You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb ‘to like’ from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitution for loving.
But Jonathan Franzen is looking at love/like/etc. in very socio-culturally accepted ways. Accepted does not mean true, nor does it mean untrue. It means we have an “image” of what “love” should be — an idealization. The image we have of Love is placed on such a high pedestal, that we don’t dare think of it in any other way. And that unwillingness to think differently is wrong. (Except, I’m being silly, because I think unwillingness to dissent is also a phenomenon with roots in biology and evolutionary fitness. Group-think is totally necessary for survival, thus desired.)
Our image of Love is based solely on cultural tradition, trusted because of Time. Trusting that something is true solely on the basis that it’s been accepted for longer than we can fathom, is a fallacy.
Let’s think of it another way: what we know to be Love is just an expression of biological bonding / cooperation that was selected for since it worked well to proliferate the species. Bonding and cooperation — we’re probably more OK with commodification of those things because they’re already on less of a pedestal than Love. They already seem more mundane. Our alarms aren’t going off. And doesn’t it make sense that cooperation between kith (and kin) is based on commodities? Based on assets? It was always about that.
Go play the iPhone game, Osmos. The objective is “Become Bigger”. That’s what life does, at very basic levels. And to do that, it requires assets in the forms of food and children, and it needs resources to obtain food to have children, to become bigger, to multiply.
Sure, that seems reductionist and maybe even “ugly”, but is it really? From that perspective — if you allow yourself to entertain the thought, not even believe it, but just entertain it — doesn’t it make sense that “love” would be “commodified”? It’s just showing up in a different way than we’ve seen before. It’s not some “evil” of the modern, technological age. It’s just an evolution of what always was.
I’m not saying any of the above is factual/certain — just something to consider and break out of the band-wagon a bit. Because my genes are all wrong and I’m probably not gonna multiply.
What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a given task are not sufficient; one must be able to “put one’s personality across” in competition with many others in order to have success. If it were enough for the purpose of making a living to rely on what one knows and what one can do, one’s self-esteem would be in proportion to one’s capacities, that is, to one’s use value. But since success depends largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences oneself as a commodity or, rather, simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold. A person is not concerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming salable. […]
The “identity crisis” of modern society is actually the crisis produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other giant bureaucracies), as a primitive individual’s identity rested upon membership in the clan.
Hypothetically, what would you say to someone asking the “chicken or egg” question about neural chemistry: Does neurologocal/chemical/genetic information precede personality/responses/disposition or is it simply an expression of metaphysical “events”?
For example, those who believe in soul or karma and reincarnation, usually are more partial to the latter answer. For them, “chemistry” cannot possibly add up to the complex phenomenon they witness, therefore they accept the metaphysical answers more readily.
For a scientist, there may be other reasons to question “what came first,” but a metaphysical preference isn’t one of them. I wonder how valid the question is right now, for the scientific community.
It seems to me that we don’t yet know exactly how things add up to what we witness, and yet Evolutionary theory gives tells us that things were not even as organized as this, before. So the idea that there are some metaphysical absolutes that govern behavior seems a little silly, seeing how much behavior has changed over centuries and how much it differs between species (so long as we don’t take the anthropocentric stance, and do value the “morality”/experience/behavioral patterns of other species instead of casting that information aside and believing the “humans are special and endowed” paradigm.)
I’m concerned about this one. Kindle actually has a maximum of highlights one can make per book (I only found out while reading Infinite Jest, after highlighting pages at a time; probably to prevent copying) and I think I might reach it for this one. It’s really good.
Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridiculously unfair. How could it have endured as an institution in Europe for hundreds of years?
The central idea was simple: with God’s intervention, innocence would plainly reveal itself, as the accused thief sank to the bottom of the pond, or the accused adulterer remained unburned by the red hot poker placed in his hand. Only the guilty would drown or burn. (For witches, the ordeal was less “forgiving”: if the accused witch drowned she was presumed innocent; if she bobbed to the surface, she was guilty, whereupon she was hauled off to a waiting fire.)
With time on our hands, my friend and I concocted a plan. She would falsely accuse me of stealing her purse, and then I would lay my hand on the stove and see whether it burned. We fully expected it would burn, and it did. So if the test was that obvious, how could people have trusted to trial by ordeal as a system of justice?
It did seem that likely Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by nature. But what does that actually mean in terms of our brains and our genes? To make progress beyond the broad hunches about our nature, we need something solid to attach the claim to.
