Originally Isolation Quotes

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

Of all individuals, the hated, the shunned, and the peculiar are arguably most themselves. They wear no masks whatsoever in order to be accepted and liked; they do seem most guarded, but only by their own hands: as compared to the populace, they are naked.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassions for anxiety are very different - we are afraid of losing out in the competition, feeling unwanted, isolated, and ostracized. But the purpose of anxiety is still to protect us from dangers that threaten the same things: our existence or values that we identify with our existence. This normal anxiety of life cannot be avoided except at the price of apathy or the numbing of one's sensibilities and imagination.

The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.

If everything must have a cause, of course, this also applies to God; if God can exist in isolation, then why not the universe?

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself. "Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write). "But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

A survivor who is isolated (whether in physical or emotional distance) from his or her family of origin will experience profound grieving.

The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought," he said, "the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.

I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today’s world your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.

Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species’ obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparking Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by “human suffering,” the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But those are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s “Last Messiah.” It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be the greatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere of knowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentially perverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man something in his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay the noblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits of depravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the human race, in which villainy--nay, cruelty--is to be found in that degree.

He could have been invisible and it wouldn’t have made a difference to them. He didn’t care, so long as he felt at ease, which was his original intention. He wasn’t there to make friends, nor did he want to.

It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man, and prompts him to say in secret at the sight of another suffering: 'Perish if you will; I am safe.' No longer can anything but dangers to society in general disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher or drag him from his bed. A fellow-man may with impunity be murdered under his window, for the philosopher has only to put his hands over his ears and argue a little with himself to prevent nature, which rebels inside him, from making him identify himself with the victim of the murder. The savage man entirely lacks this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason he always responds recklessly to the first promptings of human feeling.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today's world your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People's income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities not only affect their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

The moon occurs more frequently than the sun as an image in lyric poetry. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous -- it would blind you. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. The moon is the incunabulum of photography, the first photograph, the first stilled moment, the first study in contrasts. Me here -- you there. Between 1969 and 1972, six missions left for the moon and six missions came back. The men who went to the moon who were forever altered without exception all say the same thing -- it was not being on the moon that profoundly affected them as much as it was looking at the earth from the vantage point of the moon. You there -- me here.

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty – not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man's household – to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.

What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse.Isolation and loneliness are not the same"...."While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities.But totalitarian domination as a form of government is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. it bases its self on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is the most radical and desperate experiences of man

It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is replaced by a solipsism en deux in the I-thou relationship. As a relationship between Dasein and Dasein this has its possibility only on the basis of being-in-the-world. Put otherwise, being-in-the-world is with equal originality both being-with and being-among.

The country through which we had been travelling for days has an original beauty. Wide plains were diversified by stretches of hilly country with low passes. We often had to wade through swift running ice-cold brooks. It has long since we had seen a glacier, but as we were approaching the tasam at Barka, a chain of glaciers gleaming in the sunshine came into view. The landscape was dominated by the 25,000-foot peak of Gurla Mandhata; less striking, but far more famous, was the sacred Mount Kailash, 3,000 feet lower, which stands in majestic isolation apart from the Himalayan range.

A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment. "When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that's where disease comes from, that's where breakdown in our health — mental, physical, social health — occurs," the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry told me. If a gene or virus were found that caused the same impacts on the population's well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front-page headlines. Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted; it is the water we swim in. We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy. Among psychologists there is a wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of. These have been variously listed as: - belonging, relatedness, or connectedness; - autonomy: a sense of control in one's life; - mastery or competence; - genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others; - trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; - purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. "The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature." So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844. None of this tells you anything you don't already know or intuit. You can check your own experience: What's it like when each of the above needs is met? What happens in your mind and body when it's lacking, denied, or withdrawn?

she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

An isolated civilization had thrived here, had erected structures to some higher power, but had somehow vanished without a trace, leaving no history, save for the temples where they had worshiped. The

Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage. The individual will consider his advantage in complete isolation, from the point of view of an absolute minority, so to speak; he will then realize that he can pursue and achieve his interest only with the help of some kind of majority. Therefore, if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man. It regulates the relations between individual and society, and all other ambitions as well, for riches, knowledge, and honor follow from it.

Nations, like individuals, have been always disposed from interest or vanity to forget their day of small things; like individuals, too, they have always been unwilling to isolate their origins from the great ones who have gone before.

Leon was less withdrawn, more friendly, and he was, much of the time, in contact with reality. He was, in other words, getting better. It is our guess that Leon did not want to get better. He did not want to get any closer to us, or to Joseph and Clyde. He was only too aware of the implications of getting better, and he was frightened of them. He had become sick originally for very good reasons, and the reasons had not changed. Thus, although he needed companionship, he wanted it only up to a point, and this point had already been reached and passed. He was beginning to care too much for Joseph and Clyde (and perhaps for us too) and he needed to return to his earlier state of isolation from his fellow man.

