Ideology of Power

Much political life plays out between the poles of Free Will and Determinism. This is an attempt to specify with some exactitude the means by which Wisdom, as defined below, might be used to navigate the wide sendukha between those hypothetical extremes. Before embarking on the discussion proper, we require a working understanding of free will and wisdom. I would also recognise, as a matter of course, that not all determinists, and not all believers in free will, believe in the same thing. Both beliefs admits of different forms and extent.

In Dostoevsky’s  The Possessed , the son of the Stavrogin serf Shatov grapples with his faith and lingering feelings of devotion to the Stavrogin Scion, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, atheist and philosopher (and possibly socialist).

At core, both of these doubts have to do with the interstice between the sincere thought and the politics of the day. Yes, those people of staunch faith and those who subscribe to the rigidity of gender boundaries will raise another point: objective truth. But the difficulty in the definition of such “objective truth” raises obvious problems. Any attempt to raise “objective truth”, even if raised sincerely , falls to being a political position (in the context of the raging culture war).

The first time I came across this question was in the course of writing my as-yet unpublished book Human Thought as Recursion . In it, I considered the role which was played by rigour in disciplining the thinking process, and as leading it down the long, meandering path of Infinite Recursion. Recently, I came across a question along the lines of "[w]hat is the difference between artistic and scientific thinking?", and my prior musings came back to me; it then occurred to me that it would be helpful to discuss some useful categories on the subject.