The trouble with being human these days: Identity by Zygmunt Bauman

The trouble with being human these days: Identity by Zygmunt Bauman

" Inevitably, the undermining of familiar institutions, an aspect of modernity that has certainly been intensified in recent years, has had important consequences for people's sense of identity. There is nothing new about the observation that national and class-based identities (both of which had seemed almost definitively modern) have been upset by the end of the Cold War and various other developments discussed under the heading of 'globalisation'. Similarly, Bauman notes that while the workplace was traditionally a very important source of personal identity, changes in the economy have rendered it far less reliable. He suggests that the enduring identities once associated with work have given way to looser and more provisional identities, and conceptions of community, that are subject to constant change and renegotiation. Indeed, Bauman points to a more profound transformation of how we understand what it means to be human in the absence of transcendent ideologies (traditional or otherwise) such as have characterised modernity until recently."

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies

Words To Live By

1.
Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.
2.
Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them.
3.
When in another's lair, show him respect or else do not go there.
4.
If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy.
5.
Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.
6.
Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.
7.
Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.
8.
Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself.
9.
Do not harm little children.
10.
Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.
11.
When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him.