Archive for the ‘ The Self ’ Category

We Have Destroyed Our Selves, and We are Now Busy Destroying Everything Else

People exist in two ways – as individuals and as groups of individuals. The power struggle between the two is a necessary part of our existence. We exist as individuals first because we exist in individual bodies – bodies with highly-developed nervous systems – that are perhaps over-developed. We exist as groups because we are [ READ MORE ]

Losing Interest in Ourselves

Science has been very useful in helping us understand the world outside of ourselves. But it has not been very useful in understanding  more important worlds – our social worlds and our mental and emotional worlds. What have I said here? Nothing that hasn’t been said thousands of times before. Nevertheless it deserves saying again [ READ MORE ]

More Similarities Between Humans and Computers

This is a continuation of my posting Computers Have Been Designed to Act Like Humans. I didn’t realize I was getting into such fertile territory. I am still reading the book Technology and Culture, and the chapter The Forth Discontinuity by Bruce Mazlish. I am familiar with what seemed to be his basic argument – that [ READ MORE ]

Computers Have Been Designed to Act Like Humans

This is a continuation of my last posting People Merge With Their Things. One reason people have become so confused about what they are was the deliberate decision to make computers seem human. It was unlikey that people would confuse themselves with a sailing ship, for example – unless they were a ship designer, a ship [ READ MORE ]

Shame

We are ashamed of ourselves, for what we have turned out to be. Are we aware of this? No, we are not aware of anything, and instead we are proud of our deadness – which should our ultimate shame. I continue to read Sartre, who is talking about The Origin of Nothingness. I can only [ READ MORE ]

We No Longer Know Who We Are

We have been changing so fast we are like nothing we ever have been. We can no longer relate to ourselves because we have no words to describe what we have become. We cannot understand ourselves and don’t know what we should be doing. We have no past and no future. In a very real [ READ MORE ]

Man’s Interior Reality

This has been one of my favorite subjects, I wrote about it directly in Inside and Outside (where I refer to Marshall McLuhan) and Inner Reality and Outer Reality, and touched on it in many other postings. I am now reading a book about Ortega y Gasset, and delighted to find it was one of his concerns [ READ MORE ]

Acceptance

Finally, at age 74, I can begin to see what an emotional and mental mess I am. And I can also see how screwed up everybody else is too. The two realizations go together, and cannot be separated. This, I believe, is why psychotherapy doesn’t work. You cannot understand yourself unless you understand the social [ READ MORE ]

Society Must be In Complete Control

It must be in complete control of everything and everyone – especially every one. This is what a mass society demands – and we live in a mass society (as called to our attention by Ortega y Gasset) – and what Sheldon Wolin calls an inverted totalitarianism, where enforcement is by everyone, not just from [ READ MORE ]

Ortega on Resistance

By Ortega I mean Ortega y Gasset and to by Resistance I refer to the quote below, taken from page 93 of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” and the Triumph of the New Man, by Pedro Blas Gonzalez. This text has not been proof- read very well, and I have made some minor changes to [ READ MORE ]

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