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> Privacy is often inconvenient. Understanding is inconvenient. You're so right. What else? - Safety is inconvenient
- Growth is inconvenient
- Success is inconvenient
- Long term happiness is inconvenient
We could write a very, very long list of all the good things in life
and find, at root, that they are "inconvenient".That's why I consider the word convenience to be the modern form of
the Greek work Thanatos, which is the "death drive" toward atrophy,
stasis, forgetfulness and rigor mortis. Living is "Inconvenient", and
because everything worth having costs something, convenience is
"anti-life". But that's a lot of beard-stroking philosophy. A more interesting
question for hackers might be: "Exactly when did we become the arse-wipers of the world, coddling
everyone in "convenience" lest their delicate brows produce a bead
of sweat or their minds be troubled by a moment of doubt?"
Here's a quote from Digital Vegan pondering the writing of De
Tocqueville: Political scientist Alexis De Toqueville writing in his 1840
Democracy in America [DeTocqueville35] questions the perils of
convenient systems so perfect in their pampering and coddling that
they render life pointless. Of what today we would call cybernetic
governance, he writes:
`` That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and
mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like
that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood;
but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
childhood: it is well content that the people should
rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For
their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it
chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that
happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and
supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures,
manages their principal concerns, directs their industry,
regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their
inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care
of thinking and all the trouble of living?''
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