Latest news with #Socrates
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
You Don't Know Yourself As Well as You Think You Do
Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you've heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo's temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade. In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, 'If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.' And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, 'To thine own self be true,' presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it. Good advice, to a point. If you know absolutely nothing about yourself or your likes, wants, values, or personality, you either are a baby or have bigger problems than a dead philosopher can address. Yet sometimes all of modern life seems to be pushing people toward knowing themselves in more and more granular ways. People are going to therapy in rising numbers to seek self-understanding. They are tracking their steps, reading, and sleep. They are giving their data to corporate marketing databases so they can find out their Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram number, or Harry Potter house. On TikTok, as Rebecca Jennings reported for Vox, creators are inventing new micro-identities for people to resonate with: 'Dilly dally-ers' are people who like to fart around and waste time; a 'therapist friend' is someone whose friends talk to them about their problems. The quest to find and define yourself can feel never-ending. It can also feel like a vital part of life, as though if you're not seeking self-understanding, you're missing out. (Our old pal Socrates also said: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.') 'If you haven't noticed how pervasive this message is in society, just pay attention for the next few days,' Rebecca Schlegel, a Texas A&M University social psychologist, told me. 'It's so baked into our culture that we almost take it for granted.' [Read: What we lose when we're priced out of our hobbies] But the dream of perfect self-knowledge is unattainable, and chasing it too doggedly can leave you more confused and stuck than when you started. Humans' ability to see themselves clearly and accurately has limitations that neither personality quizzes nor Fitbit data can overcome. 'We should never think that we know ourselves very well,' Simine Vazire, a University of Melbourne psychology professor who has studied self-knowledge, told me. 'Anyone who thinks they do—by definition, they lack self-knowledge, because they're wrong about that, at least.' Knowing yourself is difficult, in part, because some behaviors and attitudes stem from the unconscious mind, outside your sphere of awareness. 'The mind purrs along under the hood in various ways,' Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychologist and the author of Strangers to Ourselves, told me. One of many examples he gives in his book is how people interpret ambiguous situations (and why). If I tell a joke at a party and no one laughs, my unconscious patterns will determine whether I think I'm a socially awkward fool whom everyone hates or assume that my audience must not have heard me over the din of the party, because I'm clearly charming and hilarious. Bias is also a hindrance. For example, many people have a tendency to rate themselves as better than average across all kinds of traits, even though, obviously, we can't all be above average. Biases are part of the problem with a personality quiz, Vazire told me. Far from revealing some hidden truth that was locked within, she said, the test is 'just repeating to you what you tell it.' Another tricky thing is that most people aren't fully aware of how much capacity they have for change. A study of 19,000 people that Wilson worked on, called 'The End of History Illusion,' found that although people reported having changed a lot in the past decade, on average they believed they were mostly done changing and wouldn't evolve much more in the next 10 years. [Read: I gave myself three months to change my personality] The pursuit of self-knowledge is difficult even when someone goes about it in a thoughtful, deliberate way. Meditating, journaling, or asking yourself the hard questions can be greatly beneficial. But active, conscious introspection has a dark side: rumination, or getting fixated on a problem and going over it again and again, which can make things worse and trap people in a negative thought spiral. People can also undermine themselves by thinking too much about the good things in their lives. In a small study Wilson conducted, when the researchers asked people to reflect on how their romantic relationship was going, the very act of reflecting seemed to change the subjects' minds. Some got happier with their relationship; some got less happy. But according to Wilson, these changes in perspective didn't necessarily reflect people's true feelings. Love is not fully explainable, after all, and Wilson theorized that the subjects put too much stock in whatever answers they came up with for the study. If they struggled to list a lot of good reasons they loved their significant other, they might conclude that they were less in love than they'd thought. People sometimes 'construct a new story about their feelings based on the reasons that happen to come to mind,' Wilson wrote. Introspection, as he described it in