Thanks for that. I was wondering what he had to say about fascism, as the negation of democracy; this seems to be the book for that.

During the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century, American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey argued that the greatest threat to democracy was not a political regime or even an aggressive foreign power but rather a set of dispositions or attitudes. Though not fascist in and of themselves, these habits of thought—rugged individualism and ideological nationalism—lay the foundation for fascism.

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Dewey_for_a_New_Age_of_Fascism.html?id=_HlUzQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Review:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341736937_Review_of_Nathan_Crick%27s_Dewey_for_a_New_Age_of_Fascism_Teaching_Democratic_Habits

And then I saw this 1948 article: https://www.nytimes.com/1948/10/26/archives/president-likens-dewey-to-hitler-as-fascists-tool-says-when-bigots.html

Looks like the same nonsense runs like a tapeworm through history.

there is no habitable place outside of every culture, and so Dewey, as you say, starts in the house we have, but his fight is not between progress and stasis, but between the cultural and the personal. — Antony Nickles

It remains the claim that democracy is the duty to put yourself in the others' shoes and investigate the desires and needs involved in the dispute at hand. — Antony Nickles

Put this in brackets, and call it the Dewey, Nickles, unenlightened position. So we can put ourselves in the shoes of some other that calls this 'Commie indoctrination'. They are not letting us in the house to discuss.To them, we are undermining the foundations. They are claiming the virtue word 'democracy' for themselves and excluding us from it. Now you can say oh that's politics and this is democracy, and I can agree, but what are we to do about the Republican Party?

Yes, this supports the point. Imagination is within reality. — Hallucinogen

This is the result of loose talking. The faculty of imagination is real, the contents of imagination are imaginary. The problem you have is not so much fallacy, but equivocation between what is real and what is imaginary.

An architect imagines a building and draws it in minute detail. The plans are real plans, but the building may never be built, because finance, permission, whatever. Yet the imaginary building can be realised.

As if a man had had his legs bitten off by a shark, and we all earnestly inquire what is the most important problem; that he is drowning, that he is bleeding to death, that he is losing consciousness, that his cries are not heard, or that the shark is coming back for more?

And yes education for Dewey is a term for something special, so something merely additional to the necessary and inevitable indoctrination with the ways of our lives (their criteria and judgments Wittgenstein will call it) — Antony Nickles

Unfortunately, there is no escape from the politics. Progressives can accept the need for institutions, for a stability in society, the way a home improvement fan can accept the need for a home to improve. But to accuse Dewey of indoctrination is weaponised irony, as I tried to point out. The inheritors of Dewey are people like John Holt and Ivan Illich, those who see at least a part of education as a mutual exercise in learning from each other, as you have described above.

I make much of the use of the word 'indoctrination' because it is used as a term of abuse projected by those who would abuse onto those who want to prevent that abuse. This practice, which has infected the US and the world, destroys the language and society with it. But I'll leave it at that and perhaps we can ignore the propaganda now, and get on with the more interesting discussion of Dewey and education, which I am keen to learn more about.

We were told in school that the US is a classless society, — Fooloso4

That's indoctrination!

As if by magic, conservative and progressive align with wealth and poverty, because the poor want to get rich and the rich want to stay rich.

Indoctrination with unchanging truth is not what education is supposed to be according to Dewey. — Fooloso4

But it is what conservatives accuse him of, and what they favour themselves, but presumably call by another name.

Put differently, what is it we wish to conserve? — Fooloso4

Ooh, sir! I know, sir! We wish to conserve what is good and change what is not so good for the better.

I think I'm going to let you see if you can work that out for yourself.

But imagination can change reality. Tolkien imagines a world, and books are published, films are made, songs are sung, merchandise is created, and the world is thoroughly polluted.

The unchanging truth is not their doctrine?

Someone should let them know that indoctrination with the unchanging truth is what education is supposed to be; its the transmission of culture, and so the conservation of conservatism. Do they think that to be conservative just means hanging on to one's stash?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff?fbclid=IwAR1nav4uJ3G-bVk3Ci4w5yl8d-ITIivUCOCFGbjzLfsPBX0JY5jkR1HQ1M0

The smart money seems to be on nuclear, and biological catastrophe as well as climate apocalypse. Personally I predict that as soon as the smart people descend into their bunkers, the rest of us will be able to sort things out together.

Conservatives call this indoctrination. — Fooloso4

Of course education is indoctrination. But how else is conservatism to be conserved from one generation to another?

