Thought Leader

I have written about the position of women in our patriarchal society from various perspectives on this site several times before – in the context of guns and violence against them, on a fundamental level on the link between patriarchy, writing and images, on why one should respect women for their extraordinary qualities, and on…

Copenhagen is a beautiful city. It is also a financial black hole for South Africans. With a currency that is constantly edging lower against international currencies because of an inept and corrupt ANC government which cannot manage the country’s economic relations in such a way that its toxic internal political conflicts do not impact negatively…

Some time ago I wrote a piece on Shoshana Zuboff‘s recently published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and already other signs are beginning to appear that this invidious phenomenon is spreading in the workplace too, as surveillance of workers to ensure optimal productivity. In a recent edition of TIME magazine (‘When humans become robots‘; July…

By Pierre Brouard and Judith Ancer If a young person feels that they are gay, is the priority to work out if they are sure they are gay, or to help them deal with the fears and anxieties of their family and friends? We are two psychologists who work regularly with this dilemma, and recent…

On a virtually daily basis, one is confronted with more dreadful news pertaining to the destruction of the world as we know it – or knew it – by forces that seem to be, almost irrefutably, related to anthropogenic climate change in the shape of global warming. For example, a report on Yahoo News (27…

The spectre of anti-Semitism is once again stalking us, according to Vivienne Walt (TIME, July 1 2019, p. 33-37). Unbelievable, one might exclaim. Not really, and I’ll explain why – or rather, I’ll let Freud – one of the most original thinkers in history – explain why. But let’s look at the evidence for the…

From the point of view of complexity theory, or chaos theory, if you like, everything is interconnected. ‘Chaos’ is here regarded as just a very complex variety of ‘order’, unlike in earlier times — the ancient Greeks, for instance, opposed chaos’ and ‘cosmos’ (order), as most of us do in our daily lives. In Deleuzoguattarian…

Many people — especially those who still read novels — will know George Orwell’s 1984, with its depiction of the brainwashing society of Big Brother, of Newspeak (the language designed to inhibit critical thinking), the Thought Police, and constant surveillance of every citizen, monitoring their behaviour (lest they should exhibit signs of discontent, or worse,…

The global hype around the HBO television series, Game of Thrones (GoT), which ended with what was apparently generally perceived by fans as an anticlimax of sorts, made me reflect once again on the pertinence of the intellectual work of that indomitable French thinker, Bernard Stiegler, for grasping the way that contemporary electronic technology is…

By Pierre Brouard Do we still need an International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOT), to draw attention to the violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and all other people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities or expressions, and sex characteristics? If this year’s events I attended are…