Institutional Imprisonment Part IIII

I thought I’d do these consecutively and then I remembered this is my artistic public journal so I said: oh well. The likelihood that more than 50 people will read this is pretty low still, so bearing that in mind, I am keeping the content personal and not performative and I actually don’t want that to change. In fact I think that’s why I started doing this in the first place.

Anyway, so a quick recap of the CORE Theory:

Humans are inherently fragile and cannot fully integrate emotional, ethical, social, and symbolic realities without risk of collapse. To construct coherent selves, individuals inhabit multiple overlapping realities, using them not only to survive but to build identity, meaning, and ethical capacity. The ethical self emerges only when these realities are consciously negotiated and mediated through complex systems—social, cultural, symbolic, and institutional—and through practices such as art and acting, which allow humans to experience, interpret, and integrate diverse perspectives safely without claiming total responsibility. Art, in particular, functions as a structured laboratory for self-construction and ethical engagement, modeling how humans can hold fragility, multiplicity, and moral complexity without collapse.

Now as promised in Part III: we will now go over what makes this new knowledge. I have decided to make a list so just bear with me. And I’ll be referring to it as The Theory rather than My Theory.

Originality & Contribution

1. Integration of fragility and multiplicity:

• Existing psychology (e.g., Freud, Bowlby) treats fragility as pathology or limitation.

• Postmodern philosophy (e.g., Lyotard, Baudrillard) describes multiplicity but often as fragmentation or confusion.

• The theory reframes fragility and multiplicity as structural preconditions for constructing coherent selves, not problems to solve.

2. Ethical emergence from self-construction:

• Moral philosophy and cosmopolitan ethics often assume awareness automatically produces responsibility.

• The theory shows that ethics is emergent, contingent on how multiple realities are negotiated and mediated—introducing the concept of structurally bound ethical development.

3. Art as structural tool for selfhood and ethics:

• Existing art theory treats art as representation, expression, or empathy.

• The theory positions art and acting as practical, structural scaffolds for negotiating multiplicity and fragility, thereby directly facilitating ethical self-construction.

New Knowledge: This framework unifies psychology, philosophy, ethics, systems theory, and aesthetics to explain how humans construct selves and ethical capacities under conditions of fragility and complexity, something no single discipline currently integrates.

Purpose & Human Benefit

• Psychology and psychotherapy: Offers a structural understanding of identity formation, trauma, and moral conflict, suggesting therapeutic strategies for navigating conflicting self-realities safely.

• Medicine and healthcare: Provides insight into how patients cope with multiple dimensions of suffering and responsibility, informing holistic care models that respect psychological and ethical load.

• Education: Guides teaching methods and curricula that cultivate ethical awareness and selfhood by engaging multiple perspectives and experiential learning (e.g., role-play, creative practice).

• Cultural work and the arts: Offers a rigorous theoretical basis for using art, theatre, and storytelling to train empathy, ethical reasoning, and self-understanding.

• Social policy and organizational design: Explains how systems can be structured to distribute responsibility and meaning, reducing moral overload and improving human resilience.

Summary of Originality

The theory is original because it:

1. Treats fragility and multiplicity as foundational for self-construction, not flaws.

2. Shows that ethical selfhood emerges from negotiating multiple realities, not automatically from awareness.

3. Positions art and complex systems as practical scaffolds for this construction.

It extends existing knowledge by unifying fragmented insights from psychology, ethics, systems theory, and art into a coherent explanatory and practical framework, offering actionable insight into how humans can live ethically, meaningfully, and resiliently in a complex world. Most importantly it gives words to what neuroscience still cannot explain: how humans can themselves create a coherent self.

This theory (my theory) combines psychology, philosophy, ethics, art theory, and many others, into one framework: it explains how humans can inhabit multiple realities, hold fragility, and construct ethical selves using symbolic and artistic practices.

So far no existing discipline fully explains how this is done, why it works, and how it is applicable to real human life. The fact that I have made the integration is what makes it new knowledge.

That’s right I came up with new knowledge. We’ll discuss more about the theory’s real world applications in Part IIIII. And elaborate more on The Theory itself because it truly never ends.

And a quick reminder: I’m publishing this online because I believe it should be public because hybrid doctoral level research of this kind can sometimes be lost in obscurity, in lack of recognition, in lack of application: the list goes on. I plan on making this work both credible and accessible beyond institutions, academia, and my own artistic practice, and this is one way to begin doing that.

Stay tuned.