‘You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations … When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.’
…
‘Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be antihuman.’
We can’t answer questions about ourselves the same way anymore — by just thinking about it philosophically, looking for some metaphysical reason.
Call it reductionist if you must, but it’s beautiful that even weekly we’re ever-closer to answering our deepest questions by looking into our biological, chemical — and deeper still — physical blueprints.
When wondering why we animals do as we do, we can also inquire about what the particles do, and how those activities travel up and down the chain of magnifications to create a whole, and the epiphenomenon we finally witness.
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.
Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.
I could definitely see that type of anxiety being a source of procrastination. To be too honest: since childhood I’ve had high expectations of myself, and tension along with them.
But despite that, I disagree: personal experience with what I procrastinate on defies the theory. I never (or rarely) put off anything that requires a high degree of performance or anything I think is important for my sense of “worth” — for example, beginning/continuing an online class, writing something that I will publish, or bringing life to an idea I’m passionate about.
The things I put off are the mundane chores: taxes, dishes, cleaning, accounting for whatever. And the reason is simple: I know that those chores — or ones similar to them — will still be around the next day and the next and the next. So until it’s a pressing matter, why should I waste my time? If I got to all my chores right away, I’d only ever spend my time doing chores. So it seems, often. Dishes will pile up ‘til I die, and I won’t regret not doing them. Instead, I would rather devote my time to the important things.
So, no, Procrastination is not laziness. It’s prioritization.
That’d be a pretty good social leveller, come to think of it. So there, James Murdoch. You might well walk around thinking, “Ooh, hooray for me, I’m the chairman and CEO of News Corporation Europe and Asia, not to mention chairman of SKY Italia and STAR TV, the non- executive chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, and a non-executive director of GlaxoSmith-Kline”, but at the end of the day you’re just one of 900 trillion insignificant molecules in an all-encompassing turdiverse. And your glasses are rubbish.
Anyway, the astronomers who made the discovery about Andromeda deserve our awe and respect, because their everyday job consists of dealing with concepts so intense and overwhelming that it’s a wonder their skulls don’t implode through sheer vertigo. Generally speaking, it’s best not to contemplate the full scope of the universe on a day-to-day basis because it makes a mockery of basic chores. It’s Tuesday night and the rubbish van comes first thing Wednesday morning, so you really ought to put the bin bags out, but hey – if our sun were the size of a grain of sand, the stars in our galaxy would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and if our entire galaxy were a grain of sand, the galaxies in our universe would fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools. You and your bin bags. Pfff!
…
How can I flip channels and enjoy Midsomer Murders once I’ve been reminded of the crushing futility of everything? I can’t even get worked up about the murders in that kind of mood. Yeah, kill him. And her. And them. Sod it. It’s all just atoms in an unfathomable vortex.
But unlike Charlie Brooker — who seems bothered by being so awed by it all that he can’t take out the garbage — this is my favorite thing. This is why I have garbage jenga and don’t give a fuck. This is what makes it all bearable and worthwhile.
And yet, for some things, totally unbearable. The things that deserve to be jenga’d like garbage in the face of all this… and yet are not, because they’ve been made important by organizations whose CEOs don’t read enough science news. Pretentious things. The worst things.
Yes. But what’s left out is that an “observer” is not necessarily a conscious being, like a human. Nature is able to observe itself, through interactions between systems that record one another.
The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”[1]
Bernard d’Espagnat (born 1921) is a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality.
I don’t agree with that quote, but I have no idea which facts or experiments he’s referring to, and the “Education and career” section make it clear that this guy isn’t pulling things out of his bum. Sounds like an interesting person.
I’m curious if he means the experiments affected by { observation }, in which case that’s not necessarily the conclusion to which one should jump. But I’d like to find out specifically what he’s talking about.
The motivation for inquiry is to understand the world so as to change ones relationship to it:
“how can I live a happy life?
Gareth Williams, talking about Seneca.
Loosely quoted, because I was taking live notes at the { Theories of Everything } roundtable.
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Annoyed that I couldn’t find { Gareth Williams } or Seneca anywhere on my blog so far — have I really not recorded this? It is/was a central idea in { The Operating System }. Maybe I really didn’t this time, but it’s increasingly bad in general — search engines only point to the surface level, the “most popular” results. What’s the point of tags and Google site index if you can’t even find buried things?
