If the last eighteen months are any guide to the nature of humanity, we can agree that we didn’t exactly shine. Many of us did excel – particularly those in health care and tech. I strongly suspect that in the future all they’ll be talking about is how fast we got that vaccine out to the world and what the impact would have been without it. Other’s will remember that this was the time where we all realized how necessary the Internet became, logging in somewhere behind electricity but ahead of automobiles and dress clothing.
This is the astonishing thing about humanity – our souls stretch from hell to heaven, literally. We have robots (now two) on Mars, yet we have people hoarding anything from toilet paper to plastic bags at the first sign of disruption. I know people in other countries that tell me that medicines and vaccines are being sold on the black market for thousands of times their cost. This sort of gouging is deeply troubling.
There are the non-maskers on one side, that feel that putting a little piece of cloth in front of their face holes is/was some sort of violation of their rights, despite the fact that the Libertarian position is that your freedoms end at my doorstep. So your breath reaches me right? Not free to blow toxic biotoxins on me, thanks.
Even worse were the various forms of elites, those that claim to mask and then don’t, claim to stay home but get their hair done, claim to hate Tesla and yet own one, will yell at you for not wearing a mask and threatening their very existence, despite the fact that you’re jogging outdoors and been vaccinated for two months. The Hollywood elite preaching we-are-all-in-this-togetherism while safely ensconced in their yachts and mansions.
We learned that people are not egalitarian, do not care for their fellow man in the abstract, and parrot the ideas of their selected tribe over what is directly in front of their face. We entrench when we should listen and move with the passions of the moment, without stepping back to assess the outcome of what we’re proposing, e.g. abolishing police, or allowing guns to be everywhere.
Yeah, it’s been a tough stretch, and I’ve given some tips, but I think what underlies our maladies has been undiscussed on this blog. There are politics everywhere I’ve tried to keep that out of HappyWisdom, and intend to continue to. The folks at HappyWisdom are moderates and thus have no political home anyway.
But this isn’t a political issue. Our troubles go beyond that. We lack philosophical grounding, which leads to a lack of connection to each other, a loss of that mental model that bonds us to the community and the world. Therefore, we at HappyWisdom have decided that Philosophy is the cure. Philosophy at its best provides a structure and framework to start with. It turns out that our generation isn’t the first to come upon these issues. Let’s look back and see a broader framework than today’s dialectic. We’ll pull from a bunch of sources, but our primary work will involve the absolutely outstanding channel, School of Life. Here’s their first Philosopher, Plato. It is a great place to start.
The school of life is a secular channel but they still are quite fair with their treatment of some of my heroes such as Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and Pascal. Just be aware of, as British actress and part-time philosopher Abigail Thorn stated so eloquently, “Pay attention to the notes they’re not playing.”
We’ll come back soon with philosophy analysis with the promise to make it, above all, useful.