Can't it be argued — schopenhauer1

It can be and is argued because our behavior is a mosaic pattern of instinctive and learned behavior. I do not know whether we can definitively sort out all of the pieces.

Given the tools of molecular decoding, we can see that genes direct a significant portion of behaviors. Twin studies show how identical twins who were separated early on, developed remarkably similar lives. Genes presumably carry instincts, along with physical characteristics, in animals (in which we are grouped).

Is 'story telling' a by-product of language or is story telling the very essence of language? As we write our posts here, aren't we telling stories? There is a speaker, an audience, action occurring in the past, present, or future, conditionally or not, objects acted on, and so forth. We are born with [have an instinct for] language, but we have to learn it. Young children can learn multiple languages simultaneously when they are exposed to multiple languages at the same time.

We would (I am guessing or hoping) learn singing and dancing fluently too, if we did not also learn so damned much performance anxiety. No, I am not claiming we would all be playing Bach, or singing or dancing like [fill in the name of your favorite performer]. But most people are capable of folk-singing and folk-dancing. We don't because we have learned inhibitions.

Humans, somewhere along the way from Australopithicus to Homo sapiens have developed a linguistic/conceptual based mind (with developments of the Broca's region, Wernicke's region, neocortex, amongst other brain regions and networks. This linguistic mind has changed the way human behavior functions from other animals. It gives humans the ability to create complex hierarchical thinking. We still have very basic instincts (e.g. eating to get rid of hunger, warmth, a drive towards pleasure, etc.) but most other behavior any more complex than these basic drives, is based on linguistic-cultural origin and not instinct. — schopenhauer1

I would submit that the language instinct is at the heart of your "linguistic-cultural" behavior. Besides language, general cultural features such as hierarchy-formation, domination of individuals and groups over other individuals and groups, story-telling (composing narratives out of experience), eating together, music (nothing specific, just the employment of music and rhythmic motion (dance) in some form, religious behaviors (again, nothing specific), and so on all demonstrate instinct.

At the most biological level, humans share with the rest of the animal kingdom a regular pattern of sleep and wakefulness, mating, breast feeding, foraging for food, nest making, defensive hostility (to protect the group), etc.

If you add the basic biological stuff to rhythmic movement and melodious sound making, language use, story telling, eating behaviors, dominance behaviors, religious behaviors, you have named a significant share of human behavior.

That still leaves room in human behavior for novel, spontaneous, never-seen-before-on-TV behaviors and patterns and learned behaviors.

The reason that human behaviors and cultures are consistent across the board (in general form, not in fine detail)--the reason why we are more similar than we are different--is instinct. It's our instincts that give basic form to human behavior.

The latest findings indicate that we have been our species, homo sapiens, for 300,000 years. (Remains found in India, Israel, and Morocco from 200,000 to 300,000 years old all have very modern teeth.) It's safe to say that we didn't make it over 300,000 years, and longer from our previous species to homo sapiens WITHOUT instinctual guidance.

If you look at tool making, there were very long stretches where the same tools were being made. There didn't seem to be a lot of day-in day-out learning leading to improved tools. It was the same thing over and over--until at some point that stopped and tools started to vary, become more specialized, be made out of different materials, and so on. That development seems to bring us closer to the "modern era" which began maybe 40,000 years ago.

I base my approach on evolution. We didn't just evolve as humans with no connection to pre-human animals. Humans evolved from earlier animals. The features of our behavior have ancient roots, just as the biology of our bodies have ancient roots. Even giving a large role for evolution leaves plenty of room for learning and novel, spontaneous behavior. If modern humans were found from Morocco to India 300,000 years ago, we were clearly a curious species--we kept going to the top of the next hill to see what lay beyond.

So it's both instinct and culture.

The Garden of Eden seems to be the only explanation there; the other options are just observations of descriptions. — Noble Dust

The G of E story is the prime explanation of all our misfortunes, and since it is archetypal, everything else is going to seem like a footnote. That life is unsatisfactory or that we are neurotic is as foundational as the story of Adam's and Eve's expulsion from paradise. It only lacks the nicety of narrative form.

