Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Needed: Herculean Efforts


Professor J,


First, at our house we are on our 4th consecutive day without electricity. So I'm doing a bit of outpost blogging today (an ode to brevity). I'll expound next time...hopefully from a well lit and toasty warm writer's loft. 

Apart from cataclysmic events, the erosion of old thinking and an influx of new ideas, and realizing that something isn’t right and addressing it, it seems that you are saying: 

That we need to ask people what they’ve been learning or pondering lately (and wait for blank and/or confused expressions) instead of just what they are reading/watching.

 Focus and stop multitasking and wasting time.

Constantly question our own thinking as well as everyone else’s as well as work hard to recognize our own biases and other things that might skew our opinions.

      And how to get people to do these things, when, as you point out, our culture worships busyness to such a point that people who should have leisure time to think deeply and discuss important ideas as well as invest in others are caught up in an endless cycle of activity? Activity that is either diversionary or necessary.  How to go about such a complete shift in thinking and culture? 

Must we not start with the individual? Even then the task as you’ve outlined it seems Herclulean.  Might you give a historical example of people in similar circumstances doing the necessary things to prevent ruin? Individual examples are easy enough to come by but what of nations and cultures?

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