[B]y calming yourself when you are excited by restlessness and energizing yourself when you are dulled by inertia, you exercise and strengthen two of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment—tranquility and energy. You also strengthen your equanimity and metta. Similarly with the other three energies: you exercise all your enlightenment muscles, thereby allowing your buddha nature to manifest more strongly.
“Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50% more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account.” Globally we see the same effect: the world’s 300 biggest metropolitan areas produce half of global GDP and two-thirds of GDP growth.
But beyond their productivity, are these people healthy & happy? Perhaps productivity isn't the single or even most important metric that we should use to judge.
To understand this model of relentless action and reaction, think about the three great crises of the twenty-first century—9/11, the financial crash, and Covid-19—one political, one economic, and one natural. In the first, 9/11, we saw that the supposedly unstoppable march of capitalism, democracy, and American hegemony had produced an angry, violent reaction in parts of the Muslim world.
The divisions "political, economic, and natural" are too neat, especially in looking back at the financial crisis (very political in origin) and the Covid-19 crisis: financial & political & cultural norms were more significant than the virus itself.
[N]atural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.
In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.
