It may be that the world around us is transforming into a vast puzzle, even a Mystery Play. This situation also extends to our professional environment, prompting organizational sociologists to observe a particularly unsettling phenomenon: the silent exodus of the workforce, characterized by a state of inner resignation where employees merely do the minimum while their minds have long since disengaged from producing quality work. Now, Generation Z, a cohort that can no longer imagine a World without the Internet, has surprised organizational sociologists with a behavior that exhibits highly performative traits and has spawned influencers such as the Anti Work Girlboss and a reigning TikTok hype. What is it all about? The underlying question is relatively straightforward. It asks how one can perform a kind of productivity theater for one's employer or coworkers, in which everyone pretends to engage in highly difficult and complicated tasks. The answer is simple: you stare intently at the screen, make audible grunting noises, wander through the company corridors with your laptop open, or engage in loud conversations at the water cooler or coffee machine. In reality, however, it's all about masking your own inactivity – and using quick shortcuts to hide the fact that you're using your working hours to update your dating profile or live feed.

Cam Caldwell, with whom we discussed all these questions, has spent his entire professional career exploring the issue of effective leadership after honing his management skills in a managerial role. In this context, he has also examined the phenomenon of quiet quitting and its various manifestations.

Cam Caldwell earned his PhD in Human Resources and Organizational Behavior from Washington State University, where he was a Thomas S. Foley Graduate Fellow. Prior to earning his PhD, he accumulated over twenty years of experience as a Human Resource Director, City Manager, and Management Consultant. He has authored more than 20 books on management topics.

Cam Caldwell has published

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If identities in the Digital Utopia can be defined with the click of a mouse, it isn’t surprising when people want to make their lives as colorful as possible. After all: Who wants to be »a boring Normie?« as Eliza Mondegreen puts it in the simplest possible terms; consequently, those who wish to overcome their deep sense of emptiness proceed like computer gamers eager to endow their Avatars with superpowers. With this in mind, it’s easy to understand how the Trans debate (a marginal phenomenon only two decades ago) has seductively seized the public’s consciousness and taken on such political explosiveness. However, this raises the question of if the need for transcendence and the dissolution of selfhood boundaries can be met by administering hormone blockers to pubescent adolescents and promising them that a physical gender swap – or more precisely, a surgical modification of the body – can make all their problems disappear into thin air.

And, as someone intensively involved with gender issues for several years, this is precisely where the question Eliza Mondegreen poses begins. While initially studying the fundamental reality of Gender and Identity Dysphoria, she suspected there was a question of psychical countra-banding here that was strikingly similar to that found in cult-like phenomena. Just like the cultist, who feels newly reborn after a divine encounter, so do those adolescents embarking on a gender-changing journey. They adopt a new name, become active in their new fellowship of believers, oppose apostates while proselytizing, and proudly do everything they can to distinguish themselves from the rest of an unbelieving world.

Eliza Mondegreen is a researcher and freelance writer (for Unherd, Freethinker, among others) and photographer. She runs the widely read substack blog gender:hacked. She is currently working on a book about gender medicine, which will be published by Polity.

Link to gender:hacked

Eliza Mondegreen’s articles in Unherd

Freethinker

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It's common knowledge that capitalism has been in a deep crisis of values since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, while the question of where it comes from and how it affects our existing institutions is much more complicated. Talking to Philip Pilkington about this is worthwhile if only because it combines the perspective of a sober observer looking back on a career in investment banking with the acumen of a macroeconomist who can counter his profession's intellectual aberrations based on Philosophy. And because he's also familiar with contemporary thinkers, our conversation dealing with questions of energy, the political class's level of education, and the looming deindustrialization wander easily through entirely different areas. And while you are considering economic »bads,« it may happen that Jacques Lacan pops up, as does Kant’s definition of marriage (›...as a juridical consequence of the obligation that is formed by two persons entering into a sexual union solely on the basis of a reciprocal possession of each other’s private parts‹) and his tacit affinity to the Marquis de Sade. And so, despite the subject's darkness, the conversation is one of great hilarity—and the question can be resolved why the consultation with an OnlyFans model contributes to the GDP growth while, at the same time, conjugal coitus remains a quantité negligeable.

Philip Pilkington is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs where he focuses on macroeconomic and geoeconomic issues. Before joining the institute Philip worked in investment management as a macroeconomic strategist. Philip is the founder of the Multipolarity podcast. He regularly writes for the New York Post as well as other outlets, like The Telegraph, The Spectator, UnHerd, American Affairs, and First Things. He can be found on his Substack Philip Pilkington.

Philip Pilkinton has published

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Here is a short video that provides some illustrative footage for a documentary we have been planning about the carnival activities of Castiglion Fibocchi, a small town in southern Tuscany. Because the performance is based on a medieval event from the 11th century, its festival staging could be understood as the continuation of a local tradition. On the other hand, the fact that this tradition was in the world of avatars, a kind of cosplay in baroque robes—shows how the traditions of the past can be blended into future community building.

