Author: The Hopeful Realist

Analyst of the human illusions about our place in the Earth System. Soon to be published: Holding It Together: Social Control in a New Era of Great Transformation. My eBook, HOPEFUL REALISM: A Climate Manifesto, is available on Amazon; free download via Kindle Unlimited. https://smile.amazon.com/Hopeful-Realism-Robert-MacNeil-Christie-ebook/dp/B0B52F18CX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2LWKLZZGP6BB3&keywords=hopeful+realism:+a+climate+manifesto&qid=1656946028&s=books&sprefix=,stripbooks,428&sr=1-1

Categorical Consciousness: Imaginaries and Experience

September 10, 2025

What? Well, I was just thinking about how people deal with habits and addictions when either may have both pleasurable and self-destructive consequences. Some folks may be victims of another’s categorization, or of their own. Of course, categorization is a linguistic mechanization that is closely involved with both framing the world for many purposes, and … More Categorical Consciousness: Imaginaries and Experience

The Missing Debate: Modernist Illusions and the Urgency of Now

July 30, 2025

Photo credit: NASA, via Unsplash Earthrise viewed from our moon gave many a broader perspective on the living Earth. There are so many well written and seriously researched analyses of where we are today and where we need to go, that there is simply no way to read them all. Most debates within that literature … More The Missing Debate: Modernist Illusions and the Urgency of Now

A Pain Poem

July 2, 2025

DISCLAIMER: I do not consider myself a poet. I don’t think I’ve written a poem in over forty years. However, the confluence of events in this past week or two, the two eloquent lines bracketing the text I wrote here, and reading the book on immigration, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, … More A Pain Poem

Categorical Consciousness: Imaginaries and Experience

June 4, 2025

Photo credit: R.M. Christie ~ ~ ~ What? Well, I was just thinking about how people deal with habits and addictions when either may have both pleasurable and self-destructive consequences. Some folks may be victims of another’s categorization, especially if it causes them to be ‘disappeared.’ Of course, categorization is a linguistic mechanization that is … More Categorical Consciousness: Imaginaries and Experience

It’s Only the Beginning: Tyranny and Resistance

April 23, 2025

Political power disintegrates when the people withdraw their obedience and support. ~ Gene Sharp The Musk’s hyper-tech-bro ruffians storm-trooping through the federal government has moved as fast as phantom fairy dust from the Wicked Witch of the West. The initial response of widespread protest has moved fast too, but not nearly fast enough to have … More It’s Only the Beginning: Tyranny and Resistance

Ignorant Indifferent Intelligence: Is It Artificial or Real?

March 26, 2025

Sometimes, it is very hard to understand certain minds, well, almost impossible. But there are clues. Psychology and psychiatry have certainly built a vast storehouse of knowledge about how people think about how they behave and how the way they live relates to others. But there is so much more, which is why we have … More Ignorant Indifferent Intelligence: Is It Artificial or Real?