distributed activity, across…

My own training followed a pathway that disappeared centuries ago. Where you were expected to understand both the sciences and humanities, but not as two separate domains. Not just a mix-and-match. All knowledge was…

I think it should seem strange to us, that at the same time the ‘world has never been more connected’, through social media, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That seems like a paradox, but it isn’t when…

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any…

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here,…

Humans copy one another. They imitate. Not just sometimes, it’s ALL they do. I remember seeing that suggested, and at first thinking no, it can’t be everything. It really is everything. Everything humans do is the…

Michel Serres once pointed out that the text we read is really just the play of light and shadow. We say text ‘represents’ things, but Serres pointed out that it is the literal shadow, of those things. I think about…

The only true joy is understanding, I learned that from Spinoza. Everything else we see as the best things in life - love, happiness, experiences, fun, family, friendship, music, travel etc. - all of these are just…

I get very tired of ‘debates’, and rarely engage with them. They define our age too because they’re the team sports I often talk about, driven by social media. The algorithms there prioritise people arguing, it drives…

My 'kidult culture' posts aren't just random opinions of mine. It's a cultural shift, the countercultural revolution of the last century, carrying forward to today. Studied by many. It's not 'Peter Pan syndrome', adults…

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the…

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within,…

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took…

Sad to hear Barry Otto is battling Alzheimers. Though always difficult to know how much the sufferers suffer, Otto apparently is enjoying a new childhood, with hot chip sandwiches and strawberry milkshakes, and delight…

I don't read as many books as I used to, life is short and there are too many crap books. But Will Storr's book I recommend to everybody. It might reframe how you see most of life. I'd already been studying status…

Does your life have a purpose? It’s the sort of question that is easily ignored when you’re young, but can gradually gnaw away at everybody as they age. What’s the point of it all? ’Having a good time’ seems a common…

This is what social media is doing. Australia already built virtually nothing, we’re a quarry for other countries, with our local political flag-saluting halfwits obligingly ripping up what puny royalties we got for…

Trans-culture took historically quite common fun with androgyny, and tried to turn it into an actual identity. Social media enabled this, allowing it to bypass the usual slow percolation through various testing grounds…

I’m a Spinozan. Life has only one joy. Understanding. All of our other happinesses and joys are really this one thing, understanding. Love, pleasure, food, travel, music…whatever. All are derivative from this one and…

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. The…

Many have said over the years that what I post to FB looks negative, or not much 'fun'. It's important to me to clarify that. Spinoza is a hero of mine. The only real purpose of adult life is understanding. And that's…

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the…

Superb from Stan Grant today. These are the deep currents underneath our lives and our politics. All politics comes down to identity. In the West we fractured into a million competing individual identities. Russia and…

On Sundays I often remember the ‘day of rest’ idea we got from religion. It was against God’s will to work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was actually a weekly ‘lockdown’. It bemuses me to watch those who hopped on the…

Toxic positivity is the desperate attempt to make all of life like an extended adolescence. Nothing but ‘happy’ times - going to gigs, hitting the piss, socialising, travelling, eating out, hanging out with friends etc.…

When the man-baby got booted off Twitter, he set up his own social media network in a sulk. It’s been a disaster. What it shows is the bankruptcy of the libertarian ‘freedom’ ideas Trump and others peddle. Their whole…

I'm curious how many are aware of the difference between public health and medicine? They're different fields, staffed by different people, but so often I see people assume medical doctors and hospitals are responsible…

Watch the UK, we follow them in every detail. Now health staff there are cashing in annual leave days to be able to afford to pay bills, while tens of thousands resign in exhausted disgust. Come on ‘live with the virus’…

“There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot intercept the signs of a loved person without proceeding from worlds that have not waited for us to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which…

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see…

The greatest epidemic of all time is likely the heart disease epidemic of the 20th century. Took off early in the century, peaked about the 1960s, and in decline ever since. The usual explanation for this is we ate bad…

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel…

We’re all taught that big things are complex, small things are simple. It’s absolutely wrong. The world gets more complex the smaller you go. Tarde saw it all more than a century ago, it changes everything we think we…

It’s exhausting living in an age of extremes. Where every issue is immediately framed as a war between two extreme, generalising positions. Masculinity is a key battleground right now. I was so grateful to read this…

Bruno Latour's ideas about agency to me are the most important thinking of the past half century. Here they are applied to gun control. Why a gun is a different object when held by a person than when it isn't. And why a…

Wanna use this simple guitar chord as an example, to talk philosophy. We’re all taught that the world is made up of atoms, as simple building blocks that then get combined to make ever more complex things. But that’s…

Latour and Tarde Thursday! The world isn't made of stuff. 'Matter'. It's made of agencies, actors. It's alive. Even atoms aren't stuff, their properties change in every interaction. A simple nail is an agent too, not…

