How to understand the world: the grammar of power and its traces - some techniques learned the hard way

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The Grammar of Power and its Traces

How do we make sense of what is going on in the world today?

The information out there is bewildering and full of lies and propaganda. Most people don’t think about how they think about events. They don’t question how those events are presented to them. This is partly why ills like war, injustice and suffering persist. They are obscured and normalised.

Here are some ideas about how to break through the mind-deadening noise of news and commentary and begin to see what lies behind events, the structures and ideas that create them. I wish I had learned these techniques much sooner.

These methods are not universally applicable, they are not complete and they spring from the learning and experience of a middle-aged, white, privileged, cis, straight man. Can’t get round that.

Before going on, a warning: use of these methods will take you to a lonely and bleak place where you see the world as it really is, not as others present it to be. They will also take you to a place of self-doubt, uncertainty and the realisation of your own ignorance. No way round that either.

With those provisos, let’s begin.

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The Raw Data

It’s important not to start from an initial political or philosophical framework. This is of course easier said than done, because we unconsciously deploy our mental frameworks to filter information and make sense of it.

But instead, try to get at the facts. This too is not easy. But I will suggest one source of facts that is in fact easier than ever to access. That is the experience of those ‘on the ground’. Before the internet and social media, it was almost impossible to obtain unfiltered information from the location of any event — a war, a riot, an uprising — unless you were there. It is now possible.

Why give priority to these data?

One is epistemological — about the nature of knowledge. Data from the ground has suffered less interpretation, filtration and modification than other types of data. It is not bias-free, of course, for lots of reasons. But it’s better as a starting point than almost any report or analysis generated from a distance.

An example. In 2004, there were violent riots across Kosovo after three children were drowned, allegedly by a Serb. I was there at the time, working for the UN. There were no foreign journalists in Kosovo when the riots took place. Nevertheless, they reported this ‘renewed outbreak of ethnic tension’ in the Balkans. This was not an incorrect analysis. But it was incomplete. There were other important reasons — the frustration of a people denied the right to decide their own affairs, a history of deep psychological trauma dating back to the mass ethnic cleansing of 1999 and, less obviously, the rage of young men who knew they would never enjoy the luxuries and women they saw on MTV. A big factor was fury at the incompetent UN authorities which governed the province: much of the violence was directed at the UN itself, its offices and vehicles. None of these factors appeared in the reporting of the riots. But anyone there could have explained them to you.

The second reason is unashamedly political. The people on the ground are those most affected by whatever is going on. They have most at stake. They are the ones doing the suffering and the dying. Therefore, their conditions and concerns should be put at the centre of any analysis.

Moreover, they tend to know best how to solve the problem they are experiencing. I have worked with political groups and revolutionary movements across the world. All of them speak with much more authority, knowledge and detail than any foreign ‘expert’ on their affairs.

It is remarkable how often these voices are absent in any report or analysis. If you listen to them, of course, you will encounter a wide variety of accounts and views, not a single ‘narrative’, for instance of recurrent ‘ethnic’ violence. But this is a crucial point, and a crucial word in thinking about the world: polyphony.

It’s important to get as close to the ‘reality’ of the experience as possible. This means as far as possible not relying on someone else’s account of what happened. For instance, the BBC might report that Putin has said something about why Russia invaded Ukraine, perhaps including a quotation. This may well be accurate, but it is inevitably an abstraction. Read the report and you will find that in fact Putin wrote an essay about his reasons (and of course he did not call Russia’s attack an invasion). Then you will find in the essay remarkable and fascinating insights into Putin’s mind, including the credence he gives to anti-Russian conspiracies (here’s the original text issued by the Kremlin).

If you read this original source material, you will already know more than 99% of the population. And again, your sources should be as multiple and varied as possible. One problem with the current way that international relations or world events are talked about is that the discussion uses terms and theories that tend to emphasise material facts — tanks, drones, trade flows, etc. But as we shall see, these material factors are far from the only factors that we need to understand. To get at these immaterial factors, we need to turn to less conventional sources — novels, poetry and film.

So much for the raw-ish data about the event.

Interpretation: who does it, what’s included, and what isn’t

There is the event, then there is how it is reported, and then how it is analysed and framed. With each layer, we are moving further and further from the physical reality of what happened.

