Random Thoughts, Part 3

Made at: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

Several months ago I started collecting my random thoughts, things I think about while I'm eating breakfast, walking down the street, getting ready for bed, trying to become a better teacher, looking at a fortune cookie and thinking I could do better, or what have you.  You can see my previous 36 random thoughts in Part 1 and Part 2.  Alas, Part 3 is upon us, so get ready for random thoughts 37-58!




37. Imagine if more people cared as much about being decent human beings as they care about being edgy.

38. What if we just decided to give every human being adequate food, shelter, healthcare, and education?  Is there a reason we don’t do this?

39. Hypothesis: Movies like V for Vendetta and The Dark Knight helped create the current glut of mal-adjusted young white men who make the internet a terrible place from 4chan and obnoxious Star Wars fans to MRAs and incels.  Such movies foster the cult of irreverent iconoclasts piercing the veil of a phony society and shaking us awake from our dogmatic slumber, but in practice this cultish fixation often amounts to being an asshole incapable of empathy or self-reflection.

40. Politics in practice is rarely a matter of good or bad, but more often a matter of better or worse.

41. The Twilight Zone is about human nature.  Black Mirror is about gadgets.

42. There is no requirement to have an opinion about everything.

43. Another one of those things that I’m not sure is new or if I’m just noticing it more: for many undergrads (and occasionally at higher levels) there seems to be an increase in liking a particular philosopher as if the philosopher is a gang or sports team to which one is dedicated at all costs.  This has always been a hazard, I suppose, with particularly seductive philosophers like Plato, Nāgārjuna, Wittgenstein, or Foucault, but I wonder if the cult of celebrity worship and factionalism in our broader culture have seeped into philosophy.

44. Once you thoroughly give up the bizarre notion that morality must be the result of a legalistic decree from a supernatural being (and few post-antiquity Western philosophers have done so, least of all “atheistic” existentialists and postmodernists who have yet to beat their theistic hangover), morality can easily be as objective as we need it to be.  Modern people have much to learn from philosophers like Aristotle and Confucius.

45. Many people are increasingly looking for people to agree with rather than people to learn from.  This tendency, greatly enhanced by social media, is having an effect on our culture that we may not be ready to understand.

46. Everywhere I’ve ever spent more than a week has the world’s worst drivers according to the people who live there.

47. Sometimes being a decent person means making an effort to understand others who at first appear to be acting indecently.

48. It amuses me that there are professional philosophers who think that Hegel or Wittgenstein “make sense” while Mencius or Vasubandhu do not.

49. It seems to me that the more often someone casually and pejoratively uses terms like “political correctness,” “SJWs,” and “identity politics,” the more likely that person is to be an asshole, or at least a person in need of further self-reflection.

50. Philosophy doesn’t solve problems.  It makes them more interesting.

51. Economists: Economics is based on rational self-interest.

      Also economists: Markets fluctuate because people are easily scared.

52. One of the hardest things about teaching philosophy is that the internet has convinced everyone that all questions have easy, searchable, tweetable, meme-able answers while philosophy, if it is done right, shows us that the most interesting questions, if they have answers at all, have answers that are far more complicated than they first appear.

53. The internet tells you what a bunch of people say.  It doesn’t tell you who’s right.

54. You will never be truly educated if you lack the ability to admit when you’re wrong.

55. College students: Everything is a social construction.

      Buddhism: Your “self” is a construction.

      College students: No, it’s not.

56. I hope for a Star Trek future and fear a Mad Max future, but we’ll probably end up with The Expanse future.

57. I try to focus more on what I can learn from unexpected situations and less on getting what I think I want.  When I can manage it, this makes my life more interesting, and at least for me, more enjoyable.

58.  I miss the silly cat memes of the mid- to late-2000's.  When did we decide internet memes have to mostly boil down to "here's something not very funny that allows me to nastily and snarkily assert my superiority over others"?