Plato’s cave

They say you can judge a person’s character by the people they admire. It’s obvious: if they admire Einstein and Newton, they are a scientific type… If they admire Saint Onuphrius and Saint Anthony, they are a austere and religious type, and if they admire some fraud or crook, they are certainly a fraud themselves and not to be trusted. The problem with me is that when I was young, I read "The Great Inventors of Mankind," which my father gave me as a gift, and I wanted to be like them. When I realized that inventions are difficult and that I probably wouldn’t invent anything, I began to admire various heroes, warriors, and the like. I didn’t do well there either, after realizing that acts of heroism are generally difficult and dangerous, and that, ultimately, in times of peace, you can't perform many heroic deeds anyway. Then I started reading about pioneer doctors like Pasteur, Koch, Jenner, and others who made innovative discoveries and saved many lives. These wer...

  The leftists babble, the right-wingers eat, the anarchists scream: a evaluation guide for pre-election texts ...I’m sick of text-sheets [walls of text]: I like high-quality, small sweets. A spoonful of sweet preserves with a bit of ice cream. I don’t need to eat a whole tray of baklava. I rarely read long texts... they contain too much garbage. In fact, I’ve found an easy method to figure out the author's political stance. If the text is relatively short, they are probably right-wing and establishment. (Establishment right-wingers are generally too bored for many words because they have a lot of business and positions to look after). Establishment leftists say quite a bit more, since they have to justify their privileged position as appointed leftist intellectuals. The unappointed leftists, on the other hand, are extremely wordy: they write angry "sheets" [walls of text], mixing mismatched sources with philosophers, historians, economists, and dead revolutionar...

  “The so-called ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are an unnatural union of different religious values and concepts, just like the ‘Greco-Christian civilization’: an unnatural union, a forced marriage. Anyone who has read the Old and New Testaments notices a strict, vengeful, warrior God who protects the Jews in the first, and a tolerant, loving, forgiving, and self-sacrificing God for all humanity in the second. It is as if God transformed from one divinely inspired text to the other.” 🙂

…Every society, in order to live and prosper, needs stability, cohesion, and a common value code: it needs shared values that shape commonly accepted rules of coexistence… …and which, ideally, become laws: they crystallize into a commonly accepted and respected legislation. All of this requires a common vision that will give hope, resilience, stubborn effort, and patience for achieving goals and solving problems. A common vision granted by God, from the transcendent realm, is the best and most authoritative solution. A story that (almost) everyone accepts as true is a great solution. Leaders who enjoy metaphysical favor and who communicate with the transcendent — which guides them and informs them about the right course for the people — are exactly what is needed. The story can be modified over the years, but not radically: a radical transformation of the foundational myth on which a society rests entails the transformation of that society… …its transformation into a differe...

  …The other day — Thursday — was World Philosophy Day, and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) decided to celebrate it for the very first time. In the country that produced the very first purely philosophical discourse — the Greek Pre-Socratics — the country that, with incredible boldness and insight, tried to explain the world beyond myths, religious beliefs, superstitions, and prejudices; the country that gave the world the giants who laid the foundations for almost every philosophical current… they sat there like little schoolchildren. Before the emergence of philosophy, the dominant way of explaining the world was based on myth. “The basic characteristics of mythical thinking were: •  Anthropomorphism: Natural phenomena (e.g., thunder, earthquakes, the sun) were explained as acts or expressions of the will of gods and heroes who had human form and qualities. •  Arbitrariness: Events happened because of the personal, unlimited power of deit...