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But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions.
The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t true. The problem was that nobody was interested.
Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists. Each is on his own, undisciplined by bureaucratic control; hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church. In the view of the priests they are presumptive pretenders. Joan of Arc was a shaman for she communed directly with the angels of God. She steadfastly refused to recant and admit delusion and her martyrdom was ordained by the functionaries of the Church. The struggle between shaman and priest may well be a death struggle.
Evolution is recklessly opportunistic: it favors any variation that provides a competitive advantage over other members of an organism’s own population or over individuals of different species. For billions of years this process has automatically fueled what we call evolutionary progress. No program controlled or directed this progression. It was the result of spur of the moment decisions of natural selection.
exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have other better things to do.
Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.
It’s not the “nice” guys who bring about real social change. “Nice” guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the “bad” guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.
Biological man doesn’t invent cities or societies any more than pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them. The force of evolutionary creation isn’t contained by substance. Substance is just one kind of static pattern left behind by the creative force.
Once you understand something well enough, you don’t need to run from it.
Once this political battle is resolved, the Metaphysics of Quality can then go back and re-ask the question, “Just exactly how independent is science, in fact, from society?” The answer it gives is, “not at all.” A science in which social patterns are of no account is as unreal and absurd as a society in which biological patterns are of no account. It’s an impossibility.
He knew now that the reason nobody ever spelled them out was nobody ever could. In a subject-object understanding of the world these terms have no meaning. There is no such thing as “human rights.” There is no such thing as moral reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else.
The idea that “man is born free but is everywhere in chains” was never true. There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It has done that job so stunningly well intellectuals forget the fact and turn upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done.
The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death, doesn’t work. Intellectual patterns cannot directly control biological patterns. Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
If seeing is believing then hypnosis and trance should be impossible. But since they do exist, what you have is an empirically observable case of empiricism being overthrown.
Thus, when sane grown men in Italy and Spain carry statues of Christ through the streets, that’s not an insane delusion. That’s a meaningful religious activity because there are so many of them.
That is, we don’t perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals.
Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it’s a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one.
