You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.
As a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
fuckyeahexistentialism:
In the 1980s, neuroscientists studying the brain processes underlying out sense of conscious will compared subjects’ judgments regarding their subjective will to move (W) an actual movement (M) with objective electroencepalographic activity called readiness potential, or RP. As expected, W preceded M: subjects consciously perceived the intention to move as preceding a conscious experience of actual moving. This might seem to suggest an appropriate correspondence between the sequence of subjective experiences and the sequence of underlying events in the brain. But researches actually found a surprising temporal relation between subjective experience an objectively measured neural events: in direct contradiction of the classical conception of free will, neural preparation to move (RP) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move (W) by hundreds of milliseconds.
This is what I’ve been saying for years but no one believes me.
nightmarebrunette:
Is there any way to live in this society without implicating ourselves in the profound wrongs of the world? This is a serious question.
You’re right about that.
The poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of human existence…though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times.
We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.
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Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
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Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: the fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!
…Camus also indicated a specific failure of both [Capitalist and Communist] systems: their inability to provide creative, meaningful work. We see this failure in the very high rates of depression. We attempt to define depression as a psychological ailment, but it is a symptom of a cultural failure: the inability to make life meaningful or enjoyable. Depression in the face of depressing circumstances is a symptom of unconscious rebellion. Although the rebellious can be and are medicated into submission, this does not address the underlying problem.
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Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse (2008)
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![Venn Diagram of the Day: These Google stereotypes raise a very important question: Why are Buddhists so happy?
(Embiggen)
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