My first day as a senior in high school , our guidance counselor told us that if we didn’t already apply for college you were behind and losing. I got so depressed I gave up and went to trade school.
@@Rick-ih7wpI agree, but it wasn’t until later in life I learned I had an interest in things like philosophy. I try to look into it as much as I can, but at the end of the day I’m still just a welder with wireless ear buds.
This is a fantastic lecture. You're able to perfectly articulate a set of social ills that are so vast, we all recognize them but can scarcly call them out. Thank you, Wes.
When Wes was talking about the devaluation of the qualitative experience and the substitutive heightening of quantitative abstractions, it reminded me of a cannabinated rant by psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna from the 90's, and I wanted to share it with you all in hopes that you can see it map onto to that which Wes is talking about, with the caveat that the rhetoric comes from an admittedly inflammatory angle. It goes: "Catalysts (in reference to psychedelic drugs) to say what has never been said. To see what has never been seen. To draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance, and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language. And, what's really important, is, I call it, 'the felt presence of direct experience,' which is a fancy term which just simply means: we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are, now, is the most immediate sector of your universe, and, if you are worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to icons. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit brained this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you, and your friends, and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told no, we're unimportant, we're peripheral, get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind, and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all of this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where's that at?"
thanks for this panacea. i feel slightly more awake now!! i do feel the scarcity of recognition does cause our compensatory movement, which, as you said, leads us away from the ways we naturally wish to be socially constructive
4:10 Community. (Is beneficial, to help each other grow alongside each other) 🤝🏻 5:11 Self-Reliance, Independence. 🎒 5:44 Community-Reliance, Dependence. 🤝🏻 6:40 Back to Earth 🌎 9:55 Making your own way 🚶🏡 15:24 What happens if…? - Scarcity. - Nihilism. 16:43 I want things. - Money 💰 - Stuff - Material Goods 17:40 Schools 🏫
I think it’s so true that the idea of a meeting-with-self is not appreciated in the states. Its incredible paradox that amid all this individualism, the self is forgotten.
When our society presents a gigantic government oversight, we loose the ability to live independently. Try to turn any direction and you will be confronted by government regulations, bureaucratic intervention and total control over your individuality.
I have a question. So, my read of the situation of individualism as you lay it out is a lack of recognition of interdependency. We are interdependent upon each other to survive, but we don't recognize this on a conscious level because of the historical momentum enforcing individualist attitudes. My question is: How in the history of philosophy have philosophers dealt with a problem like this, where there is a dissonance between the societal facts of the matter, in our case, super surplus and huge webs of interdependency, and the considerations of the culture that manifest to deny that, again, in our case, artificial scarcity and faux paus individualism?
Although it doesn't address the topics you mention, I might point you in the direction of the late philosopher, Mark Fisher along with the Soviet/Russian concept of 'Hypernormalization.' Both Fisher and Hypernormalization explore how a culture can essentially _pull the wool_ over their own eyes. Not to say that the are blind or unaware of a situation, but that they avoid reality with a sort of collective agency.
I imagine that our percentage of unemployed has more to do with the _fashion_ in which we measure unemployment than the actual number of people who do not hold craft in an active profession.
@J5L5M6 100% agree, but that statistic is 100% wrong. we don't know who are stay at homes, self imployed, non taxpayers, artists drug dealers and mafia.
It's crazy, how much society fights people who choose to live off the grid in solitude. There have always been hermits that chose to survive as islands in the wilderness.
@@MasterBeehive Would you get angry at slaves who escaped their masters, just because their masters taught them to speak? Social contract means nothing if there is not a hinterlands to flee too. Society has no right to exist if it would usurp all of the wilderness.
@@MasterBeehive No. people are a product of nature and nature is always creating variation. Society does not 'think'. Only people can think, and you cannot stop saying what other people thought for you. Language is a protocol, a game with common rules. People can decide to not play the game, to not play the game of language or of society. You are displeased with reality itself and it will never go away, no matter what 'great philosophers say' they are just wrong humans.
