When you see a tightrope walker, no one needs to explain what is happening. You immediately understand the risk and skill involved, and you are transfixed by it. I'd say this is a "magical" situation: understood intuitively, without explanation, with minimal cultural context. Nature creates a lot of magical things, but I have trouble thinking of many magical human creations. Fireworks? Percussion? What else?
From the wikipedia talk page on Kyle MacDonald, my Google-rankings arch-nemesis and proponent of the "one red paperclip" project:
how can one man get all kinds of attenoin because of a paper clip when there are starving and dieing every day this gives the message that if you do a cheap trick you will be rewarded but if you live a honest life and try to work for what you have you get scorned
No it doesn't. Cardboard boxA 17:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Two approaches to saving all of your experiences on a hard drive somewhere:
There's something strange about saying a portion of space and the land within "belong" to an individual. This extends to the idea of countries: how is it possible for a space to "belong" to a group of people?
Practically, we talk about "ownership" and "property" when something won't be taken away from someone. Yet the only thing we own necessarily are our thoughts. Our life can be taken away and our actions can be misassociated, but without our thoughts there is no "us" to own them.
Yet we still talk about certain objects and spaces as "property". Some of these others attempt to take, but fail either due to the owner fighting for ownership, or due to a misguided or misdirected attempt. Other things no one attempts to take, because they don't want them or have made an agreement not to. These are all very different types of property, and we should treat them differently (unlike some anarchistic philosophy that uses the term "property" very generally):
I'm not sure what to call "property due to misunderstanding", but it must exist. Maybe something like the Christian or Muslim hope in afterlife — plenty of misguided attempts have been made to destroy it (through martyrs, etc.), while the only true loss of that hope is when believers convert from an afterlife-affirming religion to an afterlife-denying belief system.
Speaking of civil liberties as a property by struggle may be a bit extreme, but I think it's accurate so long as you're not making any other assumptions about the nature of humanity and its purpose.
What about thieves? The existence of thieves is dependent on the existence of property. In a world without property, one person may still take another person's bike, but it would no longer be stealing.
Imagine two people, A and B. B sells various products. A buys one and gives it back to B. B resells it to another individual. It seems like A should be able to do this, it's just a donation.
Scenario two: B sells A a product, but never gives it to A. B has stolen from A.
Scenario three, a combination: B sells A a product, and never gives it to A. Instead B gives it to another person, C. Now let's say C just gives it back to B. It seems like C is just as responsible for the theft as B is.
I just bought some pretzels from a vending machine. It also dropped two bags of sour cream and onion potato chips, which I don't care for, that were dangling nearby (already paid for). I gave one bag to some people working nearby, but the other I put on a shelf with some similar chips, behind a chain window protecting some food products for the night. There are cameras that watch this spot for theft, but what about this kind of theft?
It's really no wonder that trees survive — there's so much surface area for them to soak up life. It's interesting to see the variety in trees, and how they all get along in their own ways. The big ones need more sun and water and nutrients, which they get because they're bigger — and the small ones don't need as much, but they still get it.
It seems like we have a hunger for "newness", or death and rebirth. In Christianity, we have the death of the "misdeeds of the body" (Romans 8:13) and rebirth in Christ (and in Judaism, the Jubilee year). In Buddhism, the total death of self and recreation (or perhaps "realization") of oneness with everything. Academia is colored religous by its semester-oriented structure; any student can explain the "fresh" feeling of a new semester. Sartre takes this to an extreme, saying that we are new creations every moment (which, oddly enough, causes angst). Total permanence, reminiscent of Parmenides, traps us. Total impermanence, a la Heraclitus ("Everything flows, nothing stands still."), frightens us and causes angst.
Perhaps the love of shopping that so characterizes our American society thrives on this dichotomy? Materialism is a continual recreation through addition, coupled with an eventual eradication of the old. (Being the only sort of "recreation" people know, it's not suprising that Christian speakers spend so much time discouraging this attitude in the context of Christianity.) Materialism provides a sense of newness without forcing us to identify with a purely permanent or impermanent nature.
.
