We always have one choice in the face of life’s obstacles. We can follow reactions that are already hardwired into our body’s physiological responses, or, for better or worse, resist those urges and will ourselves onto a different path. Either way, life’s challenges—the crests and valleys of that turbulent ocean—are the stakes that define what we’re made of. The decisions we make in the face of death are what make us real.
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
In Kierkegaard’s view, philosophy is so caught up in its own systematics that it forgets and loses sight of the actual self of the philosophizing subject: it never touches the “individual” in his concrete “existence.” Hegel indeed trivializes this very individual and his life, which are for Kierkegaard the central concern.
And in other cases in which the evidence to be evaluated is strictly numerical, as in evaluating business prospects given financial information, it appears that human judgment is competitive with the most sophisticated mathematical methods.
The Internet was meant to be the ultimate equalizer, providing small start-ups access to customers everywhere. And there is some truth to this idea. But the larger truth is that far from being a platform that has enabled competition, the Internet by nature encourages the creation of monopolies on a scale rarely seen in history.
