Cognitive Budo
A Combat Manual for the Sovereign Mind
Sohrab Morovati
We live in the golden age of manipulation. Other centuries have lied every bit as much as ours. But none had yet turned the lie into a precision industry, with its laboratories, its patents, and its shareholders.
Against this industry, we think with the reflexes of the Paleolithic. Cognitive Budo gives the mind what the martial arts gave the body: a map of its weak points, and a discipline for defending them. It distinguishes six faculties and six lines of attack against them. From the sophists of Athens to the engineers of Silicon Valley, from Bernays and Goebbels to the troll factories, it follows the hand that manipulates and shows where it lands.
It then teaches the parry, a breathing of the mind in three phases that opens, between what strikes us and what we do with it, an interval where freedom becomes possible again. In these pages you learn to see the attack coming, and to keep your response in your own hands.
A wall we can see is already half crossed; it is the wall painted as a horizon that cannot be crossed.
The introduction and the first four chapters, as a PDF.
Coming soonThe Cognitive Citadel
Six faculties, six ways in. See where you can be reached.
THE SIX FACULTIES