Loading...

notes scratchpad

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Submit a note
There are currently 5 notes in this directory beginning with the letter Y.
Y
Yevgeny Zamiatin (1)
They talk a lot about the importance of pronouns like he and she, but they don’t give enough attention to the most evil of pronouns: WE. We is deep in our genes. We is the community. We is the home group, the familiar, the trustworthy. We love we. We is belonging. We comforts us. We exalts us. We is the pride in other people’s achievements, while taking them for granted as an entitlement. We is white privilege; and black privilege and brown privilege and any other privilege that includes or excludes people you don’t know. From we, the nebulous idea of the stranger gets defined as everyone out-group, impersonal danger gets imposed on the real world. We is the origin of the UNTERMENSCH. We is the complicity with proxy brutality against unseen human beings. We cherry-picks its gods and its devils, to worship or murder with conscience absolved. We is a trick.
Submitted by: Russian Writer (1884-1937)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Young and Old in Protestant v Catholic Sensibilities

Anglo-Canadian, when encountering pain, wants to eliminate it or permanently evade; the best pain is pain forgetten. Protestant aestheticism.

French-Quebecois sees pain and wants to run towards it, jealous of the intensity of feeling (even though it hurts). The most beautiful pain is pain from love and loss. Catholic angelus misericordia.

English culture worships potential - which means youth. French culture worships love - which means pain.

Youth worship subordinates mature, hard-won learning, that need years to acquire, to visceral fast-paced trends and fashions. Youth worship creates ephemeral personalities, cyclical rather than it evolving culture and a fear of being subjected to complexity. Worshippers of idealized youth practice luddite self-quarantined. The paradigm is cherubic, angelic, aggressively disinterested. Merciless purity.

Love worship subordinates material acquisition and the long-term attaining of sublimation. It can be invested in the drive to create other people (children) or instead pursue talent and accomplishment. Seldom both.

Submitted by: Comparisons
Yuval Noah Harari (1)
It’s not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of life will need to change. Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art… Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximise their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.
Submitted by: Israeli (1976-)
Yuval Noah Harari (2)
When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or the other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has the time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.
Submitted by: Israeli Historian (1976-)


Submit a note

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers…"