10/24/21

Today I woke up at noon, planned out some Halloween lessons, did a bit of planing for my upcoming trip to Mexico City, and finished Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which I had started yesterday. Freud’s ideas are often made fun of (and not without good reason), but I had also seen him referenced in enough places that it seemed like something I should familiarize myself with. Now, having read some of his work, I would put him in the same category in which I put Plato: his ideas are mostly wrong, but they are wrong in very thought-provoking ways. This particular book concerned the ways in which the creation of peaceful society requires the repression of individual desires; sometimes this repression is external (ie cops), but as civilization advances, this repression is increasingly internalized by the individual, where it expresses itself in the form of guilt (I think this conclusion is generally true; where I differ with Freud is in nearly all of the specifics he brings to his argument). I intend to read another one of Freud’s short works, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, later this week, and perhaps I will give a longer review there. I also still need to review The Word for World is Forest, which I finished a week ago.