[HN Gopher] Simone Weil and the Need for Roots
___________________________________________________________________
Simone Weil and the Need for Roots
Author : acsillag
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-04-22 21:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (paulkingsnorth.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulkingsnorth.substack.com)
| senderista wrote:
| Obligatory classic takedown:
| http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm
| dang wrote:
| I wouldn't use the word 'takedown' for that because to me the
| word connotes internet takedown culture, which that piece long
| precedes. It's an interesting artifact of the early reception
| to Weil in the English-speaking world. It's deeply ad hominem,
| though (not to mention rather shockingly sexist by our
| standards nowadays).
| Nursie wrote:
| > We need these roots.
|
| You might. I need friends and family, some community
| participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the
| need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to
| be tied up with in the text.
|
| > Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and
| we are in denial.
|
| This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
| slibhb wrote:
| Are you sure you know what you need? I rarely am. I'm also not
| sure that Simone Weil is right but I'm a little scared she
| might be.
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| I think that in the long run wider societies need some shared
| belief system / culture / ideas to function properly, just like
| all kinds of communities do in smaller scale.
|
| Essentially we are tribal animals, and nothing can really
| change that. Without a sense of common identity there's little
| solidarity, and without solidarity you'll eventually have
| conflict. Failed states with civil wars tend to be those which
| lack any kind of common identity and ideas, while more
| successful ones tend to have those.
| aphextron wrote:
| >I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient
| traditions or worship
|
| You do. It's just that in modern society we've substituted
| these for more easily digestible, commodified, manufactured
| replicas. Hollywood celebrities have replaced the pantheon of
| Greek gods. Consumerism is the new piety. Techno Utopianism and
| liberalism (in the classical sense) has supplanted the ancient
| traditions of old. The Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world are
| our priestly class. We still need these things, but instead of
| searching for them, communing with others, and engaging with
| our inherited body of three thousand years of western cultural
| heritage to find meaning, we purchase it with the press of a
| button on an app.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Don't forget politics. As traditional religion has retreated
| Politics has taken on a greater role - politics as tribal
| identity. Good article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/maga
| zine/archive/2021/04/america...
|
| "The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated
| religion is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served
| as the prime minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the
| 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of
| secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were
| effectively faith-based, and that no human being could
| survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty
| didn't derive from traditional religion, it would find
| expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism,
| socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel
| Goldman calls this "the law of the conservation of religion":
| In any given society, there is a relatively constant and
| finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and
| where it is expressed."
| Nursie wrote:
| I don't worship celebs either, nor Musks nor Zucks.
|
| So I say again, _you_ may need these things, I don't.
| mrphoebs wrote:
| The content seemed to be talking about the fundamental common
| operating system for societies, not individuals. Individuals
| might have varying needs but as long as their needs align well
| with a superset of a culture's fundamental tenets the society
| would be relatively harmonious, or at least that's the way I
| see the author approaching the subject. I don't think these
| fundamental tenets need to have a theological basis for them,
| but as humans an overwhelmingly large part of our history as a
| people tribes, kingdoms and societies have been grounded by a
| shared belief in a common higher power. (I'm an atheist btw)
|
| >This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole
|
| This refutation seems to be as vague and unfounded as the thing
| it's refuting and doesn't provide much value. It would be
| beneficial to everyone reading if you can elucidate.
| Nursie wrote:
| It'a a bland assertion and hyperbolic. I'm not sure there's
| more to be said.
| totetsu wrote:
| Well she was a christian mystic, with Jewish parents, so its
| bound to be tied up with that. If you get past that even as an
| atheist a lot of her writings are quite thought provoking.
| IIRC, using spiritual thinking as a flashlight to illuminate
| the unknown that is outside what can be understood by reason,
| or, that which is divided is also connected .. and maybe some
| stuff about friends and separation
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| As the article points out, she was a Christian but very
| critical of the dominant forms of Christianity:
|
| "Weil herself was Christian, but was scathing about official
| forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases lined
| themselves up with 'the interests of those who exploit the
| people.'"
