Question: What is the biggest problem facing society?
That's a hard one. I'm just going to mention one and I don't know if this is the biggest one, but I would say with respect to younger people: the gap between aspiration and their skillset.
That we live in a rich society and we have huge amounts of evidence available to young people, that they should be able to live a beautiful life, and they really want that when they're young people. But, by the time they are young adults typically, the skillset that they need in order for them to achieve that for themselves has not been developed for various reasons.
Just to take one kind of stereotypical example, if you imagine someone who is addicted to video games as a young person, becomes very proficient at video games, and thinks of himself or herself as highly proficient; but then that's the skillset you've adopted. When you leave the video game world behind and go out into the real world, you don't have the skillset to take on the real world. You're only dealing with a virtual reality.
That becomes enormously frustrating and thenpsychologically destructive things can happen. So, that's a problem I worryabout a lot.
Stephen R. C. Hicks is a Senior Scholar for The Atlas Society and Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University. He is also the Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford University.
Es autor de El arte de razonar: Lecturas para el análisis lógico (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), Explaining Postmodernism: Escepticismo y socialismo de Rousseau a Foucault (Scholargy, 2004), Nietzsche y los nazis (La navaja de Ockham, 2010), La vida empresarial (CEEF, 2016), Liberalism Pro and Con (Connor Court, 2020), Arte: Modern, Postmodern, and Beyond (con Michael Newberry, 2021) y Eight Philosophies of Education (2022). Ha publicado en Business Ethics Quarterly, Review of Metaphysics y The Wall Street Journal. Sus escritos se han traducido a 20 idiomas.
Ha sido Profesor Visitante de Ética Empresarial en la Universidad de Georgetown en Washington, D.C., Profesor Visitante en el Social Philosophy & Policy Center de Bowling Green, Ohio, Profesor Visitante en la Universidad de Kasimir el Grande, Polonia, Profesor Visitante en el Harris Manchester College de la Universidad de Oxford, Inglaterra, y Profesor Visitante en la Universidad Jagiellonian, Polonia.
Es licenciado y máster por la Universidad de Guelph (Canadá). Se doctoró en Filosofía por la Universidad de Indiana, Bloomington (EE.UU.).
En 2010 ganó el Premio a la Excelencia Docente de su universidad.
Su serie de podcasts Open College está publicada por Possibly Correct Productions, Toronto. Sus conferencias y entrevistas en vídeo están en línea en CEE Video Channel, y su sitio web es StephenHicks.org.
Instagram Takeover Questions:
Every week we solicit questions from our 100K followers on Instagram (a social media platform popular with young people. Once a month we feature Stephen Hicks' answers to select questions, transcripts below:
También varios artículos, seleccionados por su probable interés para el público objetivista: