Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (30236)	6/28/1999 12:46:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

>Secondly, "mythologies" have little to do with "morality"; they are ways in which we explain the cosmos to ourselves.< They might not be at the heart of morality, but they are imho the engines for something as important. A concept of self and society - who we are, where we are going. In the 50s and 60s we had a mythos of Progress whose endpoint was a Raygun Gothic technopolis - the kind with sculpted domes on very slender stalks and free-floating rings around stuff. The priest of this new mythos was the Rocket Scientist. Being an engineer at heart, I embraced this pretty uncritically until we ran headfirst into a new, more somber mythos that is still gathering steam. The "deep ecology" mythos that depicts Man as a predator, as fallen out of Gaia's homeostasis. Global warming, the rainforests, the sin of cheeseburger. It is an essentially self-loathing Weltanschauung that has osteoporotic Moonwalkers dying unsung without a credible spacecraft in current development. We reached for the stars - and were distracted by an itch in our collective underwear. Tragic.

To: jbe who wrote (30236)	6/28/1999 1:28:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Oh- lots of fun things to think about in your posts--! Although it's now noon and I'm still in my nightgown...oh dear-- well- just one thing then- People today are no worse than they ever were; they may even be better. SOmeone (I'm sorry I can never remember where I read a lot of things) said that our grasp of the past is blurred by romance, that in the religious works we are confronted with saints and conversions, purity and single-mindedness, while we ourselves are conflicted and impure. When actually, the past is recorded not so much as what people WERE, as what they dreamed of being, that we confuse vision for history. So I think you are right that people are no better and no worse. But I do think there is a lack of structure today and that societies need some sort of cohesiveness that we seem to have lost, which used to be provided by Chrisitanity for many. I'm not sure a new mythology would necessarily have to be an official "religion"? Couldn't it be a collection of beliefs that somehow bring together the various cultures with universalities of a different sort. Eek. I'm confusing myself. Will have to read what myths are again. We need a more cosmic set of stories that can include many more people, while still incorporating the basic archetypes? Is that possible? I can't feel intelligent in a nightgown and with my stomach growling.