Environmental influences also affect dopamine. From animal studies, we know that social stimulation is necessary for the growth of the nerve endings that release dopamine and for the growth of receptors that dopamine needs to bind to in order to do its work. In four-month-old monkeys, major alterations of dopamine and other neurotransmitter systems were found after only six days of separation from their mothers. “In these experiments,” writes Steven Dubovsky, Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Colorado, “loss of an important attachment appears to lead to less of an important neurotransmitter in the brain. Once these circuits stop functioning normally, it becomes more and more difficult to activate the mind.” A neuroscientific study published in 1998 showed that adult rats whose mothers had given them more licking, grooming and other physical-emotional contact during infancy had more efficient brain circuitry for reducing anxiety, as well as more receptors on nerve cells for the brain’s own natural tranquilizing chemicals. In other words, early interactions with the mother shaped the adult rat’s neurophysiological capacity to respond to stress. In another study, newborn animals reared in isolation had reduced dopamine activity in their prefrontal cortex — but not in other areas of the brain. That is, emotional stress particularly affects the chemistry of the prefrontal cortex, the center for selective attention, motivation and self-regulation. Given the relative complexity of human emotional interactions, the influence of the infant-parent relationship on human neurochemistry is bound to be even stronger. In the human infant, the growth of dopamine-rich nerve terminals and the development of dopamine receptors is stimulated by chemicals released in the brain during the experience of joy, the ecstatic joy that comes from the perfectly attuned mother-child mutual gaze interaction. Happy interactions between mother and infant generate motivation and arousal by activating cells in the midbrain that release endorphins, thereby inducing in the infant a joyful, exhilarated state. They also trigger the release of dopamine. Both endorphins and dopamine promote the development of new connections in the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine released from the midbrain also triggers the growth of nerve cells and blood vessels in the right prefrontal cortex and promotes the growth of dopamine receptors. A relative scarcity of such receptors and blood supply is thought to be one of the major physiological dimensions of ADD. The letters ADD may equally well stand for Attunement Deficit Disorder.

The feminist movement has provided women with a context that legitimates speaking of the previously hidden violence in our lives--the incest, rape, battering, and harassment that shapes our days. And reveling the pervasiveness of this violence exposes the falsity of the patriarchal myths that such incidents are isolated; are committed only by a few deranged, aberrant men; are only fantasies or delusional, hysterical, or "crazy" women; or are fantasies originating in women's desires.

The advantages of a propaganda that constantly “adds the power of organization” to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality. It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.

The political independence of a nation must not be confused with any intellectual isolation. The spiritual freedom, indeed, your own generous lives and liberal air will give you. From us you will learn the classical restraint of form. For all great art is delicate art, roughness having very little to do with strength, and harshness very little to do with power. ‘The artist,’ as Mr. Swinburne says, ‘must be perfectly articulate.’ This limitation is for the artist perfect freedom: it is at once the origin and the sign of his strength. So that all the supreme masters of style - Dante, Sophocles, Shakespeare - are the supreme masters of spiritual and intellectual vision also. Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be added to you.

The Elven people believe that preservation of the land and all that lives and grows upon it, plant and animal alike, is a moral responsibility. They have always held this belief foremost in their conduct as creatures of the earth. In the old world, they devoted the whole of their lives to caring for the woodlands and forests in which they lived, cultivating its various forms of vegetation, sheltering the animals that it harbored. Of course, they had little else to concern them in those days, for they were an isolated and reclusive people. All that has changed now, but they still maintain a belief in their moral responsibility for their world. Every Elf is expected to spend a portion of his life giving back to the land something of what he has taken out of it. By that I mean every Elf is expected to devote a part of his life to working with the land–to repairing damage it may have suffered through misuse or neglect, to caring for its animals and other wildlife, to caring for its trees and smaller plants where the need to do so is found.

The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others—we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents. This is frightening, for obvious reasons. Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid, anxious. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me. But I suspect it originated in my relationship with my father, around whom I was never safe.

The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action, The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. This origin is what really needs explanation.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.

But long after the papers are signed and the original familial bonds are severed, adoption has a way of isolating the adoptee. For me, it had always been this way: a wide sea seemed to separate the lone island of my experience from the well-mapped continents on which other people, other families, resided.

Zorro also is part of the bandido tradition, most closely associated with the possibly mythical Joaquin Murrieta and the historical Tiburcio Vasquez. As well as these local California legendary figures, Zorro is an American version of Robin Hood and similar heroes whose stories blend fiction and history, thus moving Zorro into the timeless realm of legend. The original story takes place in the Romantic era, but, more important, Zorro as Diego adds an element of poetry and sensuality, and as Zorro the element of sexuality, to the traditional Western hero. Not all Western heroes are, as D. H. Lawrence said of Cooper's Deerslayer, "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," but in the Western genre the hero and villain more often than not share these characteristics. What distinguishes Zorro is a gallantry, a code of ethics, a romantic sensibility, and most significant, a command of language and a keen intelligence and wit.

Nobody is born with “attention.” Like language or locomotion, being attentive is a skill we acquire. As with all other skills, the conditions necessary for the development of attention have to be present. It is not an isolated attribute of the child’s but the product of a relationship between the child and her environment. “A

As for other acquaintances – there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room: human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, without anything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, present an embarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or of subjects on which to converse with them. At that distant day, there was a dreary isolation in the civilised Christian society of these realms for families that had dropped below their original level, unless they belonged to a sectarian church, which gets some warmth of brotherhood by walling in the sacred fire.

Refusing to let God enter into all aspects of human life amounts to condemning man to solitude. He is no longer anything but an isolated individual, without origin or destiny. He finds himself condemned to wander through the world like a nomadic barbarian, without knowing that he is the son and heir of a Father who created him through love and calls him to share his eternal happiness. It is a profound error to think that God came to limit and frustrate our freedom. On the contrary, God comes to free us from solitude and to give meaning to our freedom. Modern man has made himself the prisoner of reason that is so autonomous that it has become solitary and autistic.

The ego develops a defense in order to protect itself against being overcome by unconscious demands such as sex and aggression. The work of the psychoanalyst is to get the person to become conscious of their instinctual urges, which may involve isolating the pain experienced when they were originally confronted by an unsatisfied impulse.

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!” It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course – for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider.

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like. Originally, being free meant being among friends. ‘Freedom’ and ‘friendship’ have the same root in Indo-European languages. Fundamentally, freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship – when being with others brings happiness. But today’s neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such, it does not really free us at all. Accordingly, the question now is whether we need to redefine freedom – to reinvent it – in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing freedom into coercion.

