We may not always think about our death, but we sense death constantly on a cellular level. Evolution gave us this morbid gift. We are built to propagate the species. Every hormonal response, reflex, sensation and cognitive ability exists to serve this purpose. Every emotion, from fear, love and happiness to sadness, ambivalence and ennui, confers critical information that helps us stay alive.
The push of stayin' alive. But what about the pull? What are we stayin' alive for? To listen to the Bee Gees?
This is not to dismiss the potential risks that may arise from rising global temperatures, but simply to suggest that obsessive discussion of those risks in 2019 and early 2020 led to myopia. For the average American on the eve of the pandemic, the chance of dying from an overdose was two hundred times greater than the chance of being killed by a cataclysmic storm, and the chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident was fifteen hundred times higher than the chance of being killed by a flood. The threat of climate-related disaster lay in the future; the threat of pandemic was proximate. In 2018, the number of Americans killed by influenza and pneumonia (59,120) was substantially higher than the number who died in car crashes (39,404).
Per the immediately preceding quote, we have a strong instinct to stay alive, but we're often quite deluded about the relative levels of threat from a wide variety of sources.
Does all this suggest that psychological reasons, whether “implicit” or conscious, have no reality whatsoever, that they are a pure construction? No, reasons are indeed constructed, but under two constraints that ensure that they have some degree of both psychological and social reality. The reasons we invoke for justification have to make psychological sense. Talk of reasons need not—in fact, we have argued, cannot—provide an accurate account of what happens in our minds, but it tends to highlight factors that did play a causal role. Reasons are typically constructed out of bits of psychological insight.
Ah, yes, our strength of reason isn't what we'd like to to be, and comes from unreliable places.
Increasingly, in our current system, the public only gets to choose which oligarchic faction they support. And they’re turning off in droves – that is, when they’re not enraged. By pioneering a life for ourselves beyond the competition delusion, we could make our way once again towards the ancient Athenian vision of democracy as a system in which every citizen takes turns in ruling and being ruled.
Colin Wilson’s approach lies somewhere between the passive receptivity of the Jungian work and the strenuous super-efforts of Ouspensky. He argues that it is essential to realize that our conscious attitudes have a powerful effect on how we see the world.
“What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.
The first argument is an argument from experience. Those societies that glorify militarism almost invariably lose wars.
If you get in a lot of fights, you're gonna lose some. Simple. Ask the U.S. military. No one individual or entity is invincible. Ask Michael Jordan.
There was a pervasive sense that, in the phrase Margaret Thatcher famously used to shut down debate over free-market economics, “there is no alternative.” She used the slogan so much that some of her cabinet colleagues began to call her “TINA.” That phrase captured the spirit of the times, an almost Marxist idea of historical inevitability—except that capitalism, rather than socialism, was the ideology lying at the “end of history.” And it wasn’t just Thatcher.
This line of thinking, of "no alternative," of "invincibility," is deluded when applied to any plan, institution, or ideology. And markets are not the least exception: some work well, some horribly. But all require constant attention and inputs of energy (such as regulation).