Bad things happen in life because we are fragile and nature is rough. We are neurotic -- slightly crazy -- and we create at least some of the unsatisfactory reality from which we suffer. Our fears and fantasies can lead us into very bad decisions which create suffering. The war on Iraq strikes me as neurotic on our part. We had been stabbed in the World Trade Center and somebody, by God, was going to pay dearly. It might have made more sense to attack Saudi Arabia, since most of the 9/11 terrorists had connections there. But, since when did crazy make good decisions?

developmental factors like parents, teachers, socio-economic status, etc., are not in our control initially. The question now is how personal autonomy is developed/attained. — Noble Dust

Yes, autonomy is an important issue, as is how we attain it. But autonomous individuals are as subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as any one else is.

I'm asking why life is suffering, if that is indeed the case. — Noble Dust

One explanation is provided in Genesis: Adam and Eve were expelled from the G of E for their disobedience, and because they were no longer innocent. Life went downhill very fast once we were expelled. Of course, if they hadn't been disobedient, we wouldn't exist.

Another explanation is provided by various: Life is unsatisfactory; happiness is not in the cards.

Yet another explanation is that people are neurotic: we can find ways of being miserable even when we have everything we need.

Hobbes pointed out that life can be nasty, brutish, and short.

Finally, we have limited capacity to make silk purses out of sows' ears. Many of the bad things that happen to us just can't be papered over. The truth that life often sucks shines forth from within the compost heaps of our existences.

Almost all other animals' behaviors are driven by instinct. — schopenhauer1

Yes, it is not innate, but it seems to be epigenetic in a way for some learned behavior in other animals, as they are "primed" to learn and cannot help but learn based on their programming.An example of this is a... — schopenhauer1

baby exposed to human speech.. It WILL learn the language it is exposed to whether it likes it or not. It might have preferred to learn Parisian French, but if it is exposed to Brooklyn Yiddish, that is what it will learn. We are compelled by instinct or we are primed, or it just happens automatically to learn language. The way our brain works is determined by genes. Instinct.

Babies seem to be born with very, very basic ideas about the way the world works. A prime demonstration of this is showing a baby a balloon filled with ordinary air. Let go of the ball and the baby smiles. Present the baby with a ballon filled with helium (or better, hydrogen gas about ready to explode spontaneously), let go, and the balloon rises to the ceiling. The baby is shocked. SHOCKED! It is surprised because the rising balloon violates it's basic expectation of the way the world works.

You are under-rating instinct in humans, and you may be under-rating learning, or reasoning, in other animals. For instance, consider a hungry crow presented with a snack that is floating on the surface of water have way down a narrow tube. It can't reach the snack with it's beak. It picks up pieces of gravel and drops them into the tube until the water level lifts the snack within reach. Instinct? Probably not. Birds' survival depends on a lot of instinct and some learning.

Dogs that are in laboratory situations where they get rewarded for xyz behavior and can observer the other dogs doing the same thing, will stop cooperating if they do not receive a reward and other dogs do. Primates in a similar situation will stop cooperating if the quality of their rewards are deficient--like getting a piece of lettuce instead a slice of apple. Either there is an instinct for fairness, or the lab animals are capable of seeing futility. What's the point of cooperating if I am not going to get a reward?

Most animals have to learn certain things; there is variability among animals--not all worker bees are equally good at their tasks). Squirrels that aren't good at finding their buried food once it gets cold tend to starve.

Parents don't have to be taught to respond with great favor when the see their child emerge into the world. The process is helped by neurotransmitters (like oxytocin), which is emitted at just the right time -- apparently instinctively.

I don't think dogs are born to summon assistance from people, but they do. Perhaps it has something to do with their instinctive gaze-following behavior. Dogs are one of the few animals that follow the human gaze. Dogs learn that if they want something that is inaccessible (the ball under the couch), they can get a person to fetch it for them by directing the persons' gaze to the ball under the couch. Dogs engage in unrelenting staring to alert us to their wishes. Once you stop reading and look at them, they will indicate (physically, of course) whether their food is overdue or that they want to go outside (to shit/piss/bark/wander aimlessly around).

Sex is mostly instinctive. Did you have to read a book to learn how to jack off? I hope not. Two dim teenagers can figure out how to have sex the first time without previous coaching. (Prior coaching is hard to avoid these days.) There is no grand design to a good share of the world's many billions of pregnancies. Arousal ----> insertion ----> ejaculation ----> sperm meets egg ----> conception ----> VOILA another baby on the way. It doesn't take any long-range planning (not a bad idea, it just isn't required).

