Complete Justice = Complete Catastrophe

Complete Justice = Complete Catastrophe: Ecophilosopher Garrett Hardin considers this equation as central to its core principles. In his 1968 essay titled "The Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin explains how every rational being will seek to maximize his or her gain in the event that everything becomes the common property of all. Some see this notion as a seething critique of communism, and in particular, the Soviet farming policies related to collectivization. One way to solve the problems stemming from common ownership is to advocate a policy of privatization whereby only a limited number of people have access to certain resources. Given that the world itself possesses only a finite body of goods, man must put into place a series of control measures with respect to the environment. For Hardin, an area in dire need of regulation is the burgeoning growth of human population. He firmly believes that the freedom to breed, as laid out in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is an insidious concept. The primary basis for his reasoning stems from the fact that those who have many descendants are actually doing a serious disservice to society in the sense that they consume more resources in safeguarding their well-beings. Although people have characterized Hardin as being both aloof and cynical, he has certainly hit upon something important (like the Malthusian limit).

Ontology vs. Technology

Ontology vs. Technology: In Martin Heidegger's essay The Question Concerning Technology (1950), he refers to nature as "The Enframing" whereby a systematic ordering of the landscape by mankind has resulted in a seemingly unrecognizable and irreversible situation that constitutes our present condition in the world. Not being able to recognize and understand the changes brought by technology to the Earth and to the Self holds drastic consequences for the future. Today, mankind can operate a high-definition television or a super-charged automobile without having to comprehend even an inkling about the physics behind their respective operations. And this is precisely where the fields of science and technology have come to supplant the most basic and primal elements of man's being-in-the-world. For example, the above picture is the Sylmar Cascades in Southern California, which serve as the Los Angeles Aqueduct's terminus. Without the Sylmar Cascades, which require vast amounts of energy to pump mass quantities of water through the Newhall Pass, more than ten million people in Los Angeles County would be facing a serious water crisis (not that they already are). And how many Angelenos truly understand the survivalist implications of such a technological apparatus?

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wonderment

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wonderment: In his Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953), Wittgenstein offers a variety of novel interpretations regarding the true nature of analytic philosophy. Concerning philosophy itself, Wittgenstein claims that all philosophical problems stem from a mere misunderstanding of language. What one person means by the word "phenomenology" for example, may be radically different from what another person means by it. Although there may be a general, philosophical definition of the word "phenomenology," the definition is postulated with a set of words that inevitably projects a so-called "meaning" onto it. Therefore, one cannot actually satisfy the logical conditions necessitated for a "meaning" rooted in language, especially since language itself constitutes an ever-expanding group of words with meanings that often presuppose their use(s). In this instance, Wittgenstein demonstrates how the "meaning" of any particular word presupposes our capabilities of using it to articulate or develop an effective manner of communication. Thus, even though language is fundamentally a public phenomenon, as one person utilizes it to communicate with another person, it is ultimately formulated in the private constructs of the mind.

The Ineffability of Modernity

The Ineffability of Modernity: What's that sound? That sound that eerily creeps up behind you when you walk down the street. Is it the sound of urban sprawl? Is it the sound of reindustrialization? It's catching up with you every moment of your existence on the Earth. There is no exit. Nobody can escape the sound. It's delicate and ineffable at the same time. It masks itself as progress. Machines working hither and thither, cars traveling to and fro, planes taking off and landing, but it's all helter-skelter in the end, right? Yet we are creatures of the 21st century. And what does that mean? In a way, man has certainly lost his ability to know himself. Likewise, Articulating what it means to be a human being in the 21st century has become nearly impossible. People who define themselves by their material possessions only get distracted and lost in them over the long term. Thus, man has created the infamous Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.), just as he has with various other social anxiety disorders. But it's that SOUND which clouds each one of our individual concerns, and until we learn to transcend that SOUND, we will be locked in this vicious cycle of modernity.

The Origins of Mechanized Warfare

The Origins of Mechanized Warfare: Achtung - Panzer! is a book by long-standing German General Heinz Guderian. First published in 1937, the book remains stalwart in the face of contemporary military strategy whereby the deployment of mechanized, armored divisions is central. The prospect of marrying army divisions with tanks, mortars, and other forms of mechanized artillery was a rather novel concept at the outset of World War II in Europe. Similar calls for mechanization were asserted by French commander Charles de Gaulle in the 1930s, but those calls were not heeded in France like they were in Germany. And it is fair to say that these innovative war tactics, embraced by the Germans, were a major reason why the Battle of France (Fall Gelb) lasted a mere two months in May and June 1940. As a result of Guderian's treatise on mechanized warfare, the German Army fashioned a series of Panzer Korps in order to bring his war theories to fruition. These Panzer Korps were outfitted with German Panzer and Tiger tanks which relied more on speed and nimbleness instead of armor and defense like the French FT-17.