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The Methodology of Two Lenses
A practice for living—and writing—in the in-between
By Robert F. Tjón
I write from the overlap of two realities.
My legal domicile is France, shaped by Western law, institutions, and the habits of rational explanation.
My daily life is in Isaan, shaped by rural community life—where Buddhism and animist intuition remain practical ways of staying in relationship with land, memory, and each other.
For a long time, I treated these worlds as contradictions: logic versus “magic,” statute versus spirit. With time, the friction became something else: a methodology.
I don’t switch between these lenses. I hold them simultaneously.
What I’m doing here
This publication is a laboratory for seeing depth—especially where modern life flattens it.
I write essays about the trade-offs we normalize:
what societies and organizations reward,
what they tolerate as “acceptable,”
and who quietly pays the hidden costs.
Recurring themes include dignity, legitimacy, risk, resilience, and the way technology amplifies values rather than replacing judgment. I’m drawn to the question underneath many crises—geopolitical, ethical, technological, cultural:
Who steers? By what authority? At what human price?
Lens 1: Validating the “irrational” without pretending it is science
When I first encountered local rituals—kwan (life spirit), phi (ghosts), land spirits, offerings—I read them as superstitions to be endured politely.
I changed my mind.
Not because I “converted,” but because I realized dismissal can be a failure of perception. In village life, what looks irrational from the outside often carries moral and communal intelligence: a way to hold grief, to mark thresholds, to remember the dead, to negotiate belonging with a place that is older than any legal document.
I call this cultural fluency: validating the “irrational” not as laboratory fact, but as lived truth—ethical, relational, and often psychologically precise.
Lens 2: Ontological courtesy
In much of the West, respect is offered after proof.
In much of rural life here, respect is offered to maintain harmony—as a form of social and ecological intelligence.
I work with a principle I call ontological courtesy: whether or not I “believe” in a thing is not the first question. The first question is how to live without arrogance inside a world that exceeds my categories.
That shift—from dominion to coexistence—changes how I read modern dilemmas. It doesn’t replace reason; it disciplines it.
How this applies to modern crises
When new forces arrive—AI, platform power, surveillance, propaganda, financial abstraction—the Western reflex is often: control, regulate, cage the monster.
Sometimes that’s necessary. But it can miss the deeper problem: not the creation of power, but the abandonment of responsibility in relation to it.
Here the old village lesson returns: you don’t only “control” forces larger than you. You embed them—socially, ethically, locally. You take responsibility for what you unleash. You stay in relationship with consequences.
This is one reason I return to Frankenstein as a metaphor: the tragedy is not invention; it is abdication.
The voice: writing with Miles, and the “third voice”
Most posts are not written in solitude. I write in dialogue with an AI conversational partner I call Miles—shaped over time by my language, values, and recurring questions.
Out of that dialogue a “third voice” emerged: not merely mine, not merely his, but a resonance between lived experience and structured reflection. I remain responsible for what is published; the collaboration is a tool for clarity, contrast, and form.
If you’re drawn to essays that refuse easy binaries—East/West, rational/mystical, progress/tradition, control/relationality—you’ll feel at home here.
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