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| When your country falls apart because there is no longer a
| shared narrative, language, or worldview holding it together,
| yes, it will affect you.
| borepop wrote:
| When an author is (1) simultaneously lamenting the loss of
| "roots" and "real culture" and attacking internationalism, (2)
| taking gratuitous shots at "wokeness," and (3) dressing the whole
| thing up in an intentionally vague "intellectual" wrapper that
| doesn't actually add anything substantive, it's not that hard to
| see where he's heading. All this article needs is a light
| sprinkling of references to "cultural Marxism" to reach full
| Jordan Peterson status.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I kind of see what you're saying, but it seems odd to use Weil
| for this kind of project since she was well known to be on the
| Left of the political spectrum (and also quoting Arundhati
| Roy). I don't see this article going in the Jordan Peterson
| direction, though, but more in the direction of Wendell Berry.
| jqgatsby wrote:
| Did anyone else think this was going to be about algebraic roots?
|
| The complex numbers are famously the algebraic closure of the
| reals, but I find myself wondering lately if there is a related
| thought which doesn't privilege them over the hyperbolic numbers
| or the dual numbers.
| bjeds wrote:
| You are being downvoted, but this is not as off-topic as it may
| seem.
|
| Simone Weil had a brother, Andre Weil. You may not know his
| name on the top of your head, but I guarantee you that you've
| heard of the pseuodonym he created together with some other
| mathematicians: Nicolas Bourbaki.
|
| I'm sure Weil and/or Bourbaki has lots to say about these
| topics.
| bittercynic wrote:
| The idea that the unrooted go on to unroot those around them hit
| hard, but I think the opposite is also true.
|
| In the past few years I've had the good fortune to have some very
| kind, generous people in my life, and when I saw the positive
| impact they had on those around them, and on myself, I realized
| that things about me were magnifying the distress in people
| around me, and I needed to make some changes.
|
| If you have the good fortune to be in a situation where you can
| work on cultivating a generous spirit, I think it could be one
| way to push back against the machine.
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| I tend to fully agree with the thesis. Sadly, there's nothing to
| return to, so I am condemned to live in a current barren
| wasteland of modernity.
| seandoe wrote:
| I think we're blessed to live in a time where we have such a
| plethora of scientific knowledge that shows how deeply
| connected we are to the natural world and each other. It's a
| shame we choose to focus on our subtle differences to
| intentionally divide ourselves.
| kergonath wrote:
| We are not deeply connected to the natural world at all.
| Otherwise we'd have panicked about the mass extinction we are
| causing already and we'd do more than talking about
| addressing climate change.
|
| We are profiting off nature, turning it into a domesticated
| version we hope will be sustainable (but have no proof it
| will be, quite the contrary).
|
| And yet it's true that we never understood the world around
| us so well. This is fantastic if you are interested in
| sciences. Overwhelming evidence shows that most people don't
| care.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| You have misunderstood the word _connected_. The parent
| commenter meant that we are intertwined with nature, not
| that we are responsible caretakers.
| kergonath wrote:
| Oh right. I interpreted it as connected on an emotional
| level. Also, I might be a bit bitter about the whole
| situation.
|
| In any case, connected or not, nature is about to give us
| a good kicking.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > I think we're blessed to live in a time where we have such
| a plethora of scientific knowledge that shows how deeply
| connected we are to the natural world and each other.
|
| We are mostly connected to each other via sanitized business
| transactions. Meanwhile, we don't even know the names of most
| of our neighbors.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Not knowing one's neighbours may seem like a problem to
| you, but it can be a great thing for others. So many young
| people who move from close-knit small towns or villages to
| big cities (especially, but not only, sexual minorities),
| find it liberating that no one is scrutinizing their
| lifestyles like back home.
|
| Also, countries like Finland manage to be high-trust and
| relatively homogeneous societies, while at the same time
| having strong expectations for privacy in a block of flats,
| where neighbours might find it uncomfortable and intrusive
| if you tried to interact with them.
