Category: Human Predicament
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The Less I Know of You . . .
. . . the more highly I can think of you. And the more highly I think of myself, the less I know of myself.
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Servility Will Cower to Force
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: For my part, I am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power. The only means to prevent men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the sure method of…
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Human Relationships
The good ones require differences, but the differences must be complementary, not contradictory, like the halves of a natural whole that make up the whole, complementing but not contradicting each other.
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Omnia Sana Sanis
"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness. For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow.…
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Disingenuousness
One politician accuses another of being disingenuous. But isn't such an accusation itself disingenuous inasmuch as disingenuousness is itself necessary for polite, politic, civil, political behavior? Could one have diplomacy and civility without fakery and phoniness? Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev,…
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Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as…
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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
The passage of years has made of a man on the make a man of wisdom. He stands on a street corner, a spectator of the passing scene. An old flame from his cocky youth passes by. Gloria Mundi sees him but without acknowledgement. The old man thinks to himself, "What did I ever see…
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Such Sweet Sorrow
Part of what makes "parting such sweet sorrow" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) is the realization that one may never see the beloved again alive. Death presides over all of life; in leave-taking he steps out of the shadows. You see the glint of his scythe from the corner of the eye. In the twilight glow,…
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Man is a Project
To believe in oneself is to believe beyond the evidence.
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Too Many of Us
Surface all the way down. Centerlessly peripheral. All fringe, no focus. Spiritually centrifugal. Swallowed by the social. Dis-tracted. Unaware without a care. Swamped by the flesh. Oblivious. Vain, vacant, vacillating. Thoughtlessly full of useless thoughts. Incontinent in every way except micturition. Too many of us are like this.
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Once More on Envy
His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might — and make the father look small.
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Envy Again
How little you must know about me to envy me! Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target? Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which,…
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Envy
How little you must be to envy me!
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Study history to know yourself and what you are capable of
In this important video, Jordan Peterson explains how history describes you. Part of what he is doing is railing against the pernicious leftist displacement of evil onto external conditions, social and economic, and its removal from its original and true locus, the foul and diseased heart of the human animal. For your own good, please…
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The Long and the Short of It
The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it. This suggests that the old who lose themselves in the quotidian…