Tagged: Human nature

Culture vs. Self-Knowledge

The word “culture,” as used with reference to human societies or societal customs, has been one of the key theoretical constructs in late modernity’s assault on being. I never use it, except in the most casual conversational context, without the qualification that the term is artificial, names an idea that is not only ill-defined but perhaps indefinable, and runs counter to the basic...

Stigmatizing Human Breath

I just read a new headline from The Washington Post that absolutely crystallizes the essence of our hysteria pandemic: “The coronavirus is airborne. Here’s how to know if you’re breathing other people’s breath.” The details of the article, urging the use of carbon dioxide monitors as a proxy gauge for determining whether the air in any given space has traces of human breath...

The Tyrant As Caricature

Caricature: “exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.” (Merriam-Webster) What is a human being, as ordinarily witnessed? A creature that devotes too much of its brief life and limited energy to the acquisition of goods that would only have ultimate value to a being that was going to live forever. And what is a tyrant? A human that devotes...

What I Do Not Believe

I do not believe that some people being egregiously wrong implies that anyone who happens to disagree with those people is right. We may call this the Law of Imbalance. I do not believe that I have to show compassion for, or even interest in, humans who have forfeited their humanity to the vices of existential cowardice, petty survivalism, and the sub-infantile willingness...

Spiritual Substitution

Feeling small compared to the cosmos is not an illness, but rather a sign of higher health, the strong soul’s humility. Seeking smaller surroundings to insulate oneself against that feeling of cosmic smallness is an illness. The need to feel “big enough” for one’s environment at all costs indicates a fundamental fear of the beautiful, the rare, and the great, which is to...

Independence vs. Cynicism

Expecting good from someone is the fastest way to be disappointed — and also the best way to discover a good person. Many people will let us down, to be sure. A rare few will not. You will never find the few unless you are brave enough to face and withstand the many.  Not expecting good from anyone is the easiest way to...

The 2020 United States Presidential Election

I gave this post its very formal, impressive title as a simple bit of irony. If you are an American voter, and you wish to vote for someone who might actually have a chance of winning the 2020 United States Presidential Election, you must vote for Republican Donald Trump, a lifelong world famous crap merchant, or Joe Biden, a babbling fool who has...

Circles and Self-Corrections

The cosmos self-corrects, and that certainly includes the human portion of the cosmos, to the extent it may be regarded separately. One might object that to say the cosmos self-corrects is to suggest that “The Whole” itself is flawed, which might reasonably lead one to ask, “Flawed against what standard?” Nevertheless it is so, although I prefer to say incomplete rather than flawed...

Utopia

In Utopia, the presumed goal in confronting a new virus would be to prevent a single death, a single illness, even a single infection. With an imaginary social purity, defined in the narrowest physical terms, as the overriding purpose, there would be absolutely nothing — no folly, no delusion, no atrocity — Utopia would not commit (or submit to) in the name of...

Humans: Three Reflections

An ideal to be approached as closely as possible, in as many ways as possible, and with as much self-examining honesty as possible: Attach yourself only to people who make you better. Completely avoid those who make you worse. Those who make you neither better nor worse become the latter with frequent association, due to wasted time; therefore, avoid this third group too,...