Ethereal Insights

Communist poster by Kacper G Boundaries | Monday – December 29, 2025 As I've covered in this series " Collectivism & Individualism ", there are certain boundaries that define the multitude and always growing political groups in the modern world. Yes, modern men like to talk a great deal about the fantastic nature of multiculturalism , but they never admit that the only thing this ideology has brought forth is more and more imposed awareness about the need to create social boundaries and political objects out of more and more people. Of course, in the past people lived far more simpler lives and they just weren't aware of all of these modern social labels and signals that one is supposed to respect and understand to be considered an upright citizen and really to be allowed into "polite society". But boundaries are important and I can always sense the tension between those who always seek to expand the collective to encompass ever larger bodies of people a...

Picture of a traditional Congolese apparel Why are rituals important? Tuesday – November 11, 2025 The ritual and the tradition carries the cultural meaning, heritage, and future of the tribe, an anthropologically distinct people, and more than that the ritual is a connection to the past and really a bridge between the living, the contemporaries, the pats, the ancestors, and the divine, the creator and in many western contexts the ritual is misunderstood as something that savages engages in to excite themselves in the moment, often with the auxiliary thrill of drugs and/or alcohol , but nothing could possibly be further from the truth: rituals are really what makes humanity essentially humanity in any time and even modern men engage in ritualistic behavior such as voting in democracies, or other civil responsibility, but modern rituals are often crucially tied somehow to the individual and his particulars and that really makes the modern ritual disconnected from humanity. See, the poin...

Tiger Diorama in the natural history museum Is might right? Tuesday – September 30, 2025 I once again ask you to consider the tiger, excellent in form and feature, the product of survival, of blunt and hard refinement and perfection, the tiger exists in perfect harmony with nature: do you really believe that this magnificent creature, this apex of nature, asks for permission? What does right and wrong mean to the tiger or indeed the forces that have shaped the material domain? Let the howling, cold, and stone cutting wind be your answer: the forces of perfection do not ask for permission and they do not hesitate; they simply exist and they simply act. The tiger is the product of the force in perpetual motion, and in that way the tiger is surely the polar opposite, the diametrical opposite of humans, the biological accident that is humanity. Indeed, for every man, even the man without conscience, there is such a thing as right and wrong, but be under no illusion that the creator of the ...

Lego tiles by Vadim Bogulov What is identity? Saturday – September 27, 2025 Identity is one of those things in life that can be rather hard to define, but identity is also something that exists all around us and with us at all times, whether we like it or not, and the only way to truly get away from or escape from the confines of identity would indeed be to retire from the world: it would require you to completely leave the social and human context that has shaped you behind and this would for most people be quite an impossible feat. But identity is also an aspect of social dynamics, of social life, that is largely conceptual and constructive. That is to say: identity is not a quantity that defines the person, but rather the quantity (the identity) is defined and shaped by context, and one individual is not really enough to evoke a complete conceptualization of an identity; multiple people have to be put in relation to the identity, and in this sense it's also quite in keeping with...

Photograph of a Kenyan tribe Kargi, Kenya What is the " Anthropological Distance "? Monday – September 22, 2025 At what point or at what distance—briefly returning to the subject of hatred that I covered in part two of this series —does the human connection become so diminished that it becomes replaced by the political object of the out-group, the foreigner, the alien, and the outsider? This phenomena of group dynamics or inter collective politics (politics between groups/collectives) is what I have decided to coin/name the "Anthropological Distance", and my question concerns how and when this distance becomes so large that human relations transitions from somewhat equal and cordial or somewhat common grounds to hostile or unequal grounds ripe for conflict, and this is something that can be observed in most social situations and it is a core part of group dynamics, especially once certain conditions that can be described have been meet: indeed these conditions occur...

Giovanni Battista, Tiepolo's fresco What is hatred? Friday – September 19, 2025 In order to understand hatred as a political act, as an act in the process of imposing one's group identity on the world, one must understand the importance of collectivism and the political objectification of the collective individual , the individual member of the collective. Ask yourself this: is it easier to hate a random individual that you do not know anything about, or is it easier to hate a person that you know and that you also know has hurt you in some way? For most people that question would indeed be easy to answer: most people would have a rather hard time hating a random individual that they know nothing about, but on the other hand most people would not struggle to understand why they may feel hatred towards a person that they know has caused them hurt. On the individual level, it is actually quite hard for most men to hate another man, and indeed it is just as hard for most men to s...

American WWI era pro-war propaganda poster, featureing "Uncle Sam" What is Collectivism? Wednesday – September 17, 2025 Collectivism is the mode of being that describes when men gather in groups that form around a common collective identity that in turn form organically around certain collective goals, aspirations, circumstances, problems, etc. Human beings are said to be "social animals" and by this it is usually meant that humans need each other mutually in order to sustain their own life, and therefore the collective effort that is put into sustaining life becomes the organizing principle of any collective: that is to say that the original collective intention was always to make life easier, since men working together and cooperating can create a better outcome not only for the individual but in the process every other member of that collective. In the prehistoric past of mankind it is thought that men that were expelled/deported from their immediate collective, ...