Thanks for your response.

My alternate explanation would be that skills are memory and memory is actually embedded in the holographic universe as wave patterns, and retrieved by transmission/reception waves of the correct frequency from the brain. This conforms to the latest research regarding the quantum holographic universe. — Rich

I don't understand what a holographic universe is, or what these waves of the correct frequency are. I am afraid that an explanation will be as over my head as the holographic universe is. I'm not knocking the idea -- I just have no idea what it means.

I have tendencies to entertain utopian ideas, but with good medication and regular therapy, it's under control. I would go for the maximal version, except for Kant's plank, "Nothing straight was every built with the crooked timber of mankind."

The thing that I most like about your scheme is that it calls for engagement (5.Hoping for things to get better entails striving to make things better). An abstracted, not-really-there approach is a losing strategy, typical of very negative thinkers who start from the position that we are going down the drain in the final flush.

One of the places one finds the abstracted, not-really-there approach is in some Marxist organizations who always inveigh against "reformist" activity of any kind. Odd that they should do that, considering Marx himself said the point was to change history, not just to understand it. "Of course, when they are the only Marxists in town (some small group of a dozen aging people in a town of 1 million) their role of keepers of the sacred flame is more important than their actually engaging in construction activity," he said sarcastically. (When I use the term "marxist" I am referring to political organizations, not to academics who consider themselves "marxists".) The academic marxists are a whole 'nother can of worms.

Your approach has the sunny disposition of St. Catherine: All the way to heaven IS heaven. Working towards the good is a fulfillment of the good.

Your approach is also good for those who are just hoping for survival, never mind even minimal utopia. For instance, throwing in the towel on global warming (and a dozen other environmental problems) adds to the likelihood of bad outcomes.

Question: can people be dynamic and attain "complete harmony and absence of discord"? As people change, discover new things, try out new approaches, abandon old approaches, etc. opportunities for discord arise. How does we attain perfect harmony and still allow for change? Must behavior become static?

Did you even read the title?

The purpose of the post was not to relate my my own ideas on the subject. — Rich

I did read the title. Yes, I understood that you were passing along information you had read. The "you" in my response was less "Rich" and more "anybody who thought a piece of evidence of post-mortem consciousness had arrived".

At the time I wrote my response I had not read the article; it was my snobbish assumption that nothing very significant would be published in Newsweek first. I have since read it.

So what do you, "Rich" think about this? Evidence of consciousness surviving death or not?

Whether one thinks that consciousness survives death, or not, can't be proven until someone reports back after having been dead for a while (let's say... 30 days). I can be as certain that there is no survival of consciousness after death, as you may be that there is survival. We'll just have to disagree.

I don't think DNA activity after death tells us much either way. It's an interesting item. And, I would think, irrelevant. Because, if you think consciousness survives death, it isn't because of DNA. It would be because of the non-materiality of consciousness and mind, and DNA is material stuff.

I don't know what happens after death. I hope that when we die that's it, FINIS, but... I can't and don't know. And neither can you, or anybody else, of course.

10. The point is not to interpret the world, but to change it. — Justin1

Karl Marx's epitaph.

It's refreshing to see a new participant who has a positive attitude, rather than the more frequent nihilist drill. Welcome to The Philosophy Forum.

We don't have to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I am not sure what "Universal Perfection means, though. Is Universal Perfection what is realistically possible? I would be quite happy if we just strove toward a good that is realistically possible, where people behaved reasonably well, if not perfectly.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Bene Gesserit, Litany Against Fear

What philosophical implications does this pose for the people living in the year 2118 in terms of people’s perceptions of time, society and place? — Time

Between now and 2118 our period will be evaluated and re-evaluated numerous times, just as the period between 1900 and 2018 has been evaluated and re-evaluated. For instance, World War I was said to be "a war to end all wars". Not quite. What WWI did, we discovered in 1939, was lay the groundwork for World War II, a much worse war.

