Your grades from the school machine, determine what job you get in the corporation, your actions are interpreted in performance reviews which determine your access to credit or social admittance. In these societies of control,you are granted freedom to act, but your actions are surveilled and you are granted or denied access basing on if you act " right " To quote Deleuze "Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continually change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point."

This is a high-level summary of Michel Foucault's work " Discipline and punish". In it, I look at how power has been organized in societies which had sovereign rulers, vs those with more dispersed institutional centres of power. How do Kings get their subjects to do things vs say Parliaments? How are schools, prisons and factories all avenues for how power is exercised? Foucault's ideas have us questioning how ideology is administered, and how we are normalised, assessed and granted access to things in power structures in both silent and none obvious ways.

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism: This book is an examination of the way culture, empowered by technologies, is making us more narcissistic, looking to the world to fit our own self-narrative rather than the other way around. While I don't agree wholesale, I think this is a great book to use to reflect upon the changes in how we view ourselves since the advent of modernity

The Title Says it all.

Raymond is a journalist, writer, thinker, saxophonist and most importantly, a husband and a father We discuss how he came to his current position in life, his favourite philosophy and whether or not democracy actually works

If seeking pleasure is unsatisfactory, and the ethical life is simply tradition, well what are we to do? There is a third way...the leap of faith. In this episode, we discuss Kiekagaard's religious solution, what it means to be a knight of faith as opposed to a mere sheep of the flock of the church, something he found to be a true loss of oneself, a mockery of the radical call to be a Christian.

" The most common form of despair is not being who you are." Kiekagaard How do we become our selves? Well it appears there are 3 modes of existence that as use to reconcile our potential with our necessity: The Aesthetic, Ethical and Religious modes of life are the responses Kierkegaard uses to frame how we respond to the responsibility of living. Today we explore the aesthetic ( a life filled with the pursuit of what is interesting ) , and the ethical ( a life filled with observing our duties to society ) Spoiler alert, both modes fail to result in us becoming fully ourselves. So that's where the third way, the religious way comes in.

This is the first in our discussion on Existentialism. It's a wide-ranging affair and I knew of no better place to start than with Soren Kierkegaard and his take on how anxiety and angst are markers on helping us become a self Becoming a self is no mere task as so many, he claims, do everything in their power to escape themselves. Enjoy.

In this second part to the exploration of Nihilism, we delve into the "loss of Truth" as the essence of Nihilism and the difference between passive and active nihilism The question we ask ourselves is if the things that previously gave us meaning turn out to be man-made constructs, where do we go from here?

They say you shouldn't meet the people you admire. Well, I'm not one to listen to what they say. Ernest is the first proper celebrity I got to meet and know well, beyond his writing. And I wasn't disappointed..In this episode of Sunday Chats-we talk about his school life, what made him decide to become a writer, and what it's like being iconic-which both of us carry the burden of being !! ;-)