Deconstructing the Victim Mindset: Choosing Truth Over Fear

A victim mindset is a cognitive pattern where individuals consistently perceive themselves as powerless targets of external circumstances, blaming others or events for their difficulties. This mindset resists personal responsibility and change, often clinging to a narrative of helplessness to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths. Socratic humility is the intellectual virtue of recognizing and embracing the limits of one’s knowledge, fostering openness to learning and growth. It counters arrogance by encouraging a […] Read more »

The Core of Individualism: Humility, Empathy, and Courage

Intellectual Humility: Having a consciousness of the limits of one’s knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one’s native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one’s viewpoint. Intellectual humility depends on recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. It does not imply spinelessness or submissiveness. It implies the lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight […] Read more »

Confronting and Overcoming the Victim Mindset Within and Without

Karpman’s Drama Triangle is a psychological model describing dysfunctional social interactions through three roles: the victim, who feels powerless and seeks rescue; the persecutor, who blames or oppresses; and the rescuer, who intervenes to “save” but often perpetuates the cycle. These roles create a dynamic of blame, dependency, and conflict, trapping participants in unhealthy patterns. The Empowerment Dynamic (TED) Triangle is a constructive alternative to the Drama Triangle, featuring three […] Read more »

The Great Reset as a ‘Great Reckoning’ of Accounts Due

We are individually and collectively approaching “Childhood’s End”. The Great Reset is a proposed global rebalancing of societal and economic systems, envisioned as a reckoning where individuals and institutions face accountability for their moral and transactional choices. It forces an internal confrontation with one’s ledger, aligning outcomes with the standards—reasoned or exploitative—chosen by each. Klaus Schwab’s concept of the Great Reset is a proposed global initiative to reshape societal and […] Read more »

Certainty as a Substitute for Truth

Deductive rigidity refers to the strict application of fixed premises to reach conclusions, often stifling inquiry by treating those premises as unchallengeable, leading to inflexible and potentially flawed outcomes. In contrast, abductive reasoning offers flexibility by inferring the best explanation from observed facts, adapting to new evidence and context to align further with truth. The maxim “You can be dead sure and dead wrong” exposes a fundamental flaw in human cognition: the tendency to […] Read more »

Abductive Reasoning and the Pursuit of a Moral Life

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of […] Read more »

The Transcendence of Law & the Path to a Non-Transactional Agape-Based Existence

Law is the shadow of reason; whereas children require rules from their parents to navigate life, adults instead use reason to guide their morality and decision making. ~Nathan Martin Laws are only meant to be an age appropriate way to communicate reason, and what is reasonable, to small children. Spiritually and psychologically mature adults do not need laws then, as they have reason to guide their morality and ethical decision […] Read more »

Law as a Type and Shadow of Reason

John Locke’s “law of reason” refers to the natural capacity of human beings to use rational thought to discern moral and ethical principles that govern just interactions, independent of external authority. It is an internal guide, accessible through reflection, that aligns individual actions with objective truths about reality and human rights. Law, at its core, represents a fundamental failure to trust in individual reason. While proponents often frame it as […] Read more »

The Crucifixion of Jesus: How Innocence Defeats Power

Agape love, in traditional Greek usage, refers to a form of love that prioritizes the well-being of others without expecting anything in return, often associated with divine or universal compassion, and is distinctly non-transactional as it seeks no reciprocation or zoomed in personal benefit, deferring instead to a zoomed out “bigger picture” personal benefit. In the New Testament, agape is elevated as the highest form of love, exemplified by God’s […] Read more »

My Favorite Ayn Rand Quotes

Individualism and Independence Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as […] Read more »

Prometheus, Epimetheus, Stolen Fire, & Pandora’s Box

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many […] Read more »

The Interplay of Deduction, Abduction, and the Metaphor of Jesus as the Inner King

Deductive rigidity refers to the strict application of fixed premises to reach conclusions, often stifling inquiry by treating those premises as unchallengeable, leading to inflexible and potentially flawed outcomes. In contrast, abductive reasoning offers flexibility by inferring the best explanation from observed facts, adapting to new evidence and context to align further with truth. Human reasoning shapes our worldviews, moral frameworks, and spiritual lives through two primary modes: deductive and […] Read more »

Creativity vs. Productivity: The Role of Reasoning in Creating and Producing Value

*Note: the examples in this article aren’t necessarily based in our experience with CPS and ex-partner, but they’re there to help understand and clarify the problems and patterns that I am exploring here. Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and refining new ideas or creative solutions to address needs or problems, often relying on imaginative thinking to envision possibilities. In personal relationships and family law, the interplay between creativity […] Read more »

Breaking the Matrix: How Abductive Reasoning Unites Reality and Truth

Deductive reasoning, defined as starting with general premises assumed true and deriving specific conclusions—like “all dissenters disrupt order, so Jane, a dissenter, is disruptive”—often shapes how people perceive reality, mistaking their subjective lens for universal truth. This process can create a thought matrix, a rigid mental framework where premises from culture, authority, or personal experience dictate thought’s boundaries, defended dogmatically as reality itself. For example, someone shaped by childhood trauma […] Read more »

The Straw Man Fallacy: Reducing Depth to Shallowness

The straw man logical fallacy—where an argument or character is distorted into a weaker, oversimplified version to be easily attacked—serves as a potent tool for misrepresenting individuals of depth and complexity. A person of depth, marked by nuanced ideas, emotional richness, and intricate reasoning, becomes a target for those with agendas or those too biased or dimwitted to grasp such complexity. Whether driven by malice or ignorance, these critics erect […] Read more »