Never accept that the report or analysis that you’re looking at is authoritative. Always question it, wherever it came from. Be particularly suspicious of those claiming to be ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’. This is a ‘tell’ because there is no such thing as an objective account of reality. Those telling you that their analysis is ‘objective’ are instead trying to manipulate you.

So how are we to understand the account or analyse the analysis?

One of the most important habits to apply — a heuristic — is how you privilege information. What is the most valid information?

In the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster (analysed by me here), and thus the reports of the inquiry, and thus the media interpretation of what ‘really’ happened, and thus the policy that followed the inquiry, the residents of Grenfell Tower were granted precisely four days to relate their devastating experience - out of 300 hearings of the inquiry over seven years (!). In most reports of war, reports focus on the event or phenomenon — an airstrike, a blockade, the casualty count. The actual victims are usually allowed no more than a short quote that is commonly used to confirm the accuracy of the accompanying report or to ‘offer colour’ to that report.

So there is an absence.

And this absence is a crucial part of understanding what you are reading or what you are seeing in the news. What — or who — has been left out? This question is not frequently asked. It is rarely mentioned by the author of the account: a news presenter, a reporter, an analyst. Those sitting in a studio in London discussing the famine in Gaza do not say ‘we have chosen to exclude the voices of those on the ground, and this is why…’. In fact, they may not even realise they’re doing it. If they do, they do not want to reduce the authority, and claim to truth, of the account they are giving.

So we have to identify the absence for ourselves. Here there are several ‘rules of thumb’. Not always but often true:

• White voices are given preference over those of people of colour
• Alleged ‘authorities’ e.g. government officials are given preference over ‘ordinary’ people
• In western media, western voices and analyses are preferred to local or non-western voices to the extent that often the local perspective is ignored altogether. So a retired senior official sitting in Washington is given a platform to explain what is going on in the Middle East rather than someone actually from the Middle East.
• Rich and successful people are given more attention than poor people. Bill Gates writes an op-ed for the New York Times; the resident of a housing project in Baltimore does not.
• Those who speak articulately and clearly are given preference to the clumsy or inarticulate (or those with ‘working class’ or ‘regional’ accents). This skews the analysis in obvious ways — towards the educated and thus, usually, privileged.

Application of these ‘rules of thumb’ reveals a lamentable reality: the inherent, unconfessed yet deep-seated supremacist and classist thinking among those reporting or analysing any particular event. Of course, I abhor this reality, but it’s also very useful data in working out what’s really going on. Whose version of events is given preference and whose not is of course revealing of who has the power and who doesn’t. The powerful try to conceal their power; but nonetheless it must leave its traces.

Another persistent attribute of ‘mainstream’ analysis is not only the voices who are ignored, but what it doesn’t analyse or mention. So, in talking about famine in Gaza, the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory is often not mentioned. When discussing the views of Bill Gates, the underlying system that gives him status and authority is not mentioned. There is almost a total absence of systemic thinking. This undermines the reader’s understanding but, more insidiously, sidelines any critique of any system, not least by pretending that system doesn’t exist.

Names and Frames

These power relationships are however often revealed in the framing of any particular issue. As Kahneman and Tversky discussed in their seminal ‘Choices, Values and Frames’, the manner in which a problem is framed dictates the choice of the solution. If you frame the Israel/Palestine as an ‘issue’ or ‘dispute’, wording that suggests some kind of equality of the two ‘sides’ involved, this leads to different policy responses or indeed apportioning of responsibility. If you frame it as an illegal occupation by one country of another’s territory then it gives rise to other responses.

Framing also brings more concealed risks. Framing dictates the data: the nature of the data on which you base the analysis is a function of the choice of means of collection of that data. In geopolitical analysis, almost all data is collected within particular intellectual frameworks that implicitly dictate the importance of different categories of data and political phenomena themselves. Analysis of ‘terrorism’, for instance, a word that itself is used routinely to obscure, centres certain kinds of data (military capabilities, singular objectives) and ignores other kinds — broader systemic or political origins or causes.

But sticking with one particular data type, as with a particular analytical framework, risks the danger that data or events outside of the framework will undermine your analysis. Almost all big recent events — 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, the Arab Spring — were not predicted. The analytical tools used to understand each of these types of events, those found in the discourses of ‘terrorism’, finance or ‘geopolitics’, were inadequate, not least because they invariably applied only a single analytical framework.

