Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 27 May 2021

 

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

The social cost of carbon was finally getting injected into the price of fossil fuels, and that old saying, ridiculed by the fossil fuels industry for decades, was suddenly becoming the obvious thing, as being the most profitable or least unprofitable thing: Keep it in the ground.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

All these tangible and intangible flows still course through every country on the planet, yet no one nation can shape them on its own. Everyone is connected, but no one is in control. In other words, the world we live in is open, fast—and thus, almost by definition, unstable.

Fat Chance

Robert H. Lustig

Sugar covers up the inequities of foods, making not-so-tasty food seem like it is worth eating. Bottom line, you can make pretty much anything taste good with enough sugar.

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

Although  strategic planning is billed as a way of becoming more future oriented, most managers, when pressed, will admit that their strategic plans reveal more about today’s problems than tomorrow’s opportunities.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 25 May 2021

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

– Albert Einstein

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Taxes are interesting. They are one way governments guide a society and fund governmental activities, more the former than the latter. They are as old as civilization. An ancient manifestation of the power of the state. It’s possible that both debt and money were invented in the earliest cities, specifically in order to enable and regularize taxation. Both of them being forms of IOU.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The metaphor achieves the “carrying over”—metapherein—of a genuine and seemingly impossible metabasis eis alio genos, the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances, and this can be done only by analogies. (Kant gives as an example of a successful metaphor the description of the despotic state as a “mere machine (like a hand mill)” because it is “governed by an individual absolute will. . . . For between a despotic state and a hand mill there is, to be sure, no similarity; but there is a similarity in the rules according to which we reflect upon these two things and their causality.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear, moreover, becomes pointless when the selection of victims is completely free from all reference to an individual’s actions or thoughts. Fear, though certainly the all-pervasive mood in totalitarian countries, is no longer a principle of action and can no longer serve as a guide to specific deeds. Totalitarian tyranny is unprecedented in that it melds people together in the desert of isolation and atomization and then introduces a gigantic motion into the tranquillity of the cemetery. No guiding principle of action taken from the realm of human action—such as virtue, honor, fear—is needed or could be used to set into motion a body politic whose essence is motion implemented by terror.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

As Heraclitus said: “Underworld souls perceive by smelling.” Twenty-five hundred years later, we say that the person who can get down has a quick apprehension—“street smarts”—and senses reality behind the front. Ancient descriptions of the underworld maintain that in this realm nothing solid exists, only images, phantoms, ghosts, smoke, mist, shades, dreams.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Metaphysics is for us the name of a science, and has been for many centuries, because for many centuries it has been found necessary, and still is found necessary, to think in a systematic or orderly fashion about the subjects that Aristotle discussed in the group of treatises collectively known by that name.

The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova

Their [confidence mens'] genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 24 May 2021

 

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think.’ What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absent-minded in company, or sought solitude in order to think without interruption, I could not have said, and still cannot say, what it was that I actually thought.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment Keynes had described in The General Theory might be described as the commonsense regulation of inflation and employment, rather than the nefarious planning that Hayek excoriated. Glass-Steagall’s government-mandated breakup of the American investment houses was just a responsible antitrust action to restore competitive banking. Social Security and public works spending were inoffensive elements of the basic social guarantee.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

As to the certainty or otherwise of their methods, the Empirics, though apparently not admitting the fallibility in principle of induction from what has been seen “very many times,” did admit to making mistakes because their experience was limited. They hastened to add, of course, that the Dogmatists did too, without admitting it. Dogmatism, they said, could at best only reach the level of plausibility and likelihood.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Humanitas is never acquired in solitude and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the “venture into the public realm”—in the course of which he risks revealing something which is not “subjective” and which for that very reason he can neither recognize nor control. Thus the “venture into the public realm,” in which humanitas is acquired, becomes a gift to mankind.

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 22 April 2021

 

2020 novel of ideas about addressing climate change & other forms of environmental degradation

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Some who need to lose a dozen pounds to attain what they perceive as their ideal weight and health might do fine just by cutting back on the more obviously fattening foods and the carbohydrates they contain—for instance, sugary beverages, beer (“shun beer as if it were the plague,” wrote Brillat-Savarin), desserts, and sweet snacks. These folks will do fine eating slow carbs, with their complement of fiber to slow digestion and absorption and keep insulin levels low. Rigid abstinence will not be necessary for them.

Revolutionaries of the Soul

Gary Lachman

The first step in developing our capacity for Faculty X [Colin Wilson's concept of a melding right & left brain functions for a more complete appreciation of reality], then, is to create a sense of optimism—not about anything in particular, but a general sense that life means well by us, what Jean Gebser called “primal trust.” And this leads naturally to the next step, developing a sense of purpose. After we stop sending our right brain messages of doom, the next step is to foster a sense of interest. Mystics and poets tell us that we live in a fascinating universe, a cosmos of such complexity that it seems unthinkable anyone could be bored in it. Yet this is exactly what happens.