his book, should be understood less as an archaeological dig to uncover the capital-T Truth of ourselves and more as literary criticism 'in which we are the text to be understood.' Just as a good novel doesn't have one single truth in it, a person has many truths as well. Rather than seeking a perfectly accurate story about themselves (which is impossible), people should try to construct a narrative that's 'pretty positive' and 'somewhat reality-based,' according to Wilson. This is one way to think about therapy—as a collaborative process of rewriting your story until it works well enough to let you stop thinking about it quite so much. The notion that each person has one real, abiding self buried within, waiting to be discovered, is both widespread and difficult for many people to shake, Schlegel told me: When people go through a big change, for instance, particularly a good one, they tend to think of it less as a transformation from one thing to another and more as a discovery of something in themselves that was always there. Schlegel has found that belief in the true self is linked to seeing greater meaning in your life, but she described herself as a 'true-self agnostic.' (She referenced the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who called the true self a 'troublesome myth.') For all the idea's benefits, 'the downside,' she said, is 'what happens if we close ourselves off to change. And then we miss out on something we might have loved.' [Read: Life's stories] Most of my life, I thought I was a dog person who hated running. Yet just a couple of weekends ago I ran a 5K then came home to my two perfect cats, Cherry and Ginkgo, whom I am utterly devoted to. If you had beamed a premonition of that Saturday into the mind of my younger self, she would have been confused, perhaps even alarmed. My preference for dogs and my disdain for running were two things I thought I would never change my mind about. But that might have been just a failure of imagination. As Wilson and his co-authors wrote in their 'End of History Illusion' study, 'People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.' Why did I change my mind? On the running, I really have no idea. I just got on the treadmill one day for some reason and found it to not be so bad. My husband wanted the cats, and I fell in love the day we brought them home as tiny kittens. Was I always a cat person, secretly? Did I have an inner runner within me, just waiting to be discovered? Did I actually change or did I just become more myself? I don't know, and I don't really care. Both explanations seem plausible, and I ended up in the same place either way: watching Survivor on the treadmill every now and then and being woken up every morning at 6 a.m. by a scratchy little tongue licking my face. Vazire, like me, runs 'very casually once in a while.' She told me that her well-meaning partner sometimes shares things he's learned about how to improve your form or otherwise optimize your running, and she gets annoyed. 'I'm not trying to optimize anything,' she said. 'I'm not trying to become a runner.' I wouldn't consider myself a runner, either. I just run sometimes. Not every habit or preference has to become an identity. Sometimes we just do things. As Schlegel put it, 'Not everything has to be so weighty.' Instead of conceiving of our true self as set in stone, the secret to a healthy pursuit of self-knowledge may lie in building a flexible sense of self, one that allows for surprise and even mystery. Research has linked the belief that the self is changeable to positive outcomes: lower stress, better physical health, and less negative reactions to hardships. Maybe we should stop searching for ourselves quite so intensely, put down the Sorting Hat and the label maker, and just, I don't know, live life and try things without overly worrying about what they say about who we really are. To be found, to be known: These are unreachable destinations. Not only is our ability to know ourselves limited, but scientists can probably only know so much about the nature of self-knowledge. Vazire is highly skeptical that research can solve that puzzle. 'I don't think the expertise we need here is quantitative empirical data,' she said. 'It's just wisdom, or something like that.' Parts of the self will probably always remain a little lost, resistant to easy categorization—and maybe that's fine. I am a cat person now, though. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
2 days ago
- General
- Atlantic
You Don't Know Yourself As Well as You Think You Do
Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you've heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo's temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade. In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, 'If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.' And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, 'To thine own self be true,' presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it. Good advice, to a point. If you know absolutely nothing about yourself or your likes, wants, values, or personality, you either are a baby or have bigger problems than a dead philosopher can address. Yet sometimes all of modern life seems to be pushing people toward knowing themselves in more and more granular ways. People are going to therapy in rising numbers to seek self-understanding. They are tracking their steps, reading, and sleep. They are giving their data to corporate marketing databases so they can find out their Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram number, or Harry Potter house. On TikTok, as Rebecca Jennings reported for Vox, creators are inventing new micro-identities for people to resonate with: 'Dilly dally-ers' are people who like to fart around and waste time; a 'therapist friend' is someone whose friends talk to them about their problems. The quest to find and define yourself can feel never-ending. It can also feel like a vital part of life, as though if you're not seeking self-understanding, you're missing out. (Our old pal Socrates also said: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.') 