Samarth Bansal
@samarthbansal
Samarth Bansal
Imagine a society without any form of government. People come together and agree to form a government. What powers would you be willing to give to this government, and what rights would you reserve for individuals? This thought experiment, associated with philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, explores the nature and legitimacy... See more
Noam Chomsky - What We Really Want
youtube.comDesire and Consumerism
1. advertising induced wants. marketers realized they were not able to reach children, so advertising introduced nagging behavior to get their parents buy them stuff. but material things are not core to human nature.
2. people crave dignity and self-worth of doing something significant. Jonathan Rose has studied the reading habits of the British working class in the late 19th century. they were better educated than than the aristocrats. many efforts made to drive this out of people.
3. the natural thing for humans is to want to be independent and creative. mean maybe you work on a you know the fixing up old cars in your garage in the weekend instead of sitting in the watching television. you want to do something that's significant, that's worthwhile — maybe even if it's a ugly horrible job like going to coal mines instead of taking a government handout because people want dignity and a sense of self-worth and a sense of creating and doing something important. that's what we are.
4. huge part of the economy is devoted to trying to drive these things out of people's heads to make you think that all you want is more commodities so you should go shopping instead of reading/
5. wage labor is not very different from slavery.
6. market economy is supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. but that'd if there was an ad it would be an announcement by
say Ford Motor Company here are the characteristics of the cars I think that's nice,here's what consumer review says about them—that would create informed consumers making rational choices. but it's not what you see. there are huge efforts to try to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices to undermine market economies and turn people into people who believe that what they want is to sit on a couch and watch television.
When you have trouble writing, it’s usually because you don’t know what you’re trying to say. Most writing problems are actually thinking problems. And you can't copyedit your way out of poor thinking.
On dealing with the thorny question of separating art from the artist and what it takes to be an artist
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you... See more
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
Imagine if governments decided to add Prozac, an antidepressant, to the public water supply with the intention of enhancing the population's overall happiness. What ethical, medical, and social implications would arise from this decision, considering the principles of consent, the nature of happiness, and the potential impacts on societal... See more
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
Mary’s Room (Frank Jackson): This thought experiment questions the nature of consciousness and the acquisition of knowledge. Mary is a scientist who has lived her entire life in a black and white room, learning about the world through a black and white television. She knows everything there is to know about the physical world and color, but she has... See more
Future of Work and