Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 5 November 2020

 

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

There is an interesting parallel here with the science of economics as developed by Adam Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, which seemed to demonstrate with rigorous logic that the ‘laws of production’ doom our civilisation to final ruin. At this juncture, John Stuart Mill pointed out (in Principles of Political Economy) that although we cannot evade the rigid laws of production—which lead to overpopulation and the ‘rat race’—there is no law of distribution: we can do what we like with the wealth, once it has been created, and use it to build a less self-destructive society.

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

Enthusiasm is very contagious, and one filled with the right quality, kind and degree of it unconsciously communicates his interest, earnestness and expectations to others.

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

For example, metaphysicians have been heard to say ‘the world is both one and many’; and critics have not been wanting who were stupid enough to accuse them of contradicting themselves, on the abstractly logical ground that ‘the world is one’ and ‘the world is many’ are mutually contradictory propositions. A great deal of the popular dislike of metaphysics is based on grounds of this sort, and is ultimately due to critics who, as we say, did not know what the men they criticized were talking about; that is, did not know what questions their talk was intended to answer; but, with the ordinary malevolence of the idle against the industrious, the ignorant against the learned, the fool against the wise man, wished to have it believed that they were talking nonsense.

The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm

It is hardly necessary to stress the fact that the ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. It presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation; in this orientation, the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, he is afraid of giving himself—hence of loving.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 3 November 2020--Election Day USA

 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Increasingly, only the collective human ego—what I call “the Big I”—bounds and defines this constructed world. We subordinate, alter, and reinvent almost everything around us according to our own interests, from the mountains of Vancouver Island to the Isle of Dogs and the very sky overhead. Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, many of us come to believe that external reality—the reality outside our constructed world—is unimportant and needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there. And, in any case, as the pace of our lives accelerates, we have less time to reflect on these broader circumstances.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The left-wing critique of liberalism is chiefly an attack on liberal faith in reform.

History Man

Fred Inglis

This biography . . . stands in a tradition. It is the tradition of good lives, inaugurated by Aristotle, amplified by Aquinas, liberated from Christianity and given the doctrine of the “civil affections” by David Hume and Adam Smith. Our tradition is rooted deep in its own history by Hegel as being the only foundation it could possibly justify, and thereafter domesticated by the British tradition that made Hegel tolerable and culminates (for our purposes) in R. G. Collingwood.

This tradition teaches that a good life may be lived only in terms of those virtues which an individual truly possesses and is capable of. The trouble with the word “tradition” is that it has, damnably, been so monopolised by the political Right, which contrasts the stability of tradition with the crazy enthusiasms of revolutionary struggle. But a moral tradition is no less than the embodiment through time and in a place of those principles which permit that version of a good life to be lived, revised, challenged, and transformed in the biographies of the traditionalists.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

Maslow’s ‘holistic’ model of the psychic organism led him to three major conclusions: (1) Neurosis may be regarded as the blockage of the channels of self-actualization. (2) A synergic society—one in which all individuals may reach a high level of self-satisfaction, without restricting anybody else’s freedom—should evolve naturally from our present social system. (3) Business efficiency and the recognition of ‘higher ceilings of human nature’ are not incompatible; on the contrary, the highest levels of efficiency can only be obtained by taking full account of the need for self-actualization that is present in every human being.

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

 Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday, 2 November 2020

 

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Cynics, satirists and “mystics” (circuit V-VIII types) have told us over and over that “reason is a whore,” i.e., that the semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the older, more primitive circuits. However much the Rationalist may resent this, it is always true in the short run — that is, to use one of the Rationalist’s favorite words, it is always pragmatically true.

Synchronicity

Joseph Jaworski, Peter M. Senge (Introduction)

I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

“In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive, but it seems different to each species, different also to each individual specimen. Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators. In other words, every appearing thing acquires, by virtue of its appearingness, a kind of disguise that may indeed—but does not have to—hide or disfigure it. Seeming corresponds to the fact that every appearance, its identity notwithstanding, is perceived by a plurality of spectators.