People are so afeared of communism that they wouldn't touch these ideologies with a barge pole. It's kinda a slippery slope fallacy but they want to play it safe, the risks are just too high to take the gamble. Apparently suffering outside a gulag is better than suffering inside one. My two cents. — Agent Smith

You need some more small change there, buddy. The US leads the world in incarceration rates. Land of the Free, except...
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=incarceration+rates+by+country+per+capita&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

I see. Never mind then. Obviously can't be god - that's Bartricks.

Seems a tad hasty. Non-native speaker, and not well versed in the subject, but 4 posts in the last 2 years is not exactly flooding us with low quality...

Speaking as a member of the underclass and a layabout by trade, I can assure you that my revolutionary fervour is fed by starvation. This is not a new theory I am promoting - bread and circuses has long been known as the basis for a peaceful society.

Are you for or against the idea of a UBI (universal basic income) for all as being trialed in a few projects now. — universeness

For. I can even make an economic argument for it , though with the caveat that when one changes society in one way it can have all sorts unforeseen consequences. It goes something like this:

The human need is for security in relation to basics - food, shelter, and protection against marauders. These days, we spend such an inordinate amount of our economic activity on security against others, that it would be more cost effective to deprive the world of desperate people, instead of stockpiling weaponry, and building ever higher walls and stronger locks. If everyone had enough to eat, somewhere to live, and access to entertainment and perhaps cheap travel, along with already available education and health services, the attractions of robbery, piracy, and so on would be vastly reduced.

We can well afford layabouts, much easier than we can afford vandals and robbers. But one effect is that workers would be harder to exploit, if they had an alternative.

My local scheme: https://gov.wales/wales-pilots-basic-income-scheme

Money is an illusion. — Yozhura

This is obviously true. I like money because the the nice people at Walmart give me stuff in exchange for it, and they like it because other people give them stuff for it and so on. We call things like this "a social construct" rather than an illusion, because our valuing gives it real value, and one cannot manage without it these days. Economists call it "confidence", and when confidence is lacking, value is lost and inflation occurs.

On today's standards we're forced to work to sustain ourselves, even though our society could provide for you if they deem you beneficial enough for them to provide such assistance. — Yozhura

This is not quite true, and there is a big difference between the wage-slave and the historic slave. Here are a couple for you to consider: wage-slaves are not beaten or tortured, and if they escape, they are not chased and recaptured and brought back by force: if they choose to starve themselves, they are not force-fed.

However, depending on where you live in the world, things can still be dire. It is the measure of a civilised society that we do provide for and look after those who cannot work for whatever reason. If this does not happen where you live, then your first job should be to make it happen.

However, there is no reason why society should deliver food to folks who simply cannot be bothered to lend a hand. Our cooperation multiplies our efforts to an abundance unthinkable for an individual. We are both using the internet and the labour of unknown workers that produce our devices, and thus we incur a debt (a real debt of gratitude) to others.

Why is it ok for our species to expect that every individual should works as a slave to those who are in power, just to sustain themselves. — Yozhura

It isn't. Divest yourself immediately of everything made by these slaves, and go forth moneyless and jobless to live a free life. (Perhaps hang on to a pair of pants until you have time to fashion a flint so as to kill an animal and make your own leather trousers.)

Are you talking to me? — Amity

To anyone who cares to listen, but more I'm withdrawing somewhat from talking to you, with that dangerous enticing "we". Time for me to be quiet and watch the exegesis of others.

So, what we are looking for is to relate better both to TSZ and Nietzsche...yes?
Between or among ourselves. — Amity

The traveller needs to read the map, to get where they are going if they are lost, and when they get there, they have no more use for the map. What I am saying, (and all I am saying, because I'm unenlightened not Zarathustra) is that there is nothing here to understand in the sense of there being a resting place even as a distant goal. I cannot and should not help anyone to understand what has been deliberately obscured. Stop thinking that anyone enlightened, unenlightened, Zarathustra, Nietzsche, Jesus, Hitler, L Ron Hubbard, or David Attenborough is the overman with the answers. Dance, die, return.

(nor even this Nobel laureate):

I can't feel you anymore
I can't even touch the books you've read
Every time I crawl past your door
I been wishin' I was somebody else instead
Down the highway, down the tracks
Down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars
Hounded by your memory
And all your ragin' glory
I been double-crossed now
For the very last time and now I'm finally free
I kissed goodbye the howling beast
On the borderline which separated you from me
You'll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry
Idiot wind
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots, babe
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves

You can manage without god, if you are willing to take all the responsibility yourself.