'If you haven't noticed how pervasive this message is in society, just pay attention for the next few days,' Rebecca Schlegel, a Texas A&M University social psychologist, told me. 'It's so baked into our culture that we almost take it for granted.' But the dream of perfect self-knowledge is unattainable, and chasing it too doggedly can leave you more confused and stuck than when you started. Humans' ability to see themselves clearly and accurately has limitations that neither personality quizzes nor Fitbit data can overcome. 'We should never think that we know ourselves very well,' Simine Vazire, a University of Melbourne psychology professor who has studied self-knowledge, told me. 'Anyone who thinks they do—by definition, they lack self-knowledge, because they're wrong about that, at least.' Knowing yourself is difficult, in part, because some behaviors and attitudes stem from the unconscious mind, outside your sphere of awareness. 'The mind purrs along under the hood in various ways,' Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychologist and the author of Strangers to Ourselves, told me. One of many examples he gives in his book is how people interpret ambiguous situations (and why). If I tell a joke at a party and no one laughs, my unconscious patterns will determine whether I think I'm a socially awkward fool whom everyone hates or assume that my audience must not have heard me over the din of the party, because I'm clearly charming and hilarious. Bias is also a hindrance. For example, many people have a tendency to rate themselves as better than average across all kinds of traits, even though, obviously, we can't all be above average. Biases are part of the problem with a personality quiz, Vazire told me. Far from revealing some hidden truth that was locked within, she said, the test is 'just repeating to you what you tell it.' Another tricky thing is that most people aren't fully aware of how much capacity they have for change. A study of 19,000 people that Wilson worked on, called 'The End of History Illusion,' found that although people reported having changed a lot in the past decade, on average they believed they were mostly done changing and wouldn't evolve much more in the next 10 years. The pursuit of self-knowledge is difficult even when someone goes about it in a thoughtful, deliberate way. Meditating, journaling, or asking yourself the hard questions can be greatly beneficial. But active, conscious introspection has a dark side: rumination, or getting fixated on a problem and going over it again and again, which can make things worse and trap people in a negative thought spiral. People can also undermine themselves by thinking too much about the good things in their lives. In a small study Wilson conducted, when the researchers asked people to reflect on how their romantic relationship was going, the very act of reflecting seemed to change the subjects' minds. Some got happier with their relationship; some got less happy. But according to Wilson, these changes in perspective didn't necessarily reflect people's true feelings. Love is not fully explainable, after all, and Wilson theorized that the subjects put too much stock in whatever answers they came up with for the study. If they struggled to list a lot of good reasons they loved their significant other, they might conclude that they were less in love than they'd thought. People sometimes 'construct a new story about their feelings based on the reasons that happen to come to mind,' Wilson wrote. Introspection, as he described it in his book, should be understood less as an archaeological dig to uncover the capital-T Truth of ourselves and more as literary criticism 'in which we are the text to be understood.' Just as a good novel doesn't have one single truth in it, a person has many truths as well. Rather than seeking a perfectly accurate story about themselves (which is impossible), people should try to construct a narrative that's 'pretty positive' and 'somewhat reality-based,' according to Wilson. This is one way to think about therapy—as a collaborative process of rewriting your story until it works well enough to let you stop thinking about it quite so much. The notion that each person has one real, abiding self buried within, waiting to be discovered, is both widespread and difficult for many people to shake, Schlegel told me: When people go through a big change, for instance, particularly a good one, they tend to think of it less as a transformation from one thing to another and more as a discovery of something in themselves that was always there. Schlegel has found that belief in the