Thoughts for the Day: 1 November 2020

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When an ecosystem functions well, it’s homeostasis; if it’s in decline or in the midst of unsustainable growth (as with cancer), then it’s heading into trouble. The system could end up in a state of constant vigilance and, to use Feinstein’s term, become allostatic and never return to normal.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

It may be that Hegel was not entirely wrong in seeing human history as a story of progress—not toward a merely rational reason, but rather toward a greater and more expansive awareness, a consciousness in which Pascal’s “reasons of the heart” predominate and act as a container for instrumental rationality.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Basically, when we approach life with our habitually passive attitude (James's “inferiority to our true selves”) we are saying to our robot, “Go ahead and take care of this, it isn't important enough for me to attend to,” and the result is that sense of separation from life, of never really touching it, that plagues so many of us in the modern world.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible,  unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 31 October 2020 (Happy Halloween!)

 

The Lost Tools of Learning

Dorothy L. Sayers

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

The Age of the Unthinkable

Joshua Cooper Ramo

Studies of food webs or trade networks, electrical systems and stock markets, find that as they become more densely linked they also become less resilient; networks, after all, propagate and even amplify disturbances. Worse, the more efficient these networks are, the faster they spread those dangers.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

If we assume that what we see of the world is limited by our understanding of space and time, and that these limits are not necessarily fixed, we can use our existing perceptions as starting points for deeper, more inclusive ones.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. In looking at capitalism vs. socialism, we are always confronted with a dilemma, not a choice.

The Federalist Papers

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison

[T]here is, in the nature of sovereign power, an impatience of control, that disposes those who are invested with the exercise of it, to look with an evil eye upon all external attempts to restrain or direct its operations. From this spirit it happens, that in every political association which is formed upon the principle of uniting in a common interest a number of lesser sovereignties, there will be found a kind of eccentric tendency in the subordinate or inferior orbs, by the operation of which there will be a perpetual effort in each to fly off from the common centre. This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for. It has its origin in the love of power. Power controlled or abridged is almost always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controlled or abridged. This simple proposition will teach us how little reason there is to expect, that the persons intrusted with the administration of the affairs of the particular members of a confederacy will at all times be ready, with perfect good-humor, and an unbiased regard to the public weal, to execute the resolutions or decrees of the general authority. The reverse of this results from the constitution of human nature. Hamilton, Madison, & Jay: The Federalist Papers (Optimized for Kindle) (Kindle Locations 1680-1689). Kindle Edition (Federalist No. 15, Hamilton).

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 28 October 2020

 

Buddha Takes No Prisoners

Patrick Ophuls

The Buddha taught a way—that is, a method of investigation, not a set of beliefs—that leads to ultimate truth, a truth beyond words.

(My review here.)

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

 Without goals, without some purposeful anticipation, we live, Frankl said, only a 'provisional existence', a kind of marking time which is really a death in life.

(My review here.)

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The life of peoples, according to Montesquieu, is ruled by laws and customs; the two are distinguished in that “laws govern the actions of the citizen and customs govern the actions of man” (L’Esprit des Lois, Book XIX, ch. 16). Laws establish the realm of public political life, and customs establish the realm of society. The downfall of nations begins with the undermining of lawfulness, whether the laws are abused by the government in power, or the authority of their source becomes doubtful and questionable. In both instances, laws are no longer held valid. The result is that the nation, together with its “belief” in its own laws, loses its capacity for responsible political action; the people cease to be citizens in the full sense of the word.

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 315). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Thoughts for the Day: 27 October 2020

 

Winning Body Language

Mark Bowden

If you want to be persuasive and influential, then passion is going to be one of the great keys to getting everyone on board, motivated, and actively seeing to the work that you need them to do to help build your inspirational vision.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

What every literature teacher wants is for students to experience the meaning—and also experience the sensory effects of the words in their connotations and music. This out loud approach is simple and it gets me further than I’ve been able to get with more traditional approaches. (Traditional? What could be more traditional than asking students to read literary texts out loud?)

What Doesn't Kill Us

Scott Carney and Wim Hof

Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and  environmental  conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy. I believe that anyone can tap into these unconscious processes and eventually control their autonomic nervous system.

“...how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes...” Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers.”

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 26 October 2020

 

Fifty Degrees Below

Kim Stanley Robinson

“Climate change is obviously real, and byproducts of our economy have had a role in this global warming. Republicans by denying this have compounded the problem, and lost our descendants hundreds of fellow species, and decades of work. Now it’s time to do something about it, and I’m the one with the will to do it. We’re going to need to work at this, it needs to become a big part of the national project, the focus of our economy. In that sense it is actually an incredible opportunity for new industries. We’re on the verge of a truly life-affirming and sustainable global economy, based on justice and nurturing the biosphere, rather than strip-mining and fouling it. I’m ready to lead the way in starting to treat this planet like our home.”

