I met a guy in Second Life last night. He sent a message on a group chat, asking how he could hook up with a cute twenty - something gal for a "date".  Being a newbie, he had no idea what a pain it would be for  anybody  to accompany a total novice to a popular (i.e. laggy) sim for  any  reason, let alone romance. But his  main  problem was his blank profile. I asked him, what do  you  bring to the table? Why would anybody want to know  you.  The group was divided. Some tried to help, suggesting places for a date, places to meet girls etc. Others picked up on the central problem, which was a guy shopping for a mate like he was buying a car. Connecting in life is about what you can  offer , not what others have to offer  you . Every Christian child should learn this at his/her mother's knee (not many do). But it makes sense. If you live your life within the boundaries of what folks are willing to give you (much less than what you  really  think you need), you will be unhap

The following is  shamelessly  extracted from the excellent Wikipedia article on Ken Wilber Upper-Left  (UL) "I" Interior Individual Intentional e.g.  Freud Upper-Right  (UR) "It" Exterior Individual Behavioral e.g.  Skinner Lower-Left  (LL) "We" Interior Collective Cultural e.g.  Gadamer Lower-Right  (LR) "Its" Exterior Collective Social e.g.  Marx One can crudely categorize the perspectives taken on people and their  behavior  in different schools of thought: Individual interior accounts (upper-left quadrant)  include  Freudian   psychoanalysis , which interprets people's interior experiences and focuses on "I" Interior plural accounts (lower-left)  include  Gadamer 's philosophical  hermeneutics  which seeks to interpret the  collective consciousness  of a society, or plurality of people and focuses on "We" Exterior individual accounts (upper-right)  include  B. F. Skinner 's  behaviorism , which limits itself t

Parse this if u can. It's worth re-reading it until you get it: "Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local non-market relationships, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they often do, undermine and corrupt commercial ties." MacIntyre hates sentences shorter than 20 or 30 words without lots of parenthetical thoughts thrown in. It makes him very hard to read.  He's not a bumper sticker philosopher. However, as far as I know, he is the smartest philosopher of the 20th century, maybe any century. What he's doing here is tossing out the entire moral philosophy that underlies both capitalism and socialism. Adam Smith had it wrong. Karl Marx had it wrong. To "flourish" ( be human) we need to have certain virtues and exist within a network of mutual obligation. Commercial transactions make sense only when embedded in this larger human