Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Bianca Jagger: Answertext will be available soon.

by Bianca Jagger

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Bill Joy: I was pleased to meet many years Jacque Attali who’s a friend and patron of micro-finance. And he had written something which I found very interesting about utopias and the spirit of the French tricolor he said, some people’s idea of utopia is where everyone has liberty, and some people’s ideas of utopia is where everyone is equal, there’s equal opportunities say, but a society where one has liberty and equality still leaves us feeling alone because what people want and I think of what a more mature version of a utopia would be is where people feel comradeship or brotherhood, "fraternite" in the French. So I think the reason we feel so alone is because we don’t feel this sense of brotherhood. The world in which we live, the focus on consuming and all the things that the capitalist system brings us is not a sufficient focus on fraternity, on brotherhood that our souls are nurtured. And that’s what we need. It’s a more spiritual focus that we need to feel like we’re not so alone.

by Bill Joy

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Bora Cosic: Human being feels as lonelier as more people surround him/her, this is understandable paradox. There are some weirdoes which are ready to spend whole life alone, sometimes guided by certain constructive idea. However most of the people, even those who are creative and full of vacations, feel at most comfortable in small groups, the big world is not made out of an individual, but from many small worlds similarly to the universal systems.

by Bora Cosic

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Brian J. Weller: The feeling of aloneness is not a function of how many people there are around us. It’s actually a qualitative issue about how we are within ourselves. If you think about it from another perspective, as individuals we’re like waves on an ocean and we appear to be very separate, very alone. But actually when you look inside, the waves are simply the movement of the ocean and the ocean is our collective awareness, our collective soul. That is the sense of self that we’re really reaching for and that’s where our true connectiveness is, and that’s when we cease to feel alone. So, this wonderful paradox in life is that we’re both alone and we’re both connected. It’s a matter of where our attention is and where our sense of perspective is. Once again, to feel that sense of connectiveness is principally what? It’s through the heart and you know it’s through love. It’s through stepping beyond the mind. The mind by nature is comparative. It’s by nature divisive. It’s by nature compartmentalizing, cutting reality. The heart is the appreciator of wholeness. So, in a sense, that to come back to connectiveness it really is about reaching into the love deep in our hearts. So, why do we feel so alone? Because we’re not in touch with our quality. Anything else I can say about that, yeah, aloneness is a real – it’s an expression of our sense of separateness and it’s fear-inducing, and the behavior that comes from that does not serve us now. So, I think this is a great question. This really points us to, I think, one of the core issues of our time. Here we are in this great city full of people. Do we really feel connected with each other? That’s the question, and I think the answer is often not.

by Brian J. Weller

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Catherine David: This is meant to be the metaphysical hour but I am afraid that after all we are at the level of bad lyrics for a bad song. (This is a performance. I have had people that must have managed it without doubt in a more inventive way than us. And probably they even had more fun doing it.)

by Catherine David

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

China Keitetsi: Answertext will be available soon.

by China Keitetsi

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Constantin von Barloewen: […] of the so called notion of progress. In traditional cultures that still exist in Africa today, or in Latin America, man is integrated into his family. He was born and he died in his family. Today he knows that he will probably die behind spanish walls in the abstraction and solitude of a hospital, maybe even without a familial integration. The atomization of man in the technical world is progressing fast, just like urbanization does and man is torn from his rural communities into the urban world. He often does not have the necessary conditions, he is not integrated into a culture. The suicical rates increase in Germany, in Europe, in North America, in China. At the same measure as material prosperity increases, humanity does not automatically increase as well and solitude does not decrease, that is for sure, on the contrary, material prosperity leads to solitude even faster, because our attention is drawn to merely material aspects and not to the solidarity between the people. This increasingly takes place in the course of the continuous industrialization and in more and more parts of the world. David Riesman wrote his classical sociological book "The Lonely Crowd" back then in the fifties already and he spoke of inner-directed and other-directed people. Today we have more and more people who are other-directed by the mass media and fewer people who are inner-directed by education and tradition. In this context he speaks of lonely people. This will […]

