I just want to add that when it comes to choosing those few trusted contacts whose experience and judgment you turn to for guidance, validation, etc., you do not need to limit yourself to the living.
In fact, I would say limiting yourself in that way is a serious mistake.
The idea that human nature is evolving is a leftist conceit, the purpose of which is to dismiss the testimony of past generations as irrelevant to current concerns. But if you make the effort to look for yourself (in an ironic reversal of the leftist trope about Galileo, the Churchmen and the telescope), you'll find that this testimony is often quite relevant.
17 October 2012 at 07:37
dearieme said...
I gave up the morning radio news decades ago, and the TV news over the last fifteen years. The mixture of lies, fantasies, exaggerations and suppressions became intolerable.
Human nature is now what it always was; but human psychology *is* evolving, in the sense that the 'average human' or indeed average Englishman/ American is a significantly different thing now from a thousand years ago - or even 50 years ago (due to the rapidity of demographic change/ differential population growth). This applies globally and within countries. Personality has changed, and also intelligence has declined.
All the more reason to look to the past!
17 October 2012 at 11:01
Evelyn said...
Perfect! Many thanks for the reminder of what is important in our lives.
Even better than looking out the window is to actually be outside. Living. The term 'Modern intellectuals' is more of an oxymoron than a description. How much intelligence does it take to reduce thought to parroted repetition of dogma?
@JH - intrinsically, any specific situation is neither more nor less difficult than another - there is a trade-off between depth and breadth. Some celibate hermits and housewives/ mothers have been notable for their wisdom.
18 October 2012 at 11:07
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I find it impossible adequately to discount the degree of distortion of reality as purveyed by the mass media and the official organs of communication: facts are mixed with lies and the whole is framed and reframed to support this, or that, interpretation; and in the long term all being sorted into alignment with the secular Leftist agenda.
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The greatest delusion among intellectuals, which wastes their time and manipulates them absolutely, is that they are able to survey and sift and make sense of this mass of churning signals.
Modern intellectuals regard themselves as if they were reality filters: mega-millions of gallons of fakery and illusion pouring-through the conduit of their minds from which they sift out the particles of truth, the essence of the situation...
They pour-in garbage and they claim to distill pure crystalline gems.
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So, how do you know what's going on in the world? By personal observation and experience supplemented by the observation and experience of (a few) trusted contacts.
Or not at all.
In other words, the same way as ever.
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In setting-up their minds to perform the industrial-scale process of garbage sifting the modern mass media, and to prevent the system becoming clogged, intellectuals necessarily install coarse-meshed filters in their minds: so coarse are these filters that they are unable to notice anything in the intellectual's surrounding environment.
And when anything in the local and personal environment does, momentarily, become caught in the filter, then it is necessarily incorporated in the industrial process: compacted into the output.
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Meanwhile everything we can know (and in that sense need to know) is all around us and in our own lives: waiting to be noticed.
"What's going on in the world? Look out the window"
7 Comments -
I just want to add that when it comes to choosing those few trusted contacts whose experience and judgment you turn to for guidance, validation, etc., you do not need to limit yourself to the living.
In fact, I would say limiting yourself in that way is a serious mistake.
The idea that human nature is evolving is a leftist conceit, the purpose of which is to dismiss the testimony of past generations as irrelevant to current concerns. But if you make the effort to look for yourself (in an ironic reversal of the leftist trope about Galileo, the Churchmen and the telescope), you'll find that this testimony is often quite relevant.
17 October 2012 at 07:37
I gave up the morning radio news decades ago, and the TV news over the last fifteen years. The mixture of lies, fantasies, exaggerations and suppressions became intolerable.
17 October 2012 at 09:28
@Corky - agreed.
Human nature is now what it always was; but human psychology *is* evolving, in the sense that the 'average human' or indeed average Englishman/ American is a significantly different thing now from a thousand years ago - or even 50 years ago (due to the rapidity of demographic change/ differential population growth). This applies globally and within countries. Personality has changed, and also intelligence has declined.
All the more reason to look to the past!
17 October 2012 at 11:01
Perfect! Many thanks for the reminder of what is important in our lives.
17 October 2012 at 17:21
Even better than looking out the window is to actually be outside. Living.
The term 'Modern intellectuals' is more of an oxymoron than a description. How much intelligence does it take to reduce thought to parroted repetition of dogma?
Thank God I'm a crow.
17 October 2012 at 18:04
So, how do you know what's going on in the world? By personal observation and experience
Difficult from an ivory tower, Bruce.
18 October 2012 at 10:10
@JH - intrinsically, any specific situation is neither more nor less difficult than another - there is a trade-off between depth and breadth. Some celibate hermits and housewives/ mothers have been notable for their wisdom.
18 October 2012 at 11:07