More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It appears that the meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.
It is a strange and paradoxical fact that there is a reciprocal relationship between the worth of something and the difficulty of accomplishing it.
Hamartia was originally an archery term, and it meant to miss the mark or target.
People are more commonly upset by what they did not even try to do than by the errors they actively committed while engaging with the world.
But to remain passive in the face of life, even if you excuse your inaction as a means of avoiding error—that is a major mistake. As the great blues musician Tom Waits insists (in his song “A Little Rain”): “You must risk something that matters.”
Pan’s hypothetical lack of fear of death is not courage, but the manifestation of his basically suicidal nature, the sickness of life (which he is constantly manifesting by his very refusal to mature).
It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness—and there is a touchy despondence and arrogance that goes along with it. It smacks of Neverland.
You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?
The biblical account insists that Abraham stayed safely ensconced within his father’s tent until he was seventy-five years old (a late start, even by today’s standards).
Egyptian story of Osiris, Set, Isis, and Horus.*
Under such circumstances, chaos emerges.
Let us agree, to begin with, that you have a minimum moral obligation to take care of yourself.
The mere fact that something makes you happy in the moment does not mean that it is in your best interest, everything considered.
work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder.
A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good. And under such circumstances, every brick laid is an act that partakes of the divine. And if what you are doing in your day-to-day activity is not enough, then you are not aiming at the construction of a proper cathedral. And that is because you are not aiming high enough. Because if you
...more
We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing.
Unfortunately, people often act in spite of their conscience—even if they know it—and hell tends to arrive step by step, one betrayal after another.
And this is something to deeply consider, if you are concerned with leading a moral and careful life: if you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?
Part of moving Beyond Order is understanding that your conscience has a primary claim on your action, which supersedes your conventional social duty.
By doing so you can be part of the force of truth that brings corruption and tyranny to a halt.
The sovereign individual, awake and attending to his or her conscience, is the force that prevents the group, as the necessary structure guiding normative social relations, from becoming blind and deadly.
you are required not to do things you hate.
We are not helpless. Even in the rubble of the most broken-down lives, useful weapons might still be found.
If you are willing to conceptualize yourself as someone who could—and, perhaps more importantly, should—stand fast, you may begin to perceive the weapons at your disposal.
Well, of course you are, but afraid compared to what? Afraid in comparison to continuing in a job where the center of your being is at stake; where you become weaker, more contemptible, more bitter, and more prone to pressure and tyranny over the years? There are few choices in life where there is no risk on either side, and it is often necessary to contemplate the risks of staying as thoroughly as the risks of moving. I have seen many people move, sometimes after several years of strategizing, and end up in better shape, psychologically and pragmatically, after their time in the desert.
In one midwestern American city (I think it might have been Louisville), a young man met me after my lecture and said, “Quick story. Two years ago, I was released from prison. Homeless. Broke. I started listening to your lectures. Now I have a full-time job, and I own my apartment, and my wife and I just had our first child—a daughter. Thank you.” And the “thank you” was accompanied with direct eye contact and a firm handshake, and the story was told in the voice of conviction.
letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden.
These gods are the axioms and foundational beliefs that must be accepted, a priori, rather than proven, before the belief system can be adopted, and when accepted and applied to the world allow the illusion to prevail that knowledge has been produced.
There are many reasons, for example, why people are poor. Lack of money is the obvious cause—but that hypothetical obviousness is part of the problem with ideology. Lack of education, broken families, crime-ridden neighborhoods, alcoholism, drug abuse, criminality and corruption (and the political and economic exploitation that accompanies it), mental illness, lack of a life plan (or even failure to realize that formulating such a plan is possible or necessary), low conscientiousness, unfortunate geographical locale, shift in the economic landscape and the consequent disappearance of entire
...more
Freud, as we noted, attempted to reduce motivation to sexuality, to libido.
Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat.
For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery. An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).
The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.
Ressentiment8—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system.
No group guilt should be assumed—and certainly not of the multigenerational kind.
To take the path of ressentiment is to risk tremendous bitterness.
Such division of the world into the devil without and the saint within justifies self-righteous hatred—necessitated by the morality of the ideological system itself.
This is a terrible trap: Once the source of evil has been identified, it becomes the duty of the righteous to eradicate it. This is an invitation to both paranoia and persecution. A world where only you and people who think like you are good is also a world where you are surrounded by enemies bent on your destruction, who must be fought.
To take the world’s sins onto yourself—to assume responsibility for the fact that things have not been set right in your own life and elsewhere—is part of the messianic path: part of the imitation of the hero, in the most profound of senses.
We should conceptualize them at the scale at which we might begin to solve them, not by blaming others, but by trying to address them personally while simultaneously taking responsibility for the outcome.
Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology.
When coal is subjected to intense heat and pressure, far below the Earth’s surface, its atoms rearrange themselves into the perfect repeating crystalline alignment characterizing a diamond. The carbon that makes up coal also becomes maximally durable in its diamond form (as diamond is the hardest of all substances). Finally, it becomes capable of reflecting light. This combination of durability and glitter gives a diamond the qualities that justify its use as a symbol of value. That which is valuable is pure, properly aligned, and glitters with light—and this is true for the person just as it
...more
A house divided against itself, proverbially, cannot stand. Likewise, a poorly integrated person cannot hold himself together when challenged. He loses union at the highest level of psychological organization.
Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame, and the self-devouring physiological forces unleashed by stress.
The poorly integrated person is thus volatile and directionless—and this is only the beginning. Sufficient volatility and lack of direction can rapidly conspire to produce the helplessness and depression characteristic of prolonged futility. This is not merely a psychological state. The physical consequences of depression, often preceded by excess secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, are essentially indistinguishable from rapid aging (weight gain, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s).1
A person who is not well put together overreacts to the slightest hint of frustration or failure. He cannot enter into productive negotiations, even with himself, because he cannot tolerate the uncertainty of discussing potential alternative futures. He cannot be pleased, because he cannot get what he wants, and he cannot get what he wants because he will not choose one thing instead of another.
To move forward with resolve, it is necessary to be organized—to be directed toward something singular and identifiable.
Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher. Do you really want to be anything you could be? Is that not too much? Might it not be better to be something specific (and then, perhaps, to add to that)? Would that not come as a relief—even though it is also a sacrifice?
That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling fully into the chaos, instead of transforming it. But artists have always lived there, on the border of human understanding.
