Your Saturday Assignment

Watch this...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DKZmIzEMUN8

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin

Comments

[Syven]

As an independent observer it is ironic that the two people that have impressed me most in the US primaries are firstly, Mike Huckabee and then Ron Paul.

Elections are not won however on sentiment, and one only has to go to YouTube to see video counts between someone who might watch an Eliyahu Goldratt video and a pop culture video. If PBS had a 3% viewing rate, intelligent video dwarfs in comparison to superficiality.

Free will is free will but conformity is also conformity. It is so much easier to travel the path of least resistance and as I think these things out here at your blog, we have prostituted the idea of talent for the conformity of fame, we have submerged self-responsibility for social responsibility and we underestimate not simply the external conditioning of media, but the internal conditioning of our own brain - how our amygdala operates, how our hippocampus operates, how neurotransmitters effect our pre-frontal cortex.

So my journey is one of discovery rather than preaching, it is about the reception of self-awareness and not the megaphone. I have a great respect for the Founding Fathers of the United States, because they were mortal, they were the best and worst of us but as British subjects they risked treason to discover what freedom means.

Mine is an individual journey and it is in part a journey to escape the narcissism of our new age (which I guess is processed by the amygdala) but it is also a recognition that there is boundaries to discover, a purpose to create, a life to make and I guess this is processed by the hippocampus - and it is this varied search for freedom that should unite us, even if the nature of conformity leaves us much divided.

Beyond that, I thank you Ryan for allowing me to think out aloud at your blog and principally I came here as a traveler rather than a tourist and so I write this not to preach at you or tell others what to do, but simply to explore and learn - and your video was constructive as a catalyst for that purpose.

M.