But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.
When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts.
You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.
Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace.
You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded,” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.
It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.
It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.
It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.
The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role... Beware of single cause interpretations – and beware the people who purvey them.
Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion – and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.
Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.
Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life.
It’s the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons.
Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs – not even you.
If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth – then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.
We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare96 and, second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement.
You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future to the present. You don’t talk about it. You don’t all get together and say, “Let’s take the easier path. Let’s indulge in whatever the moment might bring. And let’s agree, further, not to call each other on it.
Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship. Competition is for personal growth and status.
How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.