Fukuyama; more than just "The End of History"
Democracies exist and survive only because people want and are willing to fight for them; leadership, organizational ability, and oftentimes sheer good luck are needed for them to prevail.
Lister had said to his friend, “My dear Pasteur, every great benefit to the human race in every field of its activity has been bitterly fought in every stage leading up to its final acceptance.”
Young people, he says, are impatient, changeable, and appetitive—“and of the bodily appetites they are especially attentive to that connected with sex and have no control over it.”
Glucose consumption will make your pancreas release more insulin and make you gain weight, while fructose consumption will drive the accumulation of liver fat, causing insulin resistance, leading to chronic metabolic disease.
Professor Howard Fulweiler, in his essay, "The [Other] Missing Link: Owen Barfield and the Scientific Imagination," delivered at the 1983 Los Angeles MLA seminar on Owen Barfield, opens with a reference to Thomas Berger's novel, Little Big Man, in which the old Indian, Lodge Skins, tells his adopted grandson "that the Indians believe everything in the world is alive, while the white men think everything is dead." Had Barfield been there, he would have said that such mechanical thinking on the part of the white men was new, the result of something called the Scientific Revolution, which began a few centuries ago and which has given rise to philosophical and scientific hypotheses which separated mind from matter, man from nature, and doomed the reality of the spirit-world.
For each of these four kinds of mental balance, we will identify the “middle way” of homeostasis as the freedom from three kinds of imbalance: deficit, hyperactivity, and dysfunction.
We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.
As William James and Henri Bergson would argue around the same time, without the selective activity of the mind there would be no “world,” only a formless chaos.