true self is linked to seeing greater meaning in your life, but she described herself as a 'true-self agnostic.' (She referenced the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who called the true self a ' troublesome myth.') For all the idea's benefits, 'the downside,' she said, is 'what happens if we close ourselves off to change. And then we miss out on something we might have loved.' Most of my life, I thought I was a dog person who hated running. Yet just a couple of weekends ago I ran a 5K then came home to my two perfect cats, Cherry and Ginkgo, whom I am utterly devoted to. If you had beamed a premonition of that Saturday into the mind of my younger self, she would have been confused, perhaps even alarmed. My preference for dogs and my disdain for running were two things I thought I would never change my mind about. But that might have been just a failure of imagination. As Wilson and his co-authors wrote in their 'End of History Illusion' study, 'People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.' Why did I change my mind? On the running, I really have no idea. I just got on the treadmill one day for some reason and found it to not be so bad. My husband wanted the cats, and I fell in love the day we brought them home as tiny kittens. Was I always a cat person, secretly? Did I have an inner runner within me, just waiting to be discovered? Did I actually change or did I just become more myself? I don't know, and I don't really care. Both explanations seem plausible, and I ended up in the same place either way: watching Survivor on the treadmill every now and then and being woken up every morning at 6 a.m. by a scratchy little tongue licking my face. Vazire, like me, runs 'very casually once in a while.' She told me that her well-meaning partner sometimes shares things he's learned about how to improve your form or otherwise optimize your running, and she gets annoyed. 'I'm not trying to optimize anything,' she said. 'I'm not trying to become a runner.' I wouldn't consider myself a runner, either. I just run sometimes. Not every habit or preference has to become an identity. Sometimes we just do things. As Schlegel put it, 'Not everything has to be so weighty.' Instead of conceiving of our true self as set in stone, the secret to a healthy pursuit of self-knowledge may lie in building a flexible sense of self, one that allows for surprise and even mystery. Research has linked the belief that the self is changeable to positive outcomes: lower stress, better physical health, and less negative reactions to hardships. Maybe we should stop searching for ourselves quite so intensely, put down the Sorting Hat and the label maker, and just, I don't know, live life and try things without overly worrying about what they say about who we really are. To be found, to be known: These are unreachable destinations. Not only is our ability to know ourselves limited, but scientists can probably only know so much about the nature of self-knowledge. Vazire is highly skeptical that research can solve that puzzle. 'I don't think the expertise we need here is quantitative empirical data,' she said. 'It's just wisdom, or something like that.' Parts of the self will probably always remain a little lost, resistant to easy categorization—and maybe that's fine.
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Science
- Irish Examiner
Sky Matters: a good time to spot Venus in the evening sky — and we've a 'strawberry moon' coming up on June 11
Last week I visited the Skinakas Astronomical Observatory on Mount Ida on the island of Crete. It's a small observatory perched 1,750 metres above sea level, beyond the reach of the cloud layer that would make the site otherwise unusable for astronomical observations. The atmosphere here is unusually 'stable', evidenced by the lack of twinkling of the stars and the remarkable detail that can be captured in images from the Observatory's two telescopes. About 60 kilometres west of Skinakas is the city of Heraklion. Unlike the steady stars above, the lights of Heraklion far below appear to dance about and change colour — a kind of terrestrial twinkling on steroids. As I watched this entrancing spectacle I was reminded of the impact that Greek (and Cretan) culture has had on our world from great minds such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates. Their ideas spread across the globe, sometimes taking years to cross country boundaries, sometimes much longer. 1.0m Telescope. Picture: Vangelis Pantoulas / Skinakas Observatory So what has this got to do with Skinakas, the observatory? More than you might think, because Mount Ida is one of the sites around Europe that is taking part in experiments to move ideas around the globe employing technologies that would have seemed magical to those great minds. Using a small telescope with a mirror that is one metre in diameter — and that's small by current day standards — the site will use a laser beam to connect to a satellite above, which will then itself transfer that beam (and the ideas contained in it) to receiving stations across Europe and beyond. In a fraction of a second. And in huge volumes. Indeed volumes which are much greater than we can move with current satellite technologies. Sending a beam from a small telescope to a moving satellite some 500km – 2000km above your head is no mean technological feat, and the state-of-the-art