Thoughts for the Day: Monday 14 September 2020

 

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Recognize how you're feeling.
Acknowledge you are responsible for how you feel.
Allow yourself to feel without blame. Don't suppress how you feel. Don't feel guilty about feeling.
Take yourself out of your mind and into your body. Ask yourself where you're feeling it in your body?

You're not a prisoner of your feelings. When we suppress how we feel, our emotions become a negatively coiled spring waiting to pounce. The smallest disturbance can set the off without warning. When you rehash what happened, you only coil them more. When you blame other people for how you feel, you absolve yourself from something you are responsible for.

Instead feel without guilt or shame. It's ok to feel. Feel it in your body fully and it will pass quickly.

--Shane Parrish, Farnum Street

"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves." ― Franz Kafka, The Trial  

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." — Hannah Arendt

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

To be a monad, as opposed to an atom; to be a world in itself unconnected with an indefinite number of other such worlds, each windowless and ignorant of a whole whose parts they nevertheless are—this is to be a work of art.

And from Hannah Arendt's Essays in Understanding, "Understanding & Politics:"

The fact that reconciliation is inherent in understanding has given rise to the popular misrepresentation tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Yet forgiving has so little to do with understanding that it is neither its condition nor its consequence. Forgiving (certainly one of the greatest human capacities and perhaps the boldest of human actions insofar as it tries the seemingly impossible, to undo what has been done, and succeeds in making a new beginning where everything seemed to have come to an end) is a single action and culminates in a single act. Understanding is unending and therefore cannot produce final results.

(Location 6167)