We can wish for something, but to attain it we have to decide to take particular actions. Similarly, we can believe certain things, but it is action that forms our character.

To have a “complete life,” we must combine action with virtue, constantly refining ourselves and developing our skills. Genuine happiness emerges through work on ourselves and our aims over time.

“The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best, and who ‘prefer immortal fame to mortal things,’ are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals.”

Emerson implies that it is hubris to believe that our little selves can have any real effect, when, as Chaucer put it, destiny is the “minister-general” that actually decides the course of war and peace, hate and love.

The Medium Is the Massage

Baudrillard notes that people are now measured by the extent of their involvement in the flow of media messages. “Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial,”

Though an atheist, Ayer rejected the idea that one could even talk about atheism with meaning, because it was just as nonsensical to say “There is no God” as it was to say “God exists,” as neither statement could ever be verified.

His vision was instead a world in which individuality is a myth, and where people are units reflecting whatever is happening in the media, their only purpose to consume images and signs; in this new universe, something is real only if it can be reproduced endlessly, and what is singular or unshareable does not exist.

Baudrillard calls this new world the “hyperreal” and one of its interesting qualities is that it obviates the need for the imaginary, since there is no distinction between what is reality and what is imagined. We are left with a world that is a “gigantic simulacrum” (a simulation or likeness), one that is “never exchanged for the real, but exchange