Child prodigies have the problem of finding understanding with the average person.we applaude gifted children yet same with so called genius's in any sphere of beliefs.
One thing I noticed about the United States is as being born in America vs my parents country of Guyana is that is this. In my parents country of Guyana individualism is frowned upon, one most support his or own community, and the wider collective. In the United States, the big emphasis is in the individual in relation to the community, and the importance of the community. The united states on the other hand is the importance of the individual and the individual relation to the community and importance of the community. The united states culturally and socially does not like collectivism, anarchism Marxism, communism, fascism, Marxism, catholicism, eastern othrodoxy because these ideas imposes a threat or moral issue against the individual and agaisnt the community.
I think most people fundamentally fail to understand what relationships could be or what social events could necessarily come about because of the way that capitalism organizes people, right now its pretty shit here and there is no incentive to fix it because it works. The ownership class will always take the path of least resistance in order to not fuck anything else up. I think on some level Americans need to experience pain to understand it as a motivator. Then people can use that experience down the road, as long as they remember the pain. There is a way to experience a good, constructive life without pain and it involves having a good social network. Pain works if you need to motivate someone to do something but it does not help them do what they want to do. While a good social network could conceivably create real problems for some bad people who want to keep exploiting everyone.
@@elinope4745 in one of his lectures, Wes said that supposedly loneliness is worse than diabetes and cancer from smoking. I want to find out if he was unhappy and depressed. I can't believe loneliness is so awful. I live on my own and I don't feel anything like that. I like my life.
@@_catra He was unhappy sometimes, depressed sometimes, happy sometimes. His time alone was sometimes lonely and sometimes solitude. All people are like that, even you.
Being alone =/= being lonely. Some people do not have the mental tools they need to be independent due to upbringing. It can be bad for you, it ties into your value as an individual. But others just get used to it. As humans we are aligned more with a group dynamic but we couldn't evolve without the ability to be alone. In babies we can see certain things like crying when mom is not in sight for up to 3 years, because they physically cannot do anything and their concept of themselves is not fully developed.
I can't for the life of me understand how an almost 20 videos of critique of christianity and it's ills, this same critic can only say "reality is croocked by the original sin of liberalism". People are animals ruled by the rules of variation. There will always be different people filling different niches and that is part of reality. Order is not forever and thus nature will also favor individualistic instincts.
I disagree about "good" education. TH-cam has good education, Khan academy is good education, about one in twenty universities have good education. They are propaganda shops for the most part.
@@JHimminy I said it has good education, not that it doesn't also have bad education or that it is particularly easy to parse them. It's still better than most schools which don't have methods for good education. My country was a plurality of cultures from it's inception. The government was intentionally handicapped and limited as an agreeable middle ground for them to meet and unite against foreign enemies.
Good men are scarce as an effect of women's choices. Women go for the best men and men are forced to compete in the mating market and women very much do pick winners and losers. The men who are picked by women aren't just picked by a few of them, and a lot of men who women don't pick will never be picked by any of them. Women would rather share a winner than commit to a loser. They created that with their choices and it creates competition in most other aspects of society. This has almost nothing to do with school and education. Women can't be taught to not be like this, only to subvert their own desires. And that creates losers of women who must subvert their desires vs those who don't.
My first day as a senior in high school , our guidance counselor told us that if we didn’t already apply for college you were behind and losing. I got so depressed I gave up and went to trade school.
Saved you from the rigor of college. Probably for the better.
Trade school is not giving up! Those who think that the trades are below them should be denied access to their services.
@@Rick-ih7wpI agree, but it wasn’t until later in life I learned I had an interest in things like philosophy. I try to look into it as much as I can, but at the end of the day I’m still just a welder with wireless ear buds.
@@Eviticus-Maximus "Just a welder." So, you gave up. We need welders but not those who claim to be "just a welder."
@@Rick-ih7wp okay?
This is a fantastic lecture. You're able to perfectly articulate a set of social ills that are so vast, we all recognize them but can scarcly call them out. Thank you, Wes.
