Ideas are more important than anything from my perspective. Those who only see the world from a materialist and reductionistic pov have a narrow mind.


>Worthwhile ideals to guide our decisions, or worthless posturing unconnected to reality?

That video specifically? I can't find much of what he to be particularly useful. I would actually say that modern liberalism actually leads to materialism. Classical liberalism especially does this. Let's not forget that lockean property, capitalism, and limited statism came from economic liberalism. All of which get in the way of an idealistic worldview.

>>255
I like to think of some of his points as a general red flag. For example, consider the statement "We've achieved speed but we have shut ourselves in". This is still a relevant statement today and echoes statements from Douglas Rushkoff's book 'Program or be Programmed', an essay on the necessity of learning programming in order to better understand how the technology that affects our lives works.

In that book Rushkoff noted that the Internet is a long-distance technology better suited to communicating across states and countries. In spite of this, people use it when it's plainly better to just get up and walk to the where the other person is. I've heard parents complain that their children are chatting via IRC when the children are sitting a few feet from each other. This kind of behavior separates us because it's easy when it should unite us because the distance makes it hard.

Consider the another statement that crops up in the video: "Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life would be violent and all would be lost."

This statement seems relevant in light of today's use of technology to reorient our behavior patterns. Facebook and Google are perfect examples of this. In both cases, in slightly different ways, there is a vested interest in getting people as comfortable as possible putting as much of their lives online as they can. We're now seeing some backlash, but for a long time it seemed to be working. Eric Schmidt of Google even trotted out that old line about how people who want privacy shouldn't be doing bad things to begin with.

I think the video's statement could be re-worded a bit to say that whatever we do, whatever we create and however far we can reach, we should remember that first and foremost we should make something that truly helps the world and makes it a better place. Einstein himself said something to the effect of the purpose of science is to make people's lives better. Abandoning that notion gives license to manipulate and abuse others using technology that could help them instead.

After that the speech gets a little sappy, but then again it was the first of films at that time to overtly criticize the Nazis. I feel though that these ideas are a little more universal than just a ranking on some political spectrum. The statements I picked out in particular seem to say that life's advances, be they technological or not, should be considered based on the betterment of others rather than adulation or profit of oneself. Certainly these aren't bad things in the right amounts, but losing sight of the fact that we should be looking out for each other can lead to some dangerous results (Enron springs to mind).