by Constantin von Barloewen

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Cornel West: Well, the great Pascal used to say that so many of our problems are tied to the fact that we cannot sit in a room by ourselves and deal with our boredom and, therefore, we become distracted, seduced, seduced to forms of stimulation and titillation. There is a deep aloneness in the world in terms of both coming in alone in our blessed mothers’ wombs and lying in the tomb alone in our death. At the same time, as we make our move from womb to tomb, we need friendships, we need companionship, we need love, we need support, we need endorsement, recognition, association; and yet in the world in which we live, in which market forces more and more put a premium on the survival of the slickest and survival of the fittest makes it difficult to generate trust, and without trust there can never be substantive relationship. Without trust there can never be a vulnerability that allows for the kind of high-quality relationship that would help us overcome our aloneness. Let us not confuse aloneness with solitude. Solitude actually is a very positive thing in which we are able to wrestle with ourselves, knowing that we are loved, knowing that we are affirmed, knowing that we are recognized. But, this aloneness, this loneliness that haunts our world, poor, middle-class, and well-to-do, has so much to do with the waning of the capacity to love. As Dostoevsky put it, “Hell itself is a suffering from the incapacity to love.” It remains a major challenge in our day.

by Cornel West

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Dedi Baron: Answertext will be available soon.

by Dedi Baron

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas: That’s the irony; in fact we are increasing in terms of population, and yet we have the feeling that some of us feel alone. Why is this so? In this era of materialistic world, people tend to be more concerned about of money than the relationship and love for others. Added to this materialistic trend is the presence of technology that divides people and make them individualistic. This make people, many people feel alone in spite of the continuous increase in the world’s population. So, let’s care for others, give attention to others, begin with our families. These are priceless that we can give, you know, to someone you don’t have to spend a dollar to make one’s happy and there for me this is one of the gift that we can give to our brothers and sisters, our fellowmen to make them happy. Yes, practice the love, care and service; and you will make people happy. Easier said but harder – they are hard to do, but that’s the way. Practice.

by Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Dritëro Kasapi:

by Dritëro Kasapi

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Eliane Potiguara: When people have in mind solidarity toward the other human being, when people observe, when people evidence, when they share pain with the others, the suffering, the kindness, when they are observing beings, when they look something and say: “I’m not the center of the world” and evidence: “I’m part of the world”, then, if you are part of the world and a good observer, solidary to your friend, to your neighbor, to your friends, to your neighboring countries, you are never going to feel lonely. You will always be worried about the other. If you are a very individualistic person, if you are a person who only thinks about yourself, then yes, you will feel lonely. But if you have the other in your mind, if you are thinking always about that child who did not have food, in that dog that does not have food, if you are thinking about that child who needs education, if you keep your mind busy all the time thinking in the other, you will never feel alone, you will be a person followed by the solidarity feeling. And when the solidarity feeling comes, the cooperation feeling comes together. You feel like cooperating. Because these two feelings can’t be separated, they are together. Then, solidarity and cooperation are our closest friends.

by Eliane Potiguara

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Eliot Weinberger: Well, all of us as individuals live in the tension between the fact that we are individuals, we are separate, we are alone in the world. And yet, we also live within a community and within our various groups, and it’s a tension that is never fully resolved. And at times, one feels more a part of a family, of a group of some sort of community. At times, one feels completely alienated from that family or that group, and this is human existence. This is what it’s always been.

by Eliot Weinberger

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Elisabet Sahtouris: This question reminds me of a kind of answer given by an Imara Indian in the Andes named Siri Tupac who said, “The western man has become confused. He has lost community. He has become a disconnected individual.” Much about our lives in urban civilizations disconnects us. Many of the cars driving on the highway are vehicles with a single person in them. Much of our time is spent watching a television set alone not connecting with other people. When we lose the sense of community as Siri Tupac said, our thoughts become like a tangled ball of yarn. We have no connection. We have no rootedness. We have no family. It is a sad thing about the modern world that it’s possible to be lonely. I speak several languages and have Greek citizenship. In the Greek language there is no word for privacy. In the western culture we really prize privacy. But in the Greek culture there isn’t even a word for privacy in the language and when it has to be translated from an American movie on television let’s say, at the time I lived in Greece they always subtitled, they would use the word for loneliness to represent privacy. So this was a very social culture, the Greek one. In fact, I had a hard time being alone as a writer in Greece. I finally discovered that if I said I was a philosopher then people would understand why I needed time alone to think. But otherwise the Greeks are very social beings and so they don’t suffer this loneliness problem. When western architecture came into Greece and changed into small kitchens in apartments and bigger living rooms down the hall Greek housewives were very unhappy because they couldn’t be surrounded by family as they cook--