When Wes was talking about the devaluation of the qualitative experience and the substitutive heightening of quantitative abstractions, it reminded me of a cannabinated rant by psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna from the 90's, and I wanted to share it with you all in hopes that you can see it map onto to that which Wes is talking about, with the caveat that the rhetoric comes from an admittedly inflammatory angle.
It goes: "Catalysts (in reference to psychedelic drugs) to say what has never been said. To see what has never been seen. To draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance, and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language. And, what's really important, is, I call it, 'the felt presence of direct experience,' which is a fancy term which just simply means: we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are, now, is the most immediate sector of your universe, and, if you are worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to icons. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit brained this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you, and your friends, and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told no, we're unimportant, we're peripheral, get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind, and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all of this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where's that at?"
God bless that man. Such a burst of fresh air.
thanks for this panacea. i feel slightly more awake now!! i do feel the scarcity of recognition does cause our compensatory movement, which, as you said, leads us away from the ways we naturally wish to be socially constructive
4:10 Community. (Is beneficial, to help each other grow alongside each other) 🤝🏻
5:11 Self-Reliance, Independence. 🎒
5:44 Community-Reliance, Dependence. 🤝🏻
6:40 Back to Earth 🌎
9:55 Making your own way 🚶🏡
15:24 What happens if…?
- Scarcity.
- Nihilism.
16:43 I want things.
- Money 💰
- Stuff
- Material Goods
17:40 Schools 🏫
I think it’s so true that the idea of a meeting-with-self is not appreciated in the states. Its incredible paradox that amid all this individualism, the self is forgotten.
Thankyou for this insightfull perspective...❤
When our society presents a gigantic government oversight, we loose the ability to live independently. Try to turn any direction and you will be confronted by government regulations, bureaucratic intervention and total control over your individuality.
Great stuff!
Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil.
Great lecture
I have a question.
So, my read of the situation of individualism as you lay it out is a lack of recognition of interdependency. We are interdependent upon each other to survive, but we don't recognize this on a conscious level because of the historical momentum enforcing individualist attitudes. My question is: How in the history of philosophy have philosophers dealt with a problem like this, where there is a dissonance between the societal facts of the matter, in our case, super surplus and huge webs of interdependency, and the considerations of the culture that manifest to deny that, again, in our case, artificial scarcity and faux paus individualism?
Although it doesn't address the topics you mention, I might point you in the direction of the late philosopher, Mark Fisher along with the Soviet/Russian concept of 'Hypernormalization.' Both Fisher and Hypernormalization explore how a culture can essentially _pull the wool_ over their own eyes. Not to say that the are blind or unaware of a situation, but that they avoid reality with a sort of collective agency.
Thanks Wes!
Prof, where did you get that statistic of the unemployment rate in the US? The highest unemployment is in South africa at 33%, and the US is at 3-5%
I imagine that our percentage of unemployed has more to do with the _fashion_ in which we measure unemployment than the actual number of people who do not hold craft in an active profession.
@J5L5M6 100% agree, but that statistic is 100% wrong. we don't know who are stay at homes, self imployed, non taxpayers, artists drug dealers and mafia.
Divide to rule. It's what predators do by default.
This is why the speaker is so divisive in his conclusion?
@@zerotwo7319 I did write this comment for a reason. But that was 2 weeks ago. I'd have to relistenééé
Philosophical history where wes's heart lives
It's crazy, how much society fights people who choose to live off the grid in solitude. There have always been hermits that chose to survive as islands in the wilderness.
@@MasterBeehive Would you get angry at slaves who escaped their masters, just because their masters taught them to speak? Social contract means nothing if there is not a hinterlands to flee too. Society has no right to exist if it would usurp all of the wilderness.
Natural law doesn't allow for society sans hinterland. Countries that hold rebellious slaves quickly collapse.
USA was founded in rebellion
@@MasterBeehive No. people are a product of nature and nature is always creating variation. Society does not 'think'. Only people can think, and you cannot stop saying what other people thought for you.
Language is a protocol, a game with common rules. People can decide to not play the game, to not play the game of language or of society. You are displeased with reality itself and it will never go away, no matter what 'great philosophers say' they are just wrong humans.
