Excerpts from Book that I read

The opening chapter of Walden is a thoughtful and informed meditation on economics which gains greatly by being read as a response to the new economics and, particularly, to Adam Smith. Thoreau was not interested in the wealth of nations so much as he was in the wealth of the individuals who made up the nation, but he was familiar with Smith’s work – and that of Say and Ricardo – and much of his opening chapter is an application of Smith’s ideas and terminology to the individual case. Thoreau is in agreement with Smith’s fundamental premise that it is not gold or silver, but productive labor that is the real basis of wealth. Smith’s famous book begins: “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.” ~ Page ……. Where Smith wanted to see consumption maximized, Thoreau wants it minimized and simplified. Thoreau emphasizes now hot much one can consume, but how little. He stresses this theme with production as well. Instead of increasing production, Thoreau planted fewer beans his second year and he closed his economy chapter with a story about the only tree that could be said to be truly free, the cypress, because it produced nothing and this was free of the cyclical and tyrannical processes of getting and spending.

Your belief serve as a lens for understanding what others are likely to believe, as well as how strongly they are likely to believe it. But your mind contains multitudes, and beliefs are not the one only lens that can alter your perceptions. Knowledge can also do it. For example, read the above sentence. Now please go back and count how many f’s appear in that sentence. That is important……. How many did you find? More than you can count on one hand? If not, then we have just confirmed that you are a terrific reader but a terrible counter. Try it again. Look harder, …….. See them all now? Most people who read this sentence fail to spot all six of the f’s on their first pass. Instead, most see only three. Why so few? This example has nothing to do with your beliefs and everything to you with your knowledge. Your expertise with English blinds you from seeing some of the letters. You know how to read so well that you can hear the sounds of the letters as you read over them. From your expert perspective, every time you se the word “of” you hear a v rather than f and, therefore, miss it. This is why first graders are more likely to find all six in this task than fifth graders, and why young children are likely to do better of this than you did as well. Your expert ears are clouding your vision. ~ Page 103

Similarity is boring, but differences are exciting. This hypersensitivity to difference is built into our being, all the way down to our retinas. You and I can see the visible world because our eyes wobble back and forth ever so slightly and uncontrollably, jerking this way and that in what are known as “saccades.” These eye wobble allow your retina to detect differences, changes in texture and contour and lighting, and it is this ability to detect changes in visual input that enables sight. Paralyze your eyes with anesthetic to keep them from wobbling, and everything goes dark. Place a contact lens with an image tattooed on it on your retina, and the design will slowly become invisible as the lens begin to wobble in sync with your eye. ~ Page 127

This story of cave en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave is connected with what’s come to be known as Plato’s Theory of Forms. The easiest way to understand this is through an example. Think of all the circles that you have seen in your life. Was any one of them a perfect circle? No. Not one of them was absolutely perfect. In a perfect circle every point on its circumference is exactly the same distance from the center point. Real circles never quite achieve this but you understood what I meant when I used the words ‘perfect circle.’ So what is that perfect circle? Plato would say that the idea of a perfect circle is the Form of a circle. If you want to understand what a circle is, you should focus on the Form of the circle, not actual circles that you can draw and experience through your visual sense, all of which are imperfect in some way. Similarly, Plato thought, if you want to understand what goodness is, then you need to concentrate on the Form of goodness, not on particular examples of it that you witness. Philosophers are the people who are best suited to thinking about the Forms in this abstract way; ordinary people get led astray by the world as they grasp it through their senses. ~ Page 6

It seems to be unique, language appears all the more miraculous. Other species bark and scream, grunt and wail, but none speak. …… However, neither monkeys nor apes have language in any sense that we would recognize from our everyday experience of human conversation. How did it come about that we, the descendants of just such dump apes, have this extraordinary power when they do not? The puzzle seems all the greater because we feel so at home with the social lives of monkeys and apes. ……. The answer to this apparent puzzle lies, I suggest, in the way we actually use our capacity for language. If being human is all bout talking, it’s the tittle-tattle of life from the lips of the Aristotles and the Einsteins. We are social beings and our world - no less than that of the monkeys and apes - is cocooned in the interests and minutiae of everyday social life. They fascinate us beyond measure. Let me give you a few statistics to reinforce the point. Next time you are in a café or a bar, just listen for a moment to your neighbours. You will discover, as we have in our research, that around two-thirds of their conversation is taken up with matters of social import. Who is doing what with whom, and whether it’ good or a bad thing, who is in and who is out, and why, how to deal with a difficult social situation involving a lover, child or colleague. You may happen on a particularly intense exchange about a technical problem at work or a book just read. But listen on, and I’ll wager that, within five minutes at the most, the conversation has drifted away again, back to the natural rhythms of social life. ~ Page 4 / 5