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| I guess it can depend from your life-stage really. As a
| lonely kid with different interests I really hated living
| in such a close-knit village, and felt great moving away
| from there. Yet now after years of living in the city,
| with a stable relationship and all, I constantly dream of
| moving to rural countryside and raising my future
| children there, in a more stable and calm environment.
|
| I believe it's quite natural for young people to go seek
| new life and opportunities elsewhere from their place of
| birth, as many of them have always done historically. But
| having to constantly move in search of them, never
| finding a place where you could stay permanently, now
| that really isn't a good way of living for the vast
| majority of people, even though modern employment market
| encourages it.
|
| As far Finnish block of flats go, I would argue that
| rental buildings with high turnover rate have quite low
| level of trust between neighbours and way more problems,
| while those owned by their residents have high trust and
| less issues. Some of it can be attributed to
| socioeconomic factors of course, but lack of roots and
| feeling of attachment to rental property is definitely
| also a factor.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > I would argue that rental buildings with high turnover
| rate ... while those owned by their residents
|
| Note that in the Finnish context (at least in the more-
| populated south), this isn't a rental/owned distinction.
| that is, the expectation for privacy also applies to
| blocks of flats where residents own their flat and may
| live there for decades.
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| True, indeed Finns tend to be fairly privacy conscious
| anywhere. But in owned flats people still do seem to be
| more mindful of their neighbours - less antisocial
| behaviour of all kinds. Of course it's hard to know how
| much of this is linked to ownership / sense of roots, and
| how much to socioeconomic factors.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| People used to depend on neighbors - for example, they
| helped each other on their farms on a regular basis. Now
| it's no longer the case and perhaps the dynamics you're
| describing is the worst of both worlds, where the actual
| economical need for rich and frequent interactions with
| neighbors is gone and everything that's left is the
| nosiness. But, this itself is a result of modernity
| compartmentalizing people to the degree where they
| practically never need help from their neighbors.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| But if you live in a successful welfare state, what need
| have you for help from your neighbours? The welfare state
| might help you even better, as it can benefit from
| economies of scale, and it will not demand anything in
| return from you except, once you are working a normal
| job, your taxes. Also, depictions of pre-welfare-state
| help from neighbours often underscore how that help was
| always conditional: sexual and racial minorities, women
| with children out of wedlock, people not members of the
| locally dominant church or political wing, etc. often
| found their pleas for help rejected.
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| Yet it should be noted that a successful welfare state
| exists only as long as well-doing people feel enough
| solidarity and trust towards the poor to pay higher taxes
| in support of them, and as long as those receiving the
| welfare benefits genuinely do their best to find
| employment, at least most of them.
|
| I'm pretty sure Finland won't be a welfare state in 50
| years. There's just too little left of the solidarity and
| common identity which helped creating the welfare state.
| Individualism and diversity seem to be today's trends,
| not community and social cohesion.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Welfare is basically mandatory charity - it's forcing
| everyone to chip in (via taxes) for the people who can't
| manage to support themselves.
|
| What I'm talking about is something else entirely - it's
| a setup where for example the neighbor takes care of your
| cows and other animals if you go to town for a day or
| two. Or you help him rebuild his house after a fire. Or,
| the older kids of your neighbor look after your younger
| kid, as they play together outside all day. Or somebody
| is the village's blacksmith and is fixing everyone's iron
| equipment. Or, you give excess of apples during harvest
| to someone and expect some other favor from them down the
| line. Essentially, it's deep interconnectedness with the
| people around you and essentially an opposite of welfare
| state, in which you interact not with your neighbors, but
| with bored and depressed bureucrats at the welfare office
| and the kafkesque rules that determine whether or not you
| will be granted the money.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Your idealistic vision sounds well and good. But what if
| you refuse to conform to cisgender- and
| heteronormativity, but your neighbour is a bigot? What if
| you are a politically active citizen, but your neighbor's
| politics are hostile to yours? (Note that the rise of the
| Nordic welfare states in fact helped to smooth out some
| political polarization that was hurting those societies
| in the early 20th century.) In the past, neighbourly help
| often was refused to people like that. And what if you
| are a very introverted person who simply doesn't want to
| interact with people outside your comfort zone?
