Lost in Transition

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”

—

“On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,” The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl. (via anthropologeist)

John 18:38: «Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.»

(via eat-turnips)

(via eat-turnips-deactivated20130427)

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

—Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
(via crimsun)

(via eat-turnips-deactivated20130427)

Australia once again proves that it is a world leader in innovative public policy with an experimental plan to compensate (living) organ donors.

Workers who want to donate a kidney will be offered up to six weeks’ paid leave under a federal government plan to reduce the waiting list for life-saving organs.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek and parliamentary secretary for health and ageing Shanye Neumann say the government will put up $1.3 million over two year for a trial that will be reviewed in 2015.

Ms Plibersek says living donors will be paid six weeks on minimum wage, totalling up to $3600, to help take the financial pressure off before and after the major surgery.

…the scheme is one step towards bridging the gap between the number of kidney donors and recipients.

The proposed experiment does, however, contains a peculiar restriction which is worth highlighting because it illustrates a tension between economics and ethics, at least ethics as conventionally understood (e,g, Michael Sandel). The compensation“will only be available to donors who have a job.”

WE’RE ON OUR WAY

(Source: abbyjean)