In our society the majority of people have their basic needs met and sufficient safety to pursue their goals. Thus, the realm of ideas and quest for meaning personal fulfillment are the new battlegrounds for us.
Those from the past would think that with our material wealth and safety, humans would have much greater ability to face these internal demons and societal struggles. And it seems like Western societies achieved pretty decent balance for a few decades.
But now we see our society completely disrupted and I blame the failure of the education system at large to teach us how to properly grapple with intellectual and internal conflict. As well as the internet algorithms that create our echo chambers. All education used to be was learning HOW to learn, how to learn VORACIOUSLY, and how to properly and peacefully grapple with ideas you disagree with.
The inability for modern people to leave their comfort zones and immerse themselves in ideas that are different is causing us to move backwards into a violent and poor society. It is like a feedback loop taking us back to the unstable and discriminatory ways of the past. We haven’t been taught to truly understand our opponents but to create straw mans. We have been taught that censorship, slander, and cancel culture is virtuous....
Damn, your writing makes me think so much I had to write it out to sort out my thoughts and now I realize I wrote an newsletter too 😅
I love that you mentioned the education system’s role in teaching us *how* to learn, not simply what to learn. My mom is a teacher in public school and the stories I hear about her attempts to instill critical thinking skills in her 8th graders is demoralizing. She’s had more than a few students tell her they don’t even need to learn to read.
What a shame how it seems we did reach an incredible version of society that prioritized ideas, not caste or divinity. Our society was born out of a desire for allowing people to think for themselves and yet today we have kids that would happily abandon the one tool whose lack has historically kept people subjugated to a ruling minority — education.
I try not to let myself be alarmist about grade school kids falling short because it feels easy to step into a “Back in my day” trope. I wonder if our education system is merely a gangrenous limb suffering from a larger problem. I have a budding theory that it’s not only our citizens that seem to have lost a larger, guiding principle — it may be the country itself. What happens when the focus of a country, its purpose and mission, morphs into something weaker? Maybe our people have regressed because our country itself has regressed in the role it takes on.
Mainly I’m thinking about how groundbreaking it was for the US to set itself as a moral leader among the world after WWI by creating the League of Nations in an attempt to move forward to a world that wouldn’t war with itself. Its effectiveness is debatable and even the philosophy of America’s role is, but the idea of a country clearly defining its purpose and a population that was largely unified behind that purpose is fascinating and distinct from today. There’s a lot of division between what both citizens and the government itself believe this country should be; we’ve both seen the concept of our democracy itself come up for debate. I wonder if the problems we see today are symptoms of something even deeper.
The idea of having all our survival needs met and allowing us to move towards mastering a kind of “intellectual survival” with ourselves and others has been on my mind a lot. That’s exactly what I laid out in the Medium essay as the new test of courage for modern society!
We’re at the edge of an evolutionary cliff; we can either move forward into a new world or we’ll regress into the previous one. Right now we are absolutely regressing; it’s shocking to see the same rhetoric and tactics of oppression bubble up with a new paint job take so much ground.
Haha I truly love getting your mini-newsletter in response to mine! I also think having these public, civil conversations about contentious issues — besides being enjoyable and educational — is an important way to set new norms for productively sharing ideas. And that is something I couldn’t stop fighting for if I wanted to!
In our society the majority of people have their basic needs met and sufficient safety to pursue their goals. Thus, the realm of ideas and quest for meaning personal fulfillment are the new battlegrounds for us.
Those from the past would think that with our material wealth and safety, humans would have much greater ability to face these internal demons and societal struggles. And it seems like Western societies achieved pretty decent balance for a few decades.
But now we see our society completely disrupted and I blame the failure of the education system at large to teach us how to properly grapple with intellectual and internal conflict. As well as the internet algorithms that create our echo chambers. All education used to be was learning HOW to learn, how to learn VORACIOUSLY, and how to properly and peacefully grapple with ideas you disagree with.
The inability for modern people to leave their comfort zones and immerse themselves in ideas that are different is causing us to move backwards into a violent and poor society. It is like a feedback loop taking us back to the unstable and discriminatory ways of the past. We haven’t been taught to truly understand our opponents but to create straw mans. We have been taught that censorship, slander, and cancel culture is virtuous....
Damn, your writing makes me think so much I had to write it out to sort out my thoughts and now I realize I wrote an newsletter too 😅
Please never stop.
I love that you mentioned the education system’s role in teaching us *how* to learn, not simply what to learn. My mom is a teacher in public school and the stories I hear about her attempts to instill critical thinking skills in her 8th graders is demoralizing. She’s had more than a few students tell her they don’t even need to learn to read.
What a shame how it seems we did reach an incredible version of society that prioritized ideas, not caste or divinity. Our society was born out of a desire for allowing people to think for themselves and yet today we have kids that would happily abandon the one tool whose lack has historically kept people subjugated to a ruling minority — education.
I try not to let myself be alarmist about grade school kids falling short because it feels easy to step into a “Back in my day” trope. I wonder if our education system is merely a gangrenous limb suffering from a larger problem. I have a budding theory that it’s not only our citizens that seem to have lost a larger, guiding principle — it may be the country itself. What happens when the focus of a country, its purpose and mission, morphs into something weaker? Maybe our people have regressed because our country itself has regressed in the role it takes on.
Mainly I’m thinking about how groundbreaking it was for the US to set itself as a moral leader among the world after WWI by creating the League of Nations in an attempt to move forward to a world that wouldn’t war with itself. Its effectiveness is debatable and even the philosophy of America’s role is, but the idea of a country clearly defining its purpose and a population that was largely unified behind that purpose is fascinating and distinct from today. There’s a lot of division between what both citizens and the government itself believe this country should be; we’ve both seen the concept of our democracy itself come up for debate. I wonder if the problems we see today are symptoms of something even deeper.
The idea of having all our survival needs met and allowing us to move towards mastering a kind of “intellectual survival” with ourselves and others has been on my mind a lot. That’s exactly what I laid out in the Medium essay as the new test of courage for modern society!
We’re at the edge of an evolutionary cliff; we can either move forward into a new world or we’ll regress into the previous one. Right now we are absolutely regressing; it’s shocking to see the same rhetoric and tactics of oppression bubble up with a new paint job take so much ground.
Haha I truly love getting your mini-newsletter in response to mine! I also think having these public, civil conversations about contentious issues — besides being enjoyable and educational — is an important way to set new norms for productively sharing ideas. And that is something I couldn’t stop fighting for if I wanted to!
Hello! Funny... dog pics many likes.