Archive

John Gray on Man, Beliefs, and Changes

One of the prob­lems here, of course, is that there’s no we.” Who’s we? I mean, human­i­ty’s composed—the human species is composed—of bil­lions of sep­a­rate indi­vid­u­als with dif­fer­ent goals, dif­fer­ent plans, dif­fer­ent val­ues, and dif­fer­ent ideals.

Planetary Initiation

I think that Western mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion end­ed up kind of caught in a trap locked in its egoic struc­ture, and based our whole trip on kind of hyper­indi­vid­u­al­ism, accu­mu­la­tion of resources, and so on. And we’ve now reached a point where we can’t go fur­ther than that.

The Conversation #5 — Andrew Keen

We’ve got two para­dox­i­cal trends hap­pen­ing at the same time. The first is what I call in my book the cult of the social,” the idea that on the net­work, every­thing has to be social and that the more you reveal about your­self the bet­ter off you are. So if your friends could know what your musi­cal taste is, where you live, what you’re wear­ing, what you’re think­ing, that’s a good thing, this cult of shar­ing. So that’s one thing that’s going on. And the oth­er thing is an increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal­ized indi­vid­u­al­ism of con­tem­po­rary, par­tic­u­lar­ly dig­i­tal, life. And these things seem to sort of coex­ist, which is para­dox­i­cal and it’s some­thing that I try to make sense of in my book.

The Automated Economy

Instead of hav­ing our chil­dren become con­sumers of robot­ics tech­nol­o­gy, con­sumers of prod­ucts, we’d have to train them to be pro­duc­ers, to real­ize that they can use robot­ic tech­nolo­gies to build some­thing with their intu­ition, their cre­ativ­i­ty, and their sense of pur­pose, that has mean­ing to them. Then we’d have a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly flu­ent society.