"Can't we all just get along?"
Some good stuff in The New Yorker this weekend.
From George Saunders' piece.
Thought Experiment No. 1
Imagine a baseball stadium. Fill it with twenty thousand Americans. Require Democrats to wear blue and Republicans red. At a podium at second base, have a person make a speech about, say, immigration.
Soon enough, fights break out.
Rewind.
Same twenty thousand people. Let them dress however they like. Instead of the speechmaking guy, put two baseball teams out there. Instantly, it’s a different energy. Among the fans for Team One will be both liberals and conservatives, suddenly united in common cause. Ditto Team Two. There will be disagreements, sure, but because we’ve been taught about acceptable baseball-game discourse, these will tend to be relatively good-natured.
Questions for Discussion:
Regarding the first example:
Who put out the order to wear red or blue?
Who dragged that podium out there?
Who selected the topic? And from what list
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Thought Experiment No. 5
There’s a parable, recounted in Paulo Coelho’s novel Veronika Decides to Die, among other places, about a kingdom whose well was poisoned by a wizard, such that a person drinking from the well would be driven insane. Everyone in the kingdom drank from the well, except the king and queen, who had a separate well for their use. Alarmed by the madness of the people, the king tried to issue edicts to control their behavior. To the insane populace, these edicts sounded like nonsense. The king’s problem was this: If he refused to drink from the poisoned well, which would make him insane, the people, believing he was insane, would dethrone him.
Questions for Discussion:
Is it possible that, in our culture, we each have our own customized, algorithm-enforced poisoned well? And that certain “wizards” have learned that lies are an especially potent form of poison? And that, therefore, the wells to which those “wizards” have access are more full of lies than others? And that even the wells that are full of truths aren’t great, since the method of delivery tends to enlarge one truth (one way of seeing) at the expense of others, thereby making it difficult to sustain such fragile things as ambiguity, doubt, sympathy, complexity, or genuine curiosity?
Might we then consider ourselves a culture being actively poisoned, a poisoning to which we are enthusiastically consenting?
What might we do about this?
Provide specific examples.
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"Might we then consider ourselves a culture being actively poisoned, a poisoning to which we are enthusiastically consenting?"
Hmmm... basically "Nihilism?"
ERRATUM
Surely you jest?
Don't get me started on Dubya
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