George Saunders, a contemporary writer, recently gave a commencement speech that went viral. He asked the graduates of Syracuse University what he called “the million dollar question … What’s our problem?” Saunders said, Here’s what I think. Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s us and then, out there, all that other junk—dogs and swing-sets, and the State
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