NM's blog

In his 1915 writing  May Day and the War , Lenin responded to the notion that war is just a "terrible" thing by highlighting that it is also " terribly profitable ".

An interview with Gilbert Achcar

That is my question to Google AI.  Answer: Erich Fromm's  Escape From Freedom  remains highly relevant because it explains how the psychological burden of autonomy leads people to embrace authoritarianism, conformity, and populism. His insights into modern loneliness, the loss of individual identity, and the surrender of free will accurately mirror contemporary societal crises .  The Core Mechanisms of Escape Fromm argued that while modern society gives us "freedom from" traditional constraints, it creates profound isolation and anxiety. To cope with this, individuals try to escape the burden of freedom in three ways that are highly visible today. Authoritarianism:  Submitting to strong leaders or adopting rigid ideologies to regain a sense of security and purpose. Automaton Conformity:  Blending entirely into the crowd or adopting the prevailing beliefs of one's culture to avoid standing out or taking personal responsibility. Destructiveness:  Pr...

No wonder why some people turn against asylum seekers and immigrants as a scapegoat in an advanced capitalist country. “The number of people on Sheppey who have a higher education level qualification, 16.8%, is half the England average. “ With dimmed prospects and little money , some are turning to crime. Criminal activity on Sheppey is twice the Kent average, with high levels of violent and sexual assaults. Shoplifting is also a problem. “Seashells family hub, which helps up to 400 children a week - some of whom struggle for a meal at home - had its funding cut by almost 90% in 2025 by Kent County Council.”

For those who always resign and blame 'human nature' whether it is the cause of wars, violence or obscene inequality and 'greed'. ************* A 2015 comprehensive meta-analysis of more than 2,500 twin studies between 1958 and 2012, covering almost 18,000 complex human traits, found (unsurprisingly) that identical twins are typically more similar than fraternal twins. But their personalities are certainly not identical. For the 568 traits that were descriptions of temperament or personality, the study found that 47% of differences could be attributed to genetic differences. The remaining portion, it concluded, must be accounted for by environmental influences. Other studies   seem to support this  – only around 40-50% of personality differences are genetic. But even when combining a range of different DNA variants, the effects on personality remain smaller than anticipated. Heritability estimates currently span  from 9% to 18%  for Big Five personalit...

The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The prob...