Stafford's Hypothesis on The Transference of Existence: Even if you self-isolated, stood still, and held your breath after traveling into the past, you would still be a pebble diverting the flow of time in some way. The very transference of existence via wormholes, not interaction with past actors or events, creates paradoxes. Time Transference has three stages: 1. The distance traversed between the origin or starting point of the wormhole and the rip in the Chronosphere (space-time continuum). 2. The transference of biological material through the rip in the Chronosphere without damage to or mutation of the genetic code of the chrono-commuter. 3. Arrival at the endpoint of the time transference - the reconstruction of the chrono-commuter's genetic material and the sealing of the rip in the Chronosphere.

The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don’t know whether the plague was directed toward humanity—or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.

Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely.

These days there is a tendency to regard American democracy as the model for all the world's democracies, and in some ways this is true. The seeds of democracy may have been sown in ancient Greece, but it is in American soil that they sprouted and flourished to achieve their full potential. Yet precisely for this reason, only in America is American democracy possible; it cannot be isolated from American traditions and values.

Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles—the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child indigenous peoples, and the scapegoat caste at the bottom.

the movement has to be organized afterward and the conditions for its growth have artificially to be created in order to make total loyalty—the psychological basis for total domination—at all possible. Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaint ances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.

I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here.

With the progressive perishing of its ideal the race loses more and more the qualities that lent it its cohesion, its unity, and its strength. The personality and intelligence of the individual may increase, but at the same time this collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the individual, accompanied by a weakening of character and a lessening of the capacity for action. What constituted a people, a unity, a whole, becomes in the end an agglomeration of individualities lacking cohesion, and artificially held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. It is at this stage that men, divided by their interests and aspirations, and incapable any longer of self-government, require directing in their pettiest acts, and that the State exerts an absorbing influence. With the definite loss of its old ideal the genius of the race entirely disappears; it is a mere swarm of isolated individuals and returns to its original state—that of a crowd.

Julius Caesar originally sought power in Rome because he loved to play the very dangerous style of politics common to the Republic; but he played the game so well that he destroyed all his opponents, making it impossible for him to find genuinely dangerous combat. He was unable to do the very thing for which he sought power. His word was no irresistible, and for that reason he could speak with no one, an his isolation was complete. "We might almost say this man was looking for an assasination" (Syme).

before memory. We like to think of ourselves as emerging from this primordial fog with our characters fully formed, like Aphrodite rising perfect from the sea foam. But thanks to increasing research into the development of the brain, we know this is not the case. We are born with a brain half-formed—more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others—we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents.
This is frightening, for obvious reasons. Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid; anxious. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me. But I suspect it originated in my relationship with my father, around whom I was never safe.

Through the perfectly-formed chalice archetype, one discovers the fountainhead of reality: that one’s Original Grace (consciousness’s units of sand flowing and shaping themselves to form the chalice of reality) creates the divine alignment. Because of the Psychic Informational Dynamics of Consciousness, if the Outer Ego becomes too isolated or disparaged, dreams will remind of its alignment with the Greater Self’s deeply-held archetypes. Such a unifying system allows one to forever evolve their unique creativity while remaining part of the Universal (God) Force.

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This demand is made by the leaders of totalitarian movements even before they seize power. It usually precedes the total organization of the country under their actual rule and it follows from the claim of their ideologies that their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race.

Though you can boil, extract, and refine living tissue to isolate the protein, carb, or fat, you do so only at the cost of everything else that held the cells and organs together. Yanking certain components from living systems—as we do to make flour, sugar, protein slurries, and 90 percent of what’s now for sale in the store—and expecting them to approximate their original nutritional value is like removing someone’s brain from their body and expecting it to respond to questions. That is not science; it is science fiction. So is the idea that heavily processed food can be healthy.

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.” We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real. “In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.” Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that? “The only laws that matter are laws of thought.” His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white. “The rest is devil worship," he said.

The Cloisters, I knew, had been brought into being—like so many institutions—by John D. Rockefeller Jr. The robber baron’s son had transformed sixty-six isolated acres and a small collection of medieval art into a fully realized medieval monastery. Crumbling remnants of twelfth-century abbeys and priories had been imported throughout the 1930s from Europe and rebuilt under the watchful eye of architect Charles Collens. Buildings that had been left to the ravages of weather and wars were reassembled and polished to a new-world sheen—entire twelfth-century chapels restored, marble colonnades buffed to their original gloss.

What distinguishes language from isolated gestures and signs, no matter how numerous, is that it forms a complex ramifying structure, which in its conceptual entirety presents a Wiltbild or comprehensive symbolic framework capable of embracing many aspects of reality: not a static representation like a picture or a sculpture, but a moving picture of things, events, processes, ideas, purposes, in which every word is surrounded by a rich penumbra of original concrete experiences, and every sentence brings with it some degree of novelty, if only because time and place, intention and recipient, change its meaning. Contrary to Bergson, language is the least geometric, the least static; of all the arts.

The same solution--that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass--would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them.

We are born with a brain half-formed—more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others—we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents. This is frightening, for obvious reasons. Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid; anxious. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me. But I suspect it originated in my relationship with my father, around whom I was never safe.

What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this. Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15 Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16 If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short. We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.

Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world.

The ego is an organization. It is based on the maintenance of free intercourse and of the possibility of reciprocal influence between all its parts. Its desexualized energy still shows traces of its origin in its impulsion to bind together and unify, and this necessity to synthesize grows stronger in proportion as the strength of the ego increases. It is therefore only natural that the ego should try to prevent symptoms from remaining isolated and alien by using every possible method to bind them to itself in one way or another, and to incorporate them into its organization by means of those bonds. As we know, a tendency of this kind is already operative in the very act of forming a symptom. A classical instance of this are those hysterical symptoms which have been shown to be a compromise between the need for satisfaction and the need for punishment.

