LINKS - February 2nd, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Groundhog Day vs Nietzsche: Reliving Your Life
By Matt Bennett, The Institute of Art and Ideas
“It’s Groundhog Day, again! The popular film explored an idea that religion and philosophy had previously grappled with: What if time isn’t linear, but cyclical? What if we are condemned to relive our lives again and again, to eternity? Groundhog Day presents this possibility as a challenge but also an opportunity: to imagine what the best versions of ourselves could be, even if the world around us remained the same. Nietzsche, on the other hand, imagined an eternal recurrence in which nothing changed, every little detail of our lives was relived in exactly the same way, for eternity. He recognized the idea was terrifying, but he also saw it as an exercise in affirming our existence, even the most horrible aspects of it, writes Matt Bennett.”
Becoming a centaur
By Janet Jones, Aeon
“The horse is a prey animal, the human a predator. Our shared trust and athleticism is a neurobiological miracle.”
A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe
“Their findings provide the first direct evidence that southern European as well as southwestern Asian hunter-gatherers incorporated wild plants into their diets well before anyone cultivated crops, says archaeobotanist Elena Marinova of the State Office for Cultural Heritage Baden-Württemberg in Germany. For those ancient people, “the ‘paleolithic’ diet included starchy grains, not only meat and berries,” Marinova says.”
These Bolivian skateboarders use Indigenous attire to battle discrimination
Text By Paula Ramón, National Geographic
Photographs by Luisa Dörr
“Once a symbol that stigmatized Indigenous people, these women are using their ancestral clothing to make a statement.”
Our Thing
Directed by: James Carroll, Created by Sammy Gravano
Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano is an infamous mobster who was formerly the underboss of the Gambino crime family. He gained mainstream fame after cooperating with authorities against John Gotti, who was the head of the Gambino crime family. This is a podcast series where Gravano just tells stories about the mafia. It’s awesome, especially if you are interested in this sort of thing. I link here to the YouTube page, but you can find the series wherever you get your podcasts.
I’m fascinated by subcultures. The mafia, the Hell’s Angels, tunnel people, pirates, Freemasonry—you get the idea. Learning about what it means to be human doesn’t just mean reading science and philosophy. It also means engaging with real people and trying to understand them. Why do people join secret societies? What do they provide to people that regular society doesn’t? The mafia isn’t just interesting because of colorful characters, barbarous antics, and exotic lingo. Its existence can teach us something about human behavior. I think it especially can point us toward society’s failings. When individuals’ basic needs aren’t met in “mainstream” life, they will search for purpose and community elsewhere, often to the detriment of the society from which they felt ostracized.