Francis Williams' Philosophy Blog

 both the eastern scholar alan watts and german philosopher friedrich nietzsche viewed the contemporary attitude to work as destructive.  in their view work should be a matter of pleasure. in watts' case, it was in the form of an enlightened engagement with work, a kind of lightness and dance, whereas nietzsche saw the struggle involved in work as "the reward of all rewards" and as the goal in itself, not as a means for making profit. according to nietzsche, the fear of boredom is what drives people to work. they would rather shun boredom through repetitive, monotonous tasks than be idle. in this case he distinguishes those who have the capacity to suffer boredom, who consider it a prequel to (what i can only assume he means) is a period of productivity: "For the thinker and for all inventive spirits boredom is the unpleasant "calm" of the soul which precedes the happy voyage and the dancing breezes; he must endure it, he must await the effect it has on him...

 in todays world, where tradition and morality are slowly being eroded by liberal movements, the individual is expected to be tolerant towards everything and anything. he will be afraid to criticize something which he sees as a change for the worse, something which goes against his upbringing or education. as a result of this forced tolerance he will have no use for any previously held moral values and will cease to practice them. this will cause him to lose his bearings in the world under which the general effect is a form of passiveness towards everything -a kind of passive nihilism. this will be the case in most people who are easily molded into society. in more extreme individuals however the result could be more dangerous to society: it could result in extremism, fundamentalism or fascism. this is the double edged sword of liberalism and the inevitable price that we have to pay for being tolerant.

 public intellectuals, thinktanks, universities and people at the forefront of progressive movements all have the same agenda: to make sure progress goes on unimpeded. even though they act on certain moral values, and will pose as philanthropists or defenders of such and such a cause, they all generally believe that the most important thing is that humanity survives and progresses, that at all costs civilization does not collapse. the question we have to ask however is really: is it really progress? another related question is: would it be too irrational and unthinkable to want to halt this so called progress? to prevent progress from happening? what if we are not meant to become an interplanetary civilization, what if we are not supposed to colonize mars. maybe we shouldn't assume that we are going to reach a singularity or that we will hand ourselves over to machines. moreover, what if society is on the brink of inevitable collapse and all we have left to do is to reboot the comp...

 merely the fact that there is a huge discrepancy between egoism and altruism means we should strive towards altruism. supposing psychological egoism to be true. as i have discussed elsewhere, we lack sufficient knowledge of the mind to make universal generalizations about our motives, they are simply too complex to fathom. but let us grant it as true for the sake of argument that humans are innately selfish and that is only a facade we put up when we are nice, and that egoism is an inescapable fact. precisely for this reason we should strive for altruism. because it raises us up from our animal nature in which we only look out for ourselves, to something sublime. that's why humans will never abolish altruism or any of its associated emotions like empathy, sympathy, compassion etc. maybe it is our ability to care for each other (no matter how false it may seem to us at the time) that makes us closer to divine beings. that's why nietzsche's project ails, because people look ...