Dream Meditation Practices are best performed in an isolated (close to nature) chamber that is clean and dry. Diet should be modified before practice so that solid food is reduced and a sense of lightness is obtained. This meditation is best done after bathing; the student can be nude or wear a light robe. Begin by lying on your back. Focus your mind on the lower tan tien. Summon the spirits residing in the organs by chanting their names in the order of the creation cycle: Houhou or Shen (heart), Beibei or Yi (spleen), Yanyan or Po (lungs), Fu Fu or Zhi (kidneys), and Jianjian or Hun (liver).20 Repeat the chanting and gathering until a bright light and warmth appear in the lower tan tien. Opening this place will automatically open the Microcosmic Orbit. Coordinate your breathing with this meditation to assist the process: inhaling stimulates the kidneys and liver, while exhaling moves the heart and lungs to the centerpoint—the stomach and spleen. Bring the merged five spirits from the lower tan tien (you can also include the other four spirits) up to the heart, and then to the Crystal Palace (also known as the Divine Palace or Hall of Light). The team of merged spirits—now the Yuan Shen or Original Spirit—can exit via the crown. Being conscious during the whole dream, or alternatively remembering the dream after waking, completes the process. You also have the choice of practicing meditation during your dream state. Process the content of the dream during the day, taking any actions in the material world that are now necessary. Remember that one of our goals with the Kan and Li practice is to merge the everyday mind with your dream landscape and meditation. Fusion of these three minds (different from the three tan tiens) is a feature of the developing sage. Ideally, dreaming can include the practice of Microcosmic Orbit, Fusion, and even Kan and Li.

Her disillusionment with the business had intensified as the need to simplify her stories increased. Her original treatments for Blondie of the Follies and The Prizefighter and the Lady had much more complexity and many more characters than ever made it to the screen, and adapting The Good Earth had served as a nagging reminder of the inherent restraints of film. Frances found herself inspired by memories of Jack London, sitting on the veranda with her father as they extolled the virtues of drinking their liquor “neat,” and remembered his telling her that he went traveling to experience adventure, but “then come back to an unrelated environment and write. I seek one of nature’s hideouts, like this isolated Valley, then I see more clearly the scenes that are the most vivid in my memory.” So she arrived in Napa with the idea of writing the novel she started in her hospital bed with the backdrop of “the chaos, confusion, excitement and daily tidal changes” of the studios, but as she sat on the veranda at Aetna Springs, she knew she was still too close to her mixed feelings about the film business.48 As she walked the trails and passed the schoolhouse that had served the community for sixty years, she talked to the people who had lived there in seclusion for several generations and found their stories “similar to case histories recorded by Freud or Jung.” She concentrated on the women she saw carrying the burden in this community and all others and gave them a depth of emotion and detail. Her series of short stories was published under the title Valley People and critics praised it as a “heartbreak book” that would “never do for screen material.” It won the public plaudits of Dorothy Parker, Rupert Hughes, Joseph Hergesheimer, and other popular writers and Frances proudly viewed Valley People as “an honest book with no punches pulled” and “a tribute to my suffering sex.

The hijacking occurs in an instant, triggering this reaction crucial moments before the neocortex, the thinking brain, has had a chance to glimpse fully what is happening, let alone decide if it is a good idea. The hallmark of such a hijack is that once the moment passes, those so possessed have the sense of not knowing what came over them. These hijacks are by no means isolated, horrific incidents that lead to brutal crimes like the Career Girl Murders. In less catastrophic form—but not necessarily less intense—they happen to us with fair frequency. Think back to the last time you “lost it,” blowing up at someone—your spouse or child, or perhaps the driver of another car—to a degree that later, with some reflection and hindsight, seemed uncalled for. In all probability, that, too, was such a hijacking, a neural takeover which, as we shall see, originates in the amygdala, a center in the limbic brain. Not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke strikes someone as so uproarious that their laughter is almost explosive, that, too, is a limbic response.

He lavished on me a friendliness which was as far above that of Saint-Loup as that was above the affability of a mere tradesman. Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great gentleman, charming as it may be, has the effect of an actor’s playing a part, of being feigned. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself. Everything that he possessed, ideas, work, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who could understand him. But, failing society that was endurable, he lived in an isolation, with a savagery which fashionable people called pose and ill-breeding, public authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride. And no doubt at first he had thought, even in his solitude, with enjoyment that, thanks to his work, he was addressing, in spite of distance, he was giving a loftier idea of himself, to those who had misunderstood or hurt him. Perhaps, in those days, he lived alone not from indifference but from love of his fellows, and, just as I had renounced Gilberte to appear to her again one day in more attractive colours, dedicated his work to certain people as a way of approaching them again, by which without actually seeing him they would be made to love him, admire him, talk about him; a renunciation is not always complete from the start, when we decide upon it in our original frame of mind and before it has reacted upon us, whether it be the renunciation of an invalid, a monk, an artist or a hero. But if he had wished to produce with certain people in his mind, in producing he had lived for himself, remote from the society to which he had become indifferent; the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we knew it to be incompatible with smaller things to which we clung, and of which it does not so much deprive us as it detaches us from them. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.

When the rest of the world was engaged in seizing the open spaces, Germany was in the throes of religious warfare. The foundation of St. Petersburg by Peter the Great was a fatal event in the history of Europe; and St. Petersburg must therefore disappear utterly from the earth's surface. Moscow, too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia. It is not by taking over the miserable Russian hovels that we shall establish ourselves as masters in the East. The German colonies must be organised on an altogether higher plane. We have never before driven forward into empty spaces. The German people have absorbed both northern and southern Austria, and the original inhabitants are still there; but they were Sorb-Wends, members of basic European stock, with nothing in common with the Slavs. As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp !

