Self-empowerment, Disempowerment, Geopolitics, and Cognition
What’s new?
- Interview on the Corbett Report. The concept map addressing authority and agency is addressed here.
- The piece on bureaucracy as part of this website or as stand-alone text (pdf)
- The analysis of Woodrow Wilson’s famous wish: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education.”
- Many of the ideas on which this website is based are published as a peer-reviewed Frontiers in Psychology article: Learning Autonomy in Two or Three Steps: Linking Motivation, Authority, and Agency, with Open-ended Development. Gradually more and more of this article will find its way into the website.
- Calamaro, the program in which this website is made, will be downloadable soon on this page
- A extensive 2-hour interview addressing a number of the topics on this site is available at Red Ice Creations (the second hour is for members).
- New to this site? Continue reading the rest of this page.
This site is an open source science project addressing geopolitics from an unusual — but very useful — perspective: namely from a cognitive science perspective and in particular from a cognitive science inspired perspective on topics like authority, power, self-empowerment, disempowerment. The key question we address here is what are the conditions that allow humans to thrive and what are the (geopolitical) influences that prevent this.
What is developed in these pages is a link between individual development and the largest, both in time and in place, human environment. We hope this site shows that the links between micro- and macro level developments are much more intimate and logical than you ever thought would be possible. As such this site attempts to integrate a wide variety of scientific domains. This is a step-by-step process of which only the first few steps have been taken. So the integration of insights will gradually improve and be extended. However, apart from trying to be as accessible and clear as possible no effort has been made to dumb-down the content. This entails that this text may not be easy to grasp in full at first glance
This site is under (constant) construction. And as new text is gradually refined, formulations will improve and typo’s will gradually disappear from the text. As science in progress it has both mature and immature ideas side by side. Of course it is up to the reader to determine the validity of the content, but we make that as easy as possible by providing ample sources: both to books and scientific literature (as references at the bottom of the page) and as links to internet resources.
Since the scope of this website is ridiculously broad it is well beyond the scope of a single individual’s effort to make and find all relevant links and facts among the clutter of irrelevancy, to weed out all inconsistencies, and to formulate the resulting insights into something productive. Constructive reader feedback is therefore highly appreciated and will be used for improvement.
Why are geopolitics and cognition intimately connected?
Geopolitics is the struggle for the earth’s resources of which the most important — even more important than oil, gold, fertile lands, and water — is human behavior, or more precisely ‘human agency’. Agency refers the capacity to initialize self-selected behavior. Without human agency none of the other resources would have any value. Since human agency is a topic of cognitive science, geopolitics and cognition are intimately connected.
Who is at ultimo the beneficiary of your agency? Is that you and everything you love, feel associated with, and would like to support? Or will it be some anonymous group or influence who tricked you into participating in games that you neither fully oversee nor understand and that are, like a casino, set up to guarantee that you loose? So the question is will you thrive or whither? The Cypriots recently lost most of their life’s savings, and the Polish even more recently lost half of their pensions. So who have they been working and saving for? Definitely not as much for their own benefit as they thought.
Actually it is up to you to decide whether you want to be exploited. If you decide to spend your life in a bubble of blissful ignorance and complacency, chances are that people will exploit your ignorance, gullibility, and complacency. This site argues you are exploited by the very influences that made you ignorant, gullible, and complacent in the first place. However in these times of economic and social upheavals, more and more people are realizing that blissful ignorance is a guaranteed loosing strategy.
This site should provide a solid foundation for improved strategies.
Made with Calamaro
This site is made with a free (donation-ware) program called Calamaro that is downloadble from this site. It translates multimarkdown files (basically plain text with simple mark-up codes) into a site like this. It can be just as well be used to rapidly make (and upload) a small one page website or a big site like www.geopoliticsandcognition.com (> 60.000 words, ~ 100 pages). With other programs it is possible to change the same basic text into other book-formats (pdf, LateX).
Below is the table of contents of the whole site.
Chapter overview
- Introduction
- About us
- Authoritarianism
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Attitudes to the world
- Two attitudes towards a complex world
- Two brain hemispheres
- In- and external authority
- Agency, autonomy, motivation, appraisal
- Four basic states of mind
- Motivation, authority, and co-creation
- Open-ended development
- Why we think
- Shallow and deep understanding
- The roots of violence
- Summary of attitudes towards the world
- Self-empowerment
- Disempowerment
- Cognitive geopolitics
- Geopolitics at home
- Calamaro