Awesome
Where's The Louisiana episode?
Child prodigies have the problem of finding understanding with the average person.we applaude gifted children yet same with so called genius's in any sphere of beliefs.
Everyone says this before dying.
One thing I noticed about the United States is as being born in America vs my parents country of Guyana is that is this. In my parents country of Guyana individualism is frowned upon, one most support his or own community, and the wider collective. In the United States, the big emphasis is in the individual in relation to the community, and the importance of the community. The united states on the other hand is the importance of the individual and the individual relation to the community and importance of the community. The united states culturally and socially does not like collectivism, anarchism Marxism, communism, fascism, Marxism, catholicism, eastern othrodoxy because these ideas imposes a threat or moral issue against the individual and agaisnt the community.
I think most people fundamentally fail to understand what relationships could be or what social events could necessarily come about because of the way that capitalism organizes people, right now its pretty shit here and there is no incentive to fix it because it works. The ownership class will always take the path of least resistance in order to not fuck anything else up. I think on some level Americans need to experience pain to understand it as a motivator. Then people can use that experience down the road, as long as they remember the pain. There is a way to experience a good, constructive life without pain and it involves having a good social network. Pain works if you need to motivate someone to do something but it does not help them do what they want to do. While a good social network could conceivably create real problems for some bad people who want to keep exploiting everyone.
If Newton was unsociable and a loner, was he unhappy despite doing something he enjoyed?
Was he unhappy, did he enjoy those things? I don't accept these oversimplified premises.
Lol
@@elinope4745 in one of his lectures, Wes said that supposedly loneliness is worse than diabetes and cancer from smoking. I want to find out if he was unhappy and depressed. I can't believe loneliness is so awful. I live on my own and I don't feel anything like that. I like my life.
@@_catra He was unhappy sometimes, depressed sometimes, happy sometimes. His time alone was sometimes lonely and sometimes solitude. All people are like that, even you.
Being alone =/= being lonely. Some people do not have the mental tools they need to be independent due to upbringing. It can be bad for you, it ties into your value as an individual. But others just get used to it. As humans we are aligned more with a group dynamic but we couldn't evolve without the ability to be alone. In babies we can see certain things like crying when mom is not in sight for up to 3 years, because they physically cannot do anything and their concept of themselves is not fully developed.
I can't for the life of me understand how an almost 20 videos of critique of christianity and it's ills, this same critic can only say "reality is croocked by the original sin of liberalism".
People are animals ruled by the rules of variation. There will always be different people filling different niches and that is part of reality.
Order is not forever and thus nature will also favor individualistic instincts.
I disagree about "good" education. TH-cam has good education, Khan academy is good education, about one in twenty universities have good education. They are propaganda shops for the most part.
@@JHimminy I said it has good education, not that it doesn't also have bad education or that it is particularly easy to parse them.
It's still better than most schools which don't have methods for good education. My country was a plurality of cultures from it's inception. The government was intentionally handicapped and limited as an agreeable middle ground for them to meet and unite against foreign enemies.
Gah, life is complicated.
Good men are scarce as an effect of women's choices. Women go for the best men and men are forced to compete in the mating market and women very much do pick winners and losers. The men who are picked by women aren't just picked by a few of them, and a lot of men who women don't pick will never be picked by any of them.
Women would rather share a winner than commit to a loser. They created that with their choices and it creates competition in most other aspects of society.
This has almost nothing to do with school and education. Women can't be taught to not be like this, only to subvert their own desires. And that creates losers of women who must subvert their desires vs those who don't.
Game theory and 80/20 rule at best.
What if they are all just stuck hidden away somewhere like you?
@@woverniox There are many of those. But they aren't making men winners are they? The mate market is the primary market, all other markets serve it.
@@woverniox I'm the kind that a lot of wives would cheat with. I stay hidden because they are nothing but trouble. I don't want them.
@@elinope4745 I hate to be the dude who pisses on your pity parade but there is a whole ocean of fish out there man. You only need one of them
You need a text editor.