Maybe the Truth Doesn't Always Set You Free

[kmo]

Are there people you admire but don't like to talk to because you don't like your side of the conversation whenever the two of you get together? I really notice it as a podcaster. There are some interviewees with whom I fall into an easy conversational vibe and the hour flies by. Other conversational partners are like my counterpart in a duel, but

Comments

How very American of you!

[ext_4021213]

You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile! Is it any wonder that the worst enemy in the Star Trek universe were the Borg? Americans are terrified of being dependent on their community. Saying that our very psyche is a result of our interaction with others is probably the most radical thing a person can do.

[peristaltor]

The libertarian ethic stands on individual responsibility and individual autonomy. If the sovereign individual is a fiction, a trick of the light, or merely a rhetorical device, then the rights of individuals could be equally contingent.

Yup. I started to realize how malleable our personalities were when I began my dive into advertising. I really hate ads, for example, not because I merely find them irritating; I find them irritating because many of them work, and work long before I think they've had any effect. Were I some individual in the Randian tradition, I would be able to select and choose my opinions without worry of contamination by outside pressures and competition to my cognition.

When Steve Keen and Yves Smith outlined the rise of neoclassical economics and how it depended upon furthering the myth of Homo economicus, wow! We, according to papers outlining how the theories work, are perfect producers of goods and perfectly-well-informed consumers, and this symmetry of information destroys any advantage one may have