What do you mean by a 'psychological treatment'?
Something like CBT ? — Amity

More old-fashioned. I'm thinking something like an initiation ceremony, or what used to be called a 'happening' in my mis-spent youth. Take the aphorism for example; not an argument, or a definition, or anything familiar to a scholar, but closer to a mantra or a koan; something to fill one's head with to block habitual thoughts.

I could say that the book is visionary, and the secret to the interpretation of dreams is this: Everything in the dream is you.

The difficulty is always the same difficulty; to escape the Christian mindset that infects Christians, atheists, Buddhists, scientists, and Nietzsche fan-boys alike. We always tend to understand the text in terms of our culture, rather than our culture in terms of the text - we are always looking to explain to each other - to understand rather than over-stand.

No one wants to be killed by clowns, but that is what is happening right now, before our very eyes.

A good dog is a safely approachable dog. Un chien méchant is one that attacks strangers; a mad dog attacks everything.

A bad dog is useful as a guard.

One might say, of a human life, that a good life is one that makes its own judgement of itself wholeheartedly and insightfully. A poor life, by contrast, is always occupied with judgement of others.

So, whatever attracted N to personifying Zarathustra wasn't for the sake of championing a competing metaphysic. My reading of the choice is that, despite trying to retrieve a Greek spirit not poisoned by Christianity, N did not think the effort would topple the edifice of Christian Platonism. — Paine

That seems right. Our view of ancient Greece was already infected with the Christianity that overtook the Romans. Freud went back to the Greeks, and claimed not to have read Nietzsche, (but that latter is not really believable). But where Freud was diagnosing the sickness of the Western psyche, Nietzsche was attempting the cure.

To read TSZ seriously is to subject oneself to a psychological treatment, rather than to analyse and consider some philosophical system. The clown destroys the dancer - and Nietzsche made dancing central to life. Musically, think Wagner, the romantic on steroids. Who is the clown? Perhaps the one who mistakes the treatment for a way of life.

Just because 3 is the magic number of religion and psychology, I'll add in Robert Graves (of I, Claudius fame) who came a little later again, and went back even further to a reconstructed Goddess religion, and a matriarchal social psychology. But that is for another thread to look at.

What do you think? — Amity

I really do not know. It seems like a fundamental kind of question though. Zarathustra is a somewhat mythical ancient founder of a religion, into whose mouth Nietzsche is putting these words. On the face of it, there can be no more reason to believe these words than the words of any other religious leader.
Rather less, because they are 'really' Nietzsche's words, and we know he is somewhat a trickster and obscurantist.

In line with Nietzsche's play of opposites, something lost and something found. — Fooloso4

Thanks! This at least makes sense in context; God is dead, but humans are the creators of value, and the creation of values has value. And from that, he can allow himself 'the reevaluation of all values'. And so can we. And the basis on which we are to do that is is that we must ...

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try;
No hell below us,
Above us only sky.

The Gospel of John.

So, having established a definite equivocation on the reliability of Zarathustra, my next question is , how can we reevaluate our values? But I think I should not expect an answer yet. My questions may seem premature, but they are only premature if you think they need to be answered immediately, before we confront the text; I propose them rather as ways to approach the text.

And you think that is Nietzsche's message to the world?

What do you think he found up there?

Most people do the best they can for themselves within the rules they live under from time to time. — God

This means, for example, that they will struggle to build their wooden huts on stilts above the flood water in Pakistan, until the flood that washes it all away, and then they will drown. If the government tells them to stay at home for 3 months, or wear a mask, or wear a burkha they will do so, and try to live with that. So there is no problem in banning private transport powered by fossil fuels, and no problem introducing rationing, or enforcing house sharing, or any other necessary measure.

If it were not so, there could be no wars.

Moses descended from the mountain with tablets of stone written by God.
Zarathustra descended from the mountain with nothing, because God is dead.

Do you think that Nietzsche wants us to believe Zarathustra more than Moses?

It's not about occasional passionate exchanges but extended 'vitriol and inflamed tempers' in a political discussion about a serious event or subject. As per the Ukraine Crisis thread. — Amity

Yes, I actually agree with you if you are saying that you would prefer a tighter rein on flaming and ad homs, and the more controversial the topic, the more thorough the editing, rather than the more lax. And I agree that mods should lead by example in the first instance. It's always an ongoing discussion, and one expresses a view, and then gets on with philosophy, or if it is unbearable, takes ones' pearls elsewhere.

Moderation is not a justice system, it's an editorial system

Moderation is bound to be unfair, because no one reads every post on every thread, and the lines between stupidity and malice are impossible to draw. If you stick to obscure topics, you and post infrequently, you can troll the boards for years. Once you get noticed, you start getting watched.

