Fool’s Paradise

Schopenhauer, Dunning–Kruger, and the Comfort of Being Certain

Hieronymus Bosch, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (c. 1494–1516, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain).
A fool submits to surgery to remove the “stone” of stupidity, while the surgeon himself wears a funnel — the medieval symbol of folly. Bosch’s satire is razor-sharp: ignorance is not a pebble to be extracted, nor wisdom something that can be poured in. Five centuries later, the scene still reads like a warning against the comfort of a fool’s paradise.

Have you ever argued with someone who was completely wrong — and completely certain?

No hesitation. No nuance. No curiosity. Just calm assurance, as if reality itself had signed off on their conclusion.

A recent YouTube video titled “Why ‘Idiots’ Think They're Intelligent – Schopenhauer” revisits an old and unsettling insight: long before modern psychology described the Dunning–Kruger effect, Arthur Schopenhauer had already identified the mechanism behind confident ignorance.

He called it, in essence, a fool’s paradise.

When Ignorance Feels Like Clarity

Schopenhauer observed something simple and devastating: intelligence perceives complexity; ignorance does not.

If you lack the knowledge to detect nuance, competing interpretations, hidden assumptions, and technical depth, everything appears straightforward. And when the world appears simple, you feel certain.

Doubt only begins when complexity becomes visible.

Anyone who has seriously studied a discipline recognizes the pattern. At first, it looks manageable. Then, as you go deeper, the terrain becomes more intricate. What once felt obvious dissolves into questions. That uncomfortable realization — the sudden awareness of how much you do not know — is the beginning of competence.

But if you never reach that point, you remain in a fool’s paradise: a state of effortless confidence sustained by limited perception.

Familiarity Is Not Understanding

The video draws a crucial distinction between recognition and comprehension.

We live in an age of exposure. We scroll through psychology threads, listen to economics podcasts, quote philosophers on social media, and absorb fragments of neuroscience. We become familiar with terminology. We can follow conversations. We feel informed.

Familiarity is passive. Expertise is active.

Expertise allows you to apply ideas, defend them against strong criticism, explain them clearly, and recognize their limits. Familiarity simply means you have encountered the vocabulary before. The mind easily confuses the two. Once we believe we understand something, curiosity fades. Why investigate further what already feels known?

Modern psychology later formalized this pattern through the work of David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Their research showed that the skills required to perform well in a domain are often the same skills required to evaluate performance accurately. Without those skills, self-assessment becomes unreliable — and confidence inflates.

Schopenhauer had already seen this dynamic in academic life and public debate.

Blindness Disguised as Equality

There is a harsher dimension.

To recognize excellence, you need some baseline competence yourself. Without it, the expert and the amateur appear indistinguishable. A rigorous philosophical system and a casual opinion can look equally valid. A peer-reviewed study and a persuasive blog post may seem interchangeable.

From inside that limitation, the person is not necessarily arrogant. They are blind. And blindness feels like equality.

If you cannot see higher standards, you do not aspire to them. Without aspiration, there is no improvement. Without improvement, the gap remains invisible. The fool’s paradise sustains itself.

Complexity as Camouflage

Not all confident ignorance sounds simple. Sometimes it sounds impressively complex.

Dense language, elaborate frameworks, and abstract terminology can create the illusion of depth. Yet complexity is not proof of understanding. True intelligence can move between complex and simple forms without losing precision. Performed intelligence hides in obscurity because obscurity is harder to challenge.

If an idea cannot be explained clearly, it is often not because it is profound. It may be because it has not yet been fully understood.

The Closed Loop of Certainty

The most frustrating aspect of the fool’s paradise is correction.

If someone lacks the conceptual tools to detect their own error, evidence does not penetrate. Counterarguments feel like mere disagreement. Data appears biased. Logical analysis sounds like unnecessary complication. The corrective signal never arrives because the receiver is not equipped to process it.

This is why arguing with confident ignorance often feels futile. The problem is not always stubbornness. It is structural limitation.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: every person who has ever been confidently wrong believed they were right at the time. Including you. Including me.

The only reliable antidote is disciplined doubt — not paralyzing insecurity, but the habit of asking, “What might I be missing? Who understands this better than I do? What evidence would change my mind?”

Certainty is comfortable. Doubt is demanding. But doubt is the only way out of the fool’s paradise.

Further Reading

• David Dunning & Justin Kruger (1999), Unskilled and Unaware of It

• David Dunning, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself

• Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (from Parerga and Paralipomena)

• Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

• Bertrand Russell, The Triumph of Stupidity

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

• The Article is based on YouTube: Why “Idiots” Think They're Intelligent – Schopenhauer

Who Is Responsible Here?

How cultures carry responsibility — and why this matters in times of change

Image generated with ChatGPT.

Something goes wrong. Not dramatically, not through a single mistake, but slowly and quietly. Plans stall. Expectations drift apart. When the moment comes to ask what happened, no one can quite point to a clear failure. No rule was broken. No promise was openly violated. And yet, something has clearly gone wrong.

Situations like this are familiar — in families, neighbourhoods, communities and societies. We often describe them as failures of leadership or accountability. But beneath those explanations lies a deeper question: how do different cultures understand responsibility itself?

As in the previous blog on low and high-context, we use the concepts of low-context and high-context cultures to make sense of these differences.

In low-context cultures, meaning is carried mainly by words. Communication is explicit. What is said or written matters most, because shared assumptions cannot be taken for granted.

In high-context cultures, meaning is carried largely by context. Much is understood without being said. Relationships, shared history and social cues carry more weight than explicit wording.

Most societies fall somewhere in between. Misunderstandings arise when people assume their own way of carrying meaning is universal.

These differences do not stop at communication. They shape how responsibility itself is carried.

