A BIG-THOUGHT INFO-VIDEO THAT MAKES YOU THINK BIG THOUGHTS

Have a look at the video below when you get eleven minutes to yourself.  You're going to like it.  It's one of those speeded-up, hand-sketched, animated graphics that's capable of presenting, like, the entire history of the world in several easily digestible moments.  And the narrator, Matthew Taylor, has a British accent to boot, so Americans are persuaded he's smart from the get-go because we figure if you're articulate, you're also intelligent.

Here's ten things he says that you'll agree with:

1. We're going to have to live differently in the 21st century.
2. Most of our insights into human nature are going to be counter-intuitive. The true stuff about ourselves won't, on the face of it, make much sense.  Like, I'll be very happy if I spend my time making others happy.  Sounds good, admire the ideal, but really?  Come on.
3. If you want to be a happier person, don't read a self-help book, just have happier friends. He means by that, just connect!
4. What we want now is a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy.
5. Let's start thinking about the hubris of individualism, and all the problems its caused us.
6. Can we develop a relationship to our reactions rather than be captive to them?
7. Things are getting better regarding person-to-person violence; realtime social media brings social problems into our living rooms.  We have data now.
8. Inter-personal, communal, global—three adjectives you're going to see hooking up everywhere.
9. Stop thinking about big plans and start figuring out the nature of empathy within each of us.
10. You knew there was going to be a big phrase that solves our problem.  Here it is:  empathic capacity.

There's a lot to digest in this little video, and it's a helpful video. But like all films of this genre, it's an inspirational video, which means it's short on solutions because, well, because the point of the video is that each of us has to come up with our own solutions and make our own contributions, and the film wants inspire us to do that.  Good.  But you knew that, right?

So where do we go from here?  The film kinda sorta hints at a solution in the Copernicus passage that claims it doesn't seem like the we go around the sun, but in fact we do.  

Here's our homework assignment:  realize that the structure of our individual personality is set up to process incoming data in fraudulent, self-serving, and ultimately destructive ways, and also remember that the consumerist culture that nurtures that personality has silently agreed to take advantage of our personality's tendency to misrepresent things, and the two forces—misrepresentation and consumerism—have quietly signed a pact that gets us to buy stuff—literally and figuratively—that we don't need.

Our task? Dissolve that pact. And let me know how you're doing with that.