Just as researchers investigating WWI snoop into the backstory of who-knew-what-when about the 1914 assassination In Sarajevo of the heir presumptive to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria Hapsburg (his friends just called him Frank), researchers will be snooping into the back story of how, in the end, the world's nations failed to take the neessary steps to reduce CO2 and methane emissions after the relationship between global warming and these green house gasses became apparent.

Some of the back story will be appealing and some of it will be disgraceful. There will be wars between 2018 and 2118, and the outcomes might be quite important to the people of 100 years hence -- assuming there are any. Some of the historians will, over the decades. paint their history (our lives) favorably and some will paint it as one damn bad decision after another.

We can send them a message here, since some historian will certainly be combing through The Philosophy Forum archive: what message should we send? "Oops!" "Sorry." "I recycled faithfully." "The world is going to end soon, anyway, get over it." "Blame George Bush, Dick Chaney, Donald Trump, Exxon, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Old King Coal".

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum.

Studying history is actually a pretty good way to make the people and societies of the past, even 100 years ago, (understandable and "alive".

The people and society of 1900 are accessible, "relatable", and understandable, provided one makes a little effort. After all, 1900 isn't ancient history. Yes, society has changed--it's always changing--but there are many constants which haven't changed.

Your assumption that people in 2118 will have a clear picture of 2018 because of the internet, recordings, films, videos, photographs, and so forth is not altogether well founded. We do not know how much of current communication technology will be operable, accessible, or even in existence in 100 years. Already, technology of the 1960s, like 2" wide video tape is largely lost because the technology was abandoned. The internet will be as enduring as all the big server farms scattered around the world. Do you think the millions of digital machines sitting in the big windowless buildings are still going to be working in 100 years? 25 years? It isn't certain whether CDs will still be playable in 50 years, assuming one still has a CD player.

The media that are most enduring are physical media: film, vinyl disks, print on paper. Virtual or digital media depends entirely on technical continuity over multiple decades of time, something we haven't seen so far.

If libraries keep collections of books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, vinyl recordings, or somehow maintain stocks of machines and servers to preserve digital information, then a record of today's society will be available in 2118 and 2018 will be understandable and accessible. Some libraries have already dumped their newspaper collections -- not because they were unusable, but because the librarians decided the future was in microfilm and digital storage.

Is the society of 1903 Boston in this silent film of 1903 so strange? Electric street cars, crowds, bad traffic...

White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate. — Cavacava

Is this a virtue or a fault? Do you really want white people to be white conscious?

Mass population collapse. — Uneducated Pleb

As the population grows this century and as temperatures, humidity, disruptive storms, droughts, floods, and other disasters become more intolerable, we will reach a crunch where a lot of people are going to die off.

Predictions are that the lands adjacent to the equator will become too hot to maintain normal habitation. It will be too hot to work outside in the daytime, and perhaps too hot to work for long periods at night. Much of Africa, South America, and S and SE Asia would be most adversely affected. Areas as far north as the Southern US would be affected.

Unpleasant Questions: Is a massive die-off among the poorer populations (who simply can not keep body and soul together under the stresses of population and climate change) part of the solution? Should we let this happen or not? Is there anything we might do to stop it, once it began? What if there are, simply, too many people?

not only the oil, also food, water, metals, etc. — René Descartes

Particularly fresh water for drinking and agricultural needs. Peak oil, peak water, peak metal, peal lots-of-stuff probably has already passed.

When I think about the likely rather dystopian future coming down the pike, I am glad that I am 71 and not 21 years old. I expect to be dead of natural causes in 10 years, give or take a few.

* 75-90% of which live in medium to large, polluted urban conglomerates and centers.
* Technology and automation (and potentially A.I.) remove "work" for the bulk of the population.
* Cooperation on climate change, per the usual Prisoner's Dilemma outcome, is rendered ineffectual.
* Scientific advancement to mitigate negative factros is curtailed by social and economic upheaval.
* Social upheaval and climate change create mass migrations.
* Mass migrations create and exacerbate existing social and economic upheaval.
* Mass population collapse. Even survivors of city and urban areas are so psychologically damaged they don't survive and don't reproduce. — Uneducated Pleb

We don't know how certainly inevitable all this is. It is conceivable that wise, thoughtful, scientific and socially enlightened solutions could be devised which would render these calamities moot. What is much, much less conceivable is that "wise, thoughtful, scientific and socially enlightened solutions" will ever see the light of day, much less be implemented.

