Welcome
This site is about a particular mental tool. Let’s see if I can explain it in a simple way:
Think of a regular toolbox. Wrench, screwdriver, hammer, etc. all these tools are needed. Remove just one and we miss something, feel a lack. Each one has a function and we need them all.
Of course we also need mental tools like critical thinking, analogies, memory, etc. We would (I hope) feel a great emptiness if logical reasoning disappeared from the world.
However, there are certain mental tools that are not yet “discovered”, thus not missed. One such tool is domainology, the study of domains.
It is not a precision tools, but neither is a hammer.
It is not scientific in a strict sense, but neither is most of life.
We still live our lives, we still use hammers.
But we don’t use domainology, which concerns a certain activity.
The activity is quite simple, still not very often done. It consists of putting two domains beside each other and see what you discover about them, what values, rules and most of all, what differences and similarities.
The domains could be countries, territories, but comparing countries is not so unusual. More rare, and interesting, is comparing art, politics, advertising, religion, fashion, farming, etc. You should know from the start that my interest in this is not academic. It is no question of satisfying an analytical thirst, or of fooling around and flexing intellectual muscles.
No, for me the value of domainology lies in seeing, understanding and creating harmony. I come from the domain of music, and harmony for me is closely connected with music. But not only with music as something to listen to, but also music as activity: music making.
How does music making work, how do musicians act when they make music together? What rules, written and unwritten do they follow, what values are central in music making?
As contrast you could ask the same questions about politics. How do politicians “do” politics? What are the rules, the do’s and dont’s, what values reign in that domain?
In these questions I am not being, not even trying to be a scientist. I am a musician who would like to transfer, even transplant, the values and modes of music to the very different, almost diametrically different, domain of politics.
I have an agenda, and I don’t hide it.
What are my credentials?
I have moved mainly in and between three different domains: Music, philosophy and humor, sorry, politics. I have been running four very experimental political parties, and am also now active in utopian political projects.
I have never been a “real”, that is traditional politician, nor a member of a “real” political party. Nevertheless, or precisely therefore, I have some fresh impressions and insights about the domain. And I suggest that these insights stem from this very tool of domainology.
When I “invented” it I thought, this is almost NOTHING, a pseudoscience. Dare I even tell people about it…? Then I saw repeatedly its usefulness, that it can give a holistic grasp of the world and our place, role and activity in it. So I stopped this “almost nothing” thinking.
Please accept this tool, use it and learn to see larger patterns.
Ladislaus Horatius (classical pianist, writer) Contact