Just after you began to develop intuitive grasp of the emotion economy through your parents and siblings as they gave love, shared joy and offered compassion, you began to glimpse its dual nature, the dichotomy that bifurcates it into two modes: the positive and the negative. The latter was raging all around, evident despite your parents’ efforts to surround you with transactions of the former. You saw the subtle and blaring exchanges of prejudice for inequity and resentment, then the trade of hatred for violence on many scales—the myriad activities of what we call The Dark Economy. Continue reading →

To defray his student expenses, my friend gets a part-time job “fighting hypocognition”. It’s not as glamorous as it might sound. He spends his once-free hours of the afternoon standing in the shopping arcades downtown, handing out new and important but not yet widely accepted ideas to people there. These ideas are often startling and strange, even frightening to most of these urbanites. Such ideas often clash with the ideas people already possess, those which have become intimate fixtures in their lives. Not surprisingly, many passersby just ignore him, or accept an idea nonchalantly only to drop it into a trashcan several blocks away. On most days, the ideas are at best taken out of superficial courtesy, then crammed into shopping bags amidst groceries or on-sale department store apparel.

“Yeah, it kind of sucks to see these ideas treated that way, tossed aside or just plain rejected,” he laments while turning the compost. “But occasionally you get those few who are actually receptive,” he adds. “We’ve gotten some more part-timers like me that way. Which makes it worthwhile, but it’s still hard to take all the apathy out there. It really makes you feel like we’re never going to get anywhere.” Continue reading →