Monday, June 18, 2012

What is Marketable?

More and more things are being determined by private industry on the free market instead of the government: prisons, utilities and even street lights in some communities. And even the government and schools are involved in market tactics: you can go to the head of the line in immigration if you have a half a million dollars and some schools are paying kids to read.

We have already made choices as a society about some things that are unacceptable to buy or sell.  We are in agreement that human beings cannot be bought or sold.  Nor endangered species.  Are there other things that are too valuable to put on the open market?  What about human survival?  What about areas that are afflicted by famine or disease?  Shouldn't there be an agreement that no matter how much it costs, we will make sure groups of people have the ability to live, if we can help it?


Also, market forces aren't always successful in accomplishing the purpose of an institution.  Can money really help a child to read, or does it teach the child that reading is supposed to be only for financial gain?  If all things are determined by money, don't we all learn that money is the source of all life?  And is that actually true? 

What arenas in life ought not to be determined by how much money one has? What areas of life shouldn't be given a price at all?

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Testing Our Rationality

It is the goal of philosophy to attack the irrational and to accept the rational.  Philosophers like to do this in pristine environments, which allow for the best thinking possible, either alone or with colleagues who have the same intensity to answer the questions asked.

However, what if our very premise of how to do philosophy is irrational?  What if there is no such thing as a pristine, stress-free environment?  What if, in having others participate in our seeking of answers, we are fooling ourselves that our relationships will be stable enough to create a place to produce answers?

Albert Ellis came up with Ten Irrational Beliefs that many of us have about our lives and relationships.  Which of these do you agree are irrational beliefs?  Which of these beliefs do you have a hard time letting go of?  Which of these beliefs do you deny are irrational, but that they are simply necessary for a human life?


1. The idea that you must have love or approval from all the significant people in your life

2. The idea that you absolutely must be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving or the idea that you must be competent or talented in some important area.

3. The idea that other people absolutely must not act obnoxiously and unfairly, and that when they do, you should blame and damn them, and see them as bad, wicked, or rotten individuals.

4. The idea that you have to see things as being awful, terrible, and catastrophic when you are seriously frustrated or treated unfairly.

5. The idea that you must be miserable when you have pressures and difficult experiences; and that you have little ability to control, and cannot change, your disturbed feelings.

6. The idea that if something is deemed dangerous or fearsome, you must obsess about it and frantically try to escape from it before it happens.

7. The idea that you can easily avoid facing challenges and responsibilities and still lead a highly fulfilling existence.

8. The idea that your past remains all-important and because something once strongly influenced your life, it has to keep determining your feelings and behavior today.

9. The idea that people and things absolutely must be better than they are and that it is awful and horrible if you cannot change life’s grim facts to suit you.

10. The idea that you can achieve maximum happiness by inertia and inaction or by passively enjoying yourself.


One more question: How do you usually respond to such a circumstance as it is described?  Is your response rational or irrational?

The biggest issue here is the relationship between personal need and what we can actually demand from our environment.  Rationally, we cannot demand from our environment what the environment does not have.  But even the most rational of us do just that, and when our expectations our dashed we are angry and we might lash out.  Yet the issue is not a lack in our environment, but the lack within ourselves.  How can we rationally deal with that?