In low-context cultures, responsibility is usually explicit. It is tied to clearly stated commitments, defined roles and visible decisions. Responsibility can be traced: someone agreed, someone decided, someone is accountable.

This approach values clarity and fairness. It allows societies to function at scale, among people who may not know each other well. Responsibility becomes something that can be assigned and reviewed.

In high-context cultures, responsibility is more diffuse and relational. It is embedded in social bonds, mutual expectations and long-standing ties. Responsibility is not always spoken aloud, because it is assumed to be understood. Calling someone out directly can feel less like justice and more like a rupture in the social fabric.

Here, failure is often experienced not as guilt — breaking a rule — but as shame: a disturbance of harmony, a loss of trust, a weakening of the group.

Neither model is morally superior. Each reflects a different way of holding society together.

The contrast becomes especially visible in times of change.

Low-context cultures tend to manage change by rewriting rules. Laws are updated, procedures adjusted, responsibilities redefined. Change is something that can be planned and implemented.

High-context cultures approach change more cautiously. Because responsibility is woven into relationships, change requires renegotiating trust, status and shared expectations. Too much speed can feel destabilising.

This helps explain why reforms that appear perfectly reasonable on paper may meet quiet resistance in practice. One side sees clarity and progress; the other experiences disruption and loss.

History offers many examples. In medieval Spain, Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities lived side by side for centuries, not because they shared beliefs, but because they operated within overlapping yet distinct systems of responsibility. What ultimately failed was not only tolerance, but compatibility.

Similar tensions emerge whenever universal systems meet local worlds. Centralised states encounter regions governed by tradition. Formal institutions meet relational communities. The conflict is not only about power, but about how responsibility is understood and enforced.

Understanding this does not provide easy solutions. But it changes how we interpret failure and resistance. What looks like irresponsibility from one perspective may be an attempt to preserve social coherence from another.

In times of change, the question “Who is responsible?” is never only technical. It is cultural.

Recognising that responsibility can be carried in different ways does not eliminate conflict. But it allows us to see that many fractures are not driven by bad intentions or incompetence — they arise from incompatible expectations, and from the fragile balance between rules and relationships that every society must find for itself.

Cartagena — A City That Doesn’t Reveal Itself at First Glance

Cartagena (Spain).

Cartagena is not a city that flatters you on arrival. You don’t walk into a polished museum town. You arrive in a working port — with container ships, naval docks, faded façades and whole neighbourhoods that seem forgotten by time. Peeling paint, shuttered balconies and crumbling walls sit next to grand buildings that hint at former wealth. The history is everywhere, but it hides behind neglect, dust and industry.

And yet, few cities in Spain carry a deeper past.

Founded by the Carthaginians as Qart Hadasht and later reborn as Roman Carthago Nova, Cartagena became one of the great cities of Hispania, enriched by silver mines and protected by a perfect natural harbour. Romans built theatres, temples and forums — much of which still lies beneath today’s streets.

After Rome came Byzantines, Visigoths and Moors. In the 18th century, the city rose again as Spain’s main Mediterranean naval base. Warships, fortresses and arsenals reshaped the harbour. Cartagena became a military city — and remains one.

Mining brought another boom in the 19th century, followed by decline. When industry faded, whole districts slipped into decay. Only recently has restoration begun, slowly uncovering the buried layers.

Cartagena does not hand you its story. You have to walk its hills, descend into its Roman ruins, explore its civil-war shelters and stand on its harbour quays to understand its power.

It is not pretty in a postcard way. It is raw, complex and monumental.

A city that doesn’t seduce — but rewards.

Sailboats captured against the backlight of the sun, by Pedro Jimenez Vicario. Seen at the Roman Theatre Museum of Cartagena.

L’Entrepôt Italien: A Taste of Italy in the Heart of Provence

Luca, proudly holding a bag of Noisettes du Piémont IGP — the small golden treasures from the hills of Piedmont that turn simple recipes into unforgettable Italian moments.

Step off the beaten path in the charming village of Le Val (in the French department of Var) and you’ll find a place that feels like a little slice of Italy tucked away in the South of France. Here, Luca and his sister have built more than a gourmet store and webshop — they’ve created L’Entrepôt Italien, a welcoming haven for lovers of authentic Italian food, culture, and conviviality.

From the moment you push open the door of this family-run shop, the atmosphere is warm and inviting. It’s not just about food — it’s about stories, traditions, and sharing. Since opening in 2014 in its first humble warehouse in the Var, L’Entrepôt Italien has grown into a beloved destination for cultural explorers and culinary enthusiasts alike. The shop’s ethos is refreshingly simple: offer products you truly believe in, treat every visitor like a friend, and make every purchase an opportunity to experience a bit of Italy.

A Curated World of Italian Delights

Inside the shop and on its webshop, you’ll find more than 150 Italian specialties — artisan pastas, richly flavoured sauces, seasonal collections, and hard-to-find delicacies that make every meal feel like a celebration. Whether you’re planning a leisurely Sunday lunch or crafting an aperitivo inspired by Italian ritual, there’s something to spark joy.

But one range stands out — and it’s a true cultural treasure: the products made from Noisettes du Piémont, the famed Piedmont hazelnuts. Grown in the rolling hills of northern Italy and prized for their intense aroma and delicate texture, these hazelnuts are an epicurean must for anyone serious about Italian flavours.

From roasted IGP Piedmont hazelnuts that are perfect for snacking, to rich hazelnut chocolate spreads and silky hazelnut pastes, this selection reflects both the land and long culinary traditions of Italy. They’re the sort of ingredients that transform a simple dessert into an unforgettable moment around the table.

