the burning or…

I found the following quote the book ‘The Gospel According to Peanuts.’ Linus is speaking to his older sister Lucy and says:

Charlie Brown says that brothers and sisters can learn to get along. He says they can get along the way mature adults can get along. And he says that adults can get along the way nations get along.

At this point the analogy breaks down.

The failure of humanity to ‘get along’ ascends along the axis of size and maturity and resources.  Yet maybe the principle works in reverse as well and nations and adults must learn to get along the way children do.

If you have not read ‘The Gospel According to Peanuts’ I highly recommend it as a remarkably sophisticated and insightful exploration of theology via the Peanuts universe.  I have included a link to it in my Amazon Store.

Now you cannot tell me that a trebuchet that shoots flaming pianos is not truly a wonderful hobby for an elderly English gentleman. This man should have lived back in the days of Stempunk yore. He could have armed a Zeppelin with one of these and gone on simply smashing safaris of lost volcanic islands. If this does not count as living out your dreams no matter how crazy, then I do not know what does.

Psyblog has a post today on a series of studies done to compare how people think socially and financially and the relationship between the two.  The findings seem consistently to support the idea that people tend to separate their financial and social thinking.  The studies found that social rewards (even those like candy that have an easily measurable monetary value) engendered as much investment in a project or undertaking as a moderate financial reward.  However, smaller financial rewawrds seemed to engender less investment and performance in the activity.

This compartmentalization of thinking in relation to finance explains a lot about people’s behavior regarding money.  An alumnus of a school may feel happy to volunteer time (social donation) but not money (financial donation) to that institution.  People feel bad about homeless people on the street but are reluctant to actually give money.  It is one of the challenges of living a wholisticlally ethical life to try to overcome this barrier and integrate our financial thinking into the rest of our lives.

Link