“BIG IDEAS FOR CURIOUS MINDS” by The School of Life

I always wanted to read philosophy, but I was afraid that I would not be smart enough to understand it. Luckily for me, the company invented by Alain de Botton, “The School of Life”, printed a book to explain philosophy to the children. 🙂 

And this is how I read “Big ideas for curious minds”.

I enjoyed it so much, and I found it so useful for everyday life, that I started to send e-mail to my sons, once a week.
The e-mails contained two parts. The first part was the summary of the lesson, including a little biography of the philosopher who developed the idea. The second part was my personal intake of the lesson. In other words, most of the time, I told them the mistakes I have made in my life or the few times I got it right (precisely like the philosophers thinking).

One of the lesson is: The news doesn’t always tell the whole story.

“The news tend to concentrate on the bad things that happen in the world, to keep people informed and to keep them interested, but if we watch a lot of news we can begin to feel as everything in the world is awful.
It isn’t.

Actually, lots of good and wise things are going on as well–it is just that they don’t get the same attention as the bad things, so they are harder to notice.

When you watch or read the news it is important to remember that it is only usually showing you a very tiny selection of what is going on in the world.
The world is not such a bad place–you’re just not being shown the good bits.”

Jacques Derrida was the French philosopher who developed this idea.

“Derrida was very curious about what people say, and also what they don’t say — the things people keep quiet about or don’t want to pay attention to. If he was reading a newspaper, he’d always be thinking about all the stories that could be in there but weren’t.

Derrida thought that people often have big reasons why they ignore things. It’s not just a mistake–they’re not simply forgetting to mention something. They are doing it so they can keep saying something else–so they can pretend.

It’s the same sometimes with newspapers and the news: they do not just forget that lots of nice or normal things are going on all the time; they actually want to make it seem like the world is more dramatic and dangerous than it really is.”

THE SCHOOL OF LIFE PRESS, 2018