More Than a Shop — A Cultural Meeting Place

Beyond the shelves and baskets, L’Entrepôt Italien has blossomed into a community space where stories are shared as freely as recipes. Luca and his team’s love for Italian food culture shines through every recommendation, tasting, and friendly conversation. Their blog celebrates this passion too, offering articles on seasonal cooking, Italian culinary traditions, and pairing ideas that feel like guided tours through Italy’s gastronomic landscape.

For travellers wandering Provence, food lovers seeking genuine Italian flavours, and anyone who revels in culinary heritage, L’Entrepôt Italien is a must-visit. It’s where culture and cuisine meet, and where every jar, bottle, and bag tells a story — a story of Italy, shared with warmth in the very heart of the French Riviera hinterland.

• L’Entrepôt Italien

The Journey of the Bells of Santiago de Compostela

Panel depicting the legendary transport of Santiago’s cathedral bells to Córdoba after the sack of 997, and their later return in 1236. Museum of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

If you walk into the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela today, you’ll hear the peal of bells rolling out over the old Galician city. But legend says those same bells once rang in Córdoba, nearly a thousand kilometers to the south, carried there on the shoulders of Christian captives. It is a story that mixes history, humiliation, and perhaps a dash of medieval imagination.

The year was 997. At that time, much of Spain was under Muslim rule. The most powerful figure of the day was Almanzor (al-Mansur), the vizier of Córdoba. He led dozens of campaigns deep into Christian lands, and in 997 he set his sights on Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of Saint James, already a major destination for pilgrims.

According to the chronicles, Almanzor’s army swept through Galicia, defeated local resistance, and sacked the city. Yet, remarkably, the shrine of the Apostle was left untouched—possibly out of reverence, possibly to avoid inflaming Christian devotion further. The rest of the city, though, was destroyed. And then comes the detail that every Spaniard seems to know: the great bells of the cathedral were taken down and carried all the way to Córdoba by Christian prisoners.

For over two centuries, the bells are said to have hung in the great mosque of Córdoba, turned upside down and used as lamps. Then, in 1236, when King Ferdinand III of Castile conquered Córdoba, the tables were turned. Muslim captives were forced to carry the bells back to Santiago, where they rang once again for the Apostle.

It’s a great story—almost too great. And here’s where the historian’s caution comes in. The earliest references to the bells being taken come from chronicles written long after the events, in the 12th and 13th centuries. They were compiled in León and Castile, at a time when Christian rulers wanted to stress both the humiliation inflicted by Muslim rulers and the glorious reversal brought by the Reconquista. Was it true? Possibly. Did Almanzor take trophies from Santiago? Certainly—he was famed for parading spoils through Córdoba. But whether the cathedral bells really made the long march twice is harder to prove. Archaeology has yet to confirm the tale, and the silence of contemporary Muslim sources makes us wonder.

Still, the story endures because it captures so much: the clash of faiths, the rise and fall of empires, and the way symbols can weigh as heavily as iron. To carry a bell is to carry the voice of a city, the call of a people. And whether or not every detail happened exactly as told, the legend of Santiago’s bells continues to echo, reminding us how memory and myth shape the past.

Further Reading

• Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Blackwell, 1989) – for context on the early Muslim presence in Iberia.

• Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (University of California Press, 1992) – a clear narrative of Al-Andalus, including Almanzor’s campaigns.

• Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109 (Princeton University Press, 1988) – helpful background on the Christian kingdoms where the story of the bells was later shaped.

• Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (Espasa-Calpe, 1929) – a Spanish classic that discusses the building of historical myths.

El Cenachero — The Man Who Carried the Sea into Málaga (Spain)

El Cenachero (Malaga, Spain).

At the edge of Málaga’s harbour, where cruise ships now glide in and out and tourists sip cocktails in the sun, stands a bronze figure with bare chest, strong shoulders and two baskets of fish hanging from a wooden yoke. His name is El Cenachero — and he is one of the most recognisable symbols of the city.

Long before Málaga became a destination of beach clubs and boutique hotels, it was a working port. Every morning, fishing boats landed their catch on the sand. From there, men known as cenacheros carried the fish into the city, balancing two wicker baskets (cenachos) on their shoulders and walking from street to street selling the day’s harvest.

They were not merchants in shops. They were moving markets.

With loud voices they announced their arrival:
“Boquerones frescos!”
“Sardinas vivas!”

The cenachero walked barefoot or in worn sandals through the heat, his skin darkened by the sun and the sea. His work was hard, his pay modest, but his role essential. Without him, Málaga did not eat.

The statue near the port is not a monument to a general or a king. It is a tribute to labour. To the men who turned the sea into daily bread. To a city that once lived by nets and boats, not by hotels and terraces.

In the 1960s, when tourism began to transform Málaga forever, El Cenachero became a reminder of the old city — a link to the fishermen, the beaches where boats were pulled ashore, and the voices that once echoed through the narrow streets.

Today, visitors photograph him before boarding cruise ships or strolling along Muelle Uno. Few realise they are standing next to a worker who once fed an entire city.

El Cenachero is Málaga in bronze: salt, sun, sweat — and dignity.

Alfonso VIII and Leonor of England — A Royal Marriage Carved in Stone

The painted limestone tombs of a Alfonso VIII and Leonor of England who shaped medieval Spain (Abbey of Las Huelgas in Burgos).

Among the many remarkable royal tombs in the abbey of Las Huelgas in Burgos, two stand out for both their artistry and their story: those of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his wife Leonor Plantagenet, daughter of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Their monumental sarcophagi, carved from polychrome limestone, still retain traces of medieval colour — a rare survival that adds warmth and humanity to these otherwise austere royal monuments.

Alfonso VIII (1155–1214) became king as a child after his father Sancho III died when he was only three. His early reign was marked by civil war and rival noble families fighting for control of Castile. Only in his late teens did Alfonso truly assume power, ruling with determination and political vision.