People are always asking me—and every other writer I know—where story ideas come from. Where do you get your ideas, they ask; how do you ever manage to think them up? It’s certainly the hardest question in the world to answer, since stories originate in everyday happenings and emotions, and any writer who tried to answer such a question would find himself telling over, in some detail, the story of his life. Fiction uses so many small items, so many little gestures and remembered incidents and unforgettable faces, that trying to isolate any one inspiration for any one story is incredibly difficult, but basically, of course, the genesis of any fictional work has to be human experience. This translation of experience into fiction is not a mystic one. It is, I think, part recognition and part analysis. A bald description of an incident is hardly fiction, but the same incident, carefully taken apart, examined as to emotional and balanced structure, and then as carefully reassembled in the most effective form, slanted and polished and weighed, may very well be a short story.

Africa’s coastline? great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America. There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’ However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

concordance between the individual and the mass is in this point almost complete. The masses, too, retain an impression of the past in unconscious memory traces. The case of the individual seems to be clear enough. The memory trace of early events he has retained, but he has retained it in a special psychological condition. One can say that the individual always knew of them, in the sense that we know repressed material. We have formed certain conceptions—and they can easily be proved by analysis—of how something gets forgotten and of how after a time it can come to light again. The forgotten material is not extinguished, only " repressed " ; its traces are extant in the memory in their original freshness, but they are isolated by " counter-cathexes." They cannot establish contact with the other intellectual processes; they are unconscious, inaccessible to consciousness. It may happen that certain parts of the repressed material have escaped this process, have remained accessible to memory and occasionally reappear in consciousness, but even then they are isolated, a foreign

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

James and Colleen Simmons, authors of Daniel's Challenge and Original Fast Foods, and owners of LDShealth.ning.com, have this to say on the subject: “The commercial bread-making industry figured out how to isolate strains of yeast that made bread raise very quickly compared to the old-fashion bread-making method; soon sourdough starts became a thing of the past for most of us. What we didn't know when we traded Old-World leavening techniques for quick-rise yeasts, is that not everything in wheat is good for you. In fact, there are several elements in wheat that are down-right problematic and that have led to grain intolerances in about 20 percent of today's population. When you compare what happens to the bread when it is leavened with commercial yeasts versus a good sourdough starter, another story unfolds…. The sourdough starter contains several natural strains of friendly bacteria and yeasts that also cause bread to rise; however, these friendly bacteria also neutralize the harmful effects of the grain. They neutralize phytic acids that otherwise prevent minerals found in the grain from being absorbed properly; they predigest the gluten, and they also neutralize lignans and tanins found in wheat.”1

With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls,11 it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park.12 In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober. What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things. So

All of this, undoubtedly, follows from an extremely potent and persuasive model of freedom, one that would not have risen to such dominance in our culture if it did not give us a sense of liberty from arbitrary authority, and of limitless inner possibilities, and of profound personal dignity. There is nothing contemptible in this, and there is no simple, obvious moral reproach to be brought against it. Nevertheless, as I have said, it is a model of freedom whose ultimate horizon is, quite literally, nothing. Moreover, if the will determines itself principally in and through the choices it makes, then it too, at some very deep level, must also be nothing: simply a pure movement of spontaneity, motive without motive, absolute potentiality, giving birth to itself. A God beyond us or a stable human nature within us would confine our decisions within certain inescapable channels; and so at some, usually unconscious level—whatever else we may believe—we stake ourselves entirely upon the absence of either. Those of us who now, in the latter days of modernity, are truest to the wisdom and ethos of our age place ourselves not at the disposal of God, or the gods, or the Good, but before an abyss, over which presides the empty power of our isolated wills, whose decisions are their own moral index. This is what it means to have become perfect consumers: the original nothing ness of the will gives itself shape by the use it makes of the nothingness of the world—and thus we are free.

It is announced that the United States of Africa have built a reservation for ethnologists in the heart of Africa, where they are protected and maintained in ideal ecological survival conditions and fed at set times of day as is the custom in their countries of origin. The reservation is off-limits to Africans, whether their intentions be philanthropic, scientific or cannibalistic, for fear of damaging the natural equilibrium of the tribe or endangering its chances of breeding, though matters in this regard are already very precarious. The African states assure us that all possible measures will be taken to save this disappearing race: the crucial thing is that it should be completely isolated from the outside world. The first experiment along these lines had already been attempted years ago by the people of Chad, whom the French government had paid a great deal to carry on holding a certain Mme Claustre, an anthropologist, and whom they had thereby saved from the clutches of the Whites who wished to turn her over to scientific prostitution. This almost accidental event soon resulted in all the West’s anthropologists rushing off to African reservations, where they could at last devote themselves to the observation of the only ethnic group worthy of the name—their own. By contrast, upon their approach, all the beasts of the savannahs ran off to take refuge in urban zoos, and the Africans themselves withdrew into their missions, for fear of being devoured by ethnologists who had very rapidly reverted to cannibalism.

