Freedom! And The Fear!

Lyrics for The Fear

When Francine said last week that she wanted to talk about free will, I asked her over Line to say more about the topic. She ended with a sentence:
“When we grow up, we get more physical freedom but less freedom of will. That's because of the fear.”
I understood immediately! But then when I sat down to pull information together for this article, I found that I didn’t understand at all. What is The Fear? Is it maybe different for every person?

Lily Allen made a song entitled The Fear, and it catapulted her to superstardom. It really resonated with people. But is her The Fear the same as what Francine mentioned, or is it different?

So let’s talk about this sentence! When you hear it, what do you think of?

“When we grow up, we get more physical freedom but less freedom of will. That's because of the fear.”

What is our Geist 討論逐字稿

—Let’s look at the first question: “Humans are just doomed to destroy each other?” Are humans basically just destructive assholes?
—Well, I don’t think humans are evil, but in a book, “The Third Chimpanzee”, the author analyses human behavior, like from the aspect of environment, he argues that humans always destroy their environments. Like the ancient people, we think they tend to live in harmony with nature, but the truth is not like this. For example, he uses a lot of proofs to demonstrate why the Aztecs and Maya, the reason they disappeared can be ascribed to their destruction of nature, because they used up their resources, no matter animals or plants,
—And the people around them too!
—And some creatures like animals, they went extinct, not just because of climate change, but they were overhunted.
—So you feel like, yeah, this isn’t something that can change
—I was quite persuaded by this author, because the population is more intensive than other creatures, so we can’t help but destroy what’s around us, because we need more resources than other creatures. So I think that’s possible
—Maybe it was true before, that people can destroy each other in the past, or use up a lot of resources in the past, because we have to live. But do you think the situation will change in the future? I think the situation will become better, because people are trying to find the balance between humans and environment. Like we’re trying to protect animals. Some people think we don’t use as much energy as possible, we have to save energy. So the situation has changed. Do you think people will kill each other in the future?
—Do you mean on an individual basis or a mass basis?
—Either one.
—I think individual murders will probably always be with us, but 20th century style mass mowing down of human beings will change.

What is our Geist? What do we want it to be?

Hi guys, this is a difficult article because it compresses a lot of references into a small space. Instead of trying to understand the article as a piece, I’d rather talk about some of the questions it brings up.

So each title is the question to discuss, and the text underneath is the part of the article that brings it up, just for reference. We can also talk about the meaning of each passage during the discussion.

What is Geist?
The concept of Geist is one of the most fundamental of the Enlightenment. It refers to how the human mind creates the world we live in. This mind is, by default, a collective mind, but it is one shaped by individuals’ experiences of the world. And zeitgeist is, as the word indicates, the spirit, or mind, of its time. When Goethe talks about ‘den Geist der Zeiten’ in Faust, he emphasises that it is always with ‘one’s own spirit’ that we look upon history.