In 1170 he married Leonor of England, a princess raised in one of the most sophisticated courts of medieval Europe. Through her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Leonor brought the cultural refinement of southern France and England into the Castilian court. Their marriage was both a political alliance and, by medieval standards, an unusually stable and effective partnership.

Together they ruled for more than forty years. Alfonso became one of the central figures of the Reconquista, culminating in the decisive Christian victory over the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) — a turning point in Iberian history.

Leonor played an active role as queen. She founded monasteries, supported learning, and acted as a diplomatic bridge between Castile, England and France. Under their patronage, Las Huelgas grew into one of the most powerful abbeys in medieval Europe, closely bound to the royal dynasty.

They had eleven children, many of whom married into the royal houses of Europe, weaving Castile into a vast international network of alliances.

Alfonso died in 1214, Leonor only weeks later. They were laid to rest side by side beneath their painted limestone tombs — not just funerary monuments, but enduring witnesses to a reign that shaped the political and cultural future of medieval Spain.

In the cool silence of Las Huelgas, their story still rests in stone — coloured, carved, and quietly magnificent.

From Hunger to Guillotine: The French Revolution

Execution of Louis XVI at the Place de la Révolution, Paris, 21 January 1793. Contemporary engraving.

Europe likes to imagine its revolutions as clean turning points: old world out, new world in.
The French Revolution was nothing of the sort. It was noisy, contradictory, intoxicating—and deeply human. It did not begin with blood, but with paper: with lists of complaints, with hunger, with words that—once printed and repeated—acquired a force of their own.

A pressure cooker ready to burst

By the late 1780s, France was a kingdom running on fumes. Decades of war had hollowed out the treasury: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), and—most ruinously—financial and military support for the American War of Independence. Victory abroad had produced bankruptcy at home.

The tax system deepened the fracture. Nobles and clergy enjoyed exemptions, while peasants and urban labourers carried the fiscal burden. Bread—always bread—had become scarce and ruinously expensive after poor harvests in 1787–1788. Hunger ceased to be private suffering and became public anger.

Material hardship alone, however, does not make a revolution. What truly destabilised France was expectation. Enlightenment ideas—circulating through salons, pamphlets, Masonic lodges, and provincial academies—had been shaped by thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. They promoted ideas of rational government, citizenship, legal equality, and popular sovereignty.

When Louis XVI convened the Estates-General in 1789, he meant to resolve a fiscal crisis. Instead, he exposed a crisis of legitimacy. The cahiers de doléances—the lists of grievances drafted across the kingdom—were explosive. People no longer pleaded for mercy; they demanded laws, rights, and accountability. Once expectations begin to rise faster than institutions can adapt, history accelerates.

From reform to rupture

The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 is often remembered as a spontaneous eruption of rage. In reality, it was symbolic theatre with irreversible consequences. The fortress itself mattered less than what it represented: arbitrary royal power, suddenly vulnerable.

What followed was not a straight line but a widening spiral. Feudal privileges were abolished. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed universal principles of liberty and equality. The king was recast as a constitutional monarch—then, slowly and fatally, redefined as an enemy of the nation.

By 1792–1793, France was at war with Europe—and with itself. Externally, revolutionary France faced the War of the First Coalition, fighting Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, and others who feared the spread of revolutionary contagion. Internally, counter-revolutionary uprisings and royalist conspiracies multiplied.

Fear hardened into policy. Suspicion became civic virtue. The revolution radicalised because it felt surrounded, betrayed, and unfinished. This was the moment when newspapers ceased merely to describe events and began to mobilise readers, compressing time, moral nuance, and restraint into urgent calls for action.

Ink, anger, and the street

Revolutionary Paris was flooded with print: pamphlets, posters, journals—cheap, fast, emotional. None more influential than L’Ami du peuple, written by Jean-Paul Marat.

A notorious example appeared in early September 1792, when Marat warned that imprisoned “enemies of the people” would soon rise against the Revolution. He named generals, ministers, and aristocrats, arguing that pre-emptive violence was an act of public salvation. Within days, the September Massacres followed. Whether Marat caused them or legitimised them remains debated—but his words undeniably shaped the moral climate.

Marat did not inform his readers; he warned them. He named enemies. He framed violence as prevention. His writing remains uncomfortable because it is effective: short sentences, absolute moral divisions, no space for doubt. The world is split between the people and their enemies, and hesitation itself becomes betrayal.

Alongside him, Le Père Duchesne spoke in the voice of the street—coarse, furious, deliberately vulgar. It sounded like Paris shouting back at power.

By contrast, Révolutions de Paris attempted to narrate events rather than inflame them. Its reports of the journées of August 1792, for example, describe crowds, rumours, and violence with a degree of narrative distance—an excellent source if you want a contemporaneous account that still resembles storytelling.

Words mattered because they collapsed the distance between thought and action.

Terror as a system

The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 shattered the final restraints.

Regicide changed the nature of the Republic overnight. It was now absolute—or doomed.

The Terror did not erupt spontaneously; it was organised. Revolutionary tribunals, surveillance committees, denunciation lists. The guillotine was not a mob weapon but an administrative one. What makes this period so unsettling is not merely its brutality, but its logic. Violence was redefined as moral hygiene. Death became a tool of clarity.

Even so, the revolution devoured its own prophets: the men who had given it its language, its moral certainty, and its sense of inevitability. Jean-Paul Marat, whose writings in L’Ami du peuple taught Parisians to see violence as civic necessity, was murdered in 1793. Jacques Hébert, the voice of radical popular anger and editor of Le Père Duchesne, was sent to the guillotine in 1794. Maximilien Robespierre—a lawyer, architect of the Terror, and believer that virtue and terror were inseparable instruments of republican purity—followed them to the scaffold soon after.

