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Quote by Randolph M. Nesse

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Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

Why We Get Sick delves into the intersection of evolutionary biology and medicine, explaining how evolutionary pressures have shaped our susceptibility to certain illnesses. The book examines the evolutionary basis of diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, providing a fresh perspective on health and wellness. more

Author

Randolph M. Nesse
Randolph M. Nesse

Randolph M. Nesse is a renowned American author born in 1948. His works primarily focus on biology, evolution, and human behavior, having a profound impact on the scientific community. more

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“Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other - even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of 'sociality', the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body - and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become sociodramatic, semiodramatic, melodramatic.”

ToleranceLiberalismOthernessOtherAbra Los OjosPsychodrama
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“We do not have to plump for the one or the other [extreme]. We experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the event and the non-event. Just as, according to Hannah Arendt, we are confronted in any action with the unforeseeable and the irreversible. But, since the irreversible today is the movement towards virtual ascendancy over the world, towards total control and technological 'enframing', towards the tyranny of absolute prevention and technical security, we have left to us only the unpredictable, the luck of the event. And just as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish chance - that is to say, there would never be an ultimate dice throw which, by its automatic perfection, would put an end to chance - so we may hope that virtual programming will never abolish events. Never will the point of technical perfection and absolute prevention be reached where the fateful event can be said to have disappeared. There will always be a chance for the troubling strangeness [das Unheimliche] of the event, as against the troubling monotony of the global order.”

Total SimulationUnheimlichVanilla SkyAbra Los OjosMallarmé
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted. Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and “normal” people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls “peak experiences”); and examination of peak experiences has led Maslow to conclude that the evolutionary drive (which is so clear in art and philosophy) is as basic a part of human psychology as the Freudian libido or the Adlerian will to self-assertion. — Colin Wilson, “‘Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time‘: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard” (1965) (Wilson C. “Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time”: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard // Stanley C. (Ed.). Colin Wilson: Collected Essays on Philosophers. — Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 110–111.)”

Humanistic PsychologyPeak ExperiencesAltered States Of ConsciousnessTranspersonal PsychologyColin WilsonAbraham Maslow
Book:Comments on Boredom/Evolutionary Humanism and the New Psychology: two unpublished essays
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