Posted by Curiositry 10 hours ago
It is repeatedly astonishing how exceptional Americans feel. HN always educate how self - centred American as I dont find here the illiterate and the uneducated but university graduates from the best universites.
For instance on democratic side from Switzerland and Taiwan my country (Germany) can learn more. And how to have a good life, France or Italy or Sweden (list is not finished) are better role models but even then, Germany has its own unique culture which I am currently happy to live in.
“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”
It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.
Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.
And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
1. It’s not possible to influence things on a planetary level, with maybe a very small number of exceptions. Focus on having an impact more locally instead.
2. Disagree that the amount of happiness is finite in the sense of “fixed” or limited. Increasing the amount of total happiness in the world is definitely achievable and worthwhile.
World leaders influence planetary agendas and ideals on a daily basis, deciding who lives and dies with the flourish of a pen or the screed of a late-night tweet. That doesn’t even touch the random encounters online or in person that irreparably change who we grow into as people and the decisions we make that affect others. In fact, it has never been easier for any single person to have an impact across the planet, even if it’s as small as one-on-one.
I also vehemently disagree with happiness being infinite on a single-planet species. We have finite resources, finite materials, and finite people, all with finite time. Infinite cannot emerge from the finite, though we often mistake vast expanses as infinite because we cannot calculate or visualize limits for ourselves. It is not physically possible for everyone on the planet to live like the richest Americans, in palatial estates with private jets and dedicated servants, and therefore (material) happiness is finite and must be budgeted and balanced. In that sense, instilling a sense of “enough” in children and adults both is crucial to the balancing of our species and maximizing happiness.
You can keep toiling for mud pies. The way I see it, there are two options: let go or be dragged
You lot keep parroting the same schlock generation after generation because you hope it’s true, and yet you’re dim enough to conflate work and labor with somehow being optional to existence.
My god, man, read a book. Go outside, pursue a passion with the fire in your heart, do something with your time beyond merely pursuing empty luxuries and a hollow life of non-existence. Nothing you say to me can convince me that this time, this invention, will finally be the one that destroys work and enables utopia, because to remove humanity from existence - be it in labor, or work, or passion of pursuit - is a utopia for nobody but those cretins who abhor their fellow humans.
I need to eat man
In any case, what falls under the label of “education” today is a disconnected assortment of vague aims and promises. The first on the list is “job training”. Oh, how far we have fallen. Classically, education is perhaps best exemplified by the liberal arts [1], the artes liberales, which were oriented toward producing intellectually free people and contrasted with the so-called “servile arts” (artes serviles) which are precisely what job training is concerned with. Freedom, classically, is not absence of restraint, but the ability to be the kind of thing you are. Thus, if human beings are rational[2] animals - if our telos is to be agents of truth - then the more rational we are, the more obedient we are to reason, the more human we are, and therefore the most free we are. It should be obvious. A drug user says he is free, because he takes drugs whenever he wants. But the drugs blunt his humanity and frustrate his rationality, and they enslave him over time. This example may be extrapolated accordingly.
So, education is fundamentally about enabling people to become competent human beings as rational beings and agents of truth. You can’t mechanize or automate that away as the end is the actualization of the human himself as human, not the production of goods or services. And because we’re social animals - our social nature following from the rational - we learn through speech and through communication with each other. A school is - when run properly - a community of learning.
[0] Inevitably, some uninformed person will latch onto “liberal” thinking I mean this in the partisan sense. I don’t. I mean it in the philosophical sense. We are all liberals today. In the US, both major parties are firmly planted in liberal soil.
[1] When I say “liberal arts”, I don’t mean what we call today the liberal arts. Recall that the classical liberal arts existed before the whole “Two Cultures” nonsense, after which they became a kind of stenography for power and an apologetics of the hyperindividualist liberal culture.
[2] “Rationality” in the classical sense is not confined to just inference and calculation (which would fall under ratio).