We have lost our sense of the very meaning of all human activity, which is to assure the operation of an order in which knowledge and innocence, man and nature are in harmony.

These riots and the experience of the lockdowns demonstrate the fragility of urban societies that work for the wealthy, but not for the vast majority.
The inner-cities need policies that will create opportunities more than they need expressions of sympathy and solidarity from the affluent.

This is noteworthy, given that the ability to invent fictional stories may have been the last and most crucial stage in the evolutionary history of human language and the development of modern-like patterns of cognition.

Reliable insight into the #future is possible, however. It just requires a style of thinking that’s uncommon among experts who are certain that their deep knowledge has granted them a special grasp of what is to come…
The best #forecasters, by contrast, view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. This is called, in a word, #learning.

“The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

What interests me is the evidence that unbelieief existed in practice before it existed in theory. In which case we have not only been looking at the wrong centuries but profiling the wrong suspects. Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas. Some of us, sometimes, change our beliefs and our lives as the result of a chain of conscious reasoning. But not very often or very honestly.

What keeps me today going is culture.
Somehow we have forgotten was culture is.
We are trying to give everyone the same thing. I want people to understand that difference can be this powerful thing that brings us together.

The current wellness momentum overemphasizes feelings and the body in the transformative path. We generally forget that the primordial change starts through an intellectual shift — and this intellectual mechanism is always expressed by learning.
Philosophy has traditionally been the most powerful transformative and healing tool available.

We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as a world map from the 14th century. …As a species, we have a childlike disinterest and partial disbelief in the time before our appearance on Earth.
Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.

Research has shown that beneath every forest and wood there is a complex underground web of roots, fungi, and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another.

Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals.

The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, and to mystify the familiar — all this is the test of her or his power.
Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be.
Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last. My faith in art rivals my admiration for any other discourse. Its conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely. I believe.

Today, we are at the beginning of another new era: the Imagination Age – an age that calls for new ways to see, to imagine, to think, to act, to learn, and one that, I will argue, also calls for us to re-examine the foundations of our way of being – being human – and what it means to be human. Yes, this is a different world – a world in which skills matter, tools matter, but integrity and authenticity are also required.

Borders are a very recent invention, historically,” says Sorbera. From the 12th to 16th centuries, there was a particularly rich exchange between Asia, North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. “[There was] a big network of scholars, poets and especially intellectuals who were traveling from court to court to make a life. This allowed the circulation of knowledge and language.