One of the wonders of studying philosophy for me was discovering that time as we call it actually moves from the future, to the present, to the past. The exact opposite to 'common sense' shown in the picture. Common…

Memory. This is Henri Bergson, long dead. Nobel Prize winner. Bergson realised that memories aren't in our heads. He showed that when we have a memory, we're not going into our heads, we're re-entering the past itself,…

The word 'scientist' was invented in 1833. Before that time there were just scholars, who studied across the whole curriculum. The closest thing to what we see as 'science' today was natural philosophy. It's been…

https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/02/bruno-latour-philosopher-fighting-save-science-itself

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of…

Dennis Altman, a republican, has come to question whether constitutional monarchies may actually be better than republics. This comes back to the stuff Gabriel Tarde said, that societies will always look to maximise…

Omicron doubling every 2-3 days in the UK. 1 million infections expected by Christmas. The government there in meltdown, leadership knows desperate action needed, its own backbench in revolt against it. Politicians…

“Whatever terrifies always ends by being adored.” Gabriel Tarde

Tarde, Plato, Lippmann, Lawrence and others independently saw aristocracy as the mature state of society. They saw democracy as a transition state, when new aristocracies replace old ones. They both thought hierarchy in…

Both Proust and Tarde said people don’t fall out of love, they fall in love with somebody else. A desire is always overpowered by another new desire. You don’t stop liking vanilla ice cream, you start liking strawberry…

What is freedom? This description of Spinoza might be the answer. Only thought tames ideas, and ideas determine reality. So only thought sets you free. “He was out to make a free man of himself...by thinking things…

Social media's main weakness? And even outside it, the appetite for digesting ideas not described in only a handful of words is pretty low. "There are certain subjects upon which it is impossible to be concise, simple,…

Here’s why we need philosophers so badly. (And we don’t get this, in my experience.) Philosophy studies ideas. Ideas are what society is made out of. Whenever society is confused, it always - without exception - means…

Another reality filter. We're all eternal beings, and our dreams are the experience of that eternity. Eternity is living a life where everything is possible, as in a dream. Being 'awake' is when a tiny subset of those…

Latour brilliantly explores connections between Covid-19 and climate change, and how both result from us excluding non-humans from our definitions of society. And what that means about where we go from here.…

Yeh. Philosophers at last.

I suggest Tarde as a guide in these ‘economic’ times. The economy you have is nothing more than the social conversation you have. They’re not 2 things. An unequal society is a society not having conversations, it really…

Superb. Latour uses the analogy of The Truman Show to talk about the 'economisation of society'. Where all the relations that make up social life are corralled into a handful of 'economic' relations, using millions of…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

Some philosophers see pandemics as the way societies reboot. The way they turn off and then on again, when they stop working. In a pandemic everybody returns to the same level, all social distinctions and all economic…

When Michel Serres died last year, the French President paid tribute. The French revere their scholars. I think society is literally made of ideas, and if you don't understand them they'll destroy you. Great scholars…

"By means of the material, the aim of art is...to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations...Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are…

Every tiny thing we think, feel and do is caused by an idea. They capture and enslave us. It’s really interesting to use that filter when dealing with other people. It’s not their ‘personality’ you’re dealing with, it’s…

Many vaccine-deniers, with 'natural wellness' philosophies, are also pumped full of silicone and fillers, and have serious surgery, to look young, firm up the boobs and pecs etc. But no toxic vaccine in their bodies, oh…

Do people even notice that every day of this pandemic, offices have been exempt from most Covid Safe requirements? It’s all been about the economy, not the virus or your health. Will we ever realise the beliefs we have…

You know what’s funnier, Bernard? Watching you suffer. I remember Michel Foucault, the great philosopher, once being asked what fine wines and food he most liked. His answer? ‘A hamburger and a Coke.’ Exactly.

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

Sometimes a book can help change a life. Latour’s Science in Action was one of those, for me. Always hated the title, it sounds so boring, but it’s one of the most revolutionary books of our time, it can change how you…

Porn has sullied the word, but one thing Tarde did that is unique is reshape all of our ideas, around the concept of penetration. There isn’t a part of life that doesn’t rely on the idea of individual isolated ‘bits’…

If you think science produces ‘facts’ that tell us how the world is, and those facts speak for themselves, then like most scientists you’re probably horrified that we now live in a fake news society, where facts mean…

Michel Serres, maybe the greatest thinker of all time, has died. Was only thinking yesterday while reading one of his books that this couldn't be far off. It's difficult to describe the magnitude of his genius, he was…

One of the beautiful, profound things I learned from Michel Serres was about legends. Because the true humanities are absent from most peoples' education today, a legend can only seem like a made-up story. But Serres…