What does the phrase ‘seek happiness’ mean? Today most people told to seek happiness would think of ways they could enjoy themselves. Perhaps happiness for you would involve exotic holidays, going to music festivals or parties, or spending time with friends. It might also mean curling up with your favourite book, or going to an art gallery. But although these might be ingredients in a good life for Aristotle, he certainly didn’t believe that the best way to live was to go out and seek pleasure in these ways. That on its own wouldn’t be a good life, in his view. The Greek word Aristotle used was ‘eudiamonia’ (pronounced ‘you-die-moania’, but meaning the opposite). This is sometimes translated as ‘flourishing’ or ‘success’ rather than ‘happiness’. It is more than the sort of pleasant sensations you can get from eating mango-flavoured ice cream or watching your favourite sports team win. Eudiamonia isn’t about fleeting moments of bliss or how you feel. It’s more objective than that. This is quite hard to grasp as we are so used to thinking that happiness is about how we feel and nothing more ~ Page 11

worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Talking-Machine/00s/Talking-Machine-1906-12.pdf

The first thing we found was that conversation groups are not infinitely large. In fact, there appears to be a decisive upper limit of about four on the number of individuals who can be involved in a conversation. The next time you are at a social gathering such as a reception or a party, take a look around you. You will see that conversation begin when two or three individuals start talking to each other. In due course, other individuals will join them one by one. As each does so, the speaker and the listeners try to involve them in the conversation, directing comments to them or simply moving to allow them to join the circle. However, when the group reaches five people, things start to go wrong. The group becomes unstable: despite all efforts (and groups often do try),, it proves impossible to retain the attention of all the members. Instead, two individuals will start talking to each other, setting up a rival conversation within the group. Eventually, they will break away to start a new conversation group. This is a remarkably robust feature of humans conversational behaviour, and I guarantee that you will see it if you spend a few minutes watching people in social settings. ~ Page 121

As Jane Bennett politicalscience.jhu.edu/bios/jane-bennett rightly notes, there is a form of enchantment even in commodity fetishism. But consider how much enchantment or poetry or meaning is also to be found in everyday practices of de-fetishization. When you look at the shirt on your back or the coffee in your cup and, for once, see through the object to the labor of the people far away who produced it, to the lives they are obliged to live, to the invisible but real links between their lives and yours, you may not find enchantment in their lives, but you cannot conclude that the world is dull. I cannot see the merit in making yourself blind to what’s in your path in order to ensure that you will be perpetually surprised. To decide that everyday life is rationalized, bureaucratized, or routinized is to kill it in order to get a pat on the back for rescuing it from the dead. ~ Page 93

"You came to me out of a world which I do not know and do not understand. Sooner or later, I know that you would be recaptured by it, Why should I wish to detain you? Have I not learned how to live alone? Have I not found in my own solitude the strength to endure all things--even the buffeting of snarling winds and the rage of destructive lightnings? Where did I get this power endurance from? I drew it forth out of my own heart, where at first it lay asleep. Now I fear none and nothing--not even death, which cannot be far away. I have learned to depend on no help, except my own. That, my friend, is my answer to you. Be self reliant. Wheresoever you go, remain a hermit inwardly. Then your world can never weaken you. Do not leave your stillness here after you find it. Take it back with you into that distant life whose agitation rarely reaches me, hold to it as your most treasured possession, and then, unafraid, you may let all storms blow past you. Remember always that you derive your being from heaven. My own peace I give to you" ~Dr.Paul Brunton (excerpt: Hermit in the Himalayas)

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