Category: Virtues and Vices
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The Self-Reliant Don’t Snivel
Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, Bantam, 1989, p. 180: Times were often very rough for me but I can honestly say that I never felt abused or put-upon. I never felt, as some have, that I deserved special treatment from life, and I do not recall ever complaining that things were not better.…
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Why Are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself. How is it, for example, that…
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To Exemplify Virtues . . .
. . . more than suffices unto the signalling thereof.
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The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire
Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification. Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the habit wouldn't exist in the first place. Memories…
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Virtue and Opportunity
A man ought not plume himself on his virtues if his opportunities to go astray have been few or nonexistent. Virtue untested is virtue in doubt.
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Courage Under Fire
Putting Epictetus to the Test by James Bond Stockdale
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Courage: The Hardest of the Virtues
The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. Why is that? Temperance and prudence are virtues of rational self-regard. Anyone who cares about himself and his long-term well-being will be temperate and prudent, whether or not he is just or courageous. This is…
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Concupiscence
If we were just animals, no problem. If we were pure spirits, no problem. Concupiscence is a problem because we are spiritual animals. Neither angels nor beasts, we 'enjoy' dual residency in opposing spheres. The problem is not that the flesh is weak while the spirit is willing. The problem is that the spirit is…
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Bourgeois Norms and Race
This from an alt-right correspondent. My responses in blue. For the record, I am not alt-right, neo-reactionary, or dissident right (except for my contempt for the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, anti-Trump, elitist, bow-tie brigade). ………………….. As part of my ongoing attempt to nudge you further to the right . . . consider these "life-enhancing bourgeois values preached…
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How Did We Get to be So Proud?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." So inauspicious a beginning for so…
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The Marvellous Powers We Misuse
Thought, speech, free action, sexual generation.
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Continence
The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker. Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit. Remind people of the importance of…
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On Demonizing Opponents
Here is an entry from my first weblog. It first saw the light on 23 June 2004. Don't say it is dated. The distinctions and truths it contains are timeless. The bit about courage is important and not widely understood. ……………. One night on Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity interviewed Al Sharpton. Sharpton had recently…
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Why Do We Remember the Dead?
One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death. To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Trans-humanist and cryonic fantasies aside, death cannot be evaded. We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. Where they are, we will be. And soon enough. But…