No morality or ideology. Open Premise only, please.
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BRAINWASHING As real-life experience is increasingly replaced by the mediated 'experience' of television-viewing, it becomes easy for politicians and market-researchers of all sorts to rely on a base of mediated mass experience that can be evoked by appropriate triggers. The TV 'world' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mass mind takes shape, its participants acting according to media-derived impulses and believing them to be their own personal volition arising out of their own desires and needs. In such a situation, whoever controls the screen controls the future, the past, and the present.
It's a Stressful Life for Baboons, Humans In Both the Animal and Human Worlds, It's All About Hierarchy. "You're a baboon and you only have to spend about three hours a day getting your calories," Sapolsky said. "You've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making somebody else just miserable."
Radical Honesty Movement We believe that most humans in industrialized nations are alienated from Nature and out of touch with their true human needs, due to the experience of having been raised in a culture that rewards and values material success, avoidance of unpleasant feelings, looking good/attractive packaging, and feeling "in control." These values generally substitute for and overrule honesty, compassion, health, and love. Industrialized civilization comes with a set of premises and requirements that are anathema to the genuine needs of humans and other life forms. We have become consumers more than creators. We have been conditioned to follow the herd rather than to think and feel for ourselves. Becoming more honest is the antidote to this herd mentality.
The Reward for Conformity Was. . . everyone liked you except yourself. On the path of evolution, we move from being a willing and obedient member of the group to wanting to take control over our own lives. This is a necessary but difficult transition if we are to mature emotionally and spiritually.
Much of what we see as real exists only in our heads
Humans are incredibly imaginative creatures. We are constantly coming up with new ideas and re-examining old ones. We are filled with ideas that hold a powerful sway over us, even though many of them have no real existence outside our own heads. Take money for example. It's certainly a potent force in the modern world. The financial system decides who lives where, who has what, and who has power over whom. But what is it exactly, the universal force of money that holds humanity in its palm? Its only physical existence is in pieces of paper, books of accounts, and records in computer storage. Money only has any authority at all because we allow it to. Outside our heads, it's impotent and useless. It's a fantasy, that exists only because we choose to believe it's real. How about countries? The United States of America certainly seems to be a powerful force in the world. Its military straddles the globe and its culture touches us all. It provides its citizens with a strong sense of belonging and all sorts of other benefits. But what is it exactly? Is it the White House and other government buildings? Is it the land upon which it rests? Is it the documents of its laws and history? The United States of America is an idea that exists only in our heads. And it's not even a very sharply defined idea. Virtually everyone has a view on what the US is and what it stands for, but these ideas are often very different. Listen to political opinions and you'll soon see that even its own citizens can't agree on what the USA is. If everyone in the world chose not to believe in the Sun tomorrow, it would still continue to shine. If everyone chose not to believe in the USA , it would simply cease to exist. The land within its borders would still be there, like it has been for millions of years and will likely continue to be for millions more. The tanks, planes, and missiles would still exist. So would the movies, law books, music, and buildings. But the country itself would cease to be. Like any country, it's only real because enough people choose to believe in it.
Once you get hold of this idea, you begin to see how much of what we identify as real is actually only human-created fantasy. The abstract concepts of justice, possession, and morality, for example, only have potency inside our minds. In the natural world they are nothing but ghosts.
We Aren’t In Control Of How Our Self Improvement Ultimately Unfolds That title may seem strange. After all, isn’t it control that determines what we focus on? Isn’t it our choices that direct us? Yes, that’s all true. However, when we set out to undertake any self improvement project, we can only guess at where we will end up. We can set goals and work toward them, doing everything we need to do to achieve that goal, but we don’t know what we will feel like when we get there. We don’t know because we haven’t been there yet. We also don’t know what we’ll learn along the way.
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The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends
The Hero's Journey
Campbell: They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work it out for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.
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A Dr Seussism
Always do what you want, and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
The Futile Pursuit of (material) Happiness
And as he launched into a discussion of his personal life, he swerved to ask why economists focus on the financial aspects of decision making rather than the emotional ones. Koehler recalls, Gilbert said something like: 'It all seems so small. It isn't really about money; it's about happiness. Isn't that what everybody wants to know when we make a decision?' For a moment, Gilbert forgot his troubles, and two more questions came to him. Do we even know what makes us happy? And if it's difficult to figure out what makes us happy in the moment, how can we predict what will make us happy in the future?
Moral Fashions What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it— that the earth moves.
Web Culture And The New Ethos Of Work
The best example is the dissolution of the power of controlled mass media. Fewer people are ‘consuming’ the ‘content’ media outlets are ‘pushing’ thorugh their ‘channels’. People are moving to indigenous forms of participative media, like social media, social networks, and the like. The direct or indirect control media had in the pre-Web era (depending on your level of paranoia) is rapidly decreasing. Mass media (mass anything) radiates out from the center to the ‘audience’. The people formerly known as the audience, we, the denizens of the web, have shifted to a many:many mode of interaction. The edge has taken control of the conversation within media. And we, the edglings, aren’t going to give it back.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) FUD is now often used in non-computer contexts with the same meaning. For example, in politics one side can accuse the other of using FUD to obscure the issues. For example, critics of George W. Bush accused Bush's supporters, most notably the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, of using a FUD-based campaign in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. According to some commentators, examples of political FUD are: “domino theory,” "electronic Pearl Harbor," and “weapons of mass destruction”.
