Tag: philosophy
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Three short commentaries: on election struggles, politics and marriage, and human fallibility
It’s unfortunate how much political haymaking is going on right now as the election results are being certified. As someone who has no respect for or investment in either side, the irony and hypocrisy of both is quite shocking. People who are anti-Trump are shocked and appalled, of course, but having witnessed their own previous…
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Can you fix inequality?
The classic question that seems to be being debated in society today at all levels is essentially this: “Why shouldn’t this person or endeavkr be distributed the same goods or status as this other person or endeavor?” Why are things not the same? Why are they not fair, meaning equal, meaning possessed of the same…
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Optimistic modernism
In response to the optimistic modernism of Greg Lukianov and James Lindsay I listened to a great discussion between a couple of my favorite thinkers. But I can’t help but wonder if there are some things that are being assumed or ignored. The current historical and philosophical moment is the direct child of science and…
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Why we need the noble savage
We must believe in the myth of the noble savage. It is this story, this mythology, that allows us to maintain the great fiction that guards and preserves the deep psychological needs of our hearts. There is something deep inside us that it protects, a different story, a nagging doubt, a yawning void, that it…
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The source of a culture’s lifeblood
The power of the creative divine belongs to those who have a vision of the future and are willing to bear or assign the responsibility for it. Either to carry it or to remove those who stand in its way. The power of the vision and the assignment of responsibility allows human to rise above…
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Heroes and villains
Do people need enemies? Do they instinctively seek them out? The thing that is preventing the future we envision from coming to pass. How we conceive of those enemies seems to matter a lot. Certain ideologies, such as Christianity, actively encourage us not to view actual other people as our enemies, but rather, impersonal forces…
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The blind spots of all societies
It is in the nature of every civilization to be blinded by two things. First the “things that everybody knows”, the basic, fairly unchallenged assumptions that drive people’s view of the world. The “first principles” of the science of life that are themselves axiomatic (as Aristotle pointed out). The second is the confidence and self…
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The modernist confusion about postmodernism
One refrain that seems to come up often lately among the remaining modernists in academia is, how could this have happened? Viewing (accurately) the collapse of the ideas of truth and evidence and the descent into a postmodern ecosystem of manipulation and tribalism, they wonder where it all went wrong. Having previously spent their days…
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What does saying something evolved accomplish?
I am trying to understand a linguistic and logical problem with the way we talk about certain positive traits we describe as evolutionary products. The problem is, that is some sense we seem to be saying that the cause of the causes are their effects. That in some sense the trajectory of time was inevitably…
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On acts of courage and defiance and stubborn people
I walked away from my masters degree the week of graduation because I wouldn’t agree to the demands of my thesis committee, since I saw them as fundamentally compromising my beliefs. Now, maybe that’s because I was an idiot and a jerk and a coward. And I always want to keep that as my primary…
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