No decision you make will ever make it possible to avoid death. Which, in a strange way, means that the whole idea of risk is something of an illusion. If avoiding death was the goal, then we’ve already lost the game. But what if the point of being alive was instead to experience the entire bounty of human emotion, failure, triumphs, love and loss?
What is a highly adaptive society? It is a nation-state that has acquired and developed a stable set of five key institutions: a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.
How are we doing? Oh, dear!
All of history testifies that in complex societies there must be a stable and experienced ruling class of some sort, for the alternative is chaos and anarchy, whether due to a lack of governance or to a takeover of society by ideological fanatics.
If our attention is like a hand, it can only grasp something in one way at a time.
He [Colin Wilson] may, as some critics have said, have never gotten over Shaw—listening to a radio broadcast of Man and Superman was perhaps the single most decisive event of the young Wilson’s life; and his ‘Victorian’ belief in progress and heroism may seem antiquated amidst our own cool scepticism. But, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, it’s not enough that an idea be fashionable, it should also strive for truth.
Ancient thought could not even conceive of the individual’s soul life apart from the soul of the world.
