Read the article at
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/what-should-mark-zuckerberg-do
and discuss it here.
English Conversation Course for Part-Time Students
Monday 22 October 2018
Sunday 21 October 2018
Week 2 [22-28.10.18] REFLECTIONS ON FRANK HERBERT’S DUNE
“If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world. If you have money in the bank, your wallet, and some spare change, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthiest ones. If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million people who will not survive this week. If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the agony of imprisonment or torture, or the horrible pangs of starvation, you are luckier than 500 million people alive and suffering. If you can read this message you are more fortunate than 3 billion people in the world who cannot read it at all.” - unknown source.
Probably
most of you already heard or read this somewhere, didn't you? For me it is quite
deep thought. Sometimes I wonder about how happy I am, and sometimes I do not
appreciate it enough, but recently something has reminded me of it. It is a
book - Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ - and here for interested ones is a trailer to the movie version based on
the book:
I am not going to make any spoiler of the story, don’t worry ;) My intention is to focus on some deeper philosophical questions which this book consists of. To do so I have to at least make a little introduction to how things look like in Dune. The title is a name of a planet which is very, very poor in water. There are almost only deserts.
But despite it, against all odds, there live humans. You may ask, why the heck anybody would like to live on such a place? There is a good reason for it – a spice called ‘mélange’. This is a very precious drug in all universe and Dune is only place to mine it. For this reason there is an imperial colony which acquire the spice but on the planet live also autochthonic inhabitants – Fremens.
The Fremens are very similar to our real-world Arabs
but with some differences. In physical way they all have blue eyes with also
blue whites of the eyes, what is caused by the mélange. But it is not everything.
They learn how to live on desert, in burning sun and with almost no water. They
use suits which filter they urine and turn it into renewable drinking water to
spare as most as possible. It is a must to live and it is also a part of their
religion. To spit on somebody for them means a great respect, because it means
somebody shared with his/her own water – such is an environment which led to
such behaviors and principles. And in spite of such obstacles they are fearless
that can even ride a giant (really giant, because about a few hundreds meters
of diameter in a jaw) worms which dig and live in sands of Dune’s deserts. On
the contrary the imperial colony has imported water in abundance and does not
want to share with it. It brings to my mind what I wrote at the beginning of
this article. Some people have so many and some people have so little… And I am
not talking about issues where someone deserve to have little because of
laziness or something like that. I’m talking about real disproportion in resource
distribution, about real injustice. I'm talking also about hard conditions which shape strength of men and about how much we have and shall to appreciate and admire.
I wonder if in a future people will come up
with an idea how to care about each other and as one humanity will live in
prosperity and thrive together with no one left behind. Is it even possible? Or
maybe it is inevitable? Or necessary to survive as humanity at all.
And how to
make it happen? Or maybe we don’t need such a solution? Maybe we humans need a
lesson, hard conditions which will shape us to be strong as Fremens themselves? Does our society is already too spoiled and too weak?
Maybe we even deserve such fate?
Do you appreciate what you have?
What do you think about all of this?
Hereby I
invite you to a discourse over the subject.
The used sources:
1) First image
2) Second image
3) The quote
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