Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life.

Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engström: “One should not think, it is just confusing.”) A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on.)

Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised.

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes.

Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’) – and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes.

Philosophy

The Last Messiah | Issue 45

1. Focus on what you can control.2. You control how you respond to things.3. Ask yourself, <a href="https://forge.medium.com/if-you-seek-tranquility-ask-this-question-1dd89993256f" target="_self">“Is this essential?”</a>4. <a href="https://dailystoic.com/memento-mori/?mc_cid=28399a691c&mc_eid=47e85155f0" target="_self">Meditate on your mortality</a> every day.5. <a href="https://forge.medium.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-quality-time-58db618c099d" target="_self">Value time</a> more than money and possessions.6. You are the <a href="https://dailystoic.com/the-power-of-habits/" target="_self">product of your habits</a>.7. Remember you have the power to have no opinion.8. Own the morning.9. Put yourself up for review. Interrogate yourself.10. Don’t suffer imagined troubles.11. Try to see the good in people.12. Never be overheard complaining—even to yourself.13. Two ears, one mouth f<a href="https://dailystoic.com/zeno/?mc_cid=28399a691c&mc_eid=47e85155f0" target="_self">or a reason</a>.15. Don’t compare yourself to others.

16. Live as if you’ve died and come back (every minute is bonus time).17. “The best revenge is not to be like that.” —Marcus Aurelius18. Be strict with yourself and tolerant with others.19. Put every impression, emotion, to the test before acting on it.20. Learn something from everyone.21. Focus on process, not outcomes.22. Define what success means to you.23. Find a way to love everything that happens.24. Seek out challenges.25. Don’t follow the mob.26. Grab the “smooth handle.”27. Every person is an opportunity for kindness.28. Say no (a lot).

29. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.30. Find one thing that makes you wiser every day.31. What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee.32. Don’t judge other people.33. Study the lives of the greats.34. Forgive, forgive, forgive.35. Make a little progress each day.36. Journal.37. Prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks.38. Look for the poetry in ordinary things.39. To do wrong to one, is to do wrong to yourself.40. Always choose “alive time.”41. Associate only with people that make you better.42. If someone offends you, realize you are complicit in taking offense.

43. Fate behaves as she pleases…do not forget this.44. Possessions are yours only in trust.45. Don’t make your problems worse by bemoaning them.46. Accept success without arrogance, handle failure with indifference.47. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. (Always).48. The obstacle is the way.49. Ego is the enemy.50. Stillness is the key.

“When the standards have been set,” Epictetus said, “the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when…

50 Very Short Rules for a Good Life From the Stoics

Even if the economy is growing, income inequality and stagnant wages can make people feel less secure as their relative status in the economy diminishes. Behavioural economists have shown that "our status compared to other people, our happiness, is derived more by relative measures and distribution then by absolute measures. If that’s true then capitalism has a problem.

As poverty is relative (and in many societies a matter of comparison rather than an absolute fact), inequality leads to inevitable social disruption. If that is something that the ones who hold the reins of wealth and power do not feel empathic about, it might become something that they will feel fearful about. The same type of discontent led to oppressive regimes around the world, either ideological (such as communist ones) or simply conjuctural (every military dictatorship); it is easy to destroy an unfair system, much harder to replace it with a fair one.

The cost of inequality

It's done so much for human well-being, but it's far from perfect. Will capitalism as we know it evolve into something new?

Policy

Why the next stage of capitalism is coming

Media started using discussing technology in corelation with "culture, economics, politics, labor, and media" around a decade ago. It was the turning point that Andressen foresaw in his article, "Why software is eating the world", that technology will revolutionize sectors and industries. Tech coverage by journalists became grandiose, pushing a narrative of not just technology, but the people behind it, as visionaries who create the future.

Coverage on tech

The role played by venture capital itself rarely figured: widespread adoption was seen as a reflection of merit, rather than a function of a funding model that used cash reserves to create new monopolies. By the mid-twenty-tens, Andreessen Horowitz’s marketing strategy had evolved into something like mythological.

After some resounding failures (or frauds) of overpromising tech startups such as Theranos (or WeWork), coupled with the stories around Facebook's role in the 2016 US election, including the larger part data plays in manipulating people, the narrative on tech has become gloomier and dystopian, including in the mainstream press. Zuckerberg is still a mythological figure but is far from being considered infaillable anymore. "The myth had been distorted; the idealistic, aspirational narratives had not borne out. The industry needed a new story."

Turn for the negative

Andressen's new essay, "IT'S TIME TO BUILD" sounds eerly like a "call to arms" to the tech sector to encompass or simply overtake major institutions - with the same self-understood ethos of "doing good through technology". He suggests that politics and what was already build simply isn't enough, so what is lacking is this startup mentality of building more, faster. While it is unclear how it would work, it serves as a way to give gleaming new hope to tech entrepreneurs that they get to be seen as heroes again.

A gleaming new hope for positive narrative

If Andreessen’s exhortation to build was a call for “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward,” it was also a call to power. The era of the builder may also be the era of the Silicon Valley political actor.

“The tools for distribution have become democratized, and every company can become a source of truth.” - Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, on companies who build their own media arms to expand on their own narratives. It could be indicative to where the tech industry is looking to go forward: keep pushing ambitious, overarching narratives as part of the business model, or focus more on building (rather than "the idea of building").

Take truth into your own hands

For an ontologically—perhaps pathologically—future-facing industry, anything looks possible; it has to... amid the updated rhetoric, it can be easy to forget that venture-funded companies have always been trying to envision the banks, health-care systems, schools, postal systems, and newspapers of the future. To date, they have been only somewhat successful.

In Silicon Valley, “disruption” is giving way to “building.” What will be built?

The Last Messiah | Issue 45

50 Very Short Rules for a Good Life From the Stoics

Why the next stage of capitalism is coming

Does Tech Need a New Narrative?

Mad B