I bet that people in the USSR, who were said to be finely educated yet whose opportunities were squandered by the state economy, must have looked at "a policeman learned in Shakespeare" winning a washing machine on American TV and been like "holy shit we need to overthrow the state

The thesis is that games of chance like the lottery enable people for whom competition and labor has produced little reward in a stratified class society to radically change their status. The television game show combined meritocratic competitiveness with wagers promising sudden changes of fortune.

!!

If you were to teach commands to something without language, or even to understand or teach a new concept, would it be more "natural" to conceptualize it through agency, desire, helping, and hindering?

For Wittgenstein language is a relationship of desire and effect between the speaker and the listener: when I speak, I want you to perceive something, your understanding is to perceive what I want. static1.squarespace.com/static/54889...

Language is not complete when it remains a list of things. "When we say: 'Every word in language signifies something' we have so far said nothing whatever." Recalling the mental image of the signified for a "definition" is akin to the obeisance of acting on the command to bring something.

Wittgenstein argues that the first things we are taught in language is not the name of the object but its getting. "Slab!" is not "Slab" first - it is "Bring me a slab!" first. - "With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding."

Animism as innate causal schema is evocative of Wittgenstein's "slab" example. How do humans acquire language? How is language taught? He posits a Builder and a Worker. The Builder says "Slab! Block! Pillar! Beam!" and the Worker retrieves those items in that order, perhaps first by demonstration.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy even has a subsection in its entry for "Animism" on the argument that animism is a more "natural" way for the human mind to understand causation ("Argument from Innateness") iep.utm.edu/animism/#SH3a

This experiment echoes 'Animist' ideas of causation: desire and purpose cause effects, rather than (or as a metaphorical description of) physical mechanics. After the spring thaw, the river *wants* to rise, or it doesn't want to rise. It is not just that the snow melts. bigthink.com/neuropsych/t...

In the experiment, a puppet on a slope tries to climb a hill. Two other puppets either 'help' or 'hinder' the climber to reach the top. When the infants are given the Helper or Hinderer to choose from, they selectively reached for the Helper, implying the earliest form of social evaluation.

Tracks generally the views of human psychology in, like, the Iliad, where particular capabilities were held by the gods and were temporarily granted to mortals who called upon them (or were their victims) - muses, Cupid's arrows, prophecies, fates.

Though deity intermediaries and self-object inversion seems natural to pre-modern philosophy. The self is just a particular instantiation in time and space ("conditioned") of the eternal "absolute" / "unconditioned." The contemporary metaphor is the "holographic" universe.

Seems to antithetical to modernity's requirement that the free liberal subject be completely responsible for himself (Weber's "actuarial self"). Modernity forces man to strongly define his consciousness of self. It's no surprise that Freud and Weber are contemporaries.

To go back to this quote regarding the reversal of subject and object in deity-worship, I'm reminded of this Simone Weil quote that puts it well: "It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me."

I've always been worried that my anxiety primarily comes from my underbite.