Applebaum places democracy in America in its properly-global context. Is it reassuring to know that we're not the only seductees? Maybe not, but if we're to resist the authoritarian lure we'll need to attack the problem where it lives: everywhere, and especially on the Internet. So we'll also want to look at her recent article in the Atlantic. "We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic."
Does Vermont have a better idea? "A Vermont-based site, Front Porch Forum, is used by roughly a quarter of the state’s residents for all sorts of community activity, from natural-disaster response to job-hunting, as well as civic discussion. Instead of encouraging users to interact as much and as fast as possible, Front Porch slows the conversation down: Your posts come online 24 hours after you’ve written them. Sometimes, people reach out to the moderators to retract something said in anger. Everyone on the forum is real, and they have to sign up using real Vermont addresses. When you go on the site, you interact with your actual neighbors, not online avatars."
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Whenever I encounter the term"anhedonia" I instantly hear in my head that old Louis Jordan song Caldonia, and am then rendered momentarily incapable of relating to "the inability to feel pleasure." It's no coincidence that William James turned to a musical metaphor when discussing the subject of unhappiness and "the falling dead of delight." The music can commence again, he says, and again. For those of us who weren't graced by genetics and good luck with the "once-born" predisposition always to look on the bright side of life (and death), we have to bear the cross of conquering and re-conquering happiness. And that's most of us, isn't it, if we're being honest?
James was being brutally honest, when he declared late in his twenties that he'd "about touched bottom." For him, an obscure French thinker cued the right music with his notion that free will consists in taking charge of one's attentive mind, thinking the thoughts one chooses to think and not having one's consciousness and volition hijacked by random incursions from the stream of experience and memory (and worry). He decided to act as if Charles Renouvier was right about that. He wasn't exactly faking it, but he wasn't fully feeling it yet either. There's a lesson in that willingness to experiment with an idea. As Thoreau said, it's a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things...
In Fantasyland today we ask why so many Americans are so infatuated with guns, why there's so much confusion surrounding the second amendment, and why Sandy Hook didn't change everything surrounding this perennially contentious and tragic issue.
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