This reaction to the work was obviously a misunderstanding. It ignores the fact that the future Buddha was also of noble origins, that he was the son of a king and heir to the throne and had been raised with the expectation that one day he would inherit the crown. He had been taught martial arts and the art of government, and having reached the right age, he had married and had a son. All of these things would be more typical of the physical and mental formation of a future samurai than of a seminarian ready to take holy orders. A man like Julius Evola was particularly suitable to dispel such a misconception. He did so on two fronts in his Doctrine: on the one hand, he did not cease to recall the origins of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, who was destined to the throne of Kapilavastu: on the other hand, he attempted to demonstrate that Buddhist asceticism is not a cowardly resignation before life's vicissitudes, but rather a struggle of a spiritual kind, which is not any less heroic than the struggle of a knight on the battlefield. As Buddha himself said (Mahavagga, 2.15): 'It is better to die fighting than to live as one vanquished.' This resolution is in accord with Evola's ideal of overcoming natural resistances in order to achieve the Awakening through meditation; it should he noted, however, that the warrior terminology is contained in the oldest writings of Buddhism, which are those that best reflect the living teaching of the master. Evola works tirelessly in his hook to erase the Western view of a languid and dull doctrine that in fact was originally regarded as aristocratic and reserved for real 'champions.' After Schopenhauer, the unfounded idea arose in Western culture that Buddhism involved a renunciation of the world and the adoption of a passive attitude: 'Let things go their way; who cares anyway.' Since in this inferior world 'everything is evil,' the wise person is the one who, like Simeon the Stylite, withdraws, if not to the top of a pillar; at least to an isolated place of meditation. Moreover, the most widespread view of Buddhists is that of monks dressed in orange robes, begging for their food; people suppose that the only activity these monks are devoted to is reciting memorized texts, since they shun prayers; thus, their religion appears to an outsider as a form of atheism. Evola successfully demonstrates that this view is profoundly distorted by a series of prejudices. Passivity? Inaction? On the contrary, Buddha never tired of exhorting his disciples to 'work toward victory'; he himself, at the end of his life, said with pride: katam karaniyam, 'done is what needed to he done!' Pessimism? It is true that Buddha, picking up a formula of Brahmanism, the religion in which he had been raised prior to his departure from Kapilavastu, affirmed that everything on earth is 'suffering.' But he also clarified for us that this is the case because we are always yearning to reap concrete benefits from our actions. For example, warriors risk their lives because they long for the pleasure of victory and for the spoils, and yet in the end they are always disappointed: the pillaging is never enough and what has been gained is quickly squandered. Also, the taste of victory soon fades away. But if one becomes aware of this state of affairs (this is one aspect of the Awakening), the pessimism is dispelled since reality is what it is, neither good nor bad in itself; reality is inscribed in Becoming, which cannot be interrupted. Thus, one must live and act with the awareness that the only thing that matters is each and every moment. Thus, duty (dhamma) is claimed to be the only valid reference point: 'Do your duty,' that is. 'let your every action he totally disinterested.

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”—that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”— not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself —the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness— The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea —“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—to love him.... 36. —We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels.... That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world- historical irony—

En ce qui concerne l’arabe et le berbère, je ne dirai qu’une chose : j’estime qu’un berbère qui ne connaît pas l’arabe, ne connaît pas le Maroc et l’arabe qui ne sait pas le berbère, non plus. Quant à l’origine des uns et des autres, et puisqu’on parle beaucoup ces derniers temps d’ADN, je voudrais déplorer le fait que chez nous, on a l’esprit insuffisamment scientifique pour remettre en cause des données historiques héritées, qu’on s’en tient à ce qui a été dit il y a mille ans. Or, je peux vous dire que les civilisations berbère et égyptienne ont une même origine, le centre du Grand Sahara. Quand je travaillais sur le dictionnaire berbère (j’y ai consacré 27 ans de ma vie), il y a eu une racine berbère qui m’a intriguée. Il s’agit d’un verbe, Sko, qui veut dire dans tous les dialectes berbères, « bâtir », sauf chez les touaregs où il veut dire « enterrer ». Or, c’est de notoriété publique, le touareg est un isolant linguistique, conservateur, qui peut porter les traces d’une signification originelle. Petit à petit, j’ai réuni suffisamment d’éléments pour affirmer qu’à l’époque des hordes dans le Grand Sahara, on a commencé à enterrer les morts. Puis, les gens n’étant pas sédentarisés, on a été obligés de construire un édifice reconnaissable sur chaque tombe. Par ce détail linguistique, je suis arrivé à l’hypothèse de l’origine historique commune, saharienne, des Berbères et des Egyptiens. Quand j’ai exposé ma thèse à l’Académie Royale du Maroc, elle a été accueillie très froidement. Mais une anthroplogue américaine qui menait une recherche sur les deux civilisations puis un livre paru en 2000 2 ont corroboré mon propos et montré qu’au moment de la désertification, les populations ont émigré vers l’Ouest (le Maghreb) et l’Est (l’Egypte) au plus proche des points d’eau 3, avec une particularité bovine du côté du Nil et une orientation pastoraliste ovine du côté du Maghreb. [Interview Economia, Octobre 2010]

While the visual areas of the brain are active, other areas involved with smell, taste, and touch are largely shut down. Almost all the images and sensations processed by the body are self-generated, originating from the electromagnetic vibrations from our brain stem, not from external stimuli. The body is largely isolated from the outside world. Also, when we dream, we are more or less paralyzed. (Perhaps this paralysis is to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams, which could be disastrous. About 6 percent of people suffer from “sleep paralysis” disorder, in which they wake up from a dream still paralyzed. Often these individuals wake up frightened and believing that there are creatures pinning down their chest, arms, and legs. There are paintings from the Victorian era of women waking up with a terrifying goblin sitting on their chest glaring down at them. Some psychologists believe that sleep paralysis could explain the origin of the alien abduction syndrome.) The hippocampus is active when we dream, suggesting that dreams draw upon our storehouse of memories. The amygdala and anterior cingulate are also active, meaning that dreams can be highly emotional, often involving fear. But more revealing are the areas of the brain that are shut down, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is the command center of the brain), the orbitofrontal cortex (which can act like a censor or fact-checker), and the temporoparietal region (which processes sensory motor signals and spatial awareness). When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is shut down, we can’t count on the rational, planning center of the brain. Instead, we drift aimlessly in our dreams, with the visual center giving us images without rational control. The orbitofrontal cortex, or the fact-checker, is also inactive. Hence dreams are allowed to blissfully evolve without any constraints from the laws of physics or common sense. And the temporoparietal lobe, which helps coordinate our sense of where we are located using signals from our eyes and inner ear, is also shut down, which may explain our out-of-body experiences while we dream. As we have emphasized, human consciousness mainly represents the brain constantly creating models of the outside world and simulating them into the future. If so, then dreams represent an alternate way in which the future is simulated, one in which the laws of nature and social interactions are temporarily suspended

