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| David Sloan Wilson, biologist & economics thinker |
Or, as another Wilson (Edward O.) and I put it in a 2007 article, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.
--David Sloan Wilson
“Oceania is at war with Eurasia. It has always been at war with Eurasia,” Orwell tells us at the start of 1984—although, of course, as in Vladislav Surkov’s “nonlinear war,” here the sides change according to the directives of Big Brother. With [Alexander] Dugin, however, they remain stable, although for Oceania we should read the Atlanticists; the maritime character is the same. Eurasia has always been at war with the Atlanticists, and if the way in which Dugin’s meme has gone from simulacrum to reality is any gauge, some of the most exciting stages in this battle are to come.
In Collingwood’s view, historical facts are significant only as answers to questions.
Men, though they are totally conditioned existentially—limited by the time span between birth and death, subject to labor in order to live, motivated to work in order to make themselves at home in the world, and roused to action in order to find their place in the society of their fellow-men—can mentally transcend all these conditions, but only mentally, never in reality or in cognition and knowledge, by virtue of which they are able to explore the world’s realness and their own.
Since the rise of the scientific approach in the humanities, that is, with the development of modern historicism, sociology, and economics, such questions [the traditional questions regarding the nature of this form of government and the principle which sets it in motion] have no longer been considered likely to further understanding; Kant, in fact, was the last to think along these lines of traditional political philosophy. Yet while our standards for scientific accuracy have constantly grown and are higher today than at any previous time, our standards and criteria for true understanding seem to have no less constantly declined.
I share Wittgenstein’s mistrust of deceptively clear models: and, as Waismann said, ‘any psychological explanation is ambiguous, cryptic and open-ended, for we ourselves are many-layered, contradictory and incomplete beings, and this complicated structure, which fades away into indeterminacy, is passed on to all our actions.’
This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?
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