[The quote above was published in 2005. It's from the second of three books in Robinson's "Science in the Capital" trilogy. Isn't it horribly sad that this quote--by a fictional politician portrayed in the book-- remains relevant today, almost aspirational?]

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[M]y own utopian vision—“a more experienced and wiser savage” living in a “Bali with electronics”—is just that: a utopia. However useful as a thought experiment, any attempt to rationally construct a better future disregards the messy way in which history has been made in the past and will almost certainly be made in the future.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

It was as necessary that Christ should be rejected as that he should rise again on the third day. For his message was the death-warrant of the religious consciousness itself, and all that was strongest and most vital in the religious consciousness rose up against it to destroy it. The religious consciousness in its explicit form is simply the opposition between man and God, an opposition perpetually resolved in the actuality of worship and perpetually renewed as the intermittent act of worship ceases. The Christian gospel announced the ending of that opposition once for all, not by the repetition of acts of worship, by the blood of bulls and goats, but by the very act of God which was at the same time the death of God. The one atoning sacrifice of Christ swept away temple and priests, ritual and oblation and prayer and praise, and left nothing but a sense that the end of all things was at hand and a new world about to appear in which the first things should have passed away.

[In the quote above I hear echoes of Rene Girard. Am I imagining things?]

One Simple Idea

Mitch Horowitz

Isn’t it possible that humanity exists under multiple laws and demands, including accidents? And that our lives may serve many imperatives, some of them inscrutable and even painful? Don’t we, like all creatures, exist to fertilize, feed, and facilitate an unimaginably vast scale of creation, on which we have little perspective?

The Three Languages of Politics

Arnold Kling

I call this the three-axes model of political communication. A progressive will communicate along the oppressor-oppressed axis, framing issues in terms of the (P) dichotomy. A conservative will communicate along the civilization-barbarism axis, framing issues in terms of the (C) dichotomy. A libertarian will communicate along the liberty-co

Thoughts fo r the Day: Sunday 25 October 2020

 

The Future of History

John Lukacs

But in speaking as well as in writing, the choice of every word is not only an esthetic or a technical but a moral choice.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said “Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again.” That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Content in both history and fiction comes from what is necessary to the story and ‘the judge of necessity’, as Collingwood says (IH 246), is the imagination itself.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

The problem posed by narrativity is, in fact, both more simple and more complicated than the one posed by lyric poetry. More simple, because the world, here, is apprehended from the angle of human praxis rather than from that of cosmic pathos. What is resignified by narrative is what was already presignified at the level of human acting.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

The acorn theory states that each of us is singled out. The very fact of eachness presumes a unique acorn that characterizes each person. Sun or shade, each has a character.

Thoughts of the Day: Friday 23 October 2020

 

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

This “state in which the mind continues calm and strong, undisturbed by … any … emotion” Democritus called athambia (inability to be astonished or frightened) and, according to Stobaeus (DK 68A67), ataraxia (inability to become agitated or upset), the term which descended through the two Democritean lineages—the dogmatic or Epicurean and the critical or Pyrrhonist. It is related closely to the apatheia (nonemotionality) taught by the Cynics and seems substantially the same as the condition which the Prajñaparamita literature attributes to one who knows emptiness: One who is convinced of the emptiness of everything is not captivated by worldly dharmas, because he does not lean on them.

Choosing Survival

John Kemp

An increasing demand for an increasingly free flow of information is yet another way in which markets fragment and disperse power.

My review of Choosing Survival

The Collapse of Complex Societies

Joseph A. Tainter

It is doubtful if any large society has ever succumbed to a single-event catastrophe. And the cause of understanding is not advanced by the suggestion that collapse is caused by accidents. `Accidents,' notes R. M. Adams, `happen to all societies at all stages of their history...' Too many societies encounter accidents without collapsing.

My review of The Collapse of Complex Societies

What Doesn't Kill Us

Scott Carney and Wim Hof

Weak circulatory muscles are a side effect of living in a very narrow band of temperature variation.