Thoughts 14 Feb. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Would a panel of the wise—Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Socrates—conceivably approve of our current way of life?

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[W]e have a wide latitude of choice within the limits set by the flow of solar energy. It is possible in principle to create an agricultural civilization founded on yeoman farmers instead of exploited peasants or slaves—that is, the kind of small-hold, egalitarian, salt-of-the-earth farming society that Thomas Jefferson envisioned for the United States. I have imagined such an agrarian civilization, which I call “Bali with electronics.” In short, we can have benign and culturally rich societies without energy slavery. True, these societies may not offer the kinds of permissive freedoms that many enjoy today; individuals will have to find their freedom within the prevailing moral framework, not apart from it. But in return they will get back the autonomy, agency, and integrity that were lost in societies given over to distraction and consumption.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

‘But aren’t you dichotomising?’ I have not invented that hateful thing, a dichotomy. Some people are just against what they call ‘dichotomising’, feeling it is ‘simplistic’. But such a view is itself simplistic. There are, after all, different types of dichotomies. Some are inevitable, such as between plants and animals – even though there exist microscopic life forms that defy such categorisation. Some are entirely spurious. Elsewhere I have quoted whoever it was who said that ‘there are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t’. Dichotomising has its problems.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Given the scale of the fiscal interventions in 2020, if the political will had been there, it would not have been unreasonable to talk about a new or at least a renewed social contract. There were elements in the giant flow of money that were undoubtedly novel.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The three main building blocks of human experience are time, emotion and sensation. The brain must account for all three factors in order to encode information from the outside world.

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

The muscles, bones, ligaments, feet, hands and nerves, etc., are agents for carrying out the mandates of the mind.

Powerful Hypnosis - Revealing Confessions of a  Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

If someone firmly believes ‘I am a smoker,’ they will not be able to stop smoking. If they lack self-belief that they can stop smoking, they may or may not succeed in the long term.

Thoughts 15 Dec. 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

If a society relied excessively on financial markets to allocate resources, develop research, and improve industry, Keynes believed, it was destined for underperformance, instability, and unemployment. He had designed a theory and a policy agenda in which financial markets were subjugated to the authority of the state, believing the coordinated action of a government was capable of meeting the investment needs of society which financial markets could only secure through fleeting accidents.

Have financial markets become any more successful (in terms of any reasonable understanding of the common good) than they were in Keynes's day?

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The financial run for safety happened very fast. It made sense individually. But when implemented simultaneously by the men and women who manage tens of trillions of dollars worldwide, it threatened total systemic collapse and forced massive intervention by the state.

Lots of individually rational decisions can result in collective failure (irrationality).

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The Romantics seeded a whole tradition of Anglo-American criticism in the nineteenth century to which the conservative Dickens belongs as much as Thoreau, who famously asserted in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. This largely moral critique of modernity was broadened by writers in countries playing ‘catch-up’ with the Atlantic West. The Russians, in particular, stressed social facts: the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, and the loss of a sense of community and personal identity.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

“The law is a coarse net; and truth is a slippery fish.” Yes: but a net, however coarse, is better than no net at all. Yet the purpose of law has little (and sometimes nothing) to do with truth. It is the establishment of justice—or, more precisely, the protection against injustice. And justice is of a lower order than is truth (and untruth is lower than injustice. All of Christ’s parables taught people to follow truth, not justice). The administration of justice, even with the best of intentions for correcting injustice, may often have to overlook or even ignore untruths during the judicial process.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Among Arendt’s chief concerns in Between Past and Future is to convey a concrete sense of the high price traditional thought will pay when a conception of human affairs, of political reality, which no longer conforms to our experience is relinquished. The traditional conception, which lasted for more than two thousand years, derives, as we have seen, from Plato, to whom Arendt refers more than any other thinker in this book, and nowhere more decisively than in her reading of his familiar cave allegory. The heart of her reading is Plato’s justification of the rule of philosopy, “the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm.”

From the Introduction written by Jerome Kohn.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In one passage [Buddha] rejects the premise that what is useful is true, what is useless, false. There are statements, he says, which are true but useless. Again, four categories are implied: (1) true and useful, (2) true and useless (like knowing how many insects there are in the world, to use a later Buddhist example), (3) false and useful, (4) false and useless. In this formulation he said that he himself bothered to teach only what was both true and useful.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In the rationalist and absolutist tradition self-canceling or uroboric formulas were excluded from the discourse about experience, where they were seen as invalid by contradiction, and were applied only in discourse about the transcendent and absolute One. The Neopythagorean Moderatus, for example, used the formula “It is neither this nor that” to describe the transcendent One; Plotinus said of the One, “It is the not-this.” In this tradition it was considered that Plato had shown (primarily, but not exclusively, in the Parmenides) that language must lapse into paradox when it approaches ultimate reality.

Crafting Hypnotic Spells! - Casebook Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

Confusion is hypnotic because it creates absorption: that's it! If you are confused you are temporarily trying to understand something – this absorbs your attention.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 22 September 2021

 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Beyond the confines of neo-Platonic philosophy, the special significance of the value triad of goodness, truth, and beauty has also been recognized by a wide diversity of significant writers such as Aquinas, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, Schelling, Tolstoy, Whitehead, Freud, Gandhi, Sorokin, and Einstein, to name a few. Many spiritual teachers, in both the East and the West, have also extolled this triad of values, including Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner, Thich Nhat Hanh, Cardinal Newman, and Osho Rajneesh. Sri Aurobindo, for example, describes goodness, truth, and beauty as the “three dynamic images” through which one makes contact with “supreme Reality.” The leading secular writer currently championing this triad is Howard Gardner, whose book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (New York: Basic Books, 2012) [referenced in the main text].

