You have to be willing to be a fool to advance.
Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.
Without free speech there is no true thought.
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.
Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.
If you take the low road than that wins and it gets a little stronger because everything that wins neurologically gets a little stronger.
A long period of unfreedom – adherence to a singular interpretive structure – is necessary for the development of a free mind.
An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.
Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years and your life will be entirely different.
People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone – in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others.
But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?
For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost. Nothing will save you – certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions.
Communism, in particular, was attractive not so much to oppressed workers, its hypothetical beneficiaries, but to intellectuals – to those whose arrogant pride in intellect assured them they were always right. But the promised utopia never emerged.
Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.
The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive.
On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate.
Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them – but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility.
We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.
That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.