Category: Human Predicament
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A Sucker is Born Every Minute
And so is a hustler. Before you rush out and buy Richard Lustig's book about winning the lottery, ask yourself a simple question: why is this guy hawking a book if he has the winning lottery method? Writing a book is a lot more work than buying lottery tickets. His surname smacks of an aptronym:…
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Regalia
Regalia, as its etymology suggests (from L. rex, regis), are the king's insignia. By a natural extension, anyone's insignia, colors, banners. We like to fly the colors to the point of identifying with them. We identify with flags and labels and logos and certain words. There is a stupid satisfaction one gets from flaunting logos…
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Cooperation and Competition
Liberals tend to oppose cooperation to competition, and vice versa, as if they excluded each other. "We need more cooperation and less competition." One frequently hears that from liberals. But competition is a form of cooperation. As such, it cannot be opposed to cooperation. One cannot oppose a species to its genus. Consider competitive games…
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Compensations of Advancing Age
You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other. You are free to be…
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The Wild Diversity of Human Types: Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart
Zelda lived and died for fashion, collapsing at age 95 in the front row of a fashion show. Dolores, though starting off in the vain precincts of glitz and glamour, gave it up for God and the soul. This life is vain whether or not God and the soul are illusions. Should we conclude that to…
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It Passes All the Same
No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and…
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Idle Talk
Time was when I felt superior to those who lose themselves for hours in idle talk, the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing. But superior to that superiority is benign indifference to the idlers, an indifference so indifferent that it permits a bit of engagement with them, not condescendingly, but in acknowledgement of our common…
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Kennedy, Clinton, and the Sex Business
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102: This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the…
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The Fragility of Patience
A while back we had to deal with a difficult person. Afterwards, wanting to praise me for my patience, my wife said, "Thank you for trying to be patient." At that I lost my patience. "I wasn't trying to be patient, I was succeeding!" Until that moment.
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The Childless as Anthropological Danglers
Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers. Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws that relate mental states to physical states. The childless are anthropological danglers. They are life's epiphenomena. They…
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Good, Better, Best
From the mail bag: Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good". Good, better, best. Positive, comparative, superlative. …
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Peter Hitchens Remembers His Brother
Excerpt: Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. We both knew it…
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Socializing as Self-Denial
You don't really want to go to that Christmas party where you will eat what you don't need to eat, drink what you don't need to drink, and dissipate your inwardness in pointless chit-chat. But you were invited and your nonattendance may be taken amiss. So you remind yourself that self-denial is good and that it is…
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Politicians
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 9, Human Experience, p. 126, #520, emphasis added: Politicians — more interested in their own careers than in sincere public service, ambitious to gain their personal ends, unwilling to rebuke foolish voters with harsh truth until it is too late to save them, forced to lead double lives of misleading public statements…
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The Vale of Ignorance
You would have to live behind a veil of ignorance not to perceive that this world is a vale of ignorance.