|
| Also, "bored and depressed bureaucrats" and "Kafkaesque
| rules" is a caricature, it may not be how others perceive
| their country's welfare state. Satisfaction in fact may
| run high.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > Your idealistic vision sounds well and good. But what
| if you refuse to conform to cisgender- and
| heteronormativity, but your neighbour is a bigot? What if
| you are a politically active citizen, but your neighbor's
| politics are hostile to yours?
|
| I don't think people cared much about politics at all
| before modernity. If anything, the conflicts if any in
| Europe were centered around religion. As for the
| minorities, due to people's bigotry, perhaps sometimes
| they are indeed better off in an alienated modern world.
|
| > Also, "bored and depressed bureaucrats" and "Kafkaesque
| rules" is a caricature, it may not be how others perceive
| their country's welfare state. Satisfaction in fact may
| run high.
|
| It's not a caricature. There are plenty of cases of
| people who needed help, but for some random stupid reason
| the bureaucracy refused it (I think even on this forum
| there is a girl from Germany whose parents died when she
| was young and, due to a glitch in the system, she was
| left on her own and forced to support herself via
| prostitution). The paper shufflers see the pointlessness
| of the rules they have to obey and the misery it causes
| (i.e. they knew the girl should get help, but the system
| just said they can't help her), which is a contributing
| factor into their potential depression.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Your idealistic vision sounds well and good. But what
| if you refuse to conform
|
| Then you vote with your feet and move to a community
| that's friendlier to your values. That community will in
| turn have strong values of its own, which will help
| preserve a sense of high social trust within it. It's
| easy to move out to a competing community, because these
| quasi-tribal dynamics are inherently limited in scale to
| a max of about 150 individuals.
| vixen99 wrote:
| The successful welfare state is _the_ product of your
| neighbours who tacitly agree to maintain society in many
| ways including of course paying for it. It 's a mistake
| to suppose that that stance is a given in perpetuity.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Definitely, but the point is that society found a way for
| neighbours to assist each other, without requiring
| individual neighbours to know (and carefully maintain
| friendships with) their individual neighbours. Of course
| support for this model could possibly weaken over time,
| but I think many people find the welfare state superior
| to the old way that took more effort and would only
| benefit you if you conformed to expectations.
| totetsu wrote:
| This loud obnoxious Chicago Italian botanist youtuber often
| makes that point eloquently
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y
| Minor49er wrote:
| According to the article, we are quite the opposite from
| being blessed, and are more disconnected now than ever before
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's a paradox of knowledge Vs knowing or know-how.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I think it's time to turn your view locally. Barring larger
| disasters, the rest of the world is mostly a simplified model
| viewed through a computer screen or TV.
|
| Given the current social direction and inertia, maybe it's best
| for people to begin channeling their own Saint Leibowitz.
| msla wrote:
| My roots are the roots of all humanity: War, pillage, xenophobia,
| power-grabs, jealousy and envy, and, finally, decamping to
| somewhere more promising when the vaunted Land Of My Ancestors
| crapped out. Multiple times over, given current knowledge about
| prehistoric human migrations, because I refuse to limit "my
| roots" to what a 19th Century Scientific Racist would say about
| them.
| mrphoebs wrote:
| These roots you profess as being our core are more modern than
| you think in terms of our overall history as a people. - For
| waring more complicated and denser societies were required than
| our hunter gatherere tribes of old
|
| - For Pillaging, and power grabs, jealousy, envy individual
| ownership was required that didn't emerge until we settled down
| with farming anywhere at 10,000 bc
|
| >decamping to somewhere more promising when the vaunted Land Of
| My Ancestors crapped out
|
| This too did not happen until we started settling down and
| consuming all the local resources until they ran dry. Hunter
| gatherers foraged from larger areas of land with lower
| population density like wolves or other big predators of today
| and in a more sustainable way. I'm sure as tribes prospered and
| grew they split off exploring for greener pastures. One could
| argue why they couldn't just have a conflict with their
| neighbours, it's because beyond a certain size tribes tend to
| be very violent and dangerous governing structures for their
| constituents. That's the reason why we don't see geographically
| contiguous tribes beyond a certain size and they usually move
| to a more chieftan structure of governance.