Analysis of the 2008 financial crash for instance is very revealing of the inadequacies of conventional analytical frameworks of even a relatively but not completely ‘boundaried’ system like finance (I covered this in ‘The Leaderless Revolution’ but, in a sentence, the traditional analytical and indeed regulatory systems did not foresee the new financial products — credit default options — that triggered the meltdown, and of course CDO’s were not the only contributing factor: a systemic analysis of the nature of markets — indeed capitalism itself, in both its mechanics and culture, its incentives and drivers, would have been a more helpful predictive tool, by showing that banks were, and to this day remain, intrinsically incentivised to innovate new financial products whose dangers are misunderstood, because of the unpredictability of cause and effect in a complex system like the financial system, and thus whose risks were severely underestimated internally and understated externally.)

So, not only must we examine the nature of the framing, we must consider the data used to justify that framing, which in turn requires us to look into who is choosing the data and thus who does the framing. Whoever does the framing has the power.

The Names

A related issue is the terms. What are the terms, names or statistics that are used in the analysis?

In the discourse of ‘international affairs’, certain terms dominate. States are treated as individual actors in events — ‘the US’ wants this, ‘Syria’ thinks that etc. In such analyses, states are coherent and singular entities. In certain contexts, such as votes at the UN, this is more or less accurate, but of course even in these contexts, the choice of a taxonomy of states gives rise to a particular form of interpretation of what is going on — that states have a kind of agency and that they are the primary and most important units of action. As I saw for myself as a British diplomat, this tends to be how governments interpret the world because they see themselves as the embodiment of the state and, of course, they see states as the most important actors.

In an earlier post, I deconstructed an example of this form of analysis, in this case a highly logical, clearly written, and thus convincing, yet profoundly epistemologically limited and therefore in some ways dishonest article about the Middle East in the Financial Times by John Sawers, former head of MI6, a piece that demonstrates very clearly how governments tend to ‘think’.

There are many deficits inherent in this kind of thinking. The first and obvious deficit is that it underplays the importance of other actors, whose actions may in fact be determinative: tech companies, defence interests, refugee flows, the weather etc.

More insidiously, this form of analysis presents the world as a kind of chessboard of interactions, where each piece — a state — moves and interacts with other pieces within a limited and formal system (where there may be a massive number of possible moves, but that number is known and limited). Indeed, books on international relations are often adorned with photographs of chessboards. This depiction is highly misleading, and more and more so.

In fact, a more accurate (but still inadequate) depiction of world affairs would be something like a Jackson Pollock painting1. Multiple simultaneous flows, convergences, interactions and events, some salient, some hidden or indecipherable.

In chess, as some people believe in statecraft too, moves are sequential — one after another. Thus in this form of analysis, one thing leads to another: input A leads to output B. Linearity. But this of course is not how events occur, at all.

This brings us to a crucial way to think about the world:

Systems

All events arise from a system; individual actions of course matter, as does individual choice, but those actions and choices occur within and are shaped by a system. Unless we understand the system, we don’t understand anything that occurs within that system i.e. more or less everything.

Systems thinking starts to illuminate structural causes. If a social system (even ‘society’) leads to more women of colour dying during pregnancy, then it is a structurally racist system: measured not by intention, but by result. An individual doctor or midwife may or may not be racist, but that is the proximate and not comprehensive cause. Thus structural explanations lead one to a much richer and productive analysis of manifold ‘ultimate’ causes.

Similarly, if women are underpaid compared to men across society, then it is a structurally misogynist or sexist system with multiple contributory factors that require understanding, not just the demonisation, even if warranted, of an individual company boss or corporate culture. Likewise, if Arab or African lives are given less weight than European or Israeli lives in an information system, as they routinely are, then that information system is intrinsically racist (a function, in turn, of imperialist depiction, as Edward Said first highlighted).