The revolution could not stop proving its own purity.

After the fire

By 1795, France was exhausted. Power passed to the Directory, a five-man executive body meant to stabilise the Republic and prevent both royalist restoration and popular dictatorship. It promised order and delivered corruption, political paralysis, and reliance on military force.

Stability returned only with a general who understood both revolution and discipline: Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon closed the revolutionary chapter while exporting its consequences. By “exporting,” contemporaries meant conquest—but also institutions. Legal equality before the law, secular administration, rationalised taxation, and codified civil rights travelled across Europe with French armies. The revolution failed to remain democratic, but it succeeded in making the old order impossible to restore unchanged.

France never fully recovered from 1789. It learned to live with a dangerous idea: that legitimacy flows upward from the people—and that crowds, once awakened, do not easily fall silent again.

The “Conclamatio” Relief – A Roman Farewell Reimagined

Funerary Ceremony, called the Conclamatio — marble relief made in northern Italy around 1500–1515, a Renaissance imitation of an ancient Roman scene showing the ritual calling of the deceased’s name at a funeral. The work is now held in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

The Scene

This marble relief, created in northern Italy around 1500–1515, is a Renaissance imitation of an ancient Roman work. Now housed in the Louvre, it depicts the conclamatio — the moment in a Roman funeral when family and attendants called aloud the name of the deceased.

At the center lies the body on a klinē, surrounded by mourners and musicians. Two figures raise wind instruments, amplifying the chorus of grief. Beneath the couch rest a pair of sandals and a small dog — tokens of loyalty and life left behind. To the left, a ritual flame burns; above, a draped cloth marks the threshold between the living and the dead.

The Meaning

The conclamatio confirmed death and released the deceased from the world of the living. It was both ritual and recognition — the collective voice of family ensuring that memory began where life had ended. Though carved a millennium and a half after the Roman original, this Renaissance piece captures the essence of the ancient rite: solemnity, movement, and human emotion rendered in stone.

The sculptor’s aim was not to copy but to evoke — to translate the lost sound of ritual into enduring silence. By showing grief as action, not sentiment, the relief bridges two worlds: the classical past and the reflective spirituality of the early sixteenth century.

Reflection

The “Conclamatio” relief reminds us that mourning was once a public act — a communal acknowledgment that someone had lived, and had left. Even as a Renaissance reimagining of antiquity, it preserves the universal impulse to give voice to loss. Across centuries, the echo of that final call still seems to resonate from the marble itself.

Further Reading

• Marie Erasmo, Reading Death in Ancient Rome

• Katherine Carroll, Living Through the Dead

• William H. Heller, Roman Funerary Ritual and Social Memory

La Brocante du Vézelien

La Brocante du Vézelien.

In shadows cast by time’s old hand,
La Brocante waits, a ghost in sand.
Her windows cracked, her paint a sigh,
Yet treasures sleep where dust runs dry.

The door creaks tales of years gone past,
Of once-loved things that couldn’t last.
But step inside, the past will hum,
In faded light, where dreams become.

Beneath the wear, a quiet charm,
Where memory rests in gentle harm.
La Brocante calls, in whispers frail—
A forgotten shop with stories pale.

The Monks Who Collected the World — Steyl’s Holy Zoo

Stuffed animals at the Missiemuseum in Steyl — a 19th-century vision of faith, science, and the irresistible urge to collect the world.

In the late 19th century, the quiet monastery of Steyl on the river Maas became the unlikely center of a global enterprise. The Missionaries of the Divine Word sent brothers and priests to every corner of the world — to preach, to teach, and, as it turned out, to collect. From the tropics and the savannas, from jungles and islands, they shipped back not only souls saved but animals stuffed.

What began as a pious wish — to show the richness of God’s creation — soon grew into something much larger. Crates arrived from China, Indonesia, New Guinea, and Africa, filled with birds in brilliant plumage, coiled snakes, monkeys, and even big cats. In Steyl’s Missiemuseum, they were arranged behind glass: lions beside antelope, parrots beside penguins, all labeled with elegant handwriting and missionary pride.

Over time, the collection grew into a menagerie of wonder and contradiction — part natural history, part sermon, part obsession. The monks called it education; visitors might have called it awe. Looking at it today, with rows upon rows of creatures staring out through dusty glass eyes, one senses how missionary zeal and Victorian collecting fever merged into a single act of devotion — and domination.

The result is astonishing and a little unsettling: a frozen ark, a world gathered in faith and fervor. In Steyl, the brothers tried to bring God’s creation home — and ended up capturing the wildness of an entire world inside the stillness of glass.

Five Classic Geysers in a Spanish Window

Five classic geysers (León, Spain).

Somewhere in León, I stop before a small shop window. Behind the glass hang five classic geysers, displayed like relics from another age — white, rounded, solid, and strangely human. They look as if they still belong to a world where things were built to last and gas was simply there.

I think of home — of how in The Netherlands we talk of little else but transition. No more gas, no more burning, no more delay. Every boiler, every flame, every old system has become a symbol of guilt.

Here, though, no one seems in a hurry to erase the past. These quiet machines just wait for someone who still buys them, still needs them, is still dependent on them.

I catch my reflection in the glass: the street behind me, cars passing, the faint trace of my own doubt. Maybe progress isn’t only about moving forward. Maybe it’s also about remembering the warmth we’re trying so hard to replace.

The Tree of Jesse in the Wormser Dom

The Tree of Jesse in the Wormser Dom.

The relief of the Tree of Jesse in the Cathedral of St. Peter (Wormser Dom) presents the genealogy of the Holy Family with remarkable depth and grace.

