Random Thoughts...

A week in the life of a strange, distracted, fatigued mind. Here the thoughts spill over
- “Every writer creates his own precursors”. In Kierkegaard and Zeno there is Kafka (who came after those two), but if Kafka had never written, nobody would have noticed this fact. Thus by writing, Kafka created Zeno and Kierkegaard as his precursors.
- George Bush keeps saying that democracy is “God’s gift to citizens of the world”. Bullshit. Democracy is not a gift, the people inside undemocratic countries have to work extremely hard to make and then keep their country democratic, because there are always forces opposing democracy.
- Man is attracted to a beautiful environment only because the body tells him that such an environment could sustain him. We do not find rolling desert sand dunes as beautiful as...yeah
- India and China have engineers and scientists in their positions of political power. And yet, we in the West have only thoroughbred politicians in political power. Just as psychologists are best able to advise on depression, physicists are best able to advise about space missions etc, scientific economists and philosophers are probably best able to advise about how a country should be run.
-Competitive forces, amongst all the other wonderful things they can do, have the potential to destroy the lives of humans. For example, competitive forces would have children be forced to study from younger and younger ages (perhaps with the aid of medication) in order to be able to compete with others. This is because an edge can be given to any individual that works harder earlier on in their life. It is conceivable that non-stop training would begin at age zero days for children if nothing prevents the level of competitiveness in society. What happens now is that people pretend they aren’t pushing and don’t want to push their children ahead…and then they go and do it anyway!
-All of civilisation’s history is about the specific capabilities of peoples of different nations, and how these have been used. The capabilities of peoples will always be the primary determinant of the nation’s wealth, and in general, the nation’s wealth and capabilities will also determine how free the people are
-Depressingly, depression could be adaptive. It gets you to ruminate about the causes for your depression, and you respond (at least sometimes) with thought and intelligence, perhaps more insight than when you are not depressed. Not only can you go ahead and potentially fix what the problem was, but you can help others fix their problems (The phenomenon of the depressed psychologist or the willingness of those who have had depression to help others out of it).