Still, some progress is being made. Population has stabilized (not shrinking, though) in much of the world. Some areas are still growing way too fast. The means of generating fairly clean energy from nuclear, solar, and wind are available. Having people clustered in cities is more efficient than having them spread out across the countryside, ruining essential farm land.

The cities can be cleaned up; they don't have to be smoky, filthy, garbage-strewn shit holes, to use a famous phrase. A major piece of that is not using cars to move people around. Do it with mass transit, foot traffic, and bicycles.

The dystopian stuff is mostly going to be the result of climate change, and we just aren't doing nearly enough for carbon dioxide and methane abatement. We have probably passed the point at which we can do some things easily. For some time, ever solution has been getting more difficult, and they will keep getting more difficult.

Human responses to stresses aren't quite the same as they are for rat populations; we (presumably) have more flexible response capability that rats. But yes, there is no doubt that after a certain amount of environmental degradation and crowding, people's behavior tends to become more disorganized.

Project Implicit (the implicit bias measurement test site) is a good example of the problem of social science as a whole. Thinking and behavior are difficult to precisely measure and connect.

No one doubts that prejudicial thinking and behavior exists; no one doubts that people are biased; we can observe biased behavior. Still, we can and do sometimes misattribute a given bias to behavior. When examined very closely, thinking and behavior have a not altogether straightforward relationship. We can misinterpret observed behavior.

Tests (like Project Implicit's) attempt to get closer to the truth of the matter by measuring behaviors in an artificial, controlled setting. The tests employ interesting and possibly valid strategies, but the results may or may not seem individually congruent with one's own self-knowledge. Drawing a strong relationship between these kinds of tests and results on the one hand, and real-world behaviors is difficult at best.

I think conspiracy theories are healthy - thinking of possible alternatives is a sign of intelligence. Of course everything has limits; at least they're supposed to be within the bounds of reason. — TheMadFool

Good point.

I don't mean to pick on just you here with my rambling, Crankus, but what bothers me the most about the idea of white privilege, and indeed privilege in itself, is the tendency of those who believe in it to focus almost entirely on macro examples. — Buxtebuddha

I'm too armored in white male privilege to fell any slings and arrows from your response. Just kidding.

It is not possible to address macro and micro aspects of society at the same time. Thank you for your helpful personal anecdote.

Privilege comes as a package. Those who really have a lot of privilege have it because of their wealth, education, social connections, physical appearance, personality, heritage, and race and sex. When I was last in Chicago (before the 2016 election) I stopped in to survey Trump Tower. I wandered around looking for whatever there was, and quickly noticed that I was being followed. I clearly didn't belong there, despite being white and male.

The school I attended was 100% white, and there was a hierarchy of white males. The "privileged" white males were on the basketball or football teams, had lots of friends, (got good grades, I guess; don't know for sure), were good looking, and so on. There was also a hierarchy of white females. Most of the students were excluded from the higher reaches of the hierarchy. It was simply not open.

I'm well aware that many blacks are systematically excluded from... all sorts of things. It isn't just that they are black. They often present as poorly educated, not well versed in standard English (which is spoken by all races in English speaking countries), not dressed in standard business attire, and so on. Their deficiencies may not be their fault; their language usage and attire may be culturally inflected. None the less, they will get the brushoff if they are too far from the mean -- and so will whites, asians, hispanics, and native americans.

It is always a question for the excluded whether, and in what, they really want to be included. Being an outlier has its advantages. By being excluded in the past, gay men were able to put together community for themselves. I've been excluded and I've been accepted; acceptance feels better. But exclusion is one of the possible things that can happen.

I used to think JFK conspiracy theories were baloney, but after 55 years of deep denial, I'm now willing to entertain the notion that perhaps, possibly, potentially, there could have been others involved. It isn't necessary, however.

The 9/11 conspiracies all seem extremely far-fetched and implausible.

On the other hand, it is in some ways surprising that there are not more conspiracies being floated. Maybe the Lockerbie bombing in 1988--surely a tin-pot dictator wouldn't be able to pull off a proper bombing. The British must have had something to do with it. Or maybe an unknown Nazi cell did it. Why wasn't the Ebola or Zika virus blamed on the U. S. Government? AIDS, after all, was the subject of such a conspiracy (CIA plot).