Let’s take an event and try to understand the system that produced it. A politician takes a payment to introduce a private company to a government minister (two otherwise ‘well thought of’ former foreign secretaries have done precisely this, without any consequence whatsoever). The event took place within, and as a result of a familiar, but usually unexamined, system: so-called ‘representative’ democracy. In such systems, the (very) few take decisions for the many. Such a system is inherently corruptible because access to the few is inevitably limited and thus available only to those with the social, political or (usually) financial advantages to gain that access. This systemic flaw is present in all hierarchical government systems (indeed all hierarchies), even if it is manifested in different ways: the blatant (though legal) corruption of political donations in the US; the better concealed corruption of British politics, where political parties sell access through paid-membership ‘clubs’ (and indeed donations too), and where a powerful corporate or financial tycoon will be granted a meeting with a minister, whereas a single mother in social housing will never be let through the ministry doors. Rather than focusing on a single, corrupt individual, this systemic analysis takes us to a deeper understanding of why corruption occurs.

Systems analysis, this time of information flow, also shows how governments, particularly when power is centred on one person or a small group, are inevitably rendered stupid and incompetent, because the distillation (read simplification) of data required for the few to take decisions inevitably obscures the totality and complexity of circumstances and, as I describe, preferences particular (and thus inevitably biased) kinds of information over others and, unfortunately, linear explanation (’if we implement policy x, then outcome y will result’): no wonder government today is such a mess, as complexity accelerates, and thus incompetence deepens, across the globe. I have performed such ‘distillation’ myself when I prepared policy submissions to ministers reducing complicated situations into often binary A/B choices.

Systems thinking also reveals fundamental realities of the system itself. If users of the system of social media commit suicide more often than the broader population, then that is part of the purpose of that system, social media e.g. whether Facebook declares it, intends it, or not. This insight reveals another cardinal requirement of good analysis: judge by the outputs not the intention. It is the outputs that matter: what people do, what happens to other people as a result, rather than what the system’s actors say they meant to do: the true measure of a system’s (usually undeclared or otherwise concealed) purpose.

Complexity

Thinking in systems inevitably takes us to complexity.

The world is not a chessboard. Instead, its characteristics are those of a complex system: billions of actors, connected by myriad flows (economic, environmental, cultural, migration), in constant reaction and reaction back again; a system that is dynamic and where change is non-linear and thus fundamentally unpredictable and, indeed, impossible to trace even after the event (despite our hunger for linear causal explanations). It’s a Pollock painting.

But unlike a painting, complex systems cannot be ‘frozen’ at a moment in time and thus understood, not least by top-down authority (hence the inherent stupidity of any authority — or ‘expert’ for that matter — claiming omniscience, which some do). The unpredictable nature of change (that we do not know whether input A will trigger output B, or lead to something else, or nothing) means that it is more or less impossible to foresee the effect of any particular action (as Donald Trump is now learning with Iran). Complexity means that the state of the system now and in future (and indeed in the past, though less so) is fundamentally unknowable, a humbling revelation.

Unfortunately, those who offer linear explanations do not admit complexity, for obvious reasons. Complexity offers a picture of almost infinite direct and indirect causality where output B is caused by a very wide variety of factors, of differing weights, themselves caused by further arrays and varieties of factors, where some of these factors accelerate and exacerbate (or diminish) one another through feedback loops, some enduring and some temporary, and so on and so forth. The temptation is obvious to use the singular narrative to cut through this vast complexity, but that choice comes at a terrible cost, namely accuracy and veracity.

The human brain, as night follows day, gravitates towards linearity and simplicity. ‘Occam’s razor’ — that every explanation should be sufficient but as simple as possible — is even celebrated. Given the reality of complexity in all human affairs, the razor should in fact only be applied to science, and even then I have my doubts (as Feyerabend suggested2), and certainly not geopolitical or social affairs. Indeed, it comprises a terrible danger, as we have seen. The trivialisation of political debate unfortunately exacerbates this danger, so the problem is getting worse.

Unfortunately, those who claim linear causality have one massive advantage. It is rhetorically much easier to argue for linearity than it is to prove complexity: the straight line of attribution is unavailable to the proponent of complex or systemic causes. This is one reason why the rhetoric of the Right is often powerful and memorable, ‘Occam’s razor’ their helpfully misleading servant.

Similarly, the Right will manipulate and oversimplify intricate and complex theory, such as Darwinism, into politically useful and unfortunately memorable platitudes — ‘survival of the fittest’ — which are then exploited to justify political/economic systems of domination and exploitation: ‘it’s human nature!’. The origin of this particular misrepresentation — ‘social Darwinism’ — has revealingly been traced back to a wealthy Victorian newspaper owner.

