Goals

"A common theme prompts again at me/
I wonder what could the answer be/
Is it forwards I'm going or back/
Or is it moving wallpaper I'm looking at?"

I like the question of the validity of time as a frame of reference, but it becomes especially interesting if you shift perspective on your own life (in that kind of way you can shift your eye's focus from the close to the far away and for a second mothing makes any sense to your brain). Cease from looking at it as a major linear event interspersed with minor day-to-day diversions of attention. Think about your life as those diversions, with some moving wallpaper in the background. It's just as valid, if you accept that, for most people, most of life is filled with small diversions.

I tell you, it's one certain way to escape the self-indulgent attitude of the tragedian, or the socially-responsible, or the ambitious. At least for the length of time it takes your eyes to re-focus.

Another perspective on nihilism

Perhaps believing that we cannot know, or convey, the Truth to others, nor hope to have them believe something congruent to our beliefs, is not such a bad thing.

Nihilism: "Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief."

Can we imagine a perspective where we want to throw the baby out with the bath water?


Use of the above image is totally unpermitted - if anybody has a problem with that, please go read the rest of the blog while you're here. Then...unleash hell!

Adam Curtis

Pictured is not Adam Curtis, but R.D.Laing, whose work I believe could be appropriate reading these days. Curtis thinks so too, I'd say. He features many such slightly obscure but influential thinkers of the 20th century in his BBC documentaries on the state of the world today, and how it got here. A riposte to the charge of the dumbing down of TV (too little too late, of course).

In any case, the point of the post is just to highlight the benefit of watching Adam Curtis' documentaries 'The Power of Nightmares', 'The Century of the Self' and 'The Trap'; all of which you can find on google video here.

An insightful man, with an excellent speaking voice. Perhaps his theses would find it harder going in dialectic rather than broadcast form. Yet still even if there are points to disagree on, he forces you to reach for the counter-arguments, to think and that is a rare thing in television (even if it's not television I'm advocating you watch it on, the point applies).

Better than sitting down to another run of Coronation Street, I would say.