[I]ndigenous communities around the globe use sensory and environmental stimuli to treat their sick. He flashes a list of techniques culled from ethnographic accounts and ancient texts on the screen: sensory deprivation, breathing, fasting, extreme exercise, meditation, hyperthermia, hypothermia, and psychedelic plant medicines. All of these interventions aim to wedge space between the way we experience stress and how our bodies respond to difficult environments. Someone should write a book! I think to myself.
The placebo effect might actually be the Wedge in action.
Patrician classes have taken many forms throughout history.36 However, in all cases, their function is, First, to uphold society by observing its mores and modeling its norms (making all due allowance for the inevitable hypocrisy involved), thus giving the populace something to look up to and be guided by; Second, to direct the affairs of the society for the general good even though this will inevitably further entrench their own wealth, status, and power. What distinguishes a genuine patrician class from a mere oligarchy concerned only with feathering its own nest is a spirit of noblesse oblige— the duty of those in a privileged position to behave with responsibility and generosity toward those who are less privileged, if only out of a due regard for their own enlightened self-interest. Noblesse oblige constitutes the glue that holds a well-functioning civil society together and causes a people to take their cues from above instead of below.
Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
The world is far too complex to be reduced to any single organizing framework. There is thus a fine line between clarity and dogmatism, between a useful heuristic and a distorting myopia.
Even as its citizens ask for security, in the sense of guaranteed status, they hymn unconfined opportunity. The market myth makes us think that spontaneity will sort out things according to their merits, without the need for planning and regulation. The individual is supposed to forge his or her own “environment,” unfettered by prior social arrangements. More and more the governmental workings of America have come to reflect the necessities of national size and ambition, while the Presidents express a romantic rejection of that machinery, a denial of the rule of necessity, a promise to escape “back” toward remembered freedoms.
Good stories, poems, and creative nonfiction get a good deal of their power by leaving things implied. When something is implied, the reader is pulled in and participates more deeply in the meaning—experiences the meaning—rather than just understanding it. (See Tannen’s “Relative Focus.”) And many good writers of expository and academic writing do not succumb to the syntactic bias among writing theorists in favor of hypotaxis, embedding, and left-branching syntax. Writers reach readers better when they also know how to call on the rhetorical virtues of parataxis and right-branching syntax that’s so common in everyday speaking.
In 1949 the average life expectancy (in China) was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.
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