u/WanderingPrimate717

TIME named "You" Person of the Year in 2006.

At the time, it felt optimistic: the internet had handed us the tools to publish, connect, create, shape culture. Communicate ideas on a whole new level.

Twenty years later, it feels more complicated.

Information silos. Algorithms deciding what we watch and read. The collapse of a shared narrative. More access to information than ever – but with our attention itself becoming one of the most valuable things to capture and control.

So where did the promise of "You" actually lead us?

Did the internet decentralise power and information, or simply create new forms of influence that are harder to see?

Love to hear your thoughts, Untanglers.

A farmer in 1929 with a brilliant distinction:

>Work is doing something that you have to do.
When you're doing something that you want to do, you like to do, that's play.

He's unsentimental. He isn’t pretending life was easier, or that the past was purer. He simply seems to have found a way of seeing effort without resentment.

And his old-world scepticism about progress is timeless: modern inventions "bother us and help us."

Every age tends to think it's living at the peak of history. Maybe wisdom is knowing that every age has its burdens, its comforts, and its illusions.

Some things change. Some things remain. The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west.

>The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

— Aldous Huxley, 1933, in his introduction to an edition of Samuel Butler's Erewhon

Huxley is warning that one of the most psychologically seductive things about a "good cause" is that it can sometimes give people permission to behave badly while still feeling morally pure.

This connects with the “dark-ego-vehicle principle”: the idea that moral, political, or social causes can be used as vehicles for ego needs — status, domination, moral superiority, attention, or conflict — rather than genuine concern for the cause itself.

The point is not that standing by an important cause is inherently narcissistic. Many people are motivated by real compassion, principle and justice.

But Huxley's warning is that once we feel righteous, we can become less aware of our own moral flaws.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned that humanity's increasing power over nature could become something far more unsettling: power over human beings themselves.

The danger, for Lewis, was not science or technology as such, but the loss of any deeper moral framework capable of guiding their use.

As our ability to control the world increases — through AI, biotechnology, psychology, surveillance, and social engineering — his warning feels less like nostalgia and more like prophecy.

Source: C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

Jane Goodall's final message on hope, responsibility, and the role each of us plays on this planet.

Every life matters. Every day makes some difference. And each of us has some role to play in protecting what is still beautiful in this world.

Credit: Famous Last Words: Dr. Jane Goodall — Netflix.

George Price is one of those figures whose life is hard to compress into a short post.

Born in New York in 1922, Price was an American chemist, science writer, and mathematical outsider who arrived in London in the late 1960s searching for a major scientific breakthrough.

While studying the evolution of social behaviour, Price developed what became known as the Price equation: a mathematical way of describing how traits change across generations.

Its importance was not only technical. It became deeply connected to one of the most difficult questions in evolutionary biology:

Why does altruism exist?

Why would an organism sacrifice itself for another? Why would selflessness survive in a world supposedly governed by competition, survival, and reproductive advantage?

On one level, Price's work helped bring altruism inside the logic of natural selection. Acts that appear selfless could be analysed in terms of fitness, kinship, genetic transmission, and evolutionary advantage.

But that's where the subject becomes uncomfortable.

Because human altruism is not only something we observe from the outside as behaviour. It is also something we experience from within as our conscience. We carry an expectation that we should be cooperative, considerate, loving, and selfless — even when we fail those ideals.

That makes altruism more than a technical problem. It goes right to the heart of what being human really means.

Price himself seemed unable to leave the question at the level of mathematics.

After helping formalise the evolutionary logic of altruism, he converted to Christianity and began giving away his possessions, devoting himself to helping homeless men around London. At one point, broke and living in increasingly desperate circumstances, he reportedly wrote to friend and evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith:

>“John, I’m down to my last 15p, and I can’t wait to get rid of the last 15.”

It is a devastating line. The man who had helped explain selflessness as a biological phenomenon seemed to be trying to prove, through his own life, that altruism could be more than disguised self-interest.

He died by suicide in 1975.

It's simplistic to say his equation caused his tragedy. His life was complicated — there was illness, depression, religious visions, psychological instability. But the shape of the story remains tragic.

I think what's interesting is the fault line in modern thought that Price's life shines a light on. Science can describe mechanisms by which altruistic behaviour may evolve. It can analyse selflessness in terms of genes, fitness, selection, and survival. But whether that fully explains our moral nature is another question.

Price stood at the point where biology, conscience, religion, guilt, and goodness all collide.

His life is not proof that altruism is merely selfish. Nor is it proof that unguarded self-sacrifice is psychologically simple or socially sustainable. It is a reminder that the human moral sense remains one of the fascinating and difficult things to explain from a mechanistic perspective.

I think the question is: can science fully explain altruism, or does our human conscience point to something deeper in human nature?

Epicurus’ point is not that death is emotionally easy to face, but that our fear of it may rest on the mistake of imagining ourselves present for our own absence.

We never actually encounter death as an experience — so perhaps the fear is not as rational as it feels.

Source: Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus.

Thoughts? Does this ease the fear of death, or does it miss something essential?

Another brilliant animation by Steve Cutts: film-clip for 'Are You Lost In The World Like Me?' by Moby & The Void Pacific Choir, from the Album The Systems Are Failing.

Music by Yann Tiersen - "Comptine D'un Autre Ete L'Apres Midi"

Credit for the edit: Dope Audio on YouTube

In this clip, biologist Jeremy Griffith describes the human condition as the ultimate "elephant in the living room" — the deepest issue about being human, but one so uncomfortable that we have learned to live around it rather than face it directly.

