Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Getting saved through laughter

There's way too much seriousness in the world. Today I ran across this great essay by Ryan Bachtel on the American Democracy Project.

Lorenz believes that humanity’s one ace in the hole might be our capacity to laugh. In his words: “It redirects threatening behavior [and] forms immediate bonds … Humor is a lie detector. It unmasks pretence, debunks arrogance.” He takes this further, quoting G. K. Chesterton, who wrote: “the religion of the future will be a highly developed sense of humor.” You might have noticed that people do not generally kill one another over ideas that are acceptable to joke about.

Keep laughing!

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