critical thinking – Trance Blackman

The Devil We Feed: Fear, Attention, and the Creation of Reality

The Devil We Feed: Fear, Attention, and the Creation of Reality

The Observer Becomes Part of the Story

26 September 2026 ~ 40 minute read

There comes a point in any investigation when the thing being investigated is no longer the only thing worth examining. We can follow the names, institutions, documents, networks, symbols, patterns, and apparent connections as far as they will take us, but sooner or later we have to turn the question back upon ourselves. What happens to the observer who spends enough time looking into the machinery of power, control, fear, and hidden influence? And what happens when the search for an explanation becomes part of the very environment we are trying to understand?

Lux Colloquii

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

Theranos and the Machinery of Trust

23 September 2026 ~ 21 minute read

There are certain conversations that begin with a single story and gradually reveal something much larger underneath it. Theranos is one of those stories. What initially appears to be a tale of technological deception opens into questions about institutions, incentives, accountability, evidence, and the ways ordinary people can be persuaded to trust things they have neither the knowledge nor the means to independently verify.

Lux Colloquii

The Earth We Are Shown: Narrative, Evidence, and Omission

Documentary, Persuasion, and Truth

23 September 2026 ~ 22 minute read

There’s something particularly frustrating about watching a beautifully made documentary and realizing how much of what you’re seeing has been selected, arranged, compressed, and framed before it ever reaches you. The production may be polished, the narrator credible, the imagery extraordinary, and the message carefully constructed, but none of that removes the need to question what lies beneath the presentation. What is being shown, what is being omitted, and what assumptions are quietly carrying the entire narrative?

Lux Colloquii

Beyond the Rabbit Hole: Discernment in the Age of Suspicion

The Limits of Looking Behind the Curtain

06 September 2026 ~ 19 minute read

There are rabbit holes that are worth entering, and there are rabbit holes that seem to exist primarily to keep us digging. At some point, the question changes from What are they doing? to something far more useful: What am I doing with what I now know? This conversation lives somewhere in that territory, between discernment and obsession, suspicion and certainty, awareness and the freedom to simply walk away.

Journal Entries

The Body Only Heals: Removing the Blindfolds of Modern Medicine

Learning the Language We Were Taught to Ignore

23 August 2026 ~ 3 minute read

What if much of what we’ve been taught about health, illness, and the human body is not merely incomplete, but built upon assumptions we’ve rarely been encouraged to question? At some point, outsourcing our understanding of ourselves becomes its own kind of dependency. There is another possibility: becoming curious again, investigating what we think we know, and learning to trust the extraordinary intelligence of the organism we inhabit.

Tag: critical thinking

The Devil We Feed: Fear, Attention, and the Creation of Reality

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

The Earth We Are Shown: Narrative, Evidence, and Omission

Beyond the Rabbit Hole: Discernment in the Age of Suspicion

The Body Only Heals: Removing the Blindfolds of Modern Medicine