Inquiry #3

As a person who has always viewed social values and norms as something highly synthetic, a lot of what is mentioned in Examined Life seems to be merely stating the obvious to me. One thing that this excerpt attempts to get at are the reasons that prejudice is directed towards people who do things differently. It is suggested that this is to make those who exhibit this prejudice feel superior, or that people would like to eliminate anything which does not support their own views. I'm not really satisfied with any of these explanations. They just don't seem adequate to explain these people's behavior. I don't pretend that I have the answer, but I will at least speculate. Perhaps while the explanations mentioned above may apply to a minority, the larger group of people haven't even come very far at all in their line of thought and are simply jumping on the bandwagon with those types of people, for various reasons which may include their own fear of standing out and thus being persecuted by the rest of the sheeple.

There is clearly a lot of bias towards the end of Examined Life. Capitalism and the Republican party are both bashed. This is alot like Nussbaum's idea that humans have certain dignities, and certainly I believe we should extend a hand to those who are disabled within what is reasonable, but towards Examined Life paints a picture of a world where people aren't measured by what they can contribute to society, which is great in theory, but that means that people have no reason to contribute anything to society. Capitalism isn't perfect, but neither are people and that's why it works. People in general aren't motivated to work hard to help others, and however pessimistic that might sound the nature of human-kind isn't going to change.

One good point examined life does bring up is that our bodies are essentially dependent. We cannot control all of the factors that affect our bodies. What does free will really matter when you can control someone by exerting some kind of power over their body? Even our minds that we think are free are contained within our bodies. If our bodies can be so affected by the outside how is it that our minds which need our bodies even to live are self-sufficient. There are even such methods as drugs which can be administered to the body to restrict the mind directly. With all these annoying social norms that place limits on us all, certain people more than others, and with the bodies vulnerability, it makes me think that maybe we'd be better off if we were all invisible ghosts, minds without body or form but with normal senses. I view our bodies as a tool which we use to interface with the outside world, no different from a computer or a cell phone, except that it is much more advanced, so yes, if we didn't have to go through this tool it would be much more convenient.