Bert Olivier

In her incisive book, Choice (2010) Renata Salecl — colleague of redoubtable philosopher and psychoanalytical theorist, Slavoj Zizek, and a formidable thinker in her own right — probes what she calls the “tyranny of choice” in the present era. Everywhere we turn in our capitalist society (which thrives on variety), we are confronted by a […]

In a recent issue of TIME magazine, Joe Klein makes an interesting suggestion. Harking back to an ancient Greek selection process or practice in BCE Athens, called the kleroterion, by which several hundred citizens (“free” males only; Athens had a limited democracy) were randomly chosen by drawing identity tokens every day, and tasked to make […]

Recently I was asked to contribute to a debate on pornography in a local newspaper, the Weekend Post, by responding to a number of questions on the matter. Probably because of limited space, my contribution was fairly drastically cut, which made me decide to post it here in its entirety as originally written. The questions, […]

Recent events in South Africa (like the looming attempts to control the media), together with a comment by “Maria” on one of my previous posts, have set me wondering if we are seeing the beginnings of what Arundhati Roy, Indian social activist and novelist, called “creeping fascism”? Referring (in 2003) to what was happening under […]

Listening to SAfm this morning, I heard part of a phone-in discussion between the presenter and a representative of a company that has done research on the number of public schools as opposed to private schools in South Africa. The discussion focused, among other things, on the levels of responsibility and accountability encountered on the […]

The world ain’t what it used to be. Globalisation arguably started as long ago as Macedonian Alexander the Great’s military expansion towards the East, followed by the Roman Empire’s far-flung hold on the ancient world (and if one really wanted to push the argument, you could claim that it commenced almost 150 000 years ago when […]

Journalism is usually, and I believe accurately, associated with the uncovering and reporting of “facts”. Investigative journalism, especially, involves the (sometimes difficult, even dangerous) ferreting out of “facts” that are not generally known, and often deliberately hidden or covered up, especially by those in power. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for example, will be remembered […]

Architecture is usually understood as the science, or art, of designing buildings with a view to constructing them, but among its current definitions one also finds concepts such as “network architecture”, and the structural interaction, behaviour or design of a computer system or programme, down to the attributes of particular components of the system. Seen […]

Some time ago, I wrote a post called “The changing face of identity”, where I pondered the relevance of Sherry Turkle’s work on the status of identity in the age of the internet for virtual social spaces like Facebook. At the time I surmised that such spaces would not leave human social identities untouched. Judging […]

What do soccer and philosophy have in common? Or, to put it another way — what interest do they share? It is probably safe to say that these interests are, first and foremost, moral and aesthetic. Was it Camus who said that everything he had learned about morality — or was it life — was […]

Few people seem to recognize that democracy has an economic side to it — one powerfully intimated at the close of Michael Moore’s latest documentary film, Capitalism — A Love Affair, where he observes (I don’t recall his exact words) that in the light of what he has documented in the film, capitalism is an […]

Africa is part of the developing world. When given the opportunity – likely to be opened up to a greater extent than before by the Fifa World Cup being staged in South Africa — to allow foreign investment here, as well as in the rest of Africa, would it be an unadulterated blessing, or should […]