yuhrish

Exponential growth has the psychologically destabilizing property that what’s ahead seems impossibly steep, and what’s behind seems irrelevantly flat. Crucially, things seem this way wherever you are on the curve

If we confuse ourselves too readily with our machine creations, we not only overestimate them, we also underestimate ourselves.

On Murdoch’s very loosely Freudian picture of the human psyche, the ego is anxious and utterly self-centred, utterly absorbed in itself and focused on protecting itself at all costs. It therefore ignores or distorts anything not directly relevant to the self or inconvenient to it, even at the cost of losing one’s grasp of reality.

Correspondingly, she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. On Murdoch’s picture, our most basic moral activities are activities of attending to particular things in particular ways, since this is the activity that shapes our vision of the world.

We are not born alone, we don’t live alone, so why would we change alone?

Natality challenges this death fixation. It suggests that we should not be defined as “mortals” but as “natals.” When a child is born, the world is offered a new set of possibilities — suddenly, there is a new actor on the stage of history. And for Arendt, what makes humans unique is our ability to start again. We are under no obligation to keep... See more