technology is still somewhat in its infancy. But give it a few more years and it's likely that this mode of communication will mature and be widely used. In the future, when you send an email or ask ChatGPT to summarise the differences between a South American Parakeet and a Common Irish Tern there will be a new information superhighway that ticks along unnoticed involving remote mountain tops and orbiting satellites. People watching a the rising strawberry moon — so called because it is the full moon at strawberry harvest time. Picture: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel Meanwhile, June is a curious month for the casual sky observer. The nights start late, they're short, and the sky never gets truly dark, but at least it's (relatively) warm. Despite the astronomy drawbacks, there's still much to see: The planet Venus shines brightly to the west of the setting sun and is an easy spot in the evening sky throughout the month There's a full moon on June 11, called the Strawberry Moon — a North American term which refers to the time of year when berries, including strawberries, started to ripen and become edible. And on June 29, Mars is very close to the top-left of the moon. On June 21 we have the longest day of the year, marking the peak of the summer season for Earth's northern hemisphere. We are familiar with a season lasting three months, but on Saturn a season lasts 7.5 years; on Uranus it's 21 years; and on Neptune it's about 40 years. By contrast, there are no seasons on Mercury, Venus or Jupiter. This is because only planets that have a tilted axis — ours is 23.5° — can experience seasons. For sure the ancient inhabitants of Heraklion were aware of seasons on earth. They had no knowledge of seasons on other planets. Despite their immense achievements in architecture and construction, they had to rely on the slow spread of ideas beyond their immediate locality. I wonder what they would think if they came back today to witness how their ancestors are once again at the leading edge of a transformation in our world. Dr Niall Smith is head of research/ head of Blackrock Castle Observatory, Munster Technological University, Cork
The Wire
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Ali Khan Mahmudabad Has Fulfilled the Task of a Political Scientist
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Politics Ali Khan Mahmudabad Has Fulfilled the Task of a Political Scientist Neera Chandhoke 4 minutes ago Ali has been penalised because our society has been taught to distrust intellectuals. It should realise that intellectuals are the lifeblood of our society because they advocate the thinking human being. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now On May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court extended the interim bail granted to the political scientist Ali Khan Mahmudabad till the third week of July. He had been arrested on May 18, because a couple of people finding his social media posts during Operation Sindoor objectionable had filed first information reports against him. Initially, the court had instructed him not to post any opinion related to the events preceding and during the Operation. A day ago, these restrictions were reiterated. 'We do not want him to run a parallel commentary on the issues under investigation,' stated the honourable Supreme Court. Many learned commentaries have been published on The Wire on the legal and political implications of the arrest of Mahmudabad. It is perhaps time to ask some fundamental questions of the entire issue, because they relate to the way we think and conceive of our right to freedom, and the way it is threatened by coercive politics in the country. Plato's Apology – 'apologia' in Greek stands for defence speech – represents the trial of Socrates conducted in 399 B.C.E. When he is accused of practicing subversive modes of philosophy known as Socratic questioning, Socrates stands before the jury of wise men in ancient Athens raising significant philosophical issues. His accusers allege that the method 'makes the worse argument the stronger' and 'corrupts the young'. Socrates asks the jurors a loaded question. What, he asks, 'do I deserve to suffer or to pay because I have deliberately not led a quiet life?' 'I did not follow the path that would have made me of no use either to you or to myself, but I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say is the greatest benefit, by trying to persuade him not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city's possessions more that for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way. What do I deserve for being such a man?' 'What do I deserve for being a such a man?' This question can be asked by, and on behalf of Ali Khan Mahmudabad of the political science department in Ashoka University. What has he said that any sane, rational human being will not believe in? That war is evil. