"You" would refer to my sense of "I", and my sense of "I" is the consciousness that I am aware of. So technically, no, I'm not controlling my fingernail growth, it is an involuntary process of my body.
When I say "I" I'm not referring to myself as an "Individual", I'm referring to this experience or aspect of the universe. Saying you have a body makes it sound its an object you own, and that you are just an ego in a bag of skin, waiting to be freed. You are a body. You are growing your fingernails. You make the wind blow.
it's a trait everyone has built in, whether it manifests or not is a question of situation. it's useful for society to have a built in kill switch, and in the case of overcrowding, something needs to happen to prune the population. you can't always count on it to happen naturally, from a larger evolutionary point of view, so why not build in a system by which it happens when you've done too much to prevent it from happening? From what I know of physics, reality is incredibly elegant, and I've come to expect elegant solutions from the universe. this is an elegant solution.
Honestly, the above is nothing but hearsay and half-baked New Age philosophy. You aren't tell me anything I haven't heard before and I don't think it has much to do with the topic of this thread. You can say that my consciousness is limitless and spreads out to all corners of infinity but that doesn't make it true or that I believe it.
it can cause dangerous short-sightedness. causing it's "victims" to be VERY easily manipulable, plastic. it can also cause a specific dangerous sort of hubris when it is ignorant, arrogant idealism. in some ways it is the greatest trait possible. but in other ways it is the most dangerous and deadly.
we have to. if we want to move forward out of this slave state we are in. the internet has given us the tool we need to be truly globally self moderating. and to also remain safe "small" communities (like soho and bronx are small communities, a city the size of the earth's inhabitable surface, is not)
It is out of touch with reality. Ordinary people are in control of almost nothing, but idealists deny this.
If we are, its unintentional. Were the "prophetic generation of bottled water". While other people around the world get to drink dirty water in small qualities. I guess through our inaction were cynical.
Obviously. Just as people gain cynicism as they age, I suppose the same is true for the entire race. Kind of a scary future though, if this ends up weeding all of the idealists out, huh?
What if we live in a perpetual cycle of social evolution, where we are doomed to repeat the same cultural aspects of what we consider recent history, under different visages? Than again, I am pretty baked so I should most likely just dismiss this idea as quick as possible.
There's nothing wrong with idealism as long as it's accompanied by a strong sense of personal responsibility. JFK was idealistic and he was a good president. These are the kind of people who make a positive change in the world. Cynical people rarely do.