Word: thyself
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recreational drugs. The game as Wallace portrays it is a good illustration of the paradox that there is no freedom without rules and limits. But where mindless circuitry and drugs prevail, human connections break and emotional blindness ensues. Gone too is that key imperative of Western civilization, "Know thyself." Hal, ever the global-village explainer, logs his own symptoms: a feeling of emptiness and an inability to feel pleasure. He also notes another mark of this equal-opportunity disorder: the sort of icy sophistication that often hides fears of social and intellectual embarrassment...
This idea that modern society is dangerously asocial would surprise Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he lamented the tension between crude animal impulses and the dictates of society. Society, he said, tells us to cooperate with one another, indeed, even to "love thy neighbor as thyself"; yet by our nature, we are tempted to exploit our neighbor, "to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]." The Unabomber, too, in his mode aas armchair psychologist, celebrates our "WILD nature" and complains that in modern society...
Although not the only one, Descartes was a major inspiration for the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Truth became a matter not of doctrine or received traditions but of something materially present on earth, accessible either through research or sound reasoning. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan," Alexander Pope wrote in 1733-34. "The proper study of Mankind...
...reigning cliche of the day is that in order to love others one must first learn to love oneself. This formulation -- love thyself, then thy neighbor -- is a license for unremitting self-indulgence, because the quest for self-love is endless. By the time you have finally learned to love yourself, you'll find yourself playing golf at Leisure World...
Psychiatrist, Heal Thyself...