For some time now, our whole culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.
- Nietzsche 1888
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, & it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us & destroy them. But the line dividing good & evil cuts through the heart of every man. & who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
From Die Welt. A serious German newspaper. U.K. decline means Pound Sterling on its way to being kicked out of the Currency Elite. Schwellenländerwährung = emerging market currency. I.e Brexit is reducing us to developing nation status
"It is up to us to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessings, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, sent down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will."
#Solzhenitsyn
But it's possible for those who see the depth of the problems we face, and who possess the capacity to contribute to building something better, to shift their purpose in life toward this end, even if they might not live to see its realization.
These are the seeds we must plant.
If your economy requires people to consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.
The ship was at sea, far from the shore. It was not a good ship, but it was the ship folks knew. Some said for decades that the ship was unfit. Then came an epic storm & it became clearer how unfit the ship was. More storms are looming on the horizon. Time to go back to the land.
Ideas are their stories, they are clothed in the experience & languaging of those giving voice to them.Ideas are made of relationships,traveling on & through relationships.They arent smooth bullets flying through the air, they are encounters aggregating w/in us, land, time & art.
As the Arctic burns under a record heatwave, with temperatures soaring to 45C, economists are lining up to call for more growth. The discipline is increasingly unhinged from reality.
Once you take action, you forget what you were afraid of in the first place.
That's the secret to dealing with fear.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Dear black folks, the talking heads on the left & right are not talking to us.
They're talking to each other.
They're playing a rhetorical game of "YOU'RE the REAL racist."
Avoid their trap.
Let's build up our own communities w/ those who signal through work, not rhetoric.
There are only two premises you need to accept to see the paradox.
1) every engagement on social media (comment, quote tweet, reply) is a de facto “share” which increases visibility
2) Negation is an extra cognitive operation, and is the first thing to be lost in memory
3/
The Pushback Paradox:
Arguing against a position on social media almost always results in a greater, rather than lesser, awareness and acceptance of the position you seek to refute.
2/