The famous opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics says that human beings desire by nature to know. Every teacher is faced with coping with students who seem to refute Aristotle, starting by not even knowing who he is, but such students have had the natural curiosity we see in children sadly stunted. We want to know—and we need to know. We are not like the animals, hard-wired with instincts that control their actions and order their lives, and we are not emotionally capable of living in chaos. Chaos is mental collapse, the onset of psychosis, a fall into the abyss. The mind’s reaction to incipient chaos is fear, and, far from being the personal failing of special snowflakes who have grown up overprotected from life’s bumps, the epidemic of anxiety disorders at the present moment seems a rational response to a society, and indeed a world, that seems to be teetering on the edge of a plunge into complete chaotic breakdown.
November 3, 2023
November 3, 2023
November 3, 2023
The famous opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics says that human beings desire by nature to know. Every teacher is faced with coping with students who seem to refute Aristotle, starting by not even knowing who he is, but such students have had the natural curiosity we see in children sadly stunted. We want to know—and we need to know. We are not like the animals, hard-wired with instincts that control their actions and order their lives, and we are not emotionally capable of living in chaos. Chaos is mental collapse, the onset of psychosis, a fall into the abyss. The mind’s reaction to incipient chaos is fear, and, far from being the personal failing of special snowflakes who have grown up overprotected from life’s bumps, the epidemic of anxiety disorders at the present moment seems a rational response to a society, and indeed a world, that seems to be teetering on the edge of a plunge into complete chaotic breakdown.