“Mental illness is built into society as we know it, and therefore, to heal mental illness or to foster mental health is fundamentally a social, political, economic problem.”
-Charles Eisenstein
Category Archives: Culture & Political Economy
The institutional role of the police
“The last time a nationwide movement for racial justice provoked such a defensive posture with regard to tradition (i.e. “the good old days”), civility (i.e. absolute police power), and law and order (i.e. more absolute police power), the bodies of three missing college-aged Civil Rights organizers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, were found beneath an earthen dam in Mississippi.”
(from the article)
Click here to read my latest article (published in Medium.com).
David Graeber on Bullsh*t Jobs
We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. —DAVID GRAEBER, BULLSHIT JOBS: A THEORY
“Education For Whom and For What”
“The goal of education, to shift over to Bertrand Russell, is to give a sense of value to things other than domination, which means we regard a child as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with a certain intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given the proper soil, air, and light.”
—Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Mis-Education
What if we’re being conditioned in such a way that we can no longer read anything in depth? What if the way we read influences the way we think?
“In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” (from the article)
Click here to read Nicholas Carr’s insightful article in the Atlantic on how technology has changed and continues to change the way we live and think.
Charles Eisenstein on Sacred Economics
Charles Eisenstein‘s seminal work, Sacred Economics, played a pivotal role in inspiring both Slowing Down to Run Faster and The Mass Psychology of Fittism. In the following video by Ian McKenzie, Charles talks about the role that a debt-based money economy has played in fundamentally promoting political oppression, poverty, inequality, war, environmental destruction, anomie, and the severing of deep social ties.
A few words on the foot in relation to shoes and the environment
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 22 of The Mass Psychology of Fittism (Undocumented Worker Press: ’15)
The Foot
To understand how humans might have looked, felt, moved and behaved before we entered the modern to postmodern era—that is, before the advent of liquid crystal display monitors and multinational shoe corporations—it is instructive to turn once again to Mr. Darwin, the environments in which our human genome developed, and cultures in which efficient and varied movement continues to flourish.
Why RTF is now SDF
For those of you who knew one of my earlier websites, you may wonder why Radically Transformative Fitness has been re-named Slowing Down Faster.
Learning (long version)
“[In the] humanistic conception, with its roots in the Enlightenment… education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way… in other words, providing circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.”
-Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Mis-Education
What is learning?
What is improvement?
What is Slowing Down Faster?
by Edward Yu
Slowing Down Faster could be considered the art of learning how to learn or, put another way, the art of learning how to improve. Slowing Down Faster is in this manner a radical departure from conventional approaches to learning and improving because where Slowing Down Faster emphasizes exploration, thereby encouraging people to learn how to learn and learn how to improve, conventional approaches focus on mimicking and performing, which commonly results in trying to learn and trying to improve.
Continue reading