It is no coincidence that the Right reject non-linear explanation, systems thinking and complexity science. They must if they are to land their claim of sole individual responsibility (for instance, of immigrants), a function of their simplistic rhetoric of cause and effect, which they often call ‘common sense’. This is why the Right rejects expertise and intellectualism, because experts, if remotely competent, must delve into — and admit — systemic causes. Wherever you see such rejection, be on your guard. Nigel Farage and, needless to say, Trump are masters of this technique.

I’m aware, incidentally, that in reaching for examples like these I am doing exactly what I’ve described above: naming and framing according to my own view of where the power, and the dishonesty, lie. That’s unavoidable — nobody applying this method, including me, escapes it. The most I can honestly ask is that you notice me doing it, just as you should notice everyone else doing it too.

Psychology and Emotion

Any political event, of almost any kind, is made by humans. Ergo, we must understand those humans. Political analysis instead tends to give greater weight to ‘hard’ empirical data like trade, geography, economies, arms, etc. much as the ‘hard’ science that deals with measurable phenomena (physics, biology, chemistry) is seen as inherently more credible than ‘softer’ social science (and why social and inherently political indeed ideological discourses like economics try to dress themselves up as actual ‘science’). This is a mistake. How could we understand Hitler, or Trump, without psychological insight? The fact that Trump is a chronic narcissist, sexist, racist and emotionally unstable (at minimum) is surely relevant to understanding the frightening chaos of the present geopolitical moment.

It’s often left to historians to pick apart the importance of psychology in explaining events. It follows that we need this tool for current events. Social humiliation can help explain the rise of the far right, pride might throw light on the Iranian reaction to US/Israeli attacks. Meanwhile, pride and the memory of humiliation help explain China’s strategic posture, in particular in the South China Sea and Taiwan. President Xi’s own extraordinary personal history helps explain it too. Putin’s obsession with historic humiliation (of the Soviet Union) is of course cardinal in understanding the invasion of Ukraine. I find Jungian psychology quite helpful (for instance, in identifying the shadow within all of us that must, somehow, find expression — including politically). But here too, as with complexity, there are profound limits to our understanding. How can we understand another’s psychological motives when we can barely understand our own?

You will have realised that the methods above draw on several different disciplines: it’s a multi-disciplinary approach. I am troubled by the trend towards prohibiting comment on say, international law, unless you are a ‘lawyer’3, or upon ‘diplomacy’ unless you are a diplomat or geopolitical analyst. Likewise, psychology. The truth is that we must employ multiple disciplines in any serious attempt to understand current events. And I have ignored other disciplines that are often crucial — for instance, the role of water shortage — and thus climate — in driving conflict in Syria.

Power

The techniques above will help you begin to identify the structures, institutions and ideas behind current events. In turn, these features manifest further important characteristics which shape ‘reality’ and the experience of living. Many of these characteristics are deliberately concealed.

The first tool to deploy is Stalin’s maxim, ‘Who-Whom?’ — who is doing what to whom. In other words, who has the power. Bertrand Russell defined power as making someone do something other than what they would freely wish to do. From this, we can see that power relationships not only suffuse but also form our current political, economic and social realities.

Power in its crudest form is force. Governments monopolise the use of force, whether through the coercive social control of laws, police and prisons, or the use of military power.

Governments enforce law which, for instance, protects private property and wealth, but also creates and sustains an economic system whose products, amongst other things, include poverty for many and riches for a few, and planet-destroying environmental destruction.

Within that economic system, corporations and wealth-holders exert power over others through wage relationships: where people are paid to do something other than what they would freely wish to do. This is ‘work’. The removal of wages — and thus the sustenance for life — forms the ultimate sanction and threat behind the day-to-day power relationship of the boss over the employee.

There are many other manifestations of power, often concealed behind protestations of equality of power, but revealed in systemic analysis of the outputs — of white people over other races, of men over women etc. These systemic relationships of domination are covered up by those who benefit.

It’s important to understand the methods of enforcement of power. Who perpetuates these systems, for it is not only the force of law that makes us all obey and collaborate? There are — at least — two other less obvious engines of enforcement.

