/lit/ - Literature

>>10970302
just to follow up on this -

it's interesting to think how much Star Trek: TNG was raising questions about the world we live in today. the holodeck was always interesting, and data was a key figure in a lot of puzzles the crew encountered. i know i talk about the matrix a lot, but the same things go on there: anxiety about robots, and the perennial question of how it is that we distinguish truth from illusion.

roddenberry was expressly opposed to any mention of religion or mysticism in the world of Trek, which really was his own complete vision of how it was that he wanted the world to be. and it was a monument to tolerance - there's the black guy, the chinese guy, the russian guy, all working together on the ship to explore space, and all this at the height of cold war tension.

here we are today, 50 years or so after the original one, and apparently totally unable to live with each other, hyperaware of difference, and conscentious to the point of telepathy (or madness). we fear that we are *never* getting off this earth, for various reasons.

i cannot help but feel sometimes that this is how it feels to live through an axial age, when all of the ideas that once belonged to the country now all come in and join the urban polis. except that our polis isn't exclusively geographical, it's now virtual as well: it's the internet. we're all here, all the time, doing business, rubbing shoulders, and having our tiny heads turned inside-out by multiplicities upon multiplicities of difference. historically this led to the appearance of the great wisdom traditions, that is, forms of *advanced psychology* derived from mythology, but made useful for modern living.

what's the best way for people to get along in these circumstances? limit and restrain the natural impetus to violence as transcendental problem-solver. true, one way to do this is to sanction destruction and mobilize the polis completely. this will always be an option. but there are other ways of bridging the gap between Self and Other and girard had some interesting thoughts about that too.

anyways.