SAL RESTIVO'S BLOG: THE SOCIOLOGICAL COGITO

   Free will is an illusion.  There is an elegant discussion of this illusion in Tolstoy's War and Peace.  Consider: free will is an experience.  Can we trust experience?  Consider: experience tells us that the earth does not move.  But we know it is moving in many different ways and directions at enormous speeds.  So we cannot trust our individual experience.  How do we know about all of the earth's various movements?  We know about them through the collective experience of scientists over many generations.  So experience counts but not individual experience. The Tolstoy Fallacy: That experience and feeling are trustworthy modes of interrogating and knowing reality. As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the measure of visible phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of...

  What kind of society would we have without leaders?   Would it be a society characterized by chaos, disorder, science denial, climates out of control, worldwide inequalities and injustices, politicians without IQs, rampant ignorance, fractures in our community structures and a diminished capacity for compassion...?   Would the world descend into anarchy, that is, a world organized around the principles of mutual aid?   Should we assume that the world as it is reflects our assumptions about the value of leadership, of capitalism, of democracy in practice?   What might the Hopi and Inuit teach us about leadership that the Sloan School and our Linkedin leadership gurus cannot?  

 A former student and friend asked me how I distract myself from the decline and fall of civilization. I replied: I have never felt the need or sought in any way to distract myself from reality.  For as long as I have had any memory of anything, I have wanted to face that reality not distract myself from it.  I probably developed this perspective later than I imagine and it all has to come back to my dad.  The secret to not getting duped, surprised, conned etc. was a fearlessness in the face of the terror endemic to reality.  I later found what my dad understood in an untutored way expressed in Nietzsche's willingness to make himself a guinea pig in a life-time of ultra-awareness of one's self, one's consciousness, and one's environs.  As it turns out this orientation, perspective, temperament, or worldview is an armor that protects you from addictions designed to distract you from how the world really is.  I've never done drugs, nev...

  The Triumph of the Age of the Idiot https://flip.it/TrRfn7   Umair Haque is one of many voices in the wildnerness calling us to the task of trying to save the planet and humanity.  It is irresponsible and irrational to continue to get up in the morning and carry on as if money, and positions, and promotions still matter.  Not all of us can or must be Greta Thunberg.  In the 1960s I told my students that there were many ways to join the revolution.  You didn't have to march or participate in teach-ins and sit-ins if those activities were too "activist" for your temperament.  You could write a letter to or call your city, state, and federal representatives; you could vote for candidates who supported the revolution; you could write op eds, school essays, books; at the very least, when you saw activists on TV you could simply applaud them from the safety of your living room couch.  Consider some of what Haque has to say.  A na...