Earlier quoted context omitted.
A life of indolence does not lead to any of those things. We simply are not built that way. We were built to struggle.
For once, I agree with you!
Yay!
How to Enter a City Like a King
61–70 of 105 posts
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about useful, but right is important. You could imagine if everybody spontaneously started going around doing wrong. To some unclear extent this is what normally happens, and those people doing wrong should stop. It's not even entirely their own business, right and wrong: even when they have property rights on their side, it's still OK for other people to pass comment. And it could be that colored bottle…
Religion may not be as important as it once was, but the history of Catholicism would seem to be at odds with that.
Now I'm unsure whether I'm supposed to consider it as a source of morality, or as another kind of colorful packaging. I guess you're going for the "central management of morality" angle. But it doesn't micromanage - much - and it isn't really enforced.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Socialist products never seem to be competitive in the world market. Nobody wanted to buy Soviet cars outside of the USSR, for example.
There are notable exceptions. The AKM and RPG-7 are some of the most widely marketable weapons of all time.
Yes, there are exceptions. The Soviets also poured resources into making quality watches.
But they were unable to generalize this.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, various companies sprang up to sell Soviet goods. I bought a marvelous small telescope, an old-fashioned electro-mechanical telephone, and a mechanical submarine clock. (Note that these were all obsolete technology.) They were all made by former military suppliers.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things. What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP…
> people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul. One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.
You seem to think your experience is universal.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things. What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP…
> nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which se…
Yes, but you can see this both ways. You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing - or growing, or exploring, which are a couple of other values. Learning. If we have this idea of purpose, why not attach it to some candidate quest or value? What's wrong with recursion anyway? Too meaningless to be your goal? You must have higher ideas of purpose, then.
People have a ton of different values, but a lot of general agreement, because this is some knowledge about reality, moral knowledge, a work in progress.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul. One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.
You seem to think your experience is universal.
Scratch the surface, and people are the same.
There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately.
But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren't in heaven, you're in hell.
Be careful what you wish for.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but they killed that guy later in the week, so one can understand why other kings declined to follow his example.
Which guy?
Jimmy King, "Pretzel King" of the South Bronx in the mid-70s. Weird guy, no one ever found out why he rode around town on a donkey.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#68I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…
Speaking as a U.S. citizen, I think the problem should not be approached as "stop people from doing frivolous things", but rather "government should fund the commons". Of course this doesn't make government perfect, but generally it appears to be the most successful way to achieve things like caring for the elderly and disabled, building monuments, protecting wild areas, etc. Turns out we do all these things to some…
"We the People of the United States, in Order to
- form a more perfect Union,
- establish Justice,
- insure domestic Tranquility,
- provide for the common defence,
- promote the general Welfare, and
- secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Yeah, seems like a good idea to me
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to think your experience is universal.
Scratch the surface, and people are the same. There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately. But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren'…
I wish at least to be protected by the army in some disastrous circumstances, I think. Pathetic or not.
Re: How to Enter a City Like a King
#70I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…
I would make two points.
The first is that where labor is allocated is a function of culture. We currently live in a consumerist culture. Consumerist culture wants cheap stuff and lots of it and it wants it now. Convenience is god. And we want money so we can keep buying more things and newer things, so we work and work to make that money. Old things are frozen into museum pieces alien to everyday life instead of undergoing use and development and enrichment, because they make no sense to us and we can't develop things as we don't have a direction. So whereas a gothic church may have previously received baroque spires if the gothic was meager, today, most modifications are bound to look like a downgrade. Think of the really awful proposals for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. Save for a few brain damaged architects, nobody liked them.
The second is that leisure is the source of all culture. I'm not talking about recreation or relaxing by the pool with a piña colada (nothing wrong with that per se, but this is not what leisure means). Leisure is activity that isn't oriented toward practical ends, at least not in the intention. They are the activity of a free man, at least at that moment. This spirit of leisure was at times festive, at times contemplative and worshipful (the highest form of leisure), at times something artistic and musical. Today, we live in a world of total work. Work defines us. Whereas the cultures that produced the beautiful architecture we all admire today worked for the sake of leisure, today we work for the sake of work. We are engines running in a parking lot. We can rev them at high horsepower, perhaps even move aimlessly around the parking lot, but we aren't going anywhere. We don't have an address to go to.
The word "culture" is related to the word "cult" and "cultivation". Whereas in previous ages people believed in the transcendent end of human persons, a belief that ordered their lives and generated their culture, what does a consumerist culture take as the highest good? What is the end of our lives if not the ash heap? This can only produce weariness and distraction and entertainment that has no patience for authentic play or for the kinds of efforts that outlive us. There is no love in consumerism. There is no heroism. There is no genuine awe inspired by a great, honest-to-God promise. There is no festivity or celebration. The salt has lost its flavor and is good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.