The Logic of Addiction

State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.

Category: The Loneliness of Man (Complete Collection of Essays)

  • False Gods After God

    The Boys and the Crisis of Modern Meaning The Boys is not, at its core, a satire of superheroes. It is a drama about what happens after transcendence collapses, but its symbols remain. The series stages a world where god-images persist without God, power persists without meaning, and morality persists without grounding. What results is…

  • Clyde Bruckman and the Way Scully Listens

    X-Files Season 3 Episode 4 Clyde Bruckman knows how everyone dies. He doesn’t say this proudly. He doesn’t say it dramatically. He says it the way someone mentions the weather when it’s already too late to change it. The knowledge hasn’t made him powerful. It’s made him careful. Gentle. Tired. He sees death everywhere, but…

  • Sophia

    The Soul of History Sophia was not born when the world was whole. She arrived only after the first fracture—after certainty had learned to speak too loudly, after order had begun to mistake itself for truth. She did not appear as a rival to Logos, but as what remained when Logos had said everything it…

  • Logos

    How Logos Appears Today Logos was once confident. He trusted clarity. He trusted distinction. He trusted that if something could be named, ordered, explained, it could be mastered—and if mastered, it could be trusted. When doubt appeared, he sharpened himself. When the world resisted, he refined his methods. When fear arose, he demanded proof. Then…

  • Rita and the Trouble with Knowing

    Groundhog Day Reorientated Rita arrives in Punxsutawney already oriented. She listens. She asks real questions. She notices small things. She believes that if people pay attention—to themselves, to one another, to the day in front of them—something honest can still happen. She doesn’t say this out loud. She just lives as if it were true….

  • The Day That Finally Counted

    Groundhog Day Revisited Phil wakes up to the radio again. Same song. Same voice. Same joke about the weather.At first, it feels like bad luck. Then a prank. Then a curse. But beneath the irritation is something quieter and more modern: disorientation. Not fear exactly—more like the ground refusing to stay solid. Time moves, but…

  • Why We Rage

    The Joker as Truth in The Dark Knight. In The Dark Knight, the Joker does not enter Gotham as a criminal in the ordinary sense. He arrives as a principle. He is not motivated by gain, power, or even revenge. He wants something far more radical: the exposure of the emptiness beneath absolute values once…

  • Spirit

    What Is Spirituality? The word spirit appears deceptively simple, yet its ambiguity conceals several fundamentally different ways of thinking. I will therefore avoid asking what the word means and instead ask what it refers to, since reference situates the term within a logical context rather than a private definition. The most immediate use of spirit…

  • Spiritual Malady

    Revised “There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada Addiction cannot be adequately understood when it is treated solely as a problem belonging to isolated individuals. What is commonly referred to as spiritual malady should not be conceived as a private…

  • Spiritual Malady Cont’d

    Bad Infinity (Hegel) Russell Brand captures something essential when he describes modern life as a carousel—perpetual motion without arrival, distraction masquerading as vitality, activity substituting for homecoming. The image is not merely poetic; it is diagnostic. What haunts the modern subject is not simply suffering, but the suspicion that beneath the noise there is nothing—no…