10 Documentaries Every Curious Thinker Should Watch

There are instances in life when you know something, but cannot make sense of it in a neat, nice and tidy way. Below are the 10 hand-picked documentaries which will take you to places from the ruthless scientific investigations, to fringes of culture and politics, and to the heartfelt emotions, self and psychology.

Credits to http://worldofwonder.net/tag/secrets-of-the-living-dolls/

1) The Secret Life of Chaos

Can science explain the springing of life? Can it explain chaos, disorder and uncertainty? Till now, science has been expected to explain the order and precision of the natural world. Many other phenomenon such as creation of life, division of cells, movement of sand dunes, unpredictable weather, formation of shores, and economic and financial disasters are seen as areas where science does not have much to say. However, Jim Al-Khalil explores the beauty and neatness of the chaos theory. He uses it to answer questions such as how does order emerge out of chaos? And how come nature has such seamless, and charming patterns, which could only be seen as an act of a Greater Artist.

2) Is Seeing Believing?

This is a sister documentary to “Do you see what I see?”, and covers the mind-gasming topic of reality and perception. It takes us on the journey of various visual and auditory illusions which basically shows how vulnerable our perception is. If you want to understand the contemporary insights of brain and consciousness, this documentary is for you. The world surely will make more sense after watching these two documentaries.

3) Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimensions of the Universe

What explains the repetitive shapes of snow flakes, spider-webs, sea stones, sand dunes, and galaxies? There is a neat mathematics, underpinning all seemingly random yet recurring patterns of everyday life. Find out the mathematics of irregular, disorderly solids, and appreciate the power of science.

4) Born Good? Origins of Morality

Are we born good or bad? What explains altruistic behavior in humans possessed by no other species known? What explains psychopathic behavior, discrimination, tribalism and violence? This documentary looks at centuries-old argument, which has kept both philosophers and scientists awake at nights.

Evolution equips us with both social behaviors of cooperation and empathy, and tribalistic instincts of us-versus-them. Cooperation and empathy are common in-group behaviors, while tribalism is expressed as an out-group behavior. People who look like us, think like us, and lead lives like us, are more likely to attract empathy and altruism from our side. Hence, empathy has limitations. And many of our earlier notions about human kindness and love seems to be wrong all this time.

5) Middle sexes: Redefining He and She

What happens to children whose genital inspection fail to categorize them as either male or female? How do ambiguous genitals look like, and how doctors assign the sex of a child at birth? In India, the State has long recognized such people as Hijda, third-sex but the Western world still harbors taboo attitudes towards the “Middle sexes”. The documentary takes us through the personal lives of many people, which includes those whose genitals had been declared ambiguous by doctors at birth, those who had undergone surgeries because of that, and those whose hormonal dynamics after hitting puberty led them to live as a different gender than what they were born and socialized in.

The documentary also looks at an experiment to determine people’s acceptability and tolerance towards such members of society. The results found that men and women who are insecure about their own sexuality are more likely to be discriminatory and harbor phobic attitudes towards the middle-sexians.

6) An Inconvenient Truth

Climate change is real, it’s man-made and it’s going to impact our economic, technological, and social prospects. Al-Gore explores the mismatch between scientific consensus and popular media, and looks at reasons of skepticism among politicians, economists, business owners and the wider public.

7) Secrets of Living Dolls

This is probably the most psychologically exoteric documentary one could watch. It shows men, who choose to live their lives as female dolls. An epic case of cross-dressing and trans-genderism.

8) Nice Guys Finish First

This documentary is a reply by Richard Dawkins to his infamous book, “The Selfish Gene”. He explores cooperative and altruistic behavior, which seems to be at odd with natural selection and cut-throat competitive machine of evolution. He incorporates insights from game theory, prisoner’s dilemma, and some common social behavior examples. Dawkins explains how, even self-less and altruistic individuals, contribute to the survival and propagation of genes of the whole species.

9) The Cost of Free

Google is free, and so is Facebook..or maybe not. The cost of free investigates the hidden price we all pay for using social media and how the age of Internet is re-wiring our brain and feeding onto our evolutionary traits.

10) Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

It is a series by philosopher Alain De Botton, who looks at various Greek and Roman philosophers and their perspectives of life. The series reminds us how philosophy is still relevant to different spheres of our lives whether it is Socrates on self-confidence, Epicurus on happiness, and Nietzsche on hardship, all can teach us something.

Looking back at the Orgasm

A brief glimpse at the female pleasure's set

Image from Google pictures

From the Plato’s Timaeus, to the Chinese Jade Chambers and to the Freudian’s sexology, the O game has journeyed a long path of speculations, cultural fringes and fancy mythologizing. There have been fragments in the pasts, with democratized sexual pleasure for women, and also junctures of repressive mores, mutilation, and taboo. Humans’ attempts to understand female sexuality had been sleazy, and even if, occasionally, it happens to be studied, the drawings rarely reach public thought.

