(Mostly) Jewish, was Beijing, now California
“I don’t plan on dying Frank, but I can’t live in fear.”
“I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy. I struggled with it for a while. But this is who I am, this is who my ancestors were. I’m not going to let them take that away from me.”
“One thing I realized about my people is that we have a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we’ll survive. We always do. You’ve just got to find something to hold onto.”
Mark Sampson
“The Man in the High Castle.”
Watch the Pixar Film WALL-E again with this thought:
Behind the love story, behind the science fiction, behind the earnest environmentalism is a secular, future-set retelling of Exodus.
How does a utilitarian approach to morality lead to the Golden Rule?
Anyone who studies a little bit of game theory has to believe that “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” is, at best, an occasional outcome.
In Judaism, our love of G-d, combined with belief that we are all created in G-d’s image (spiritually if not physically) provides that path. Do we always live by it? No. But the more we live in consistency with our values, the more we are driven to take care of each other.
Utilitarian morality, on the other hand, begins and ends with looking out for Number One. For me, that’s a recipe for dystopia.
Hebrew Hutong 