If you are passionate about philosophy, as I hope we all are, then I expect that passion to overflow from time to time and I expect to get moderated; it's not the end of the world. But moderation is not a justice system, it's an editorial system. If Jamal doesn't like daffodils, he's entitled to ban them from his site. So don't mention daffodils Wordsworth's favourite flowers, and roll your eyes in private.

Is 'naive' a term of abuse? Is 'sophisticated'? Where on the spectrum would you like to be seen to be?

Mrs un has a book coming out in a few weeks, and I am so fucking glad to see the back of the to and fro of editorial changes and counter-changes that have been going on seemingly forever. The moderation on this site is really weak and sloppy compared to what a 'proper' publishing outfit does.

What does it mean to give oneself purpose? — TiredThinker

Why do yo ask? Does misery seek company?

isn't "purpose" a bold thing to give to oneself? — TiredThinker

Yes. If you try, you can fail.

But look at your question; it takes a whole life, yours or mine, and abstracts it from anything personal, then reinserts the personal as an arbitrary "purpose", and demands that there should be some "meaning" of this abstract "life" for its impersonal "self". If you spend your life on meaningless questions, your life will indeed have little meaning. Find a more vital question for God's sake. Make that your purpose for a minute.

Not really. Greenhouses basically work by keeping the same air in place and greatly reducing convection cooling. I think that's why the term' greenhouse effect' has lost favour. I think you can get special glass that does work like CO2, but it tends to go into high spec glazing for picky humans, and plants cannot afford it.

I am interested if you can shed any light on your own motivation for rooting out such 'scientific facts' that you clearly have no understanding of, in order to support a contrarian position you are incapable of making a meaningful judgement of? Apart from the hubris of imagining that scientists have no idea what they are doing, such that your 30 second google can put us all straight, there must be some reason why this is your focus rather than building a better mousetrap or whatever.

Some new evidence in this argument, taken from established scientific measurements of heat retention by gases: — god must be atheist

This is evidence only of your ignorance of very basic science. Specific heat is the amount of heat energy required to raise the temperature of a substance, usually measured in units of joules of energy per kilogram per degree centigrade. Thus the lower the specific heat, the higher the temperature that will be achieved by the absorption of a given amount of radiant energy.

But this has exactly nothing to do with the insulating effect of CO2 which rather depends on its transparency to higher frequency radiation and relative opacity to infra red. The suns rays penetrate the atmosphere easily to heat the ground that absorbs them, but the heat is reradiated as infra red which is more absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus the 'greenhouse effect' is more of a 'duvet effect' preventing heat loss.

Think music; think dance. More fleeting than trends on Twitter, yet the meaning persists because it remains in the moment of creation and does not project itself to an after dance or an after song. To think of purpose or meaning for life is to devalue it because it necessarily subordinates it to some other thing. I do not grieve because I am not a million miles wide, nor complain because my life is not a million years long. To do so would be to waste the life that I have. I want to make this post as good as I can, and that will do, until the next post. Right here, right now, is the whole meaning of life, not somewhere else.

it has to be informed by overall goals_ those of becoming free from dependence and achieving fulfilment'. — Jack Cummins

(quoting Giddens)

Hey Jack, those are terrible goals to set, and impossible to achieve. "If you wish to be independent, first create your own universe." - (or was is if you wish to be an apple pie?) I suggest you should turn right around and set your goals in the opposite direction. Maximise your dependencies and aim for void-emptiness instead of fulfilment. A rock is pretty independent and fulfilled, but a human should be vulnerable and sensitive, responsive to every nuance, social and environmental. Relationships are dependencies - of exploitation and/or care. The more one is engaged with the world and others, and the less one is concerned with oneself, the happier and the sadder one will be, and that sensitivity is what it is to be in touch with one's feelings.

What Does it Mean to Find One's 'True' Self?

It means one has lost it.

One loses it early; total dependency is the first relationship, and to the extent that that relationship is insecure, one is forced into the division of not being oneself.

Don't cry. Be good for Mummy. Go to sleep. Eat up. Go to the toilet. Work hard. Do as I say.

Deny your body and your impulses, not because you wish to control them, but because your life depends on meeting your carer's wishes.

What on Earth would you do if you were not doing what you have been told all your life? Who would you be if you were not being good for Mummy? Some outrageous monster, no doubt.

To find one's true self is to confront that monster, and set it free from the prison of the unconscious. It is to face the fear and shame of oneself.

I guess the question is: would artificial intelligence cease if human beings weren't around/were extinct. — Changeling

Is that the question? I wonder: would artificial intelligence be anti-natalist? (or should that be 'anti-manufacturist'?)