Negative emotions are filth. Part of becoming a pillar above the world is removing them.

Because to do otherwise is to become rotted meat, and at that point, why do anything? He must find a way to become so disgusted in the taint of the outside world on him that is becomes his only need to remove the filth. Apathy is filth, hopelessness is filth. They are not part of the sculptor nor the statue, they are parasites, and he must recognize this.

The world is a disgusting place. The world is the thousands of screams of dead or dying meat. The world is maggots gnawing at any hint of tenderness. The world is the descent of locusts on a bountiful harvest. The world is bile and hate and suffering.

But we are not the world. We, those of us who even bother thinking about these things, are sculptors. We don't need to see the world around us, we don't need to care about anything outside of our sculpture. All we need to do, all we can do, is build the vision of ourselves and make it invulnerable to the world around us. We are the statue and the sculptor. We are monoliths of marble that we have crafted into beacons of beauty and civility, so what kind of monolith is broken by the fetid shit and rotted meat that makes up the rest of the world?

Your hypothetical person does not realize yet that all he can do is make the statue. He keeps playing in the sewage of life, making what will ultimately be taken from him. He does not yet realize that the only thing he can make is himself, and the only thing he can make himself is invulnerable. Outside of him, there is nothing.

When bad things happen. When things don't go as planned. When I fail. Shit happens, and I'm not perfect, but I have the capacity to be productive and virtuous no matter what happens in my life. I feel powerful when I feel I can rise above the daily challenges of life. I can lose everything, but I'll always have that.

I think we tend to overestimate the capacity of people to retrain for new jobs. Sure, in the example you brought up (auto to renewable energy), people moved from a manual labor job to a manual labor job, but what happens when we run out of manual labor jobs? What happens when we automate white-collar work? Will accountants, for instance, need to retrain to become programmers? Will manual laborers? I think that we'll eventually reach a point where we've made entire types of jobs obsolete, and thus made people who are only capable of being competitive in that field obsolete as well.

Transitional labor, I think, is a deferment of the problem, not a solution.

One of the primary issues that I relate to a minimum income is the rise in automated jobs. When employers find it cheaper to automate most labor, which will happen, productivity will continue to rise while available jobs will continue to fall. This brings up a real issue, in that some people will not just be unemployed but unemployable. Do you think that a basic income will eventually become necessary, due to a lack of available work?

Could you point me towards some sections of the text that make you draw that conclusion?

Besides, past the piece itself, shouldn't a school--or someone kids listen to--teach children some sense of ethics? I think the post brought up one primary problem, and then suggested a cause. Now, we disagree on the cause he postulated but I'm fairly sure we can agree that he's saying the problem is college students are coming into college with the idea that there are no moral facts. Now, from a purely practical standpoint, this presents a problem in trying to teach ethics and justify ethical systems. I think, for the practicality of discussion, there ought to be moral statements that we use as axioms upon which we base further ethical reasoning.

I think the issue really being debated here is that the author is saying that schools want to treat all opinions as being equivalent in their truth-value, but some opinions, such as moral judgement, can have more truth-value than others. Not in the binary sense that you seem to ascribe to him, in your North/South dichotomy, but in a shades of grey sense. What the author seems to be trying to say is that moral statements are comparable, and there are definitive statements one can make about the legitimacy of one moral statement versus the other.

I'm of the opinion that this problem is a more modern incarnation of an ancient problem: most people just don't find any pleasure in thinking.

The central message of this piece isn't just a matter of saying we ought to create our own leisure time, but that our leisure time ought to be more contemplative, and this message isn't just a matter of developing more leisure time, its a matter of prioritizing sitting and thinking over acting.

What I think this piece wants to say is that if we got rid of our work-central culture and our email accounts then we would default to a more thoughtful state of being. I think this is much too strong a claim than the piece can support, because before the internet most people still spent their time doing things instead of examining their life.

I mean, we may have a bit of a sampling bias, when we consider past people, because we only ever really hear about the people who enjoyed thinking enough to make or do something that persisted until this day, but there were plenty of people who avoided having time to think just as there are today.

What I think is, on the whole, those who legitimately enjoy thinking are going to find the time to do so no matter what their life circumstances, and those who don't, won't.

Johannes Oecolampadius was a protestant reformer and theologian, but that's not really relevant. What is relevant is I saw his name in a book and really liked it.