Language and Myth

Ernst Cassirer

The same may be said of any symbolic form, of language, art, or myth, in that each of these is a particular way of seeing, and carries within itself its particular and proper source of light. The function of envisagement, the dawn of a conceptual enlightenment can never be realistically derived from things themselves or understood through the nature of its objective contents. For it is not a question of what we see in a certain perspective, but of the perspective itself.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

What really did happen? [Referring to altruistic student movements in the 60s and early 70s for social welfare & in politics.] As I see it, for the first time in a very long while a spontaneous political movement arose which not only did not simply carry on propaganda, but acted, and, moreover, acted almost exclusively from moral motives. Together with this moral factor, quite rare in what is usually considered a mere power or interest play, another experience new for our time entered the game of politics: It turned out that acting is fun. This generation discovered what the eighteenth century had called “public happiness,” which means that when man takes part in public life he opens up for himself a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to him and that in some way constitutes a part of complete “happiness.”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Psychology, depth psychology or psychoanalysis, discovers no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life, and its results and discoveries are neither particularly appealing nor very meaningful in themselves. “Individual psychology,” on the other hand, the prerogative of fiction, the novel and the drama, can never be a science; as a science it is a contradiction in terms.

The Lessons of History

Will Durant and Ariel Durant

It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 1 April 2021

 

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

What is difficult is to keep the issue clearly before your mind: to recollect that the only admissible ground of inclusion in the ruling class is ability to do the required work; the only admissible ground of exclusion is inability to do it.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

A movement without leaders is a good idea in theory, but at some point you have to have a plan. How to make one wasn’t so clear. State power is a mix, first of the government proper in all its parts, but then also the military, finance, and the population’s support, and you need all of these working together to make any lasting progress.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

And history is a story which has many beginnings but no end. The end in any strict and final sense of the word could only be the disappearance of man from the earth.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In today’s economy, big is beautiful. Size allows companies to take advantage of the two dominant economic trends of our times—globalization and the Information Revolution. It is easier for Volkswagen and Ikea to enter the Chinese and Indonesian markets than it is for smaller firms. Large banks can find new customers across the globe, while regional ones cannot.

Breath

James Nestor

In the 1970s, Phil Maffetone, a top fitness coach who worked with Olympians, ultramarathoners, and triathletes, discovered that most standardized workouts could be more injurious than beneficial to athletes. The reason is that everybody is different, and everybody will react to training.

Why Liberalism Failed

Patrick J. Deneen

“To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.”

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 29 March 2021

 

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[Fear researcher] Huberman decides to paraphrase the great horror writer Stephen King: Fear has a lot to do with time frames. Before the event, a person experiences the dread of anticipation; during the event, there’s terror when they’re helpless in the moment; and after it’s over, a person remembers the experience as horror.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

As Heraclitus said: “Underworld souls perceive by smelling.” Twenty-five hundred years later, we say that the person who can get down has a quick apprehension—“street smarts”—and senses reality behind the front. Ancient descriptions of the underworld maintain that in this realm nothing solid exists, only images, phantoms, ghosts, smoke, mist, shades, dreams. We cannot see it; we can only see into it, with suspicions, hunches, intuitions, feelings. It is a two-dimensional realm with no more—and no less—substance than words, feelings, thoughts, reflections.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

We call consciousness (literally, as we have seen, “to know with myself) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic “being one” is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 26 March 2021

 

2021 publication from the outstanding science journalist

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

In 1952, while acknowledging he had no meaningful evidence to support his proposition, Ancel Keys suggested Americans should eat one-third less fat than they were at the time if they wanted to avoid heart disease. In 1970, still without hard clinical trial evidence, the American Heart Association recommended low-fat diets for everyone in America literally old enough to walk.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[Ernst] Cassirer wanted to make a clear profession of faith, a philosophical celebration of the origin of the Renaissance as a milestone in self-liberation and the reshaping of the world. The essential impulses of this immense event were overshadowed, from the seventeenth century onward, by the abstraction-fixated, anti-corporeal, consciousness-obsessed modern age of René Descartes and his methodical successors—with profound consequences well into the philosophy of the 1920s.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

WHAT MADE WITTGENSTEIN’S TREATISE [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] so incredibly difficult for its first readers (and would continue to do so for decades after) was his decision to express his thoughts through two modes of language that are so different as to seem mutually exclusive. One is the language of mathematical logic, with its entirely abstract symbols, the other a poetic language rich in imagery, concepts, allegory, and paradoxical aphorism.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis. Its foundational axiom was that the economy works for humans, not humans for the economy; this implied that full employment should be the policy goal of the governments that made and enforced the economic laws. So a job guarantee (JG) was central to MMT’s ideas of good governance. Anyone who wanted a job could get one from the government, “the employer of last resort,” and all these public workers were to be paid a living wage, which would have the effect of raising the private wage floor also to that level, in order to remain competitive for workers.

The Consolations of Philosophy

Alain De Botton

We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.