At the base lies Jesse of Bethlehem, father of King David, from whose side a small tree trunk emerges. From this trunk rises a tangled yet elegant vine, filling the pointed Gothic arch with twisting branches and leaf-like crockets.

Along these branches sit or stand a succession of royal and prophetic ancestors of Christ, each set within the foliage:

• King David, often depicted with a harp

• King Solomon, wearing a crown and holding a scepter or book

• Other kings of Judah such as Hezekiah, Josiah, or Zedekiah, marked by regal insignia

• The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, holding scrolls with messianic prophecies

• Figures sometimes identified as the Virgin’s parents, Joachim and Anne, or other key ancestors named in the Gospel genealogies

High above them all, at the tree’s flowering crown, sits the Virgin Mary enthroned with the Christ Child, the final and perfect bloom of Jesse’s lineage.

Flanking the arch are additional full-length figures:

• Evangelists or apostles, recognizable by their books or scrolls

• A bishop or abbot in mitre and vestments, possibly representing a donor or the ecclesiastical authority who commissioned the work

This exuberant Gothic carving is far more than decoration. It transforms Isaiah 11:1—“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse”—into a vivid three-dimensional family tree. Its carefully portrayed kings, prophets, and evangelists link the Old Testament to the New, proclaiming Christ as both heir of David and fulfillment of ancient prophecy.

A City Woven Around a Theatre: Roman Cartagena Revealed

The Roman Theatre of Cartagena (Spain).

At first glance, Cartagena doesn’t give much away. Traffic, shops, everyday life — and then a doorway draws you inside a modern building that quietly functions as a museum. What begins as an exhibition visit slowly turns into something else.

You move upward first, not down. On the upper floor, a long, enclosed passage opens — a tunnel that leads you forward in time as much as in space. And then, almost without warning, the Roman theatre appears.

You emerge halfway into the structure, suspended between the highest rows of seats and the orchestra below. It is an unusual entrance, and a deliberate one. Rather than discovering the theatre under the city, you enter it within the city — inserted into its surviving geometry.

A stage for a rising empire

The theatre was built at the very beginning of the Roman Empire, during the age of Augustus. Its scale alone tells a clear story. This was not a peripheral town. Carthago Nova was prosperous, strategically located, and confident enough to claim a monumental public building at its core.

Roman theatres were never just places for entertainment. They were instruments of civic identity. To build one was to declare that this city belonged to the Roman world — culturally, politically and socially.

Politics carved into space

In antiquity, visitors passed beneath inscriptions honouring the imperial family before taking their seats. The message was subtle but constant: Rome was present here, watching, legitimising, ordering the city’s public life.

Inside, society was arranged in stone. The best seats lay closest to the orchestra, reserved for those whose status mattered. Architecture reinforced hierarchy long before a word was spoken on stage. Even today, standing among the tiers, that logic remains visible and instinctively readable.

Architecture that directs attention

Roman theatres are machines for focus. The rising cavea pulls your gaze downward, towards the orchestra and the stage. Movement, sightlines and sound were carefully controlled. Cartagena’s theatre still demonstrates this with remarkable clarity.

Behind the stage once stood a richly decorated architectural façade, filled with columns and statues. Performances unfolded within a setting designed to communicate order, authority and permanence — values Rome was eager to project.

Rediscovered, not reconstructed

For centuries, the theatre disappeared beneath later construction. Houses, streets and churches reused its stone and obscured its form. It was not dramatically destroyed, but slowly absorbed by the city that grew on top of it.

Its rediscovery in the late twentieth century returned a missing chapter to Cartagena’s story. Today, the museum route does not try to recreate the illusion of a buried ruin. Instead, it guides you carefully into the structure itself, allowing the theatre to reveal its scale and logic gradually.

A city that faces the sea

Carthago Nova is a Mediterranean harbour city, outward-looking and well connected. Trade, administration and wealth passes through its port. The theatre belongs to that identity: public, ambitious, confident.

What makes the visit especially powerful is the contrast. Modern buildings press close around the ancient structure. The theatre is not isolated; it coexists with the present. You do not step back into a distant past — you step into a layer of the city that still shapes it.

Rome here is not a postcard ruin. It is architecture that still commands space, attention and meaning.

Jeffrey Epstein and the Architecture of Kompromat

How Power Uses Sex as an Instrument of Control

Kompromat: Evolutionary impulse supplies the hook; social taboo supplies the trap.

When the story of Jeffrey Epstein is retold, it often dissolves into lists of names, flight logs, and denials. That misses the deeper point.

Epstein matters not because he was exceptional, but because he exposed a structural truth about power — and about human nature itself.

Who Jeffrey Epstein Was

Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier whose wealth, client base, and business model were never clearly explained, yet whose access to global elites was extraordinary. Over several decades, he moved inside the inner architecture of elite power, where politicians, financiers, academics, celebrities, and royalty converged. He owned multiple high-security properties, operated private aircraft, and cultivated a reputation for absolute discretion, while nobody knew where his wealth came from.

Behind this façade, Epstein ran a system that systematically abused and trafficked underage girls. Court records and survivor testimonies describe a pattern of recruitment, grooming, payment, coercion, and reuse. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 in Florida for soliciting prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution and served about 13 months for this under a lenient plea deal. Arrested again in 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges, Epstein died in jail before trial. His death closed a criminal case, but it did not close the questions his life raised about elite impunity, private power, and institutional silence.

The Girls at the Centre

At the centre of Epstein’s operation were girls, many of them underage. They were recruited, groomed, paid, coerced, and reused. Their exploitation was not accidental. It was instrumental.

To understand why, one must look beyond scandal or personality and briefly — uncomfortably — toward evolutionary biology.

Why Young Girls Are the Ultimate Lever

From an evolutionary perspective, youth signals fertility, health, and reproductive potential. Across cultures and eras, these signals have exerted a powerful pull on male psychology — often stronger than reason, reputation, or long-term self-interest.