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field. Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Nixon’s career, whatever else one could say of it, had been at least as consistent as Kennedy’s—as that of the liberal hot-cold warrior, Catholic secularist, McCarthyite civil-libertarian, who changed flags often and deftly. Indeed, it was Kennedy’s ease of adjustment that saved him from his own campaign promises and initial vision of the presidency. He had come to that office preaching cold war as a crusade. Domestic satisfaction seemed almost too complete under Ike; the country was affluent, snoozy, no New Deal rhetoric could rouse it; poverty was undiscovered, and black unrest just stirring. Kennedy, with his call for escape from the Eisenhower narcolepsy, had to reduce everything to a contest with Khrushchev.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

It [the "immune system" to certain attitudes] was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

[A]s Socrates urged against Glaucon, the individual character considered in isolation from its environment is an abstraction, not a really existing thing. What a man does depends only to a limited extent on what kind of man he is. No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world will conquer him.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In De Cive (1651), Hobbes wrote of the sovereign’s duty to keep a firm grip on the universities lest they turn out seditious thinkers who, if clever, would cloud “sound doctrine” on which civil peace depended, or, if stupid, would stir up the ignorant from the common pulpit. Spinoza, who mistrusted clerics and churches, argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that although a person’s beliefs were private and could not be controlled from outside, worship in public was a social matter. “If we want to obey God rightly,” he wrote in chapter, “the external practice of religion must be accommodated to the peace of the republic.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[H]eaven help the elected official who, in the manner of Edmund Burke, tries to argue against the personal interest of his or her constituents or to communicate bad news.

Escaping Cultural Hypnosis - Startling Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

A hypnotic reality is any 'pseudo reality' (secondary reality) that exists in the mind of an individual or groups of individuals only: it has no supporting proof; it is founded on ideas and not experience.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 29 April 2021

 

Exploring the history of inquiry in the West 

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Statistical significance arguments. If on a certain hypothesis a certain result would be unlikely, then the occurrence of that result tells against the hypothesis. Of this kind are arguments ruling out the hypothesis of chance: a sequence of 1,000 heads when tossing a coin is possible but very unlikely if the tossing were random, so if such a result occurs, one rules out the hypothesis of chance and looks for some explanation of the regularity, such as a bias in the coin. Such arguments occurred in Aristotle, Cicero, the Talmud, and occasionally thereafter. There was never any attempt to quantify how unlikely the result was on the hypothesis.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Nyanaponika Thera noted, “cautious and intelligent use … of one’s own introspective observations … though far from infallible, may well lead to important and reliable conclusions.” Whether the Hellenistic philosophers meditated or not, their self-observation was sensitive and accurate, as is showed by the fact that they describe the process virtually identically with the abhidharma [a tradition of Buddhist description of operations of the mind] except for a tendency to see as aspects of a single complex stage what the abhidharma sees more minutely as successive simple stages.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

“Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.”

Escaping Cultural Hypnosis - Startling Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

When we stop thinking for ourselves we are in a trance. Trance is the default setting of a mind that's not working consciously. Sometimes, when purposeful, this is healthy at other times it's incredibly unhealthy.

Perennial Seller

Ryan Holiday

"Lots of people," as the poet and artist Austin Kleon puts it, "want to be the noun without doing the verb." To make something great, what's required is need. As in, I need to do this. I have to. I can't not.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 21 March 2021

 

One of the outstanding books of 2020

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

As the century unfolds, fear is likely to become humanity’s overriding emotion. Successful worldviews— those that survive and spread through large populations— will exploit this fear to motivate people’s hero stories, for bad…. or just maybe for good.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

"Comprehension [means] examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us— neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight." --Hannah Arendt

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

With these two points of resemblance – imagination and narrative – in mind Collingwood is saying that history and the novel are both constructs.

NL IV: “Feeling”

[I]n scientific history…everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever.--R.G. Collingwood, quoted by David Pierce in his Polytropy blog

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

[I]ndividual nation-states no longer possess the resources to solve their most pressing problems or to fulfill many of their basic responsibilities, much less provide expected benefits to citizens. As their power and authority wane, they are beginning to decompose into their ethnic, religious, ideological, and class components.

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

James Sullivan, writing influential essays under the name of “Cassius,” [at the time of the ratification of the Constitution] proclaimed: “Thus we see that no office, however exalted, can protect the miscreant, who dares invade the liberties of his country, or countenance in his crimes the impious villain who sacrilegiously attempts to trample upon the rights of freemen.”15 In my view, this point is central, even defining, because it connects the power of impeachment with the American Revolution itself. On this account, a violation of liberty or rights is an impeachable offense—even if it is not itself a crime.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

But when we release copious amounts of adrenaline into our bodies today and just sit and try to think our way out of a problem, that extra energy boost has nowhere to go. Stress needs a physical counterpart.

Crafting Hypnotic Spells! - Casebook Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

Confusion is hypnotic because it creates absorption: that's it! If you are confused you are temporarily trying to understand something – this absorbs your attention.