Today, after our neuron clusters are capable of contemplating the workings of universe and making sophisticated technology, we still understand little about our bodies. Many had sought to explain, female orgasm in terms of evolutionary functionality and later, adaptation, but this arose from inaccurate conceptions about the female orgasm, which we know today, is difficult to reach vaginally, and thus divorces itself from serving any particular evolutionary catch.

Then the sensationalized G-spot and nitty-gritty of ejaculation, arousal, and attitudes. The internet is squashing with information, often, wrong and unsupported. There are meter long “How To’s” self-help quack, all kinds of it, which thrive; “How to make her orgasm quickly”. “How to revive your sexual energy”, “10 Things you need to know about Os”. They do, because of the lack of decisiveness of science on these matters, which provide the food for a wide variety of woo to feed on.

It is true that any serious scholarship in this domain, faces barricades of culture and politics. 

But, we have a long way to go. Because, the oodles of media, literature and pornography still relies on outdated ideas about female sexuality and orgasms, which have long been discredited (in the scientific spheres). The fogginess which surrounds the topic manifests itself in a million households with unhappy paramours, poor sex education in schools and appalling practices of some cultures. Sometimes, science needs to step in, when issues with deeper political and social consequences are concerned. 

Why is sex such a taboo?

The shhh moments probe our lives every day, when we are bombarded with cues of inappropriateness and discrepancy. Some will just shrug their shoulders, melding into the “ought to be this way” narrative which is constantly hammered by cultural mores and social institutions into us since we were dumb blobs of flesh in our cradles. But some restless creatures of our kind, would like to scratch their heads and ask “Why did that happen?”

How come, sex, which our species is undeniably obsessed with, became such a “behind the covers” and often times, a “dirty” business. In other words, why is sex such a taboo? Let’s take a foot back, and ask “what do we exactly mean by that?”. Does this means sex outside marriage or practices like incest, on which large volumes of thought and literature has been expend. No, that is not what I mean. By, sex, I mean the very act of sex, which is supposed to be done behind closed doors, or possibly bushes in ancient times, without announcing it out loud or talking about it. 

But before answering that, it is important to muse another question. “Has sex always been a taboo?” If yes, then why. Did it serve any particular purpose? Humans have the tendency to look at their surroundings and think that things have always been the way they are now.

This is one of the spheres, where you find the most diverse and even contradictory schemes of theorizing. Because it’s like asking, why the word ‘fuck’ became so popular in language? Is there any particular reason for it besides that so many people started using it at once?

Culture and obviously, religion has a big hand in fencing taboo around the act, just like it does arbitrarily in matters of food and clothing. But, let’s dissect the ‘standard narrative’ which is often given in answer to this question, which goes something like this

“Sexual taboos are natural, it is a mechanism by which nature controlled whose offspring is who, so that men and women could work in functional units”

It does look quite good, and seems to make sense, but it is not quite true. Because, we know, that humans at least around pre-historic times were highly promiscuous and lived in shared societal structures, sharing food, resources and well..women. This kind of dynamics and practice, did not only exist in pre-historic times, but practiced in primitive forms of societies even later.  Surprisingly, some of these practices were sanctioned by religion, which vary a great deal on their position about sex and sexuality. This does not necessarily mean that taboo on sex was nearly absent, but that it did not exist in forms like it does today, with masturbation, nudity, sex talk, female sexuality being surrounded by contempt.

However with the advent of agriculture and changing cultural constrains, the standard narrative does hold some water, but taboo on sex was not ‘nature’s planning’ but rather a social adaption in response to religion and possibly, changing societal dynamics. When it comes to planning, nature is the worst entity. It is blind. Many people think it’s something useful that comes out of their sweet Motherly nature, which almost always has to serve some purpose.

We, coming from Abrahamic paradigms which spread and soon merged in and affected other cultures, have the tendency to fill our voids of knowledge, with pre-existing assumptions of today. It’s not that our ancestors sat around and carefully discussed what benefits would doing it behind the bushes would serve. It’s just that the ideal of ‘being civilized’ and therefore ‘unlike animals’, which has been at the very heart of our cultural conditioning. You can say, that humans did not want to look back at their animalistic past, and that sex out in open, reminds them of their primitive instincts, which culture has dictated to be embarrassing and something to get disgusted about.

 
Further Explore

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethá “Sex at Dawn: The Pre-historic Origins of Modern Sexuality”

Dening, Sarah. The Mythology of Sex. Macmillian 1996, ISBN 978-0-02-861207-2

Patton, Michael S. (June 1985). "Masturbation from Judaism to Victorianism"