Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.
More knowledge, more material goods, and more leisure did not, [Georges Sorel] wrote at the end of Illusions of Progress, reliably make people happier. The mistake of thinking that they did was inherited from enlightened eighteenth -century reformers. It arose from a soft “ethic of consumption.” Happiness, Sorel suggested in a brief passage that echoed Mill’s own bow to immemorial wisdom on the topic, depended heavily on being active and having satisfying work.
[T]he paralysis induced by thinking is twofold: it is inherent in the stop and think, the interruption of all other activities—psychologically, one may indeed define a “problem” as a “situation which for some reason appreciably holds up an organism in its effort to reach a goal”—and it also may have a dazing after-effect, when you come out of it, feeling unsure of what seemed to you beyond doubt while you were unthinkingly engaged in whatever you were doing.
In the totalitarian interpretation, all laws become . . . laws of movement. Nature and History are no longer stabilizing sources of authority for laws governing the actions of mortal men, but are themselves movements. Their laws, therefore, though one might need intelligence to perceive or understand them, have nothing to do with reason or permanence.
Of the hedonic substances found in food, only alcohol, caffeine, and sugar are addictive—and these are food additives, not foods in themselves.
The first principle” of science, as the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman put it so aptly, “is that you must not fool yourself and you’re the easiest person to fool.”)
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