by Elisabet Sahtouris

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Ervin Laszlo: Loneliness is not a question of numbers; it’s a question of relating to others. In a crowd we can still fail to relate to others around us. We can feel connected to somebody who lives on the other side of the earth. So, it’s a question of a psychological personality trait and not a question of numbers.

by Ervin Laszlo

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Esther Mwaura-Muiru: All over the world, we have become so insecure. We do not feel we can trust anybody near us. And I think, to me, that is a real problem. It’s a dangerous situation that we have. It does not matter whether the thousands of people are with me. I do not trust them. I feel so insecure. I think, for me, particularly the world of terrorism has really compounded the insecurity levels in the whole world. And that’s the thing. In traditional communities, everybody felt that they were taken care of by their neighbors, their parents, their relatives. Today, everybody is for themselves. Besides the world, again, is terrorism, we have capitalism. Everybody is for themselves. And so if everything is for myself, I want to have as much as possible so that I can have it for tomorrow. I can save it for the next year and for my children and my children alone. So I think the idea that we are not able to work together and share what we have has created this idea that I must have it and you can’t have it because I must have it. And we no longer can share. So the two things is that insecurity because of war and conflicts, lack of peace in the whole world, and the capitalism. The proponents of the capitalism ensures that only a few that are able to have so that they can control the power. If those two can be eliminated, I feel we can feel secure, since we are too many in the world to save and to protect each other.

by Esther Mwaura-Muiru

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Fernando Solanas: Evidentially each individual is alone in the world; alone in the sense that each individual is unrepeatable, it has conflicts that are absolutely personal. It is an identity, it is alone in the world, and it faces its problems alone. It certainly shares a common time, a common habitat, but it is alone, just like it's body which is a solitary entity in the world, it is unique and it is the great conflicts and dramas of interiority or of spirituality that grow or shrink in relation to others. Humans are segregated characters and thus, although feeling alone, it lives together with others, it lives in company and shares with others. But this does not revoke its very peculiar solitude given what is yet to come, in the face of death, and in the face of the mystery of where we come from.

by Fernando Solanas

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Fred Matser: The picture that comes up is, for example, when you walk through New York, Manhattan, you see many people that are going in the streets and that are busy in their mind, they don't look at other people. They are just, yes, completely protecting themselves from making contact with other people. Perhaps it protects themselves because they are fearful to make a connection. Why? Because they have been harmed in the past, because there is violence going on. So, that perhaps is one example. Another example might be that the elevators, you see when we travel in elevators, everybody is silent, hardly anybody wants to talk because they perhaps also are fearful of making a connection or they think it's weird. Perhaps, it is the inability of many people to express our feelings and thought because we have not had the safe environment to express it, because people may be opinionated about what we say, and we may not be yet strong enough to just stand out and have the courage to express what we think and feel.

by Fred Matser

Sep 9, 2006 6:05:00 PM cite

Galsan Tschinag: That we are so many people but nevertheless feel alone, is due to the fact that we are not living together or even in each other but at each other’s sides or even against each other. We are lacking love. Love for our fellow beings. If we have love inside of us than we have the key to our fellow beings. I advise to have a look at our corner, which represents a cold North slope on the mountain of life, for those who wants to understand this phenomenon even better. All creatures there are forced to search each other’s closeness. They live together closely and are not alone. They live a life, which is light and warm in the soul even if the surrounding is in nightly darkness and an icy snowstorm is roaring.

by Galsan Tschinag