We live in a culture where we focus our attention on a very few people, and only those people really “matter”. We gossip about their private lives, we envy their possessions, we sigh at their accomplishments, we strategize over their methodology, desperate to reproduce their success… and yet, they are strangers. They might as well…
Category: Sociology
New Ethics: Curiosity and the avoidance of Gossip
If we’re going to get back to being serious about community, we need to learn the lessons that have been taught – we need to learn about community killers and create new ethics. We’re going to need to make sure our communities have enough fresh air and sunlight, and we’re going to have to choke…
Letting Ourselves Be Real
I just finished an amazing book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One of the quotes that hit me between the teeth was: “The final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship…
Expressing Social Emotion
We need common references to social emotions to function successfully as a culture. This is problematic in a melting pot country like our own – we don’t know how to communicate non-verbally to others in ways that they will understand emotionally. Emotions must be spoken to in the language of emotion. Words can be used,…
Weakness is not the path to obedience
There’s a concept that runs around the manosphere/fundie community that we need to “make” women obey their husbands/fathers by reducing their rights, reducing their access to education, etc ad nauseum. The problem with this is severalfold: it’s pretty creepy to outsiders/makes a poor witness/looks culty this is how you enforce obedience in slaves (or children)…