April 22, 2025

Four short reads

You’re busy making stock, so here are some reads while it simmers. I haven’t read much in the past month that’s really hit for me, probably because we’re all too busy yelling in pain, grieving, or both. But I did like these.

• Notes on the psychic conditions.

• On compliance, conditioning, safety, and leadership.

• Living on the ground, offline, correctly.

• The organizational predecessor to the CIA wrote a manual for fascist resistance in the 1930s.

There are some common threads here, mostly around capacity collapse, the conclusion of intellectualism, the conclusion of urban quality of life, and above all, conditioning. It strikes me that there is probably a relationship between deconditioning & leadership, where people who understand how things work on a higher level are more likely to be able to lead into the future – if, of course, they can act with kindness, protect their nervous systems, and remain safe.