Conspiracy theorists seem to be a lazy lot; they are overlooking a lot of possibilities.

so you will have a new body when you die. — bahman

Good to know. Looking forward to it. Is there an option package?

It doesn't matter to me that reason tends to be a slave of our passions — Sam26

You may be giving the "passions" too negative a spin; they are not the 7 deadly sins. After all, your desire to pursue logic above all else, is a passion. The satisfaction of achieving logical argument, and the pleasure you take in doing logic, thinking about logic, are passions.

Of course, the passions can lead one astray; logic isn't fool proof either. But both passion and logical reasoning can lead us along the right paths.

racist, misogynistic, and repeatedly failed businessman — Maw

Fire and Fury the book about Trump's campaign and arrival in the White House, elaborated on 3 characteristics which are alarming:

1. Trump doesn't, and apparently hasn't, read much.
2. He watches a lot of television.
3. He has a short attention span.

Thee are worrisome flaws; in my mind they are worse than being racist, misogynistic, and failed in business (that last? don't know. ) Watching a lot of television (particularly, commercial cable shows) and not reading widely leaves one's knowledge about many national and world issues either impoverished or invisible.

He doesn't seem to have surrounded himself by people who can step in as competent content providers when content is needed.

Having a short attention span is obviously troubling, because there are so many problems which any national executive has to deal with which require sustained thought.

Trump isn't uneducated. but he wasn't recently educated. Maintaining intellectual vigor requires ongoing wide study, reading, engagement, and so on. He doesn't seem to have done that. Now, a lot of people fail to remain intellectually vigorous, but they aren't The President, either. Ronald Reagan suffered from this condition as well, in addition to sliding into dementia.

His abrupt withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and withdrawal from some important trade negotiations suggest the sort of thing that happens when "uninformed impatience" guides the ship of state.

if a white man leverages his identity to connect with people of his own skin color and gender in order to get voted into office, can you imagine what the left would say? Oh, Neo-nazi! White Supremacist! Patriarchy! — Agustino

There is a difference between being a white male, and putting that status forward in terms of blood, virility, fatherland, and all that. As Peterson pointed out, white people and male people have certain advantages (and disadvantages). A minority of white people hold a good share of the power in society, so being white is an indication that one will have enough power to carry out at least some parts of one's political platform.

Barack Obama's single greatest liability was that he was a successful black man, something that conservatives found terminally irksome. The conservatives probably would have liked him better if he used poor grammar, mumbled, and had a couple of drug convictions and a robbery or two on his record. That he was a lawyer, college professor, crisp English speaker, cool calm and collected, crime record free, and more cultured than them was just... intolerable.

Rightly or wrongly, men have occupied a lot of leadership positions, and seeing a male in a leadership role is comforting to many people, in a way that seeing a woman in the same position is not. One doesn't have to "leverage" white, male; it's already been done.

The white supremacists, on the other hand, explicitly put forward their race, gender, heterosexuality, uncircumcised dick, and so forth, against blacks, gays, Jews, and whoever is on their list of unwanted. They don't attempt to appeal to a broad spectrum of society -- anything but.

Hear hear. aka (Y)

Uncultured barbarians who have the means generally want entre to the class with matching amounts of money. The Cultured barbarians who got there first generally want to fence in their estates to keep new money out. Yes, it is snobbism, of course. This is an old problem for new money. As you become a wildly successful uncultured barbarian, rolling in cash from your various entrepreneurial activities, you will want to join the cocktail party / dinner party / dance party / board room circuit along with the other successful people.

How do you do that? You probably don't have a pedigree which would win you admission (no recent tzars, dukes, or earls in your family tree). Being white isn't privilege enough. Academic degrees definitely won't cut it. What you will do is fake a background. There are standardized methods of doing this. You live in the right kind of mansion, wear the right kind of clothes, go to the right church, give generously to the right charities, volunteer your services on the right committees, and in 30 years you might be accepted, grudgingly. Then your sons and daughters will reap the reward. They will be accepted as scions of money old enough not to still stink.

