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A batch of the best highlights from what Stefan's read, .
Man is not only a social being. Somewhere away from the crowd and the noise, he has to come to grips with himself, God and nature. In order to grow, he needs reserve and isolation and silence. In addition to his mechanical devices and machines, he needs to get back to nature, to camp out-of-doors by himself. Somewhere along the line, he has to be the maker of some of his own tools, as a shoemaker or a healer or a teacher.
The Rape of the Mind
Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo
The writers of the 2001 videogame Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, presaged the absurd intellectual environment of the world wide web: “The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate … No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in ‘truth.’ And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
How Individualism Created Our Postmodern Culture
Alexander Blum
To break down some of the beliefs that almost everyone else in history had, except us, and took to be completely obvious, which are taboo to question today.
The first is that there are inherent biological differences between men and women. Next, there is some inherent biological reality behind class, race, and ethnicity, that progress is not some natural law of the universe, but something that only occurs under certain incentive structures, which are rare throughout history. Family, community, and nation are the bedrock of social life, and war is a nasty part of the human condition that we have to accept. Equality doesn’t really exist, and some things are innately better than others. The highest levels of beauty, achievement, and greatness are pulled from the divine, while the lowest levels are pulled from demonic forces. These do not exist physically in the way we describe, but are underlying archetypal principles or forms that operate over physical matter.
Human nature is inherently corruptible and requires social traditions to keep us in check. There is a spirit world and God, and the human soul and consciousness is a force in its own right. Human life and happiness are predicated less upon material wealth and more upon social relations or values. The universe is a self-reflective emergent phenomenon that adapts to different situations.
To frame this: literally everyone else in history besides us believed all of that. Even the most educated people in the West at the start of World War I believed most of the things I mentioned above. Literally every other era in history besides that believed in them.
The Greatest Lie Ever Told
Whatifalthist
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