Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

I don’t think I need to lecture here how great TED talks are, but this talk was so good and thought provoking that I had to share it. TED talks often manage to engage and create new ways of thinking, but rarely do the speakers manage to flip your entire world view upside down. Michael Pollan manages to do that in just 17 minutes.

I sent the link to my cousin, who’s doing his master’s in philosophy. He said that the whole “man vs. nature” type of thinking is not universal, and it’s mostly a western way of seeing the world. Ancient Greeks divided the world into the laws of “man” and “nature”, or “nomos” and “fysis”. This type of thinking is one of the founding values of our culture: man and nature are at odds. If one thrives, the other must secede. According to my cousin, the Chinese for example see the world a lot more like Pollan explains it: they can’t understand this notion of man and nature being at odds. I find this fascinating.

If you start watching the presentation, I urge you to watch it all the way through. The last 7 minutes are the real revelation. I hope we start seeing farms like that here in Europe as well. And I hope legislators take heed too.