How to build an authoritarian regime — and how to stop one | Timothy Snyder

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Timothy Snyder: It’s normal that when a new medium comes along, a new communications technology comes along, that this is very disorienting to our own hardware. The same thing was true when the book came along. I mean the book, as compared to the manuscript, was a very powerful technology, and one could even say even in our 21st century world, where we claim that everything is so new and everything has transcended everything, where everything transcends everything every 15 minutes, the book is still a pretty powerful technology even when stacked up against all the things that it’s stacked up against now. But think back to say the 16th century when the printing press is beginning to make hay, what happens is that people are overwhelmed by new ideas, specifically religious world views are challenged, and religions fracture, and people fight wars, and a third of the European population is killed. So we think about the book and we think “That’s Enlightenment,” but Enlightenment happens 150 years after the printing press, and in the meantime an awful lot of Europeans killing off a lot of other Europeans. So I like to take that as the starting point—that new media are going to be destabilizing. And so the assumption that the Internet was going to come along and just take a basically good world and make it faster and more connected and cleaner and so on—that was something that we should have been skeptical about from the very beginning. And now we’re seeing why we should be skeptical about it. So does the Internet allow new things, or does the Internet create a channel for old things? I would say it’s rather the latter. We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it’s important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it’s also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we’re going to resist our leaders we have to say, “On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it’s intolerable; therefore we resist.” If there are no facts we can’t resist, it becomes impossible. So there are a couple of centuries of Democratic theory which make that argument in one form or another. That’s an old argument. And what follows from that is that if you want to build an authoritarian regime you try to make that factual world less salient, you try to make the world less about the facts that are between you and me and more about the emotions that will either divide us or bring us together, it doesn’t really matter which. Authoritarianism depends upon people getting used to hearing the things that they want to hear, and what it does is it takes that public sphere and dissolves it. It says, “There aren’t really truths out there, there aren’t really experts out there who can tell you those truths, it’s really all about how you feel about the world.” And that’s true in old authoritarianism and in new authoritarianism. So Germans in the 1930s who were no less educated than we are, probably more educated than we are, more literate—they got themselves believing all kinds of things that they wanted to believe, and they believed in, many of them, right down to the bitter end, and they got themselves convinced that truth was not a matter of constant evaluation of evidence, but truth was a matter of some larger truth, something that made them feel like they were together and that others were against them. That’s all old.

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How to minimize stress, astronaut style | Chris Hadfield

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This puppy: Fluffy time-waster or productivity hack? | Ingrid Fetell Lee

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink We find a lot of joy in cute things whether that’s baby animal videos or cartoons. And the reason that we find this joy is actually it stems from deep in our evolution. Cuteness is actually a set of aesthetic features that are “designed” to unlock playful and nurturing behavior in us. And for children even as young as six years old, cute features actually prompt these kinds of nurturing behaviors. So cuteness is actually a kind of defense mechanism that helps protect vulnerable young individuals from harm as they grow older. So cute features consist of a few basic things. Usually round features—so big, round eyes, a round head that’s usually a little bit too big for its body—And these aesthetic signals actually prompt playful and nurturing impulses in a caregiver. And so the idea is that when something has these cute features—whether that’s a baby or a baby animal or even a cartoon—These features prompt us to feel a sense of play, and they actually prompt us to engage more deeply with that cute thing so that cute animal gets a lot of stimulation that it needs for its brain to develop. This one’s a little kooky, but research in Japan has shown that looking at cute things actually can increase concentration. One of the reasons that they speculate that cuteness might influence concentration is that cute things are associated with nurturing, and nurturing is a very focused and detail-oriented activity. And so when people perform tasks after looking at pictures of baby animals they actually found that they were more attentive to detail and more conscientious in the tasks that they did. So this might be another way to both improve performance but also bring a little bit of joy to the workspace. I do this in my own workspace by adding googly eyes to things, which is a very silly way to do it but it actually brings a lot of joy and maybe it also helps me catch errors in my writing.

What Is Actuality? - Distinguish Direct Experience vs Concept

Actuality - How to draw a distinction between what is real vs what is conceptual and imaginary. The Ultimate Life Purpose Course - Create Your Dream Career: https://ift.tt/29w9I9y Leo Reviews Top 200 Self Help Books https://ift.tt/29Z66uZ Leo's Blog: https://ift.tt/2mWWGH7 Actualized.org Forum https://ift.tt/2a7wTJl Contribute subtitles & translations for any Actualized.org video, watch how: https://youtu.be/b9cKgwnFIAw Disclaimer: Advice provided without warranty. This is NOT medical advice. By watching & applying this advice you agree to take 100% responsibility for all consequences.

Corporate responsibility? Don’t make me laugh. | Anand Giridharadas

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Anand Giridharadas: Corporate social responsibility or CSR is everywhere—and which company now doesn’t have CSR? All the major banks that screwed America in the financial crisis in the world, that sold out our economy and tried to make a killing selling toxic mortgage products and didn’t come clean to the American people or regulators about what was going on, paid billions of dollars in fines for fraud—Almost all those banks, like most American companies, have CSR departments and they’ll go and they’ll do some—they’ll have shovels, they’ll do something with shovels. They’ll do something with some poor country. They’ll go to some community and they’ll even teach like a financial literacy class, like, “don’t fall prey to financial fraud - of the kind that we perpetrated.” This whole idea that you can sell kids poisonous drinks that give them diabetes while making a playground, that you can build the Dakota pipeline or invest in the Dakota pipeline while sponsoring a climate change gathering with your CSR. That you can push for a healthcare system that only gives people benefits if they work 30 hours a week, thus tempting many employers to only employ people 29 hours a week and then say you’re in the business of empowering workers or being the best first job in America or whatever. The reality is: many, many companies are trying to fight on both sides of a war in their main operation. In their lobbying activities they are pushing for an America that is merciless. And then, understanding the need to brand themselves, understanding the need to soothe a little bit of the public anger in this age of rage, they give a little back. They throw some scraps at us. And what is so sad is that all too often it works. “Conscious capitalism.” That’s a good one. Again it’s this idea that we can make capitalism more conscious, more humane simply by wishing it were so. Whereas, in fact, the problem with our brand of market capitalism in American in 2018 is that it’s a capitalism purely driven by the needs of shareholders. And that investors needs have come to so predominate that the needs of communities, the needs of workers, of employees of those companies and various other stakeholders are completely marginalized. And until we change that structure, simply calling for capitalism to be more conscious doesn’t really work. I mean conscious capitalism was supposed to describe Whole Foods, for example, until it got taken over by a private equity firm. Then you get a word like innovation. We talk about innovation. Innovation is treated as its own good, just “More innovation! Everybody’s got to innovate!” Well innovation means make things new, and here’s the problem: We’ve done a tremendous amount of innovation in America over the last generation. What we didn’t get a lot of out of that innovation was progress, if progress is defined as “most people’s lives getting better.” In fact, in the era of innovation we’ve also seen the odds of social mobility (of out-earning your parents, for example), fall from 90 percent to 50 percent. A crap shoot, right? So yes, great, we have a lot of new stuff, a lot of “new shit has come to light,” as they said in that movie. But the reality is that hasn’t gotten people paid more, that hasn’t made people’s lives more stable, that hasn’t helped people afford housing, that hasn’t helped people educate their kids better. So we’ve got a lot of innovation but it’s not the same as progress, and progress is the more important of the two.

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