At the same time, those very signals place young girls in the opposite position socially. They are the individuals most in need of protection. They sit at the intersection of maximum biological attraction and maximum social vulnerability.

That contradiction is precisely why exploitation here is so effective.

When powerful men are drawn into sexual situations involving young girls, several forces collide:

• deep evolutionary drives

• absolute social taboo

• severe legal consequences

• irreversible reputational damage

The result is not merely transgression, but total vulnerability.

Closed Worlds, Open Leverage

Epstein’s homes, planes, and private island functioned as sealed environments — spaces stripped of ordinary safeguards. Inside them, boundaries softened. Escalation felt gradual. Silence felt mutual.

This is how kompromat works in practice. Not always through explicit blackmail, but through uncertainty: What happened? Who saw it? What exists?

Fear of exposure does not require exposure. Evolutionary impulse supplies the hook; social taboo supplies the trap.

Why Royals Matter

The association between Epstein and Prince Andrew, followed by Andrew’s settlement with a victim, became emblematic for a reason.

Royalty embodies two extremes at once:

• elevated status

• catastrophic reputational fragility

A compromised royal threatens not just an individual, but an institution built on legitimacy, continuity, and deference. The instinctive response is protection: deflection, minimisation, procedural fog.

This is not conspiracy. It is institutional self-preservation.

Trump, Epstein, and the Logic of Exposure

Epstein’s close social relationship with Donald Trump has been extensively documented. Trump publicly described Epstein as a friend in the past, socialised with him in elite circles, and appears alongside him in multiple accounts of New York and Florida high society.

Beyond social proximity, Trump has long been surrounded by publicly reported hypotheses concerning:

• opaque financial dependencies

• extensive ties to Russian and post-Soviet capital

• and persistent stories and allegations involving sexual misconduct

Some of these allegations have led to civil cases or public settlements; others remain unresolved or contested. What matters here is not adjudication, but structure.

The connection is not evidentiary but systemic.

Intelligence and power systems have long understood that the most effective leverage does not create desire — it exploits existing drives. Whether through debt or sex, the principle is the same: exposure plus dependency equals influence.

Evolution supplies the weakness. Systems of power merely learn how to use it.

The Unspoken Contract of Silence

Elite worlds function on an implicit understanding: discretion is virtue; curiosity is danger.

Once someone has crossed an absolute boundary — especially one involving the exploitation of the young — silence becomes self-enforcing. People comply not because they are ordered to, but because their own instincts warn them what disclosure would cost.

This is governance without commands.

The Enduring Lesson

The Epstein affair was not primarily about sex, nor even about crime alone. It was about how deeply human biology can be weaponised inside modern power structures.

Young girls worked as leverage because evolution made them irresistible — and civilisation made their exploitation unforgivable.

That combination produces the strongest form of compromise there is.

Epstein is dead. The architecture he revealed remains.

Its core materials are ancient, and unsettlingly simple: desire, protection, fear — and silence.

The Oppidum Saint-Vincent in Gaujac (France)

Plan of Oppidum Saint-Vincent at Gaujac, showing Iron Age ramparts, Roman monuments, and later medieval occupation layers. After J. Charmasson, published plan.

The ruins of the Roman baths at Oppidum Saint-Vincent, their low stone walls still tracing heated rooms and pools, set against the wooded hills that once framed daily life on the oppidum.

From down in the valley near Gaujac, the forested crest of Oppidum Saint-Vincent gives little hint of its past. Only when you climb it does the hill begin to speak. Saint-Vincent is not a single archaeological site, but a hillside shaped and reshaped by human lives for more than a thousand years.

The story begins around 425 BCE, when Gallic communities took possession of the summit and enclosed some twelve hectares with a defensive wall. This was an oppidum: a fortified hilltop settlement typical of Celtic Gaul. Oppida were not refuges in panic, but centres of authority, combining defense, habitation, ritual and trade. From Saint-Vincent, the Rhône corridor could be watched and controlled, and contacts reached as far as the Greek port of Massalia, modern Marseille. Archaeology reveals houses, storage areas and a striking ritual feature known as the “altar of ashes,” hinting at ceremonies that bound community, land and belief together.

By the early fourth century BCE the site was largely abandoned, its walls left to weather. But the hill was not forgotten. Around 120 BCE, as Roman power advanced into southern Gaul, Saint-Vincent was deliberately reoccupied. Its defenses were reinforced, transforming the old oppidum into a stronghold once more, now facing a new political horizon.

That horizon became Roman around 40 BCE, when Lepidus granted Saint-Vincent the status of oppidum latinum. The hilltop was reshaped into a Romanised town structured by terraces. Public life concentrated around a forum with porticoes, baths were built, and a monumental sanctuary—traditionally called the “Temple of Apollo”—dominated the sacred space. At this moment, Saint-Vincent was not merely inhabited; it was important. Its religious role drew pilgrims from across Narbonensis during major festivals, reinforcing both its political and spiritual status in the region.

The prosperity did not last. In the later third century CE, a series of earthquakes struck the region. The urban fabric of the hilltop suffered badly, and the Roman town gradually emptied. Yet even abandonment did not end the site’s usefulness.

Remains of the medieval village at Oppidum Saint-Vincent: dry-stone houses and enclosure walls built by quarrymen and stonecutters between the 10th and 12th centuries, reusing the fabric of the ancient city.

During Late Antiquity, in the fifth and sixth centuries, Saint-Vincent entered a quieter but crucial phase. Parts of the old ramparts were repaired or rebuilt using simpler masonry and reused Roman stone. These walls are often referred to as “Visigothic,” and while the term survives, it deserves nuance. Saint-Vincent did not become a Visigothic city. Instead, it functioned as a hilltop refuge, a place of temporary safety for populations from the surrounding plain in an unstable world. The walls of this period speak not of empire, but of pragmatism: repair what already exists, defend what can still be defended.