And per George Bernard Shaw, you also talk the right way. Very important to get the accent and idiom down cold.

Agustino Jr. can then marry the daughter (or son, if they turns out gay) of the leading family. It's a long range project. Good luck.

all emotion does is cloud the issue — Sam26

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. David Hume

The mainspring that runs our brain is the limbic system (the emotions) not the pre-frontal cortex (our center of reasoning). Moral education is more the instruction of the passions than the instruction of reason.

Imagination would be decidedly helpful in getting through the 1000 year stretch, but imagination has to have something to work on. Think about how you would imagine the pleasures of sex if you had never had sex, or never seen or heard a depiction of sex. One's fantasy would be kind of impoverished.

So. therefore, get as many experiences as you can of all kinds, real, read, or heard about. Then you will have more raw material for the reactors of your imagination.

So, Agustino, a lot of the stuff that gets batted around these days from the left and the right both is like fako interior decorations. It just isn't real.

Paul Fussell wrote a book a few decades back, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, that explains all this. There are certain features of the would-be old-money upper class look. even though one is, like yourself. a nouvelle arrivee. For instance, the wood floor should be dark wood -- as if it had been walked on for at least 200 years. There are products available to achieve the desired darkness.

One should buy real oriental rugs of course, made by suffering children under horrible working conditions, but they need to be old oriental rugs, slightly threadbare. After all, they were bought when Wilson was president. And so on.

If he wasn't POTUS, would that not be disturbing? — Agustino

No. Then God would be in his heaven where he belongs and all would be right with the world, sort of.

Yes, decoration is supposed to look nice. It aimed high but missed. You can't "legitimately" glue some veneer onto wallboard and call the job done.

Part of the problem was that the camera angle was too wide. Had it narrowed in on Peterson, the podium, and the fako backdrop, it would have come off better. As Oscar Wilde put it, "Only shallow people do not judge by appearances".

I thought the setting looked quite nice and fancy, though I don't know the place. — Agustino

Oh dear... So now we know what your mansion will look like. Hint: if you're going to go for the ruling class look in decor, go all the way: fako wood paneling, fako styrofoam beams in the ceiling, fako oriental-type carpets, fako leather/oak/horsehair-stuffed chairs, etc. No visible florescent lighting, use period colors, no anachronistic brand names on anything.

The fake decoration wasn't hideous, certainly, but it was the wrong fake decoration for the space. A modern hotel conference room isn't entitled to (possible, but probably not) marble statuary (too white, bright for one thing), books that look leather bound (either fake or bought by the ton by interior decoration supply companies) and fako 18th-19th century woodwork. There were too many other signals that this was merely a conference room in a hotel -- the chairs, lighting, walls, paint, etc.

The decor has nothing to do with what Peterson said or didn't say -- it was just off-putting on its own.

Oh dear, what's wrong with the TRUMP brand now? — Agustino

As a hotel brand, nothing I suppose. It's just that the eponymous developer of the brand happens to be POTUS, and as such is disturbing in ever so many ways.

PS It doesn't help his case at all that the lectern he's at has a big sign saying 'TRUMP Hotels'. It's not his fault, just bad luck, but it reduces his chances of changing anybody's mind to just about zero. — andrewk

I had the same distraction factor of seeing the TRUMP brand. Plus the fake decor behind the lectern.

Peterson is a good talker, have to hand that to him. He does a good job of supporting his points, pretty much.

I do have difficulty connecting Karl Marx, the man of the 19th century, to spawning post-modernism, or that Karl Marx is responsible for Lenin's, Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, or the North Korean's horrible acts. In his name, yes, really really bad things were done. But other people managed to do very, very bad things without Marx -- like slavery and genocide in the western hemisphere before Marx was even born.

Also, the US led the way in nuclear terrorism. Given the relatively loose control that was actually exercised over the many thousands of atomic and thermonuclear bombs (never mind the alleged sole authority of the POTUS to use them) it is miraculous that a totally ruinous nuclear war didn't happen by accident. Of course, it's not too late to have that war, since we have enough atomic weapons ready to launch (but far fewer than before the nuclear reduction treaties) to bring about a nuclear winter. Can't blame that on Marx.

