Broadly speaking, there are two ways of viewing the world: the Ceramic (or hydraulic) view and the Organic view. The Ceramic worldview is individualistic and sees the world as concrete, solid, measurable, and definable. The world and everything in it, including people, is mere stuff to be manipulated, collected, owned, bought, sold, killed, stuffed, put in boxes and hung on walls.
Sunday Letters
Welcome to the Sunday Letters archive. Here you'll find all editions of the newsletter from 2015. Sunday Letters is a conversation I'm having with myself. It attempts to address the psychology and philosophy of living the good life in the face of rapid technological change. It is the pursuit of an answer to a question. Thanks for being here.
Bandura on Selective Moral Disengagement
As I observe this world of people, it seems that moral disengagement is active everywhere, not least among politicians and corporate leaders. In the workplace, for example, many choose to ignore immoral and unethical practices. We put our heads down, blinkers on, and just get on with the work when we know very well that […]
Sunday Letters: Welcome Back
I wrote to you earlier this week on Substack with the news that Sunday Letters was making its way home to this website. This current issue is, in fact, the first time that Sunday Letters reaches your inbox directly from the backend of this self-hosted WordPress site. Before now, I relied on third-party services such […]
Annie Dillard on Time, Structure, Coffee, & Learning A Trade
Albert Einstein on The Need For A Socialist Economy
In this morning’s Sunday Letters, I’m republishing in full, Einstein’s 1949 essay “Why Socialism?” When we consider the extent of the global environmental crisis, the new cold war between the US and Russia on one front and China
The Problem With Society
As concisely as possible, this is the most significant contributing factor to the problem with society. It is the fundamental risk to the survival of our species. I’m not optimistic in the short term, but in say one thousand years if humans are still around, I am, in fact, optimistic. I’d like to think that […]
Intelligence: You Either Have It, Or You Don’t
Intelligence, whatever way we wish to discuss it, is a highly-regarded faculty, but it’s problematic. Researchers consider the term intelligence to be too broad to be helpful in understanding human behaviour and personality. The word simply does not allow us to discuss the depth and breadth of human abilities–or indeed their growth and development–in any meaningful way. But that doesn’t stop people from using it to pigeonhole other people