In the Middle Ages, the hill found yet another role. Around a small church dedicated to Saint Vincent, families of stonecutters and quarrymen settled on the summit. The abandoned monuments of Roman antiquity became quarries; blocks once shaped for temples and baths were repurposed for houses, walls and paths. Stone moved again, but with new meanings and new hands.

What makes Saint-Vincent compelling today is precisely this continuity through change. It was never erased and rebuilt from scratch. Instead, each generation worked with what was already there—walls reused, terraces adapted, ruins transformed into resources.

Some members of SECABR (Société d’Étude des Civilisations Antiques Bas-Rhodaniennes) enjoying lunch at the site of the Oppidum Saint-Vincent.

That layered history is why the presence of SECABR (Société d’Étude des Civilisations Antiques Bas-Rhodaniennes) matters so much. Their quiet stewardship—walking the site, monitoring erosion, sharing knowledge—continues a tradition that is as old as the oppidum itself: caring for a place because it matters. Where once councils met and pilgrims gathered, people still come together, not to defend or to rule, but to remember.

At Saint-Vincent, the walls no longer protect against enemies. They protect against forgetting.

More Information:

• SECABR (Société d’Étude des Civilisations Antiques Bas-Rhodaniennes)

Somewhere between the gondola and the next glass of wine

Somewhere between the gondola and the next glass of wine.

The Next Generation of Bomberos of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Spain)

The Next Generation of Bomberos of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Spain).

They stand there in the bright Andalusian light—Sanlúcar’s newest firefighters in training, a mix of nerves, pride, and that unmistakable spark of people who’ve chosen a life of stepping forward when others step back. These trainees aren’t just learning how to fight fires; they’re learning how to read a crisis, trust each other, and serve a community that depends on them.

The Silent Prophets Above the Gate of Chains (Santa María de Ciudad Rodrigo, Spain)

The silent guardians of the Puerta de las Cadenas of the Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo (13th century).

Above the Puerta de las Cadenas of the Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo stretches a striking frieze of Old Testament figures, carved in stone like a solemn assembly presiding over the cathedral’s northern entrance. According to Sendín, the sculptor gathered Abraham, Isaiah, the Queen of Sheba, Solomon, Ezekiel, Moses, Melchizedek, Balaam, David, Elijah, Saint John the Baptist, and Jeremiah—twelve figures who together trace the long arc of biblical history.

At the beginning stands Abraham, the patriarch of faith, followed by Isaiah holding the scroll of prophecy. The Queen of Sheba, crowned and elegant, brings a rare feminine presence, representing the nations recognizing divine wisdom; beside her, Solomon embodies that wisdom in royal calm. Ezekiel appears with the intensity of a visionary, while Moses—marked by his staff or the tablets of the Law—represents the covenant and its commandments.

Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king who offered bread and wine, stands close to Balaam, the foreign prophet compelled to bless Israel. Their inclusion highlights the ways God’s voice, in medieval understanding, could emerge from unexpected places. David, with his crown and poetic bearing, re-establishes royal lineage before the frieze turns to Elijah, the fiery prophet taken to heaven in a whirlwind.

Only one figure belongs to the New Testament: Saint John the Baptist, the final herald before Christ, the bridge between old and new. The cycle closes with Jeremiah, carved in a gesture of lament, embodying the sorrow and longing that permeate Israel’s story.

Why place this assembly above a cathedral door? In the Middle Ages, façades were meant to teach. These prophets form a visual overture to the Gospel proclaimed inside, affirming that Christianity rises not in isolation but from a long, unfolding tradition. Together they create a threshold of memory and meaning: a carved chorus of voices preparing the visitor to step from the world into the sacred story beyond the gate.

The Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo (13th century) with the Puerta de las Cadenas.

A Vessel with Two Faces: Bird and Deer at El Tolmo de Minateda (Spain)

Painted Iberian crater, El Tolmo de Minateda, early 1st century BCE. Bird and deer appear on opposite sides of the vessel, forming a symbolic dialogue placed in a funerary context.

In the first half of the 1st century BCE, in what is now southeastern Spain, a large painted vessel was placed in a grave at El Tolmo de Minateda (Albacete). It was not an ordinary container. This crater — a Greek vessel form reinterpreted by Iberian potters — was chosen to accompany someone into death.

What makes it remarkable is that it speaks in two images, one on each side.

On one face, a bird with outstretched wings stands upright, surrounded by flowers and vegetal motifs. On the opposite face, a deer lowers its head, calm and contained, again framed by floral elements. Both images were painted deliberately, each occupying its own panel, as if inviting the viewer to walk around the vessel and read it in the round.

This crater comes from a funerary context, and that matters. In Iberian ceramics from El Tolmo, birds and deer are not random decorations. Archaeological research shows that deer appear almost exclusively in burial contexts, where they are often interpreted as psychopomps — animals associated with transition, guidance, and the passage between worlds. The bird, frequently depicted with spread wings, may echo similar ideas of movement between earth and sky.

Together, the two animals form a quiet visual dialogue: land and air, stillness and motion, body and soul. This is not storytelling in the modern sense, but symbolic language, meant to work within ritual rather than explanation.

By the time this vessel was made, Roman power was already present in Iberia. Yet the imagery is deeply local. The form may echo the Mediterranean world, but the meaning belongs to the community that buried its dead here, using symbols that had carried weight for generations.

This crater was never meant for display. It was made to stand beside ashes, to protect, to accompany, and perhaps to explain what words could not.

Two animals. One vessel.
And a final journey, told in clay.