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The Rise and Fall of Fantasy

May 29, 2015

The Rise and Fall of Fantasy

Hay-on-Wye Festival Panel Discussion, With Ted Honderich — Who Reports on It — and David Aaronovitch and Edwina Currie
To Hay-on-Wye the other day I went, to the more intellectual of the two festivals, the one with music as well, the festival gnomically namedHow The Light Gets In by its creator and benefactor Hilary Lawson of the family Lawsons. Of Nigel, once Chancellor of the Exchequer and Boom and Bust and latterly of Global Cooling, Nigella cooking beautifully on the telly, and lovely witty Vanessa married to A. J. Freddie Ayer of Language, Truth and Logic.

Having tired out myself and my temper at 10 am and thereafter in my philosopher’s report to a large audience on what it was for them to be conscious, unaided in my report by the audience lecture handout  that did not find its way to the tent despite having been sent to Hay in advance three times, I found myself in another tent at 12 considering another subject, or anyway words. These words were as follows.

“Once we paraded grand visions of the future, now such goals are more typically left to the fanatical fringe. With economic and cultural growth in the East, what vision does the West have to offer?  Do we need new fantasies to meet the challenges of the 21st Century or is our scepticism a sign of wisdom rather than decline?”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Looking for Some Answers

April 17, 2015

Looking for Some Answers

A few months back John Michael Greer, over at the Archdruid Report, wrote an essay about how we might begin to tackle the huge mental and emotional burden of dealing with collapse. It was noted that, for the most part, the majority of people simply don’t want to think about or discuss the way in which we humans are accelerating towards an ecological brick wall and would instead prefer to either lose themselves in fantasy worlds of their own or others’ making. Thus, many people like to lose themselves in video games, TV series and dreams of cornucopian splendour where we will all shortly be living the good life, just as British PM David Cameron announced yesterday (if we vote for him). Surrounding yourself with people who think just like you do and only exposing yourself to information sources that bolster your hoped-for belief that ‘things are going okay’ and ‘the experts are in charge’ adds some comforting texture to this fantasy.

Since I stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was about 13 I’ve not been particularly interested in fantasy worlds. For me, reality is where it’s at. But reality sometimes hurts, and so when reality does actually bite, there are two ways of dealing with it. The first is to anaesthetise yourself so that it doesn’t hurt as much – either by way of the above-mentioned mental escape avenues, or by literally anaesthetising your brain and nervous system with alcohol and drugs. Unfortunately for society as a whole, most people end up choosing the latter option, and we see spiralling problems of addiction, domestic violence, depression and many other ills as a result.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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