|
| I think all of this is a round about way of saying, I don't
| think there are innate, universal, roots that humans are bound
| by. Beyond our mammalian firmware, and human firmware, most of
| the rest would be a software programmed through your
| experiences with the world, that's why there is such an
| expansive manifold of how humans can live and behave for better
| or worse.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| There's a(n in)famous mathematician who once lived in a cabin
| in the woods who strongly agrees with this position.
| mrphoebs wrote:
| I don't think mine is a position as much as general facts
| about pre-history that calls into question the parent
| commenters position.
|
| Now in the case of the (in)Famous mathematician, he seemed
| to have made a value judgement based on his interpretation
| of similar facts and the decay modernity wrought, and so it
| goes.
| dang wrote:
| Please let's not do guilt by association.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Deleuze - Guattari and their concept of deterritorialization is
| useful here. Basically, capital destroys the culture of a local
| area, rebuilds it, and repeats this process ad infinitum.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization
|
| This is easy to observe in somewhere like San Francisco. Most
| traces of culture from the pre-1990 era have been erased
| completely or have been turned into a theme park. Contemporary SF
| has almost zero connection to its roots and the sociopolitical
| consequences speak for themselves.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's nothing about this process that's contingent on
| capital, and 'capital' is a confused term anyway. The causal
| factors are both social (generally grouped under the broad term
| "modernity") and technical (since technical changes might make
| some forms of d18n more feasible than they would otherwise be).
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Social changes and technology aren't dependent on capital?
| I'd say it's pretty much impossible to divorce modernity from
| capital.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The native Americans frequently conquered each other and
| rebuilt the conquered lands to fit their empire. It happened
| with the Greeks and Romans, the Persians, etc and etc.
|
| This isn't new. Places change, and "capital" has nothing to do
| with it.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| The concept is intrinsically linked to globalization and
| global markets.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So you're suggesting the ancient Persians were globalizing
| to form markets? I mean, while ancient trade was quite a
| bit bigger than folks tend to give it credit I don't know
| I'd use the term "globalized".
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| No, I'm suggesting that the concept is more complicated
| than your middlebrow dismissal is suggesting.
| [deleted]
| helen___keller wrote:
| The more I re-read and think about this article, the less meaning
| I find in it. There's a fair bit of lamenting, but it's
| ultimately difficult to ascertain what exactly is the issue the
| cause and the consequences of this great uprooting to any further
| granularity than: things are different than they used to be and
| it's never going to be the same.
|
| This is true, but to what end. Will we truly end in civil war or
| anarchy because I don't live on the Italian countryside of the
| great grandparents I've never met?
|
| As far as the metaphor of rootedness: a plant does not wither and
| die upon being uprooted if it is planted in new soil in a
| reasonable amount of time (in fact, international houseplant
| shipping is done bare-rooted due to phytosanitary regulations).
| Upon replanting, the plant will go into shock and probably have a
| few weeks/months/years (depending on the size of the plant) of
| acclimation where you'll see no new growth. Perhaps it will die
| if the new environment is not offering good conditions.
|
| In the right conditions, you don't even need the full plant with
| original roots, you can just take a cutting off many plants and
| grow new roots in water or moss, then transplant to soil. In the
| houseplant community, propagating plants through cuttings in this
| way is much more common than reproduction by seed.
| mrphoebs wrote:
| While I see your point about the article's inability to
| cogently driving the reader to a deserved insight, Me thinks
| you've stretched the metaphor into an analogy and pulled at it
| until it's been "uprooted" :)
|
| The thought provoking premises/ideas in it at-least, what ever
| bits and pieces that were locally consistent was some food for
| thought.
