Playful activity is the doorway to personal growth. Guard yourself against losing this precious gift as you develop. Ignore the cries of the more experienced and retired players around you. Retaining the benefits of childhood does not disqualify you from the advantages of adulthood.
Tag: evolution
Cognitive Bias #2 — Bandwagon Effect
Just this past Friday, we went to war with heavy reliance on the fact that we are susceptible to the bandwagon effect. We might also refer to this as “monkey see, monkey do” (while adding the cautionary “monkey get in trouble, too.”) We humans can’t seem to resist the spin and flash of a circus bandwagon.
Change the World for Fun & Profit
Doing things like starting a business or pursuing a career in the arts is usually regarded as selfish and greedy. And even when we do support the people who pursue these things, we’re still hesitant to think of them as revolutionaries and freedom-fighters in the same way that we’d think of politicians and philanthropist.
What is Fascism?
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Why the Schism?
The debates and arguments continue. Both sides can’t understand why their opponents can’t see their own point of view. The battles between Progressives/Liberals and Libertarian/Conservatives are the most vociferous. Why does such contentiousness exist? Here is my analysis. It boils down to some specific realizations.
There is Only One Way to Save Our City
While many of my friends and colleagues wait in hope of “reform”, I’ll continue my quest to change the world by investing my voice and my votes in an entrepreneurial theory of social change. While the world at large insists on celebrating and fearing great leaders, I will celebrate the power of the individual as expressed through innovation and voluntary interaction in the marketplace.
Liberty and Community Go Together
There is a form of community that is the whole basis of the market economy. It is an extended network of human relationships worked out in peace and mutual agreement. So far as we know, the capacity to form such cooperative relationships is distinct to the human experience.
The Future of the SJW and Its Related Movements
Ultimately, there has to be a supreme “victim,” from which all other victims bow down, and take their marching orders. It has already started in feminism.
On Free Will and Determinism
Choices aren’t willed into existence, but rather choices are a reaction of how our mind and individual being interacts within the world. You didn’t choose your spouse because you willed it, you chose your spouse because you liked them.
Defending a Free Nation
Most societies, at least in this century, handle the problem of national defense by having a large, well-armed, permanent military force, run by a centralized government, funded by taxation, and often (though not always) manned by conscription. Is this a solution that a free nation can or should follow?