One is the ‘media’ and culture which normalise these power systems. The act of normalisation is performed by downplaying or ignoring the negative consequences of a system. In addition, the systems are presented not only as normal but also ‘natural’ reflections of the true nature of humanity — competitive, individualist, prone to violence over cooperation etc. This normalisation process is continual and pervasive. It is present when you listen to the news or follow political debate, it is present in mainstream culture (the lyrics of the highly successful, extraordinary but ultimately profoundly cynical K-pop song, Golden, whose triumphant self-empowerment lyrics ask nothing of the world that produces the need for them). Althusser believed that the dominant ideology was in fact infused in everything.

This leads us to another enforcement mechanism, whose deep reaches have been explored by the South Korean-born German thinker Byung-Chul Han. That enforcement mechanism is ourselves — the policeman in our own heads who tells us that poverty is our failure, that our humiliation is intrinsic to the ‘way things are’, that the secret shame that almost all of us carry at not being sufficiently ‘successful’ is wholly our own fault.

In this way, we can begin to see how the system is expressed and sustained through the individual and in individual acts. And conversely, by looking deeply and questioningly at those acts, we can begin to map out the system behind them.

There are other mechanisms of enforcement. One is racism: the structural domination of one racial group over another. Racism both forms the system and is manifested by the system in individual instances of discrimination or abuse. Like patriarchy, its expression is often subtle and concealed (’micro-aggressions’ or language itself, and of course the absences identified above) — and therefore hard to measure in isolated instances but revealed by taking the outputs of the system as a whole. There is plenty of evidence that racial or gender domination — and both — actually form the system: that they are the most important factors in explaining the political, economic and social outputs of hierarchy and domination. And all of this may be explained by a broader systemic factor, perhaps even an ‘ultimate’ cause, but certainly a question — the psychological fragility of white men which requires them to dehumanize and control others, a question James Baldwin asked.

Conclusion

The techniques I’ve described here cannot deliver the whole truth, whatever that is, not least because they rely on reported — and thus selected — data. Indeed, I’ve come to accept the impossibility of ever fully grasping that truth, though I don’t dispute its existence. In a sense, I’ve learned how little we know and how little we can know: really, how stupid we are. This realisation does not on its own give one much hope that we can manage our affairs or sort out the world’s many problems. I don’t think AI will make things much better: LLMs draw upon existing data, which are of course replete with the flaws identified above. There is no AI, and may never be one, capable of applying multiple analytical techniques to a given phenomenon and coherently integrating those findings. I’m not sure that’s even possible at all, not least because of the profound limits of empirical data itself.

On a more encouraging note, however, I have also realised that understanding cannot be singular. You may never fully reach the truth, but you can deploy multiple techniques to get nearer to it, each shedding a little more light. We should try, challenging as it might be, to apply all of these analytical tools to a given situation or history. It’s more or less impossible to separate one’s own inevitable prejudices from one’s analysis, but at least we can approach an awareness of the biases of self and others within any depiction or explanation. For we all have our biases.

I’m now embarrassed to realise how linear, and consequently how certain, my own thinking used to be (and doubtless remains, in some areas, still). I realise too that this kind of thinking is more or less required to flourish in an environment like government, a place that rewards certainty, confidence and Occam’s-razor analysis above all else. This is one reason I turned from government towards where I think more knowledge and truth actually reside. Government thinking is inherently, and dangerously, reductive — and the orthodoxy it produces always presents itself as the only credible frame, which is precisely how you know whose interests it serves. Let the people themselves declare their own concerns instead. That may be the closest to reality or truth that we can get.

For all that, I don’t think this way of seeing is a dead end. The very ground-level, unfiltered data I started this piece with is, however slowly, becoming harder to keep out of view: “lived experience” is no longer dismissed quite as readily as a source of authority, and the unfiltered, real-time record of the slaughter in Gaza, broadcast by the people living through it rather than reported from a distance, has plainly moved opinion in a way that official briefings and studio analysis never could. Nothing about that is guaranteed to last, and it changes nothing about how partial and provisional our understanding remains. But it suggests the effort is not wasted.

There is, still, a loss in all this. I feel as if I’m standing on much more unstable ground than I once did. I cannot really be sure of anything; every understanding has become uncertain and contingent — a kind of ‘epistemic loneliness’, since most people, for entirely understandable reasons, prefer the easy linearity of the arguments they already know.

I don’t cherish this feeling, but I’ve come to believe it’s a necessary evil.

I have published a video course which expands on these analytical techniques, available from my website here.

And if you read my new book, you will also see a deeper and more personal account of how I learned about these ideas.

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