Always looking backwards, vol3

Two very interesting thinkers passed away this week.  One was very interesting, got a ton of press, and will likely be forgotten within a generation.  The other was very interesting, went through long periods of being largely ignored, and will likely be read and reread for the next several centuries.  The first was Christopher Hitchens, the second was Vaclav Havel.

Freedom to bare it all

When does "empowerment" to display yourself morph into just another type of exploitation?

Mind and body and children

Some will tell you that there's no such thing as body, that everything is an illusion created by the mind.

Others will tell you that the mind is simply an extended string of biochemical processes and reactions.  They're probably correct, but being verifiably, scientifically correct isn't always very useful when it comes to broader questions of humanity.

A video on materialism

I've always liked this style of animation, and the video is really well done:

The good life is interconnected, but individualistic

Being yourself is a pretty scary prospect.  The reality of sitting alone with oneself in a room is more than most people can handle.  The idea itself is even a little frightening for some.  If just being temporarily alone with our own thoughts is more than we can handle, how could we even imagine being alone in the world?  And so we build relationships and connections and interconnections, as we should.  Understanding how to separate those connections from our own true selves is one of the primary difficulties involved in figuring out what it means to have a good life.