Now we must pack up every piece

Here's a quick question: What motivates you? What crawls under your brainstem and preys upon it like some sort of dark terror?

Crying in class, I had a teacher in High School for English who would just sort of bawl at the Holocaust. This is strange, or this was strange because she was born after World War II, is white, and of Scottish descent. You tell me.

Now on the other hand, we get going with how the Holocaust does not have anything to do with anything and you are up a creek again. They were a lot like us. The Jews and the Germans. More than 6 million people died. Judaism is an open religion. The Jews let anybody in after they try to turn them down a number of times. It is okay if you don't learn Hebrew. Meanwhile, the Japanese Internment in the United States, while not anywhere near the ballpark of the concept of the Holocaust, is very much a case study in fear and racial scapegoating.

That is, my English teacher was using the Holocaust in order to transcend the simplicity of teaching. It is a human occurrence to make efforts toward this goal.

To turn the point one more time, she was using the teaching of the Holocaust as a motivating force for herself. It was the waking up point for her, and she thought it was the greatest mark of transcendent awareness that she could give anyone. Unfortunately I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. It just seemed like a raving bleeding heart.

So to wax philosophical, she was motivating herself by motivating the class to understand the Holocaust. It's important we do not do stuff like, uh, kill mass amounts of people because they, uh, think in different ways. A nice kicker is that we have to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. The classes were provocation toward action.


Thus I present our first motivational theory: Hylomania (literally mania for materials), whereupon in reaction to our surroundings, we are intrinsically motivated.

I'm borrowing the term, which is really a term for materialism (Hylas was the fictional philosopher in Berkeley's dialouges who argued for materiality of reality, Philonous was his fictional opponent).

But for us we can use it this way I promise.