January 18, 2012

You Can Do Anything! (Annals of Childish Behavior™ continued)



Saturday Night Live addresses technology as an enabler of one of our more annoying cultural manifestations of childish thinking: The idea that you can do anything!

(Warning: This link exposes you to a commercial before playing the sketch.)




Is modern culture being overwhelmed by an epidemic of childishness? José Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1930, thought so. Annals of Childish Behavior™ chronicles contemporary examples of that epidemic. The childish citizen, Ortega said, puts "no limit on caprice" and behaves as if "everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations."


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