New York Encounter 2013: Desire, Liberty, and Satisfaction

Irish Times columnist and renowned social commentator John WATERS gives a witness of his life-journey from desire to addiction and back to freedom, with concluding remarks by Maurizio MANISCALCO, President of New York Encounter

Presented by Crossroads Cultural Center and Communion and Liberation

At the heart of both the capitalist system and the libertarianism which nowadays underlies most conventional notions of social progress lies a misunderstanding of human freedom. With the capitalist the misunderstanding is self-interestedly deliberate; with the 1960s revolutionary it is hypocritical... The 1960s placed at the centre of western culture the idea that the shortest path to satisfaction was along a straight line between instinctual desire and its intuited target. Freedom was the enjoyment of what came naturally and the handbook suggested that this came without consequences once you shook off the guilt imposed by grey-bearded naysayers from whose grasp society and its instruments had been snatched... They missed that these apparently imposed rules and strictures were the encoded wisdom of human trial and error through the ages... The “rules” emanated from within the human person, defining both the limits of human searching for satisfaction and proposing safeguards against potential encroachment on or from others... The post-1960s generations...have not been honest about their experience of freedom. Privately – individually – many have found their pursuit of freedom did not deliver the satisfactions they craved but they have invested too much of themselves in the project to admit this... But the crux of the matter is not greed, selfishness or decadence. The common denominator is a cultural phenomenon of desire misunderstood – a failure to understand that human longing cannot be met by any of the obvious things it fixes upon. This problem cannot be addressed by more rules or the renewal of morals but only by a reopening of the question: what does mankind actually want? ~excepts from Waters's July 6, 2012 Irish Times article "Baby-boomer generation misunderstands freedom" The event is open to the public and free of charge. Click here for New York Encounter's Official Website

About this Event

Date: Sunday, January 20, 2013
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Manhattan Center Hammerstein Ballroom
311 West 34th Street at 8th Avenue
New York, NY 10001

About the Speakers

John Waters
Journalist for The Irish Times, author and playwright

Maurizio Maniscalco
President of New York Encounter

Invitation

Download the Program here

Transcript

Not available