I could use more knowledge on just how POMO did come about. The topic is about as attractive as figuring out exactly how a fat berg stuffed up the London sewers, but if anybody has a suggestion for a BRIEF discussion of POMO's history, please post it.

Without eyes to see or ears to hear, how would you even know you were in a women's locker room? For all you would know, you might be hovering in a diesel engine repair shop or in a swamp or in the middle of a black hole (wouldn't affect you since you would be entirely incorporeal).

It isn't the case that Marx focussed on conflict between haves and have nots: He focussed on the conflict between producers and owners -- the working class and the bourgeoisie. The WRONG that Marx identified wasn't that some people had more than others, it was that those who produce all wealth (the workers) do not benefit proportionately, and that those who benefit DISPROPORTIONATELY (the bourgeoisie) do no work at all. EDIT: They perform work putting things together, but once assembled, they hire people to make sure it stays put together.

Another thing we have to take into account about Peterson is his milieu: Peterson is a college professor. College campus are exactly the kind of place where one would expect ideological excess because on campus are thousands of students (well... hundreds, anyway) who are anxious to try on radical new theories in a relatively safe environment (they are, after all, paying customers).

The wannabe radicals may be right, wrong, or not even wrong, but they can't, don't, and won't affect society very much. Once they get out of college and get hired to work in a large corporation, they will find they are not allowed anywhere close to the levers of power. If they attempt college stunts at work they are likely to get fired.

Peterson has perhaps been overly influenced by what happens on his (and other) campuses. It's a very lively but unrepresentative school playground.

EDIT: I should not minimize the spread of POMO-type thinking. The Obama administration issued a directive to schools which bent over backwards to kiss the ground beneath its feet that trans students could use whichever toilet they identified with, whichever locker room they identified with, and that to protect their privacy, parents should not be notified of the decision in a given school. The Trump administration withdrew the directive. So, I approve of at least one act of the Trump administration.

Didn't Marx hold that advances in production, technology, and so on would result in new kinds of thinking? That seems to have been, and is the case. Birth control, gay liberation, women's liberation, black power, chicano power, white power, disability liberation, trans-sexual therapy, ACT UP, Black Lives Matter, pro-life, Antifacissimo, and so on and so forth, are the result of those advances. Better communication technology, new medicines (birth control pills, morning after pills), surgical procedures, a de-industrializing economy, global trade, scientific advances, and plain old political organizing made all kinds of changes possible--and they happened.

Can some vague "Left" claim credit for all of this? No. The suffrage movement is about as old as Marxism. The women's movement never needed leftist guidance. They had their own thought-leaders. The modern gay rights movement started partly as a result of large number of gay men and women being evicted from the armed forces at 3 different port bases during and after WWII: L.A., San Francisco, and New York. The navy created the concentrations of gay people who starting developing a gay culture.

Racial Minorities didn't need the left to tell them they were oppressed, either. They learned that directly from life. I don't think disability activists were ever characterized as leftists: they were just tired of not being able to live in a society which made zero accommodations for the large number of disabled people.

It isn't clear to me exactly where transsexualism came from. You know, the first one (on record anyway) was Christine Jorgensen who had sex remodeling surgery in 1951 in Denmark. CJ grew up in the Bronx in New York--not a hotbed of radical ideology at the time.

The left didn't invent all the trans nonsense. It bubbled up among transsexuals, and the POMO left found it particularly attractive. given their own weird posturing.

Somehow, I don't think most members of "the left" who you consider to be behind all these identity schemes would recognize a communist or a socialist if their lives depended on it. It's a strange kind of Marxism, if you ask me -- perverse.

Indubitably.

One probably wouldn't become an atheist in order to overcome nihilism; indeed, having an anchor in a faith tradition helps one deal with nihilism more effectively. Yes, reason can lead to nihilism -- it's one of the possible positions, and a questing mind is likely to discover it sooner or later -- though most people get a whiff of it and keep moving.

There are more advantages to being anchored in a faith tradition than there are disadvantages. And being "anchored" leaves plenty of room for interpreting, reinterpreting the tradition as changing circumstances arise. "Time makes ancient good uncouth." A faith that worked as a child cease working later in life, but the "tradition" remains, and with it one's social guides, morals, ethics, liturgies, and so forth.

But... I'm glad you overcame your brief encounter with nihilism.