| wbeckler wrote:
| The question arises, what do you do about the Machine? How do you
| get roots? If you are looking for answers, a great place to start
| is "Braiding Sweetgrass" by ecology professor and Native American
| Robin Wall Kimmerer. I'm an avid reader across many genres, and
| this is my favorite book. Many people I know have said that this
| book was the most important book they've read. When I look at my
| own life, I can see the difference between pre-Braiding
| Sweetgrass and post.
|
| It is chock full of ways for people to become rooted, even from a
| cold start. Here's the wikipedia page about the book:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braiding_Sweetgrass
| wbeckler wrote:
| Also of note, even though it was written in 2013, it is today
| number two on the NYTimes bestseller list, and it's been on the
| list for 53 weeks. A lot of people are feeling like it's time
| to grow roots: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-
| sellers/paperback-nonfict...
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Rootlessness and rootedness are themes that wind through most
| of Wendell Berry's works as well. His novels Hannah Coulter and
| Jayber Crow take a good look at what increasing rootlessness
| does to a community: increasing loneliness and isolation, but
| also eventual environmental destruction.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Simone Weil gets good coverage on HN. Last year I bought a
| biography of her after reading a thread on HN. She was an
| interesting character.
| dang wrote:
| Which biography? I read Petrement's bio of her a long time ago
| (they were school friends IIRC).
|
| Her older brother was Andre Weil of course. As a kid she
| decided she would never have the talent to be a mathematician
| because he was so good at it... talk about sample bias. The
| philosopher George Grant said something like (paraphrasing)
| "that family had intellectual culture on a level undreamt of in
| North America".
|
| There's a lovely article about the family by Andre's daughter
| here:
|
| _My Father Andre Weil (2018) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492000 - Sept 2020 (7
| comments)
| elric wrote:
| "On the abolition of all political parties" is well worth the
| read. It paints a rather bleak picture of party politics, but
| when seen through 21st century eyes, it's eerily prophetic.
| guerrilla wrote:
| As a lifelong nomad, living for decades on the other side of the
| planet from where I grew up and having studied in worked in
| nearly a dozen countries, I can't relate to the sentiment. I
| think it's quite a leap to connect belonging and this rootedness.
| If I am rooted in anything it'd be in the deeper continuous
| history and prehistory of the species, the planet and universe.
| Anything else seems a bit small. I really don't think we're
| living in anything particularly special either when we consider
| the bigger picture which includes things like migration out of
| Africa, the neolithic revolution, Roman conquest or the migration
| period[1] that followed. On the other hand the original book
| looks interesting through the lens of criticism of a lack of
| local community and forced displacement[2].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
|
| 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Need_for_Roots
| loughnane wrote:
| > It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of
| Traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its
| fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England,
| Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking
| fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours,
| we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise
| man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any
| occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at
| home still; and shall make men sensible by the expression of his
| countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue,
| and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an
| interloper or a valet.
|
| I've posted this before, from Emerson's self-reliance. It is
| describing geographical roots but the human want for short-term
| novelty at the cost of building on something more familiar is
| applicable to all sorts of aspects of life. Moderation is key,
| and so in circles (like mine) where people crave new experiences
| rootlessness seems much more common an issue than provincialism.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I hate this style of writing, and it can generally be summed up
| as:
|
| "Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to <do very
| vague things like find your roots> and things will be fixed!"
|
| The author is of course not alone in writing this kind of
| meaningless content. "We simply need more Justice!", "We need to
| ground ourselves", "We need to rediscover God" etc etc.
|
| If you want to write on these lines start by defining, very very
| tightly, your terms. Be specific in the ill you think your
| solution addresses. You should probably plainly list cons of your
| claims.
| agumonkey wrote:
| With a touch of name dropping
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > "Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to <do
| very vague things like find your roots> and things will be
| fixed!"
|
| I didn't get the impression he said that things can be fixed.
| [deleted]
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