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If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.
As noted earlier, the average Homo sapiens is probably incapable of intimately knowing more than 150 individuals.
To be German in 2018 means to grapple with the difficult legacy of Nazism while upholding liberal and democratic values.
Otto von Bismarck allegedly remarked (having read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) that the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the human.10
Global politics thus follows the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way, by missing this or that ingredient of the dominant political package.
Though humankind is very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilisation.
The easy part is to prefer people-like-us over foreigners. Humans have been doing that for millions of years. Xenophobia is in our DNA.
It is a dangerous mistake to imagine that without nationalism we would all be living in a liberal paradise. More likely, we would be living in tribal chaos.
The advertisement opens with a little girl picking and counting the petals of a daisy, but when she reaches ten, a metallic male voice takes over, counting back from ten to zero as in a missile countdown.
humankind today faces three common challenges that make a mockery of all national borders, and that can only be solved through global cooperation.
No doubt we need to adapt this regime to the changing conditions of the world, for example by relying less on the USA and giving a greater
role to non-Western powers such as China and India.
At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings, but it is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land and water.
Some believe that consciousness might even be severed from any organic structure, and could surf cyberspace free of all biological and physical constraints.
Like the ancient tribes along the Nile River, all nations today live along a single global river of information, scientific discoveries and technological inventions, which is the basis of our prosperity and also a threat to our existence.
three problems – nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption
To have effective politics, we must either de-globalise the ecology, the economy and the march of science – or we must globalise our politics.
priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.
To clarify matters, it would perhaps be helpful to view immigration as a deal with three basic conditions or terms:
Many culturist claims suffer from three common flaws.
in conventional warfare, fear is just a by-product of the material losses, and is usually proportional to the force inflicting the losses. In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.
This is what happened after 9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop.
In this attack al-Qaeda managed to destroy part of the enemy’s central headquarters, killing and wounding senior commanders and analysts. Why is it that public memory gives far more importance to the destruction of two civilian buildings, and the killing of brokers, accountants and clerks?
A terrorist is like a gambler holding a particularly bad hand, who tries to convince his rivals to reshuffle the cards. He cannot lose anything, and he may win everything.
The most fundamental characteristic of this mysterious God is that we cannot say anything concrete about Him. This is the God of the philosophers; the God we talk about when we sit around a campfire late at night, and wonder what life is all about.
It is therefore your natural self-interest – and not the command of some god – that should induce you to do something about your anger. If you were completely free of anger you would feel far better than if you murdered an obnoxious enemy.
Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering.
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
It is therefore groundless to criticise secularism for lacking ethical commitments or social responsibilities. In fact, the main problem with secularism is just the opposite. It probably sets the ethical bar too high.
If we use the minimalist negative definition – ‘secular people don’t believe in God’ – then Stalin was definitely secular. If we use a positive definition – ‘secular people reject all unscientific dogmas and are committed to truth, compassion and freedom’ – then Marx was a secular luminary, but Stalin was anything but.
In the last few centuries, liberal thought developed immense trust in the rational individual.
As noted earlier, behavioural economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.
That’s why you need to waste so much time on the periphery – it may contain some brilliant revolutionary insights, but it is mostly full of uninformed guesses, debunked models, superstitious dogmas and ridiculous conspiracy theories.
The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.
For millennia, much of what passed for ‘news’ and ‘facts’ in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld.
In practice, the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.
Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.
To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance.
In brief, while nationalism teaches me that my nation is unique and that I have special obligations towards it, fascism says that my nation is supreme, and that I owe my nation exclusive obligations.
It says that the creation occurs every moment, and I am the creator. What, then, is the aim of my life? To create meaning by feeling, by thinking, by desiring and by inventing. Anything that limits the human liberty to feel, to think, to desire and to invent, limits the meaning of the universe. Hence liberty from such limitations is the supreme ideal.
If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire – then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire – then no, humans have no free will.
It is better to understand ourselves, our minds and our desires rather than try to realise whatever fantasy pops up in our heads.
yourself. You think you already know exactly who you are. But once you realise ‘Hi, these thoughts aren’t me. They are just some biochemical vibrations!’ then you also realise you have no idea who – or what – you are. This can be the beginning of the most exciting journey of discovery any human can undertake.
The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence and nothing is completely satisfying.
Be particularly careful about the following four words: sacrifice, eternity, purity, redemption. If you hear any of these, sound the alarm.
So if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is.
Many people, including many scientists, tend to confuse the mind with the brain, but they are really very different things. The brain is a material network of neurons, synapses and biochemicals. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger and love.
