From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 15:38:08 MST
Spike writes
> I had fun in the 60s but I fear it wasn't the
> same ones as others had fun in. I didn't know
> at the time there was a revolution going on. spike
Yeah, you were too young. I was square in the middle of
it, but deeply alienated from the alienated. So I never
understood all those things that Greg Burch so eloquently
refers to. Unlike most university students at the time,
I also had a rich life---well, rich to me---outside the
narrow confines of just people my own age, and I was
well-integrated into a community of about 100,000 people.
When my university friends told me in 1969 that a
revolution was about to occur, I just laughed; they
didn't have a finger on the pulse of an entire large
American community the way I did.
I agree with Eliezer's analysis, except I'm confused about
the role of idealism in extropian thinking. Somehow,
as is evidenced by its appeal to people of all ages, our
own revolutionary beliefs seem based on different psychological
motives. Therefore, I'm unsure about Harvey's contention that
our futurismo views are a continuation of the best part of the
sixties. Maybe it depends on your coordinate system.
I was deeply affected by the sixties, and what was happening
to students especially, but not in any good way. The greatest
harm perhaps was that I took my studies so much less seriously
than I might have in the eighties. All the traditional values
were being questioned, and taking school seriously was one of
them. But some people, I don't know how, managed to imbibe
fully the intoxicating atmosphere with no damage to their
careers.
So while I was there physically, I missed the spirit of the
thing entirely. It didn't appeal to me at all, and now I
view it as rather destructive on the whole. I guess you
had to be there, Spike, but in the deepest most positive
sense, I didn't experience it any more than you did.
Lee
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