Category: Reflections

Anger Management

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

If you’ve ever been angry, and I’m sure you have, then you know exactly what Homer means when, in Iliad, he writes that, even to the wisest men, anger is sweeter than honey.

Have you observed that, when two people start shouting at one another, neither of them wants to stop? They are both impelled to escalate the argument and release more anger. Most of the time, both parties are even aware that they are crossing their limits with what they are saying, but they cannot stop themselves. This is why most arguments end in a completely different arena than the one they started in. And usually, the new arena is much more serious than the initial one.

To never be upset about anything, of course, is impossible. We’d be callow if we don’t acknowledge that. What matters, then, is not how one keeps anger at bay… but how one handles the emotion.

In Psycho-Cybernetics 365, Matt Furey tells us about the Zen monk who was asked if he ever gets angry. The monk’s answer to the question was: “Every day. But what used to make me angry for a few days or hours is now something I catch and neutralize within minutes.” The problem isn’t the number of times you get angry per day. The problem is you allowing the anger to extend and overstay its welcome.

Aristotle said something like, “It is easy to be angry, but it’s very hard to be angry with the right person, at the right time, and for the right reason.”

Like everything else, anger management takes practice.

The Interpretation of Lies (Part One): Neither True Nor False

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Lying has been an indispensable skill in politics since the beginning of time. In The Republic, Plato writes:

If anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.

We see here how, from the beginning, philosophers saw that politicians should be allowed to lie. (Today, most of us accept this intuitively.) However, it is also important to note that double standards are employed. In the following paragraph, Plato writes that if the ruler catches anybody other than himself lying, that person must be punished. (We can also add to this that when a person exposes one of the Big Lies told by the government, he will be regarded as a traitor…)

Everything a politician says simultaneously conveys a lie and a truth, whether he is aware of it or not. Those who oppose him will hear the lie; those who support him will hear the truth. But neither of them will be right. Only a skilled (and well-equipped) political analyst will be able to absorb the whole, the truth and the lie together.

When a politician speaks, he is directing his words to friends and enemies at once. He is addressing supporters and non-supporters, and he needs to ensure, consciously or unconsciously, that the message delivered (and interpreted) is just right for all sides. This is especially true in a time when everything ends up online and is accessible to everyone. One is always potentially speaking to everyone on the planet. A politician who is fully transparent with his people, then, is a politician who is fully transparent with his enemies. Such a politician is bound to fail. There is no possibility of addressing his friends separately and his enemies separately. So, if one wants to have a successful career in politics, mastering the art of lying is necessary and required.

Accordingly, since the possibility of a lie is always there, then the following statement is a very reasonable one to accept: that a politician’s words are neither true nor false and are always simultaneously conveying lies and truths.

In (21st century) politics, especially because it is accessible by anyone from anywhere, every political statement is the mother of many interpretations, all of them as real (as true and as false) as the other. Retrospectively (re)visited, the meaning of each statement is different (even if it appears to have remained the same) due to parallax. Looking at an event (or a political statement) from different spacetime coordinates changes its meaning. (The meaning is not in the object itself, which in this case is the event or political statement; the meaning is the subject’s relationship with the object.)

[History, as a true historian would tell you, is not static. New evidence, whether true or fabricated, can change the whole story. How we perceive the past is the past. Historical revisionism, therefore, is an attempt to change the past into a more favorable past. And the same goes for the future. The future is not static either. Both past and future are interpreted, edited, and moderated by the present forces that control the narrative. As for the present, although it may seem like an either/or reality, it almost never is. The moment lived will be revisited and changed later depending on the political needs of the future.]

To understand politics, one must accept the simple fact that all coins are two-sided. While the supporters and their opponents argue which side of the coin holds the real value of the coin (and even try to split it), the skilled analyst knows there’s no one-sided coin and there can never be. The side of the coin that depicts the truth and the side that depicts the lie cannot be split from one another.

Moreover, the side of the coin that depicts the truth according to the supporting party is the side that depicts the lie according to the opposing party, and the side that depicts the lie according to the supporting party is the side that depicts the truth according to the opposing party. Therefore, we can say that each side of the coin has (at least) two contradictory interpretations. This means that every word uttered by a politician has two opposing sides, and each of these opposing sides has at least two interpretations.

It gets even worse when you realize that the political agendas and manifestos that are made public follow the same rules we mentioned above. They can neither be a collection of true intentions nor a collection of lies. So, the political party you are a member of may or may not align with your beliefs behind the scenes, even if on the surface it looks like you’re exactly where you belong. In fact, although this might complicate things further, we can even add that your beliefs are mere echoes of political ideologies that you have inherited or adopted over the years… You know what this means: Nothing is true, politically speaking, and worst of all, nothing is a lie.

So, how can we interpret today’s politics?

This piece was originally published on my Substack on July 26, 2025.

The Real Nightmare Begins When You Wake Up

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

You don’t wake up from a nightmare; you wake into one. This is one of the first things we learn from reading Franz Kafka’s works.

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up from a nightmare to find himself in one far worse than the one he was dreaming: he discovers that he has metamorphosed into a monstrous insect. In The Trial, Joseph K. wakes up to find himself arrested without committing a crime or doing anything wrong. In The Castle, K. is woken by a young man who, out of nowhere, tells him that he needs permission from the Castle to sleep where he is already sleeping because everything, including the inn, belongs to the Castle.

When you scratch the surface of (the experienced) reality, the Kafkaesque is what you’ll get. The Kafkaesque is this ridiculously complex and illogical universe that the simulation (i.e., world) we’re in is based on. Everything in the simulation is logical and can be explained to a five-year-old until you look at the code.

The simulation we’re in is the experienced reality but not reality itself, (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer simulation). As Kant would put it, it is the phenomenon but not the noumenon. The simulation hides the nightmarish qualities of the Kafkaesque, which lies beneath the surface of the experienced reality and is where what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again.

In the world of our experienced reality, we live as if everything makes sense, but we’re just not thinking about it at the moment, when, in reality, experienced reality will collapse as soon as we start thinking about it. That’s how you scratch its surface, by THINKING. “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined,” Albert Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. When we start to think (to doubt), we will find ourselves standing next to Descartes, losing our minds (actually, losing everything but our minds) in a world created by some evil genius. “I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this evil genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity,” writes Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy.

When what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again, that’s when we know we’re on our way to (re)discover the [what?].

Between experienced reality and reality itself, there is the Kafkaesque. All those who “exit” the simulation find themselves in it. Waking up in the Kafkaesque, however, does not mean you’re fully awake. The first time you wake up, you enter the nightmare. But the journey doesn’t end there. Beyond the nightmare, another world awaits…

Unfortunately, like Kafka’s protagonists, we eventually always choose to continue living as usual even in the nightmare, as if the status quo was never disturbed, as if everything unquestionably makes sense, as if “it’s just the way the world works”, as if “this is life”, as if there are no other ways to live than default living. That’s what makes the Kafkaesque truly Kafkaesque, living ordinarily even when we find ourselves in the extraordinary.

And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber…

— Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 25, 2026.