Curious, he [Hans Morgenthau] attended the meeting, where he “had one of the most profound experiences of my life.” Hitler spoke passionately and eloquently, telling the crowd “exactly what it wanted to hear.” And Morgenthau himself? He said he felt a “paralysis of will” even though he didn’t believe a word of Hitler’s speech.
How do Hitler and other demagogues (you know who I'm thinking of) mesmerize their audiences? This is no mean skill; it's a dangerous power. How do we inhibit those with this potentially evil talent without ending discourse that rouses us to justice or righteous action? Are the various instances of diverse discourses easily discernable?
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.
And I posit that you can have a "learning organization" of one.
If you tried to bunch together thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Street, the Vatican or the headquarters of the United Nations, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, Sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places. Together, they create orderly patterns – such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political institutions – that they could never have created in isolation. The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.
So, have we Americans descended to the level of chimps in our increasing disinclination to listen to one another and to act for the common good? One might feel that way.
Seeing things this way, it’s an obvious mistake to ask whether football should be competitive or co-operative. Competition and co-operation are inextricably entangled in the game, each defining the other.
A key point. See Steve MacIntosh's Developmental Politics for a discussion of "polarity theory" that discusses the interplay between competition and cooperation and other similar dichotomies.
In a landmark 2017 paper called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” the legal scholar Tim Wu argued that traditional censorship assumed that information and access to audiences were scarce and could be blockaded or bottlenecked. In the digital era, however, information (good and bad) is abundant; attention is what is scarce. So instead of blockading information, why not blockade attention? If you flood the zone with distractions and deceptions and just plain garbage, people’s attention would be diverted and exhausted and overwhelmed. “Flooding can be just as effective as more traditional forms of censorship,” Wu wrote. Traditional free-speech protections, such as America’s First Amendment, could do nothing about it.
In other words, flood the zone with bull shit (a technical term per philosopher Harry Frankfurt). Alas, this tactic seems to work.
Our modern rationalist’s fragmentation has resulted in a specialization without universal ideas and a psychology without soul. Deprived of this background Jung seems to stand alone and peculiar; we do not see his roots. Then, interpreters of Jung go astray by trying to fit him into a context of contemporaries who rise from the secular and material view of man and not via the Romantic one. One chief difficulty in coming to terms with Jung’s thought and style has been this very lack of context.
But while high connectivity might boost innovation, high uniformity often doesn’t, because it can lower the likelihood of new combinations.
And "uniformity," like an agricultural monoculture, lacks resilience and thus becomes more vulnerable to changes in the environment.
No comments:
Post a Comment