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

Recently, brain scans of schizophrenics taken while they were having auditory hallucinations have helped explain this ancient disorder. For example, when we silently talk to ourselves, certain parts of the brain light up on an MRI scan, especially in the temporal lobe (such as in Wernicke’s area). When a schizophrenic hears voices, the very same areas of the brain light up. The brain works hard to construct a consistent narrative, so schizophrenics try to make sense of these unauthorized voices, believing they originate from strange sources, such as Martians secretly beaming thoughts into their brains. Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State writes, “Neurons wired for the sensation of sound fire on their own, like gas-soaked rags igniting spontaneously in a hot, dark garage. In the absence of sights and sounds in the surrounding environment, the schizophrenic’s brain creates a powerful illusion of reality.” Notably, these voices seem to be coming from a third party, who often gives the subject commands, which are mostly mundane but sometimes violent. Meanwhile, the simulation centers in the prefrontal cortex seem to be on automatic pilot, so in a way it’s as though the consciousness of a schizophrenic is running the same sort of simulations we all do, except they’re done without his permission. The person is literally talking to himself without his knowledge. HALLUCINATIONS The mind constantly generates hallucinations of its own, but for the most part they are easily controlled. We see images that don’t exist or hear spurious sounds, for example, so the anterior cingulate cortex is vital to distinguish the real from the manufactured. This part of the brain helps us distinguish between stimuli that are external and those that are internally generated by the mind itself. However, in schizophrenics, it is believed that this system is damaged, so that the person cannot distinguish real from imaginary voices. (The anterior cingulate cortex is vital because it lies in a strategic place, between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The link between these two areas is one of the most important in the brain, since one area governs rational thinking, and the other emotions.) Hallucinations, to some extent, can be created on demand. Hallucinations occur naturally if you place someone in a pitch-black room, an isolation chamber, or a creepy environment with strange noises. These are examples of “our eyes playing tricks on us.” Actually, the brain is tricking itself, internally creating false images, trying to make sense of the world and identify threats. This effect is called “pareidolia.” Every time we look at clouds in the sky, we see images of animals, people, or our favorite cartoon characters. We have no choice. It is hardwired into our brains. In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

Next comes the Curse, as it is called, which God pronounced upon man. The prominent point in that curse turns chiefly on the contrast between man and nature. Man must work in the sweat of his brow: and woman bring forth in sorrow. As to work, if it is the result of the disunion, it is also the victory over it. The beasts have nothing more to do but to pick up the materials required to satisfy their wants: man on the contrary can only satisfy his wants by himself producing and transforming the necessary means. Thus even in these outside things man is dealing with himself. The story does not close with the expulsion from Paradise. We are further told, God said, ‘Behold Adam is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Knowledge is now spoken of as divine, and not, as before, as something wrong and forbidden. Such words contain a confutation of the idle talk that philosophy pertains only to the finitude of the mind. Philosophy is knowledge, and it is through knowledge that man first realises his original vocation, to be the image of God. When the record adds that God drove men out of the garden of Eden to prevent their eating of the tree of life, it only means that on his natural side certainly man is finite and mortal, but in knowledge infinite. We all know the theological dogma that man’s nature is evil, tainted with what is called Original Sin. Now while we accept the dogma, we must give up the setting of incident which represents original sin as consequent upon an accidental act of the first man. For the very notion of spirit is enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an error to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent as man is and acts like a creature of nature, his whole behaviour is what it ought not to be. For the spirit it is a duty to be free, and to realise itself by its own act. Nature is for man only the starting-point which he has to transform. The theological doctrine of original sin is a profound truth; but modem enlightenment prefers to believe that man is naturally good, and that he acts right so long as he continues true to nature. The hour when man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world. But this schism, though it forms a necessary element in the very notion of spirit, is not the final goal of man. It is to this state of inward breach that the whole finite action of thought and will belongs. In that finite sphere man pursues ends of his own and draws from himself the material of his conduct. While he pursues these aims to the uttermost, while his knowledge and his will seek himself, his own narrow self apart from the universal, he is evil; and his evil is to be subjective. We seem at first to have a double evil here: but both are really the same. Man in so far as he is spirit is not the creature of nature: and when he behaves as such, and follows the cravings of appetite, he wills to be so. The natural wickedness of man is therefore unlike the natural life of animals. A mere natural life may be more exactly defined by saying that the natural man as such is an individual: for nature in every part is in the bonds of individualism. Thus when man wills to be a creature of nature, he wills in the same degree to be an individual simply. Yet against such impulsive and appetitive action, due to the individualism of nature, there also steps in the law or general principle. This law may either be an external force, or have the form of divine authority. So long as he continues in his natural state, man is in bondage to the law. It is true that among the instincts and affections of man, there are social or benevolent inclinations, love, sympathy, and others, reaching beyond his selfish isolation. But so long as these tendencies are instinctive, their virtual universality of scope and purport is vitiated by the subjective form which always allows free play to self-seeking and random action.

When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may seem, given that almost all these diseases either originated in domesticated animals or depend upon high-density population for easy transmission. The deadliest infectious diseases and parasites that have plagued our species could not have spread until after the transition to agriculture.

some Japanese philosophers have been eager to graft the newly introduced discipline of western academic philosophy onto its premodern Japanese antecedents. The conflict with traditional values proposed a whole host of new questions: Can one articulate an original yet comprehensive epistemology that would give western empiricism and logic an appropriate place but subordinate it to a dominant “Asian” basis for thought and values? Can one develop a viable ethics that places agency in a socially interdependent, rather than isolated and discrete, individual? Can one construct an interpretation of artistry based in a mode of responsiveness that is also the ground for knowledge and moral conduct? Can one envision a political theory of the state that allows for personal expression without assuming a radical individualism? Along with these fundamental issues, a great deal of attention was devoted to a still more basic question: What is culture and what affect does it have on philosophizing?

