A distinguished lawyer was talking on an internationally well known news network recently. This individual said that, at the end of the day, the most important thing is the truth. I was surprised to hear that. Perhaps this only reflects my naiveté, given that the person is also simultaneously a politician. Nevertheless, it is now a long time ago that I would have shared that belief, unfortunately. At least I fail to see its usefulness as a practical tool to understand how people think, and operate.

The following discussion is the first in a series of primers for upcoming essays, and, unfortunately, likely to be the most tedious text on this site so far. Hopefully, an indication that, if an axiom is not at least slightly difficult to pin down, the entire ensuing theory is probably trivial and of little use to write about, but also hopefully the most complicated part of the entire line of reasoning.

A senior colleague once gave me the grace of audience for a discussion about certain strategic matters. It is a person who is responsible for thousands of people around the world, that has held such responsibilities for many years, and who, in my opinion, has taken that responsibility in a remarkably smooth way, despite the fact that events and circumstances at times have been both adverse and chaotic. For a long time, I had been curious about how this individual has managed that balance throughout such a long period, so it was with great pleasure I indulged in the dialogue.

A thought pattern that has haunted me for a while now is a tendency to unconsciously anthropomorphize phenomena. The pervasiveness of this category of false premises came to my attention as I tried to understand the politics of the Great War in Europe. It is a tendency that has increasingly come to bother me, both when trying to think for myself, and when I speak with and listen to others. It is strange that such a poor way to analyze the behavior of complex systems, including but not exclusively the decision making processes of groups of people, can appear so convenient and satisfying.

Deeply entangled in a complex web of fortunate circumstances, exposure to precisely the right great ideas of millennia spanning lineages of intellectual giants, access to basic commodities, time, genetic fortune, favourable zeitgeist and advantageous market conditions, among an incalculable plethora of decisive prerequisites, a brown field market grazer hatchling is nursed by a small but steady stream of seed funding, friends and family donations, and perhaps some, mostly but not necessarily entirely, opportunistic, support from publicly funded institutions whose employees are driven to con