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had famously said to President Vladimir Putin of Russia that this is not an era for war. May I with full respect remind the prime minister that there never can be an era for war. War devastates, it kills babies, it destroys cities and villages, it demolishes hospitals and houses, it annihilates the environment for decades to come, it is the ultimate curse that can befall a people. We just have to look at our screens to see what military aggression has done to Palestine and Ukraine, how many lives have been destroyed, how many psyches have been deranged, how many people have been denied basic goods like drinking water, food, and medicines, and how they died hungry, tired, and exhausted. Do we really have to be told what horror has been unleashed by war? When Ali foregrounded the dangers of war in his social media post, he was warning hotheads who have been baying for blood to not defend war as it is the ultimate dreadfulness that confronts human beings. Whose interests are served by war? The poet Amrita Syam scripts an imaginary conversation between Subhadra, one of the wives of the hero of Kurukshetra, Arjuna, and Krishna in the poem Kurukshetra. Fought in the name of justice, the human costs of the war were unimaginable. Generations were wiped out as two branches of a family confronted each other over property. Subhadra whose young son Abhimanyu was brutally slain asks Krishna to account for these losses: The war was, after all, a fight for a kingdom Of what use is a crown all your heirs are dead When all the young men have gone …And who will rule this kingdom So dearly won by blood A handful of old men A cluster of torn hopes and thrown away dreams. The poem should make us think. What is society left with when the grisly play of violence is over? Yudhishtir is convulsed with grief. What he, wonders, in volume eight of the Mahabharata, is the value of power, if the path to this goal is drenched with the blood of his own people? 'This heavy grief however is sitting in my heart, that through covetousness I have caused this dreadful carnage of kinsmen'. Ali reminded us of these costs when he spoke against war. He is a political scientist, and the task of a political scientist is to remind young people that there is a world we should strive for, a world of values, a world of humaneness, a world of solidarity, and a world without war. This the task of the social scientist and of humanities, to teach students to think beyond the foolishness of rabid nationalism towards a world of civility and of civilisation. This is the obligation of the political scientist. And I speak as a political scientist. A university without the humanities [and social sciences] wrote the celebrated Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton, is like a bar without beer. Without these two academic components, we will not have universities, we will have technical training institutes. Ali was writing as a political scientist, but above all as an Indian citizen who was concerned about the effect of warmongering on our society and our country. Listen to the message, do not shoot the messenger. Is our country so fragile? One of the two cases filed against Ali by a BJP functionary is on the basis of his post in which he urged his fellow citizens to also feel for minorities who have been lynched. So, one Yogesh Jatheri complained that Ali's post promoted hatred, was prejudicial to national integration, and endangered the sovereignty of the country. Really? The sovereignty of a great country like India is going to be compromised by a social media post? The mind boggles. Is our country so fragile? I would request professional filers of complaints against this or that sane and eminently reasonable academic, to remember our history and understand what our constitution is about. Even as independence came to India drenched in blood spilled by the Partition, the Constituent Assembly, which had met in December 1946, was drafting a constitution for the country. The Partition raised fresh challenges to the project of social and political transformation. Cavalcades of Hindus left from what had become Pakistan for India. Caravans of Muslims left India for a newly minted Pakistan. A substantial number stayed behind in the home of their ancestors. Also read: The Lost Art of Thinking in an Age of Manufactured Outrage Consider the mammoth task confronting the assembly. Indians who had been divided along the lines of politicised religion had now to accept each other as fellow citizens in a democratic political community that was being fashioned by the Constitution. They had descended to the lowest level of humanity during the Partition of the country. Utter chaos in northern and eastern India had begun to resemble Thomas Hobbes' state of nature; war of all against all. But the solution that Hobbes proposed in his 1651 Leviathan, a powerful state, was simply not enough. Society had to be transformed and social relations had to reworked and strengthened. The makers of the constitution had to introduce a modicum of sanity in a society that had been wracked by insanity. A new society had to be created out of the wreckage of the old, it had to cluster around norms that were as far removed from religious mobilisation and enmity that marked pre-partition and partition days of the 1940s, as possible. The political community had to be reinvented. Seeking to lay down principles that could serve as the fulcrum of a democratic political .community, the makers of the constitution institutionalised the normative precepts of political theory-freedom, equality, justice, and fraternity or solidarity. These principles had to bring Indians together on issues that concerned themselves and their fellow citizens. And progressive poets tried their best to further this project. In 1961, Sahir Ludhianvi, writing