Nevertheless, the first states were a new phenomenon in human history. They all assumed the right to mobilize wealth from farming communities, towns, and cities in return for some degree of protection. As the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (1651), the right to distribute resources “belongeth in all kinds of Common-wealth, to the Soveraign power. For where there is no Common-wealth, there is… a perpetual warre of every man against his neighbor.” Traditional elites owed their power, in part, to the intrinsic weakness and isolation of traditional farming communities.

Containment in the physical institution of a county poorhouse had the unintentional result of creating class solidarity across race, gender, and national origin. When we sit at a common table, we might see similarities in our experiences, even if we are forced to eat gruel. Surveillance and digital social sorting drive us apart as smaller and smaller microgroups are targeted for different kinds of aggression and control. When we inhabit an invisible poorhouse, we become more and more isolated, cut off from those around us, even if they share our suffering.

One of the most potent ways white supremacy is disseminated is through media representations, which have a profound impact on how we see the world. Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews. Given that the majority of white people live in racial isolation from people of color (and black people in particular) and have very few authentic cross-racial relationships, white people are deeply influenced by the racial messages in films. Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally.

Sweden’s capital is an expansive and peaceful place for solo travellers. It is made up of 14 islands, connected by 50 bridges all within Lake Mälaren which flows out into to the Baltic Sea. Several main districts encompass islands and are connected by Stockholm’s bridges. Norrmalm is the main business area and includes the train station, hotels, theatres and shopping. Őstermalm is more upmarket and has wide spaces that includes forest. Kungsholmen is a relaxed neighbourhood on an island on the west of the city. It has a good natural beach and is popular with bathers. In addition to the city of 14 islands, the Stockholm Archipelago is made up of 24,000 islands spread through with small towns, old forts and an occasional resort. Ekero, to the east of the city, is the only Swedish area to have two UNESCO World Heritage sites – the royal palace of Drottningholm, and the Viking village of Birka. Stockholm probably grew from origins as a place of safety – with so many islands it allowed early people to isolate themselves from invaders. The earliest fort on any of the islands stretches back to the 13th century. Today the city has architecture dating from that time. In addition, it didn’t suffer the bombing raids that beset other European cities, and much of the old architecture is untouched. Getting around the city is relatively easy by metro and bus. There are also pay‐as‐you‐go Stockholm City Bikes. The metro and buses travel out to most of the islands, but there are also hop on, hop off boat tours. It is well worth taking a trip through the broad and spacious archipelago, which stretches 80 kms out from the city. Please note that taxis are expensive and, to make matters worse, the taxi industry has been deregulated leading to visitors unwittingly paying extortionate rates. A yellow sticker on the back window of each car will tell you the maximum price that the driver will charge therefore, if you have a choice of taxis, choose

ERV envelope genes possess unique properties that make them suitable for use in forming the placenta: they are fusogenic proteins and they have immunosuppresive properties. Eutherian (placental) mammals distinguish themselves from nonplacental animals in the ability of the female to nurture the fertilized ovum and growing embryo within the body. The placenta is a transient tissue of embryonic origin whose evolution made it unnecessary to partition the embryo into a protective egg, which matured outside the mother's body. It serves two purposes for the maturing embryo: it is a conduit for respiratory gasses and nourishment supplied by the mother, and it provides an environment of immune tolerance. The fetus is necessarily half-foreign tissue, an allograft within the mother. It draws half of its genetic, and hence antigenic, identity from maternal and half from paternal genes. If the fetus is to mature within the mother, it must be isolated from the maternal immune system such that a graft-versus-host response does not reject it. The placenta forms early after implantation of the embryo. Syncytins mediate the formation of a continuous fused layer of cells around the embryo, isolating it from the mother, yet allowing essential nutrients to traverse from the mother's system. Although the observations on human syncytin-1 and -2 were compelling, it was left to scientists to definitively link syncytins to placental formation by studying mice. Here two syncytins (dubbed A and B) from murine ERVs were implicated, and genetic experiments with mice defective in these genes confirmed that their dysfunction disrupted placental formation. Notably, however, syncytin-A and -B were not syntenic with the human syncytins. That is, the human and mouse genes are not descended fron common ancestral syncytins; they have arisen by separate ERV gene capture events from different families of ERV in human and mouse ancestors.

Although a few enzymes (e.g. carbonic anhydrase) catalyse a single isolated reaction, most are part of a team that catalyses a series of reactions in which each enzyme picks up its predecessor’s product, taking it a step further to create a metabolic pathway. This pathway may be to build up, say, an amino acid from simpler starting molecules, or conversely to break down food molecules to yield new chemical building blocks and sometimes also to trap useable energy. Life is the combined outcome of this seemingly logical enzyme teamwork. Like most things in the living world, this gives the appearance of purposeful planning down to the last detail. Such meticulous perfection would in past eras have been confidently attributed to the attentive skill of an all-powerful Creator. Since Charles Darwin, however, we have an alternative way of explaining how things in the living world come to be the way they are. Darwin led us to understand that natural selection could bring about stepwise beneficial adaptation over thousands or even millions of years, and, in the 150 years since the Origin of Species, we have learnt far more about the genetic mechanisms that can bring about such change. Does this kind of thinking work at the molecular level when we come to look at metabolic pathways and individual enzymes? In fact the study of enzymes and other proteins allows us to be a great deal more certain than Victorian biologists could be. Many of the distinctive biological characteristics studied in comparing animals and plants, like eye colour or wing shape, have turned out to be controlled by multiple genes, whereas, in looking at individual proteins, we are looking at the products of individual genes, and latterly we can even examine those genes directly. The possibility of determining protein amino acid sequences, and, more recently, the corresponding DNA sequences, allows comparison of the same enzyme from many species and also of enzymes catalysing different but similar reactions from a single species.