Existential Threat, late April 2021
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During the George Floyd events, the phrase “existential threat” came into use, in social dialogue; as a media phrase, or meme. Meaning a threat to your very existence-the feat and anxiety from the threats of being exposed to danger. I took it to mean a question of survival, in your day-to-day life. I also considered could George Floyd have been saved by existentialist philosophy?

Although Henry David Thoreau is widely accepted as a Transcendentalist-meaning an idealistic belief in the essential unity-the creation of all things and the innate goodness of humanity.

I put Thoreau in the Existentialist camp really based on “On Walden Pond” and the “resistance to Civil Disobedience”. Existentialism is a theory based on the philosophy every individual person has the freedom and the irreconcilability to determine outcomes of their own free will. Would Transcendentalism have saved George Floyd? NO; but Existemlisim would have given him a chance.