Meta Quest Quotes

In a meta-analysis of studies on loneliness, researchers Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton found the following: Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45 percent.

[L]iberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents’ life or that of the “English,” they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do what would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them “English.” This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one’s immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, in our secular societies based on “choice,” people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position: even if they are allowed to practice their beliefs, these beliefs are “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion; they moment they present them publicly as what they really are for them, they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of free choice” (in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense) can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn away from one’s particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots.

Come stiamo correndo per le strade di Stoccolma, così corriamo dentro noi stessi. Arrivati alla meta, la distanza e il peso di questa maratona interiore saranno importanti come i chilometri di queste strade e come il calore di questo sole. mentre alzo il piede per fare un passo, l'altro piede si appoggia a terra. Se il mondo si fermasse nel momento in cui, andando avanti, ho un piede sollevato e l'altro poggiato a terra, quel piede solido che mi sostiene potrebbe mettere radici. E quelle radici potrebbero penetrare negli interstizi del terreno tra una pietra e l'altra. Ma io non lascio che il mondo si fermi. Dopo un passo, un altro, e un altro ancora.

For Aristotle, fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher, the starting point of wisdom, or philosophy, was metaphysics. Modernity, in its quest for self-destruction, has more or less rejected metaphysics. But metaphysics will never go away because metaphysics is reality itself—the study of the totality of what is. Metaphysics is the starting point in terms of actual foundations of knowledge and presupposition, yet it comes at the end of the process of pedagogy, as it is the highest science. Nowadays, aside from certain continental philosophers who follow in the train of genius writers like nineteenth/twentieth-century German philosopher mathematician Edmund Husserl, theoria and metaphysics have been jettisoned for pragmatism, postmodernism, and other forms of self-destructive prattle. [...] Unfortunately, certain basic flaws in Aristotle’s own position led to that decline, particularly his adoption of empiricism. Aristotle cut the world off from the possibility of any other world or reality or dimension, and while it took a millennium or two, this ultimately resulted in materialism, positivism, and finally the negation of all meaning and purpose.