The tension is ramping up out there. It’s not just that certain Mayan prophecies may have predicted this year as when the calendar ends. The numbers themselves have a sense of finality. We’re out of the first decade, and even out of the grace year that was 2011. We’re wondering: what now? Few doubt that [...]
Posts under ‘Socialization’
Take me to your leader
I’ve often wondered how it would go, if an alien landed and walked up to the nearest human. Would an alien assume that all humans were ‘equal’? Would an alien be that liberal? Or that naive? “Take me to your leader!” Well now. That’s quite a request. I don’t know anybody who has access to [...]
City lights
When the alien archeologists visit us, they’ll poke through the artifacts and conclude that ours was a society based around paradox. As a simple example, we live in cities but do not design them for living. It is as if we were hiding our true intentions from ourselves, like a gambler trying to bluff his [...]
Eudaemonia
Every city in ancient Greece had its own model of eudaemonia, translated as both “human flourishing” and “the good life.” The point was that society was pointed toward an apex of pleasurable existence, like an optimization of common sense. Now we have no such sane thing. Instead we have utilitarianism, which is basically a statistical [...]
Being a fan
Bizarre as it is, most people identify more with sports teams than they do with important questions of their future. For example, to me it would seem important to know what direction we’re heading in, or what our culture is, or even what our values are. In service of those values I’d camp out at [...]
Experts
Reassurance. Everybody seeks this. We need to feel assured, especially when we are young, that we are OK. That we are fine. That we are knowledgeable, acceptable, impressive, wise, worthy, loved, whatever… We grow up looking for this reassurance from outside of ourselves: Mothers, fathers, teachers, leaders. As we mature, we seek it elsewhere: Religion, [...]
Fatalism
Once upon a time, the notions of Nietzsche made sense: when we threw out God, we lost all sense of value or struggling for truth and sank instead into a hideous mire of nihilism. As time went on it became clear that nihilism, or the denial of all truths or meanings, was more a refutation [...]
The End of History
The German philosopher Hannah Arendt writes in Tradition and the Modern Age that an unsettling paradox emerges in the modern world’s view of history. If history is a struggle towards a perfect political system, then when that system is achieved history will be complete — and then what will the purpose of mankind be? The [...]
Stop yer cryin’!
OK, don’t stop your cryin’. I don’t care if you cry. Crying can be good, after all. It cleans out the eye sockets and soothes the driest of eyes. You’re left with red and bloodshot eyes, but that’s what attracts the babes, these days: men exploring their sensitive, feminine sides, etc… But it doesn’t, really. [...]