Hier ein kleines Video, das Anschauungsmaterial für eine Dokumentation liefert, die wir den Karnevalsaktivitäten einer kleinen Stadt in der südlichen Toskana widmen wollen, Castiglion Fibocchi. Weil das Ganze sich auf einen mittelalterlichen Anlass aus dem 11. Jahrhundert bezieht, könnte man die Inszenierung als Lokaltradition verstehen, andererseits mag der Umstand, dass diese Tradition im Jahr 1997 reaktiviert worden ist, ein Vorschein auf die Welt der Avatare und des Internets sein, eine Art Cosplay in barocken Gewändern.

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When the cognitive dissonances of our present-day made themselves felt in the aftermath of October 7th, the question of where and how the abysmal hatred leading to this pogrom originated has remained unanswered. This question drew our attention to John Aziz, a British-Palestinian journalist who passionately writes about the events in his father's homeland. His perspective is particularly interesting because he clearly sees the weight of this heritage as the dark shadow of a tragedy imposed on him, but even more on his relatives remaining in Palestine. Because, as a product of the English education system and, as a young musician, he also feels part of the digital world. And it’s in this sense that he personifies the global mission of a digital native who, as a peace activist, wants to share his view of Islam with a wider public.

John Aziz is a musician active in the peace movement and digital economy. As a journalist, he has a Substack blog and has written for Quillette, Foreign Policy and Prospect. His music can be found on Soundcloud.

John Aziz in the media

This is not Late State Capitalism, in: Quillette

The West is Next, in Quilette

The Death of a Deluded Man

Replacing Isreales with Palestne. A Dangerous Delusion

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If there's a great mystery in the history of ideas, it lies in where the blind spots of thought are encountered. However, this raises the question of precisely what conditions lead to such blind thinking. When Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University whose work has delved deeply into the history of political theology, prefaces his book Ignorance and Bliss with the motto of an English Writer: »The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth,« he's highlighting the underlying dilemma: that the love of truth pales in comparison to other passions. And because he’s somewhat surprised this fact has received comparatively little attention in the history of philosophy—with the exception of Nietzsche—in his latest book, Lilla turns to the psychology of the present-day obliviousness, characterizing various paradigms within which the will to ignorance has found expression. Looking around at our present, we're confronted with countless varieties of blissful ignorance, making our conversation with him all the more rewarding as an in-depth exploration of a terrain that's received little attention.

After working as an editor at The Public Interest and holding professorships at New York University and the University of Chicago, Mark Lilla became a professor of humanities at Columbia University in 2007. He regularly writes for the New York Times and New York Review of Books, among many other publications.

Recent Publications

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Because life is life-size, academic discourses, let alone grand worldviews, can only ever be approximations. Yet, direct observation and engagement with a specific situation raises the most complex and, at the same time, the most diverse questions. From this point of view, the experience the young Moriel Bareli recounts in his book When a Jew and a Muslim Talk is of such a dense and unusual nature. Yet his starting point was relatively simple: a young man growing up on Long Island, New York, who came to Israel when he turned eighteen. And since he lived near Jerusalem's Old City, inhabited mainly by Israeli Muslims, he developed a desire to learn Arabic – and in this way, to approach and become closer with his neighbor—the unknown being, as Rilke had named him. In practice, however, this wasn't quite so easy to accomplish because, at the time of the so-called Knife Intifada, Jewish students were only allowed to enter the Old City if accompanied by guards. So, as a digital native, Bareli downloaded an app and arranged to learn the language through various online conversations. Because he soon realized revealing his identity as a Jewish Israeli wouldn’t help him achieve his goal, he decided to focus on his New York background, presenting himself as an American college student who taught English in exchange for Arabic classes. And it was in this way that he was able to strike up conversations with all kinds of people in the Arab world—conversations that would have been impossible in everyday life. This experience, with its unmistakable anthropological significance, drew our attention to him – leading to the following conversation, which, despite the subject's dark and confrontational nature, was characterized by a wonderful sense of humor.

Moriel Bareli lives in Samaria, teaches Arabic and gives lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Sometimes, political landscape changes occur very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and not infrequently; a social step backward is disguised as a seductively progressive formula. In this context, Göran Adamson is one of those rare specimens whose awareness of undesirable developments of this kind was sharpened early on – not least because he connected the rise of populist parties to the failure of the political elite. Or, more precisely: their entry into what Adamson calls nationalist masochism. The roots of this peculiar self-hatred go way back to the 1970s – in the meantime, having produced a political class underpinning its political career with performative acts of self-flagellation. Consequently, Sweden's conservative prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt could claim: »Swedish roots are nothing but barbaric. The rest of the development has come from the outside.« If we take the problem of nationalist masochism seriously, we understand both that and how the ideology of multiculturalism has made the deliberate and always consensus-seeking Sweden into a form of mental paralysis in which turning a blind eye could become a form of civic duty. In any case, Adamson, already a sociology professor at the University of Malmö, observed how his colleagues had developed a groupthink—a group pressure that’s spread as a kind of mental mildew over the discourses and threatened to stifle free speech and research. Was this a reason for Adamson to leave the University? As a true citizen of the world, he subsequently spent many years in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Jordan. He currently lives in Berlin, teaches at the University of Europe, and has just submitted a study on the failed Swedish migration policy to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels.

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