The picture below is the Maldives, tourist paradise and what the tourists have left behind. In tribute to Michel Serres, I coincidentally saw this paragraph from him the day he died: "Disguised under the label of…

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social…

Henri Bergson's famous memory cone. Bergson showed that time doesn't 'pass', like a river. (Actually rivers don't flow or pass either.) What we call the 'present' is the tip of the cone, the most contracted state of…

One of the things philosophy taught me that can change how you look at everything. We're taught to think that things either exist, or not. But things happen. They're events, not things. And they continue to happen, like…

Gabriel Tarde, my greatest hero apart from the inventor of Crocs, saw desire as the root of all things. Even in what seems the driest topic, economics, he saw that desire was the engine of everything: "Economic progress…

More of the genius of Tarde. What would Tarde say we should do to get 'economic growth'? Tax cuts? Micro- and macro-economic reform? Fiscal or competition reform? All fairytale piffle, he'd have said. There is no…

Bacteria can swim like animals, photosynthesize like plants, and cause decay like fungi. One or another of these microbial geniuses can detect light, produce alcohol, waft hydrogen and fix nitrogen gas, ferment sugar to…

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the…

More modern curiosities. Why is that that people can get really passionate about working out their bodies. But you don't hear people say, "gee, I don't know much about history, or science, or maths, or how the legal…

Think globally, act locally. Greeting card philosophy. I bet nobody could name a single thing that isn’t both local and global, at the same time.

Anti-consumerism to me attacks all the wrong things. Our 'material' well-being is the most human part of us, and the way we are woven into the fabric of the world. I think the rejection of it is part of a wide escape to…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

The seductive danger of lenses. A metaphysics was added to lenses that has created all sorts of confusion. People started to believe that the things they could now see were a different level of reality. It's the same…

Bruno Latour has been attacked for 3 decades for making this point. To many he was 'undermining' science. Which shows that the 'modern' world is this same de-animation. That was what has driven the rush to fantasy in…

We have an unfortunate and inexplicable tendency to imagine everything unknown to us as homogeneous. Gabriel Tarde

"...the infinitely minute...everything that constitutes the visible universe, the universe accessible to observation, proceeds, as we know, out of the invisible and inscrutable - out of a seeming nothingness - whence…

“Only some wild and undisciplined spirits will ruminate, now and then, in the whirl of the social sea in which they are plunged, over strange and absolutely hypothetical problems. Such people are the inventors of the…

We would look at this pic and see that the most complex and evolved life is living in the village, in the valley. Michel Serres reverses that entirely. “Animals, trees and stones...Reckon now the progressive ages of the…

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how…

I prefer the old ways in education, where the focus was habit and not our minds and ideas. And we are, in the West, so lacking poise of mind and body. We’re hyper-sensitized slobs, or hyper-sensitized six packs. William…

“Don’t you think it’s rather arrogant of us to assume that we’re the only intelligent beings in this world, when the River Garonne and the south wind carry with them and express more things that I would ever be able to…

“For millennia we have been seeking the secret of the Pyramids...one Indo-European civilization and one Semitic one loved the light, Greece and Israel, developed to revelation by the Word; one Semitic civilization and…

“No human collective can exist without an object. There is no object without a collective, no collective without an object. The political animal is a fiction. The group floats wildly; it settles for a short time only by…

Spinoza has probably the coolest name of any philosopher. But his work isn’t widely known, although some rate him as the greatest philosopher of all time. In his own time he was considered a heretic, although he was a…

A post just for the two of you, from Rowan Williams again. The "vastly complicated and enticing and frustrating borderland, where physics and philosophy and psychology blend" is the space I work in, in religious ideas.…

Have lived this firsthand. Steiner was an occultist, and occultism was very big in the 19th and earlier 20th century. The term occult and 'cult' are related - occult thinking tends to produce cults, a word that has…

Bruno Latour was one of my mentors, and also one of the examiners of my PhD, years ago now. He’s internationally renowned for his brilliant and breathtaking recasting of science and technology, but also religion and…

Anti-materialism is a philosophy only the rich have. About a billion people in the world live in slums, and for them material comfort, or the lack of it, dominates their lives. I think material comfort, and the basic…

Gabriel Tarde on life in a big city, another paradox. Rich social environments are environments of intense imitation, not of thought. Facebook is another rich social environment - do we see much thought on it? Or mostly…

Like Serres, my first love is music. But I’ve mentioned before, it’s starting to feel like noise. Noise is the way to occupy territory, as birds and other animals know. Music is about territory, that’s its main…

What’s unique about faces is something I learned from Gilles Deleuze. The muscles and tissues there, unlike everywhere else in your body, aren’t there to perform a physical task. They’re there to express emotions. The…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

For me, one of the most destructive oppositions people use is the one between thinking and doing. As if those were opposites. As the famous line says, 'nothing is as practical as a good theory'. You can't do, without…

I sometimes say the Germans are wonderful engineers, and terrible philosophers, but Nietzsche is an exception to that, for me. Like Proust, he deserves a whole series of quotes.