the lyrics for B.R Chopra's Dharamputra (1961) which was directed by Yash Chopra, and in which N. Dutta gave the musical score, asked a significant and shattering question in: ' Yeh kiska lahu hai, kaun mara? '. Whose blood is this? Who died? The moment we ask this question we realise the promise of fraternity in the Preamble of the constitution. The makers of the constitution, many of whom were well versed in political liberalism were aware that democracy falters if people do not care about others, about their ill health or poverty, or who do not raise their voices if a particular community is subjected to rampant injustice and the rest are indifferent. Without fraternity we remain a mere bunch of individualised self-interested rights bearers. Without fraternity, we continue to live in Thomas Hobbes's state of nature, isolated and cut off from civic virtues that complete us as human beings. Fraternity enables us to come together in networks of shared concerns and establishes a dialogical relationship with our fellow citizens so that we can think out the distinction between what is and what can be. This is what Ali was reminding us of. He reminded us of the Preamble of the constitution. Was he therefore arrested for upholding the constitution? Let me end by returning to Socrates' defence. 'Perhaps someone might say: But Socrates, if you leave us will you not be able to live quietly, without talking?' Socrates' reply is memorable. 'Now this is the most difficult point on which to convince some of you' he said. 'If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because this means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less.' But examining our lives means that we must learn to think. We however live in an environment that dissuades and discourages thinking. This is perhaps understandable from the perspective of the ruling class. For as Julius Caesar remarked in Shakespeare's immortal play bearing the same name: 'Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.' Ali has been penalised because our society has been taught to distrust intellectuals. It should realise that intellectuals are the lifeblood of our society because they advocate the thinking human being. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Free Speech on Eggshells: What the Ali Khan Mahmudabad Case Signals for All of Us The Sole Reason Behind Ali Khan Mahmudabad's Arrest Is That He Is a Muslim Supreme Court's Bail Condition on Ashoka Professor Mahmudabad: Has Dissent Become Disorder? Watch | Does the SC Have the Power to Gag Ali Khan Mahmudabad or Has it Overreached Itself? Learning Against The Grain: Perspectives from Ali Khan Mahmudabad's Former Students 'Seeking Justice for Lynching, Demolitions Not a Crime': Former Civil Servants Group on Mahmudabad Ali Khan Mahmudabad's Arrest Raises Critical Questions on Free Speech, Liberty and the Law Ashoka Prof Arrested For 'Endangering Sovereignty' Over Post Criticising Jingoism, Sent to Custody Till May 20 Who Gets to Think in India? View in Desktop Mode About Us Contact Us Support Us © Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
RBC Keeps Outperform Rating on Williams Companies (WMB) Stock
On Tuesday, May 27, RBC Capital Markets maintained an 'Outperform rating' on The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) with a price target of $63. This decision came after insights from the EIC Conference. RBC analysts are more confident in the company as it is expected to announce new projects that lead to improved financial estimates. Aerial view of a power plant near a lake lit up at night, showing off the company's expansive electricity generation capabilities. The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) expects to see steady progress, even as Chad Zamarin becomes the new CEO. One key project is the development of Socrates, which is a fully integrated infrastructure project that will serve as the power solution for a connected data center. The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) has signed a 10-year contract for Socrates, which includes a provision for commercial reassessment at the end of the term. The company believes that if the equipment from Socrates is used as backup power after the 10-year contract, the price will be set based on the cost of replacement. According to The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB), this will bring a good deal. The Socrates project is also seen as a strong venture, boasting a five times build multiple under the contract terms. RBC's reiterated positive outlook reflects the belief that these new projects and strategic developments will help The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) grow and improve its financial performance. The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) is an American energy company that specializes in natural gas processing and transportation. The company also has petroleum and electricity generation assets and invests in new energy technologies. While we acknowledge the potential of WMB as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than WMB and that has a 100x upside potential, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock. READ NEXT: 11 Stocks That Will Bounce Back According To Analysts and 11 Best Stocks Under $15 to Buy According to Hedge Funds. Disclosure: None. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
