In Western society, the freer we've become, the colder we've gotten.
The philosopher Schopenhauer uses the image of porcupines huddled together in the cold for warmth. At first they try huddling close together but they poke each other with their quills. So they each move backwards and settle into a comfortable middle distance. That's a symbol of our society: good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes.
In more traditional societies, like Brazil for example, what they lack in wealth and freedom they make up for in social warmth and creative community. That's what we've lost in America and in the West, we know only the cold freedom of hard work and puritan individualism.
But we can recover warmth in society if we're willing to rearrange our values. Vitality and Imagination are two secular sources of warmth. If we can reform democratic society so that it's based on cooperation and association rooted in mutual imagination and experimental creativity, then we have a secular basis for a new high-energy society and not a dead cold one.
In Western society, the freer we've become, the colder we've gotten.
The philosopher Schopenhauer uses the image of porcupines huddled together in the cold for warmth. At first they try huddling close together but they poke each other with their quills. So they each move backwards and settle into a comfortable middle distance. That's a symbol of our society: good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes.
In more traditional societies, like Brazil for example, what they lack in wealth and freedom they make up for in social warmth and creative community. That's what we've lost in America and in the West, we know only the cold freedom of hard work and puritan individualism.
But we can recover warmth in society if we're willing to rearrange our values. Vitality and Imagination are two secular sources of warmth. If we can reform democratic society so that it's based on cooperation and association rooted in mutual imagination and experimental creativity, then we have a secular basis for a new high-energy society and not a dead cold one.