Time Capsule #166
On groupthink, dignity, and integrity.
Greetings,
I hope this email finds you well.
Enjoy!
Don’t try to do everything. Do one thing well.
—Steve Jobs
✏️ The Contagion of the Crowd (3 August 2020)
A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty.
Sigmund Freud
One must be wary of the contagious effect of the crowd: it influences our decision-making processes, our beliefs, and our daily lives in ways that go criminally unnoticed in modern day society.
Humans are social beings. Community with others is important; total retreat and abstinence from the crowd is not only impossible but detrimental. Yet a balance must be struck. From time to time, it is useful to retreat into solitude, using such a space to reflect and re-calibrate.
The development of the inner self acts as a counter-balance to the persona — to the mask that we all wear in society. Do not be ashamed of it; the persona, too, can be developed and tailored to one's liking, and does not necessarily need to be at odds with the inner self. That being said, a calm, reserved, and objective (insofar as one can be objective seeing life from only their perspective) inner self will cultivate a keen sense of personal awareness that will allow you to see yourself from a third person view, enabling the identification of your tendencies, your faults, your strengths and your limitations.
Honest self-reflection is imperative; journalling helps. However, as all humans must, you must return to the crowd.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Retreat, return, but do not return as you were.
uberrima fides
upmost good faith
💡 Food for Thought
The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.
St Augustine of Hippo
🔗 Sunday Best
Dignity and Integrity: House of the Intellect Part Two
To me this seems to be the most symptomatic expression of our society’s philosphy towards work: people no longer work with dignity and integrity, and it is not expected that you should.
We celebrate [and promote] the man who completes 1000 tasks one year, despite him not being proud of any of them and knowing they are not his best work, instead of celebrating the one who does just three, but does so with everything he’s got.
The idea that you should take pride in your work, and that a piece of work can be of value even though it might not be celebrated or handsomely rewarded, is foreign to most people. And so we aim for volume, of a quality only good enough to pass what I like to call the “looks good to me test” — because why bother doing your best work?
It may seem a bit abstract, the disappearance of the concepts of Dignity and Integrity from the world of education, art, philosophy and culture generally is one of the greatest challenges to a sense of intellectual community today. Recognizing our own dignity allows us to appreciate the value of our contributions to the world of ideas and well as appreciate those of others. This dignity arises from and is reinforced by personal integrity towards ourselves and work. Unfortunately, these concepts have almost completely disappeared. Simply put, these are the only possible foundations on which the House of the Intellect can be built.
How to Tie a Tie
Can’t believe it took me 28 years to figure out how to tie a tie nicely.
Aurora: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Quite a nice mini-concert from an artist I’d never heard of until now.
I recently chatted with a dance studio teacher, and asked her what makes a good dancer. Her answer was, in essence, individual expression and style. This artist seems a good representation of that.
Rudeness is a weak man’s imitation of strength.
—Eric Hoffer
See you next week!
AT