People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
Archive for the ‘knowledge’ Category.
I don’t like looking overlong at an acquaintance when he’s not aware I’m watching. I start imagining outlandish things about him. I think this is because he’s affectless at such times, so my sensibility isn’t influenced by the familiar prods and kneading we carry on with when we deliberately interact.
Two people are talking about wine, jazz. Postmodernism and cinema with striking knowledgeability. One is actually sophisticated and the other is a phony. How do we tell which is which? The phony regards his lore as a possession and is always compelled to uphold and defend its validity. The true sophisticate thinks of learning as discovery; he often changes his opinion and is absolutely the antithesis of egocentric.
The artist and the intellectual ought to fear decadence more than ignorance. Ignorance is a quality that enlightenment may ameliorate, whereas decadence is a condition curable only by despair following a catastrophe.
The problem with self-delusion is not that you are hiding shameful actions and qualities from other people (simple lying and deception take care of that) or even from yourself (a sense of mounting dread prevents this from occurring) but rather that your unwillingness to see yourself for what you are eliminates the only means whereby you might regain your bearings before that sense of mounting dread drives you into outright insanity in order for you to escape conclusively the truth about yourself.
Some people think that our intelligence is the master of our lives. Other people believe it is the servant. The vast majority of people couldn’t care less, and the patterns of their behavior, while they may be coherent, are never comprehensive.
Values are principles that control behavior. They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves. Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time. Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists. Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil. Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved. Soi brave, mon enfant!
If we win without having first lost, all we did was gamble on a guess. Every time we lose we learn what it doesn’t take to win, increasing the odds on each succeeding gamble. The anguished pain of losing is Evolution’s way of ensuring that we remember the lessons loss teaches.
By its rigidity and its disconcerting intensity, we understand that political correctness is an ideology, and we note that it has been adopted universally by the country’s intellectual elites. It is quite literally senseless to try to reason with these people; and not just because they’re arrogant and self-righteous, but because their irrational poppycock disguises a cold-eyed determination to eviscerate American culture by incapacitating our children for becoming free-standing individualists. Political correctness is tyrannical to the core— the only form of diversity it refuses to embrace is diversity of opinion. From kindergarten to graduate school the sons and daughters of Gramsci are busy every day indoctrinating our young people in the lexicography of drivel, while flying squads of scholar-poseurs are equally diligent in bolstering the claptrap by filling journal after journal with unscientific absurdities. The politically correct apparatchiki are bole weevils masquerading as butterflies. They thrive because of our lazy self-absorption and our misplaced trust in institutions we have let run amok, and they are killing the crops beneath our very eyes. If we permit them to continue, the civilization they have been subverting for the last forty years will eventually not be able to perpetuate itself.
Whatever Happened to Harmonic Dissonance? II: That a person could even utter a statement like, “I don’t need to read the newspaper because nothing in it interests me,” or, “I’ve never eaten Korean food because I know I wouldn’t like it,” betokens a breakdown of the speaker’s most basic associative operations (his mind “throwing a rod”); and it yields a proposition that is ridiculous—that we can judge the value or utility of an experience without having tried it. I remember when this fallacy typified the thinking of teenagers in the early Eighties. Now we hear it from adults every day. The disconnect occurs to people who haven’t managed to objectify, assimilate and conceptualize the elements and forces of contemporary existence; coping in desperation with incessant shotgun blasts of minutiae stresses them so completely that their minds simply shut down rather than entertain the thought of taking on something new and different. Neglecting one’s mental capacities is not the wisest preparation for life inside a kaleidoscope.
Ignorant sincerity is poignant. 99.9 % of those who take their politics seriously deal with media stereotypes instead of reality, but it’s not their fault.
Obligations don’t mean anything today. They have become tactical ploys instead of strategic parameters.
Understanding something yields knowledge. Understanding something in more ways than one yields sophistication. The sophisticated application of knowledge to experience yields wisdom.
Ideology differs from philosophy in that its terms are closed. They contain no growth matter and cannot be extrapolated in any sense other than mechanically. They are precepts and simple assertions rather than active principles.
I too am afflicted with the desire to divide humanity into two kinds of people: those who feel better about themselves when they realize how widespread gross stupidity is; and those who fear for the future of the race when they realize how widespread gross stupidity is.
It never ends.
A distrustful person only imagines that he distrusts others. What he knows—but won’t confront, and thus doesn’t know that he knows—is that he doesn’t trust himself to manage the complications that develop during relationships. The imaginary faux-distrust of which he is aware, therefore, is a protective device allowing him to slip-slide around on the surface of things.
A person either does or he doesn’t; explanations don’t mean anything. People do what they want to do. The facts speak for themselves.
We squander, I would say, 30% of our lives trying to “understand” our difficulties, thrashing them out, telling people about them, worrying ourselves silly, wearing ourselves down. If we actually wanted to know the truth about ourselves, we wouldn’t do any of that crap.
I feel confident of knowing certain things because of the experiences I have had. I am equally confident that any one thing we know well opens us to numerous other reservoirs of knowledge.