A few years ago I uploaded a post on status to somewhat mixed reviews. A significant number of people feel that status is something to embrace, or at least something that can’t be fought.
And so today I’m “doubling down,” as people like to say these days, because once you recognize the perversity of status, you also recognize that we very much need to get past it. Continue reading “Status Revisited”
Culture has always been the antagonist of conscience.
Once we see ourselves as part of a larger entity… once we identify with it… we feel a necessity to conform to it. If we don’t, we lose the existential crutch that larger entities offer us. And, partly as a result of living with that collective identification, most of us are emotionally unprepared to stand alone before the world. Continue reading “Culture Versus Conscience”
I well remember the first time someone told me they believed in the Calvinist doctrine of “the depravity of man.” It shocked me. To complain about human behavior I understood, but to condemn the entire human species as depraved… that was and remains obscene to me. Continue reading “Why Can’t We Imagine Goodness?”
Since the Bronze Age, large human societies have been organized around the provision of force. Governments, after all, are monopolies of violence.
Every rulership involves two primary operations: to deliver coercion and to keep its populace convinced that no other arrangements are possible. All other concerns are secondary, no matter what the publicists say. We are adults and we need to face such things. Continue reading “Might Is Obsolete”
I regularly go on about the necessity of forming your own opinions and making stands upon them. But while I’m quite certain about that, there’s another side to such things. We are complicated creatures, after all.
The more we express and defend our own opinions, the more we tend to get locked into them. And that part can be a problem, because none of us – not even the best of us – knows enough to claim that his or her opinions are beyond questioning. Continue reading “The Necessity of Being a Well-Rounded Person… and How to Pull It Off”
“Call me pisher” is a Yiddish phrase from my youth, and it was used to instruct me in a very important lesson. (Though I hardly realized it at the time.) And since Yiddish speakers were often not delicate persons, I’ll have to be a bit less than delicate today. Continue reading “Call Me Pisher”
The people who have kept the world from a slide into darkness and pulled it forward have nearly always been heretics of one form or another.
I’m using “heretic” beyond a religious context, but that shouldn’t be unusual, after all, it’s the punisher who makes the heretic. Without punishers, heretics would be no more than people with different ideas. And in our time, the punishers are seldom religious. Continue reading “It’s Heretics Who Save the World”
A free, post-scarcity world will not be prevented by archaic systems scratching and clawing to retain their domination. We will evolve freely, unburdened by an unfortunate past. This will happen, and today I’m going to tell you why. Continue reading “Why We’ll Win”
People frequently tell children “You can do anything you want.” This causes a lot of confusion, because in the real world, they can’t. And after their first clash with the aforesaid real world, the child is left wondering all sorts of unpleasant things: Continue reading “Why You Can Do Anything… And Why You Can’t”
“The mark of an educated mind,” taught Aristotle, is “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” And that’s what I’ll be asking of you today. Because as certain as I am that I’m substantially right on this, I’m also sure that its acceptance will take quite some time. But I do want to plant its seeds as best I can.
“The mark of an educated mind,” taught Aristotle, is “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” And that’s what I’ll be asking of you today. Because as certain as I am that I’m substantially right on this, I’m also sure that its acceptance will take time. But I do want to plant its seeds as best I can. Continue reading “The Cult of Rules”