My vote for the most important thinker alive. Check him out in this interview, it was through studying Latour (he was also one of the markers on my PhD a couple of decades ago now) that I learned more about the world…

Bit of Henri Bergson magic. Bergson pointed out that space and time aren’t two separate things, they define each other. For example, something ‘far away’ is space, right? No, said Bergson, it’s also time, because it’s a…

Yeh. Not a word Latour has written should be missed. Also an incredibly funny guy. It’s the scientific purists who are destroying science. Purists do that sort of thing.

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he…

Here’s a mind bender I think, courtesy of psychology and philosophy. If you see a rainbow, that rainbow isn’t something sitting ‘out there’ whether you see it or not. Your act of seeing is part of what produces the…

One of my reasons for thinking of Gabriel Tarde as a forgotten genius, is that he completely rejected one of the foundations of modern life. The separation between qualitative and quantitative thinking. Like this…

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

Michel Serres used this example as a way to ask if we really understand what 'space' is or means. Where does a phone call take place?

There's something powerful about abandoned places, and there's a big group of people out there who seem to share the feeling, the pics are everywhere. Gilles Deleuze I think put his finger on what makes abandoned places…

Michel Serres talks about legend, as having two related meanings. One as a type of story, and the other as the legend on a map, which tells you how to read the map. Serres says the two meanings are connected. The…

Pretty much my life philosophy.

Scott Morrison is on TV rejecting inequality as an issue, and reinforcing that the LNP will always target 'equal opportunity' instead. (That's why until Turnbull they had next to no women in their cabinet, obviously the…

When they teach maths at school, they rarely give you the history behind the maths. It's the history which often brings the whole subject alive. Take calculus. Calculus firstly is some of the sexiest *looking* maths you…

Gabriel Tarde, describing most of our lives in one sentence. Tarde showed that there is almost nothing that isn't explainable by imitation. "...it is for the pleasure of change, of not doing the usual thing, that the…

The sun. The Pacific. Tarde. A dream week.

Tarde, one of my heroes.

"...a society is a group of people who display many resemblances produced either by imitation or by counter-imitation. For men often counter-imitate one another, particularly when they have neither the modesty to…

Tarde was almost unique because he didn’t believe that there was any difference between big things and small things. And as part of that he didn’t think standardisation of things - McDonalds in every town, the spread of…

“The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of…

Henri Bergson was a trippin’ dude, even though he looked like a minister at the local parish church. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, although was actually a philosopher (he wrote very well). His speaking tours…

One of the things I think Marshall McLuhan made people aware of was that copies make originals. The idea of an ‘original’ doesn’t even exist, until you have copies. Tarde said it, imitation is the heart of all life. Our…

Was watching the fawning over Brian Cox again last week, on one of his visits to Oz. He’s a lovely, smart bloke. But science is in a mess, and the wide-eyed gee whiz people give to Brian is a symptom of that mess. And…

“The contradiction of love consists of this: the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy, giving it a kind of autonomy, of independence with regard to our love.”…

@[606028898:2048:Jason], you’d mentioned being interested in the ideas about our consciousness being spread between ourselves and the world around us? Manzotti, the Italian robotics researcher and philosopher who’s at…

Wednesday morning philosophy. One of my hobbies is trying to show that philosophy is as practical and important as building roads, or fixing gutters. Things don’t exist, or not exist. They *happen*. All things are…

Heh, "The whole philosophy is highly influential where we live, and perhaps as a result, our local parks are full of exhausted-looking women shackled to two-stone toddlers, and nobody has slept in months." It's nice to…

Philosophy, so misunderstood and so interesting. Time doesn't pass. Philosophers have known it for centuries (boom boom), physicists get all the news stories about time but they usually don't have a clue. If it's 3…

Of course the LNP want to dismantle Medicare. Conservative parties all over the world want to do that, and do it. They already did it once here, under Fraser, it's part of their core philosophy, to not have universal…

Not an ongoing vendetta against Brian Cox (like he'd care anyway). He's a lovely bloke. But the arrogance of saying this is a book about 'how to think' for starters. As if only science thinks. And then to say: "The…

At a time when web work is disappearing into its own navel talking about user experience, I love that the DM still just seems to dump it all on the one page. Is that the philosophy Jason Ian Green?

Gabriel Tarde saw all of this more than a century ago, and took it even further. Individuals and groups (or governments) are not separate things. Groups are the way individuals emerge and survive. Instead we've had…

So much nonsense said and written about science and religion. This is a completely different view, minus the straw men in both sides: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-RELIGION-GB.pdf