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February 2 - April 3, 2018
But the story of the
golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia.
He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,” whatever that was.
Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to
“make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.
(Leave aside that telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion. Virtue signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest vice.) Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.
In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
crushed into mindless ideological conformity.
The Gulag Archipelago,
The Flood Control Act of 1965 mandated improvements in the levee system that held back Lake Pontchartrain. The system was to be completed by 1978. Forty years later, only 60 percent of the work had been done. Willful blindness and corruption took the city down.
There’s an old and possibly apocryphal story about how to catch a monkey that illustrates this set of ideas very well. First, you must find a large, narrow-necked jar, just barely wide enough in diameter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside. Then you must fill the jar part way with rocks, so it is too heavy for a monkey to carry. Then you must scatter some treats, attractive to monkeys, near the jar, to attract one, and put some more inside the jar. A monkey will come along, reach into the narrow opening, and grab while the grabbing’s good. But now he won’t be able to extract his
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He refuses, as well, to solve the problems of mortal vulnerability in a merely personal manner—by compelling God to save Him—because that would not solve the problem for everyone else and for all time.
As the Christian revolution progressed, however, the impossible problems it had solved disappeared from view. That’s what happens to problems that are solved. And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared from view.
The Brothers Karamazov,
Beyond Good and Evil:
I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that intellect is possessed by an ideology).
Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.
It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon.
To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need.
Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago,
Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate
reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.
Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.
And the sins of the inauthentic individual compound and corrupt the state.
The Gulag Archipelago.
deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.
was for this reason that Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.
The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God.
All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.
Without attention, culture degenerates and dies, and evil prevails.
It’s from that chaos that the Holy Word of God Himself extracted order at the beginning of time,
There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon, by Jack Kent,
if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be nothing worth living for.
Beware of single cause interpretations—and beware the people who purvey them.
I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them.
Oedipal mother
Too much protection devastates the developing soul.
Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?211 The
answer? Limitation.
Though thirty spokes may form the wheel, it is the hole within the hub which gives the wheel utility. It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made. Without a door, the room cannot be entered,
and without its windows it is dark Such is the utility of non-existence
conscious, voluntary sins (because no other word really works) make things worse than they have to be. Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace.
