best thing i read today: Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died
This was a celebrated essay written by Tom Wolfe, first published in 1996. It was referenced in an article I recently read, and it’s great - especially reading it in retrospect.
It’s describes Wolfe’s fascination with neuroscience, and his fear for the repercussions of the prominent idea of neuroscience at the time that we are all hard-wired.. genetically predispositioned to be the way that we are, that every human brain is “born not as a blank tablet waiting to be filled by experience, but as an ‘exposed negative waiting to be slipped in developer fluid.’”
The repurcussion, Wolfe said, is the loss of the values, self control.. the soul.
“Meantime, the notion of a self - a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behaviour - a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds - this old-fashioned notion (what’s a bootstrap, for God’s sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away … slipping away … The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cipher into a giant among men, a faith that ran from Emerson (“Self-Reliance”) to Horatio Alger’s Luck and Pluck stories to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking to Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World - that faith is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882.”
