This has no form, just a stream of consciousness. Apologies up front.
Existential crisis is the word of the day, well, last 2 years? I feel a state of free falling, having no anchor to the world. Except for my wife. It is hard to trust one person with my total existence, probably not stable of me. It is all I have right now. So, I start there. Fragile. Left to the whims of another. What a huge burden to place on another. I am sorry.
I try and distract myself with my job. Work so hard to get a sense of belonging, being needed. This too is unsafe and dangerous. Any flicker of doubt of security, and I crash. Not good.
I don’t want the world that I grew up in. Do I want this world? Can I fit into this world? Why can’t people be honest? True to others, do they even know what they truly want? Or have we all become mindless consumers?
There is hope, Richard Carrier has the right idea. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Interview-with-Richard-Car-by-Ben-Dench-090803-799.html
RC: In general, I would like to see increasing universal improvements in education. In particular, I want our education system to shift from a memory-based to a skills-based model. For example, now we ask students to memorize lists and facts (as in science and history), and mechanically reproduce procedures (as in math and language), without actually teaching them any skills. Instead of teaching history as long lists of names and dates, history should be taught as cause and effect, with an emphasis on historical method: how do we know what we know about history, how do we test and challenge claims about history, when should we be humble or cautious about historical claims and why. Science should be taught in terms of method: how did ancient scientists figure out what they did, how do we test scientific claims today, what sorts of general and specific methods work, how can they be adapted to other things, what lessons have we learned about assumptions or methods that misled us in the past. Mathematics should be about why math is useful, it should be about application, what is it for, how can we use it, and to that end statistics should replace algebra as the primary focus of required course work, so students know how to evaluate statistical claims made in the media and elsewhere, and algebra and other maths should focus less on memorizing procedures and more about how those maths can be used in the real world to accomplish things, and what the equations and symbols represent in the real world. For example, calculus makes a great deal more sense, and teaches us a great deal more of use, when we understand that it's not just a complicated calculation procedure, but that equations in calculus are literally sentences describing physical, often three dimensional shapes, and that we can use those descriptions to predict things about those shapes, such as in the very way Newton designed the calculus for. And philosophy should be a required subject at all grade levels beginning at least at middle school, again not as a history of philosophy or survey of philosophical positions and ideas, but as a skill, an actual practice and procedure, a set of questions and a method, an understanding of why those questions are important, how their answers affect everything up to and including the moral and political decisions we make, how to find and test those answers on our own, and how using the tools of self-examination and critical thinking about life can make us happier, better people.
I think if every American had an education like that, an education that didn't infantilize them but challenged them and truly taught them how to think and gave them skills for questioning and getting at the truth and arming themselves against deception and manipulation, from the media, from marketing, from government, and yes, from religion, the future course of this nation would be far brighter for it.
Think! People, Think.
BD: What do you say to those who claim that without a belief in God, humanity has no moral compass? For instance, I had a conversation with someone who insisted that if it's the case that atheists behave better than theists, it is simply because the individuals in question hadn't taken their respective worldviews to their logical conclusions.
RC: Of course my entire book Sense and Goodness without God is about answering that very question.
But for a humorous primer:
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2008/02/darla-she-goat.html
And for the shortest of short answers:
Atheists have such a strong moral compass precisely because they have taken their worldview to its logical conclusion. For when you really do that, rationally and factually, you will realize there is nothing being bad has to offer you that you actually want, and that everything you really do want, and want badly, is only reliably gotten by being good. In fact, once you are fully in touch with reality, and know yourself and the real consequences of any choice, being good is so much more fun, that once you know how much more enjoyable it is, you will wonder why anyone bothers being bad at all.
Where do I go from here? More therapy. Because, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what I want. Well, yes I do. I want to live in a rational, honest society. But, where is it? Will I ever see it?
From the last segment of Century of the Self
Fundamentally here we have two different view of human nature, and of Democracy. You have the view that people are irrational, they are bundles of unconscious emotion. That comes directly out of Freud, and business are very able to respond to that. They have honed their skills doing that is what marketing is really all about. What are the symbols, the music, the images, the words, that will appeal to these unconscious feelings.
Politics must be more than that. Politics and leadership are about engaging the public in a rational discussion and deliberation about what is best, and treating people with respect; In terms of their rational abilities to debate what is best.
If it is not that, if it is Freudian, basically a matter of appealing to the same basic unconscious feelings that business appeals to. Then why not let business do it. Business can do it better. Business knows how to do it. Business is after all, in the business of responding to those feelings.
Ahhh, but there is greed in business. I think we all have seen what happens when we let business run things. We end up where we are at.
We need a change. We need the people thinking rationally, discussing and deliberating about what is best. So what about Libertarian Socialism? What about Noam Chomsky’s views on Politics?
Where do I fit in? Freely falling. Existential crisis, my world view destroyed and my dreams unobtainable.