An apt metaphor: ordinary life rolls on — work, family, conversation, distractions — while the unresolved issue of our immense duality presses in without us facing it.

Clip from YouTube: Summary of Jeremy Griffith’s Ideas

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and former Soviet prisoner who wrote about the reality of the Soviet labour camp system.

In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

This quote comes from his Nobel Lecture.

>“And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world – but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness – and violence, decrepit, will fall.”

Interestingly, Solzhenitsyn did not deliver it in Stockholm. Still living under Soviet pressure, he feared that if he left for Sweden he would not be allowed back into the USSR.

So the lecture itself had to be smuggled out. Swedish journalist Stig Fredrikson later described receiving the photographed manuscript as black-and-white negatives, hiding them inside a transistor radio, and carrying them out through Helsinki to Stockholm.

So Solzhenitsyn was not speaking about falsehood abstractly. He was writing from inside a system where truth itself had to travel in secret.

We've come a long way, but the knife-edge is real.

Cartoon by Edward Steed, The New Yorker.

In this snippet from Conversations with John Anderson, Professor Gad Saad introduces the concept of “suicidal empathy.”

His point is not that empathy is bad. Empathy is essential for any social species. It allows us to understand, cooperate, forgive, and care.

But Saad argues that empathy, like any virtue, can become destructive when it is detached from judgement, proportion, and reality. Too little empathy can make us cruel; too much empathy, misdirected or unexamined, can also lead to serious harm.

Saad has recently released a book on this idea, Suicidal Empathy, which I’m keen to review.

The question is: can empathy become dangerous when it is treated as an unlimited moral good?

Source: Professor Gad Saad discussing Suicidal Empathy on Conversations with John Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaJ8Z1gH3lQ

A little mid-week reset.

No deep thoughts today. Just a great song.

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian philosopher, scholar, and statesman who later became President of India.

This quote offers a strong counterpoint to the recent post about Norman McLaren’s 'Neighbours'. In that short film, two men destroy each other over a flower that appears between them. What begins as admiration becomes possession, then rivalry, then violence.

Radhakrishnan points to something deeper: the illusion that the other person is truly separate from ourselves.

That does not erase difference, conflict, or responsibility. But it does challenge the psychological boundary that allows us to dehumanise, compete, resent, and destroy.

"Love thy neighbour" is not only a moral command, but a recognition: what we do to the other, we are also doing to ourselves.

Norman McLaren’s Neighbours is only eight minutes long, but it remains a powerful little parable about human conflict.

Two men live peacefully side by side until a flower appears on the boundary between them.

At first, they both admire it. Then they want it. Then they claim it. Then they destroy each other over it.

The film is strikingly simple, using pixilation — a form of stop-motion with live actors — to give ordinary human behaviour an almost grotesque, mechanical quality. It doesn’t espouse an ideology. There is no speech, and no attempt at explanation. Just beauty → possession → rivalry → escalation → violence → death.

What makes it so unsettling is how familiar the pattern feels — and how quickly it can come to seem inevitable. We see violence resorted to again and again throughout the world, as if conflict is the only language left once possession, pride, fear, or identity take over.

The question is whether we can understand the psychology driving this madness deeply enough to manage the dilemma more effectively — and perhaps, eventually, move beyond it.

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist best known for The Revolt of the Masses, first published in 1930.

Written in the shadow of rapid modernisation, mass politics, and cultural upheaval in Europe, the book warned against the rise of a type of person who inherits civilisation's achievements without understanding the discipline, standards, or responsibility required to sustain them.

>“The mass crushes beneath it everything which is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” — The Revolt of the Masses

Ortega's work was an influential critique of "the masses". His concern was not simply with ordinary people, but with a mentality: the pressure to think like everyone else, distrust anything exceptional, and pull down what demands effort, independence, or deeper understanding.

Feels strikingly relevant today.

In the early 1920s, Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov wrote Kinoks: A Revolution, a manifesto in which he described the camera as a “mechanical eye” — a machine freed from the limits of ordinary human vision.

It could move where the body could not, cut between places and moments, compress time, rearrange space, and show the world from angles previously unavailable to us.

From 2026, with GoPros, Insta360s, drones, phone cameras etc that all may seem pretty obvious.

But at the time, Vertov’s Kino-Eye theory was revolutionary. He rejected acted fiction in favour of capturing life directly. Reality "caught unawares". Then using the unique powers of cinema to reveal the world in a new way.

Source: Dziga Vertov manifesto excerpt and footage from Man with a Movie Camera, featured in Ways of Seeing, Episode 1, with John Berger.

Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century French mathematician, philosopher, and religious thinker. In Pensées, he highlights the painful contradiction often at play within humans: our longing for greatness, happiness, perfection, and love — alongside our painful awareness of weakness, misery, fault, and inadequacy.

>Man would fain be great and sees that he is little;
would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable;
would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections;
would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men,
and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt.
The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Self-reflection without compassionate self-acceptance can be difficult — especially when we do not like what we see.

The more conscious we become of the gap between what we want to be and what we fear we are, the more unbearable that self-judgement can become. And when something reinforces that painful image — a criticism, a failure, a truth we do not want to face — it can provoke resentment, defensiveness, even rage.

Pascal's observation highlights why understanding, compassion, context, and forgiveness matter so much. The challenge is to look clearly at ourselves without becoming trapped by what we find.