Socrates taught not that we should perfect the world but that we should perfect ourselves within an imperfect world.
But can we not yet seek to perfect (v.) the world even if it will never reach perfection (n.)?
Reason therefore resembles language. Just as language can never be objective or neutral—for all languages, without exception (mathematics included), express a particular worldview—so too reason is not an independent criterion to which one can appeal in favor of one system rather than another. The instrumental rationality that most moderns believe is the only valid form of reason was not forced on us by nature. It was espoused—in part consciously but in larger part unconsciously—to further the ends of domination inherent in the cultural values of Western civilization.
Everything is embedded.
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.
An unattractive binary.
All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
The concentration on the inner life . . . especially the sins therein, gave an impetus to conceiving psychology legalistically, in terms of cases of conscience. If conscience is to be identified with the superego, and the passions with the id, then the rational ego that mediates between them and resolves their conflicting demands must essentially perform casuistry.
The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.
By this point, there were really two economies: the digital economy and the material economy. Andreessen’s point was that the digital economy was becoming so powerful that it was dominating—eating up—the material economy. Increasingly, new companies were finding that they could use software to enhance their profits dramatically, expand their reach, and sell digital services rather than physical products.
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