It depends on where you start. Much of our cognitive biases and dissonances have to do with what we want to achieve and our view of the self. It's foundational work and an emerging field in science.
If you'd like to explore atheistic consciousness, try Sam Harris.
Descartes' Error is a good book for understanding the relationship between logic and emotion.
Tons of good books on meditation out there. If you want to know more about eastern philosophy, a great short book is the Tao of Pooh. Yes, the bear.
True - my example of painting roads was just incidental. More creative variety of state sponsored jobs would probably make it a better option. A lot of countries already do forced military service and people are fine with it, not demotivated. So serving in the police or other places shouldn't be that different.
"an extreme individualism has stepped in as the alternative—a go-it-alone perspective narrowly focused on getting an education and becoming successful on one’s own merit."
It's ironic. Corporations are anything but individualist. They're collectives. Almost always top-down authoritarian structures that resemble fascism closer than most fascist governments. And full of bureaucracies that have nothing to do with making products, like marketing & finance depts.
And in this article, "education" is a euphemism synonymous with college. Not talking about self-learning. Some administration that gives people certificates.
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"resemble fascism closer than most fascist governments".
Except of course that (1) the corporation only survives ultimately by selling a product or service that someone of their own free will, wishes to purchase; i.e., it is of more value to them than their cash. (2) local conditions excepted (no other job available), people are not forced to work in these organizations.
Making products is all very well but if your potential customer doesn't know about it and/or its production is not financed properly, the activity is a waste of time.
Standard Oil. Southern Improvement Corporation. British East India Company. Opium Wars. American Telephone and Telegraph. International Business Machines, German operations, 1930s & 1940s. Monsanto. Coca Cola. Tobacco. Detroit, the Big Three, and the safety and efficiency wars. Microsoft and the DoJ. Microsoft vs. DR DOS. Microsoft vs. Novell. Microsoft vs. Lotus. Microsoft vs. Netscape. Microsoft vs. Linux. Apple, Intel, Google, Cisco, and the anti-poaching cabal.
Edward Bernays. Dole Fruit Company. The Pinkertons. United Steel strikebusting. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
It has always impressed me how doctrinal higher education as a terminal goal has become for the middle class. I personally believe it is utterly worthless for 9/10 of the people going to college right now. The students would be better off doing almost anything else.
Right. Even then most corporations think a BA is a shitty filter, before much longer they'll decide to educate bright 16 year olds on their own terms and selection process. Certainly that is what I'd do if I wanted to increase loyalty and employee retention.
> But even here on HN, with the high quality of debate
Maybe the debate here on other topics, from technical to political, is also of low quality? Just with the flavor of "quality", like carefully argued (but absurd) mini-essays? Much like politicians and the media which use carefully-manicured gravitas to give the flavor of truth without the nutrients?
Being irrational enough to destroy yourself isn't all that compartmentalized. It's not just about climate change, it's about economics and national ideology. Which certainly includes what we do all day in our jobs.
I like to say hyperindividualism, not individualism. Individualism and collectivism are naturally related: cooperation can bring out our individual potentials. From David Graeber's “The Democracy Project”, about Native Americans:
> Others (John Locke, for example, or many of the other English political philosophers so beloved by the Founding Fathers) became fascinated by the discovery of societies in North America that appeared to be simultaneously far more egalitarian, and far more individualistic, than anything Europeans had previously imagined possible.
In a European settler society like the US, people are still propagandized to believe the two are at odds: individual vs collective. But a moment's thought shows this to be ridiculous.
> What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments.
It's "startup news": computing for capitalism. We work on social media without knowing anything about sociology. We work on advertising, which is corporate propaganda. We have no vision of the future, unlike technologists in a sane world, so we build a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare where I'm literally filling out a form right now.
Fortunately, capitalism is a fairly young system & requires a government to provide violence (police & military) to preserve it. Capitalists often ask government to step in and make capitalism viable long-term. That is, keep capitalists from destroying each other. And to keep the populace from trying alternatives. ("Revolution.")
Slavery was more stable: lasted millenia. We're in turbulent times, particularly since we're probably ending neoliberal capitalism: an unstable form of capitalism whose one advantage is to damage the imagination enough to stop seeing alternatives except a single bad one.
I would be surprised if the death knell for neoliberal capitalism is really sounding. And what, pray tell, is the replacement? Fascism? Plutocracy? Probably not Socialism or Communism...
And slavery required less violence, per capita, to maintain? I don't think so. Innumerable slave revolts. Wars of conquest to capture slaves. Slave raiding. The daily violence needed to enforce slavery. Sexual violence perpetrated on slaves.
Capitalism is a rock of stability, from a civil society perspective, in contrast. When was the last time a developed capitalist nation had a civil war, or even a major violent revolt?
That fact that you can't call it the Jewish lobby is exactly the squeamishness I'm referring to. The Jewish lobby are not at all shy about saying that they support Israel because they are Jewish. There are of course some Jews who claim to hold the opposite opinion because they are Jewish, but it is clear that the economic and political influence of Jewish Americans is overall pro-Israeli and pro-war, most recently advocating for a proxy war with Russia in Syria.
Also comparing three terms on google trends suggests the left haven't been nearly active enough in promoting either concept:
>That fact that you can't call it the Jewish lobby is exactly the squeamishness I'm referring to.
There's a pretty good reason for that apprehension. You're asserting that Jewish interests have disproportionate influence in American foreign policy. We know this is a stalking horse for claims of Jewish influence in other circles of society.
At that point, you're not "simply asking questions", you're promoting anti-Semitic propaganda.
The Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby are two separate things.
> Ah yes of course - racism can only be carried out by white men after all.
No one said that. Just that racism is an oppression where whites are the top caste. Blacks can be racist against blacks too, for example internalized racism.
However, blacks being racist against whites is an odd statement, like homeless people being classist against the rich. Race is pseudoscientific classification of people to justify entire economic systems like slavery, and still lives on like awful backwards compatibility.
> Do these people get offended at spam emails suggesting they need viagra or a fuckbuddy?
Companies like twitter are far more aggressive at fighting spam than physical threats. To the point where people simply reported abusers as spammers at one point. That's why no one bought them.
Oops. Maybe they should've been less arrogant to their embattled userbase; so-called "social justice warriors" turned out to be normal people just trying to help them make money. What happens social media companies refuse to learn things like sociology. http://www.businessinsider.com/disney-twitter-acquisition-tr...
This idea that there is a single, global caste system which is applicable in all situations makes me very uneasy. For example, a white person being beaten up for going into a black gang area I feel would be racism, because that is a space where black people are at the top of the pyramid. A male stay-at-home dad being scorned by female counterparts would be an example of female-to-male sexism, because that is an aspect of society where women are considered to be superior.
The trick is understanding who holds the power in the situation.
> However, Blacks being racist against whites is an odd statement, like homeless people being classist against the rich.
I get what you're saying, but this just isn't a very pragmatic perspective. It's clear that white people have major hegemonic advantages over minority groups, but at the end of the day, the left (of which I am a part) needs to acknowledge and reject the damaging effect this kind of rhetoric has on racial discourse. As an extreme example, a statement like "fuck white people", is clearly racist regardless of who is saying it. It is difficult to fight racism if we give casual observers ammo to reject the left as hypocrites. This doesn't mean we have to pretend that the impact of racism affects all groups equally, but in order to see progress we must condemn hateful speech in all forms instead of dismissing it just because the speaker hails from a disadvantaged group.
How often is it happening that the rich are being ambushed by groups of resentful homeless people? Is this a significant and recurring problem in your country that existing policing is failing to address?
Interesting, what other sources can one look at, to go beyond this small preview?