Knifethrust of Thought

Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.

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.

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.

Pleasure is a sensation, happiness an emotion, satisfaction a mood, and contentment a dreaming rumination.

Perhaps the multiculturalists have a point.  What entitles us to the arrogant belief that Western Civilization is the way to go?  We ought always to seek to better our condition by learning how other cultures do things.  Let’s adopt the educational standards of the Ivory Coast, the culinary hygiene of New Guinea, the judicial-system fairness of Saudi Arabia, the religious tolerance of Sri Lanka, the imaginative television programming of Mongolia, the political liberties of Myanmar, the urban sciences of India, the high-tech infrastructure of Tajikistan, the after-school programs in Brazil, the foreign affairs genius of North Korea, the child-labor policies of Bangladesh, the social justice of Zimbabwe, the common-ground ethnic togetherness of Cyprus, the engineering ingenuity of Samoa, the freedom of dissent of Iran, the sell-your-daughter-into-prostitution ethos of Thailand, the marital relations of Pakistan, the pollution-control zeal of Mexico, the table manners of Micronesia, the philosophy of the Eskimos, the University-studies rationale of Azerbaijan, the cinema of Malaysia, the musical sophistication of Easter Island, the anti-corruption policies of the Philippines, the comedy sketches of Somalia, the legislative shrewdness of Rarotonga, the contemplative politics of South Korea and Taiwan, the relaxed code of leisure of Japan, the public defecation facilities of China, the rationalized traffic control of Ecuador, the fine art of Borneo, the literary distinctions of Tierra del Fuego, the prisoner-rehabilitation policies of Turkey, the pluralistic harmony of Rwanda, plus clitorectomy, and we’ll see how it goes.

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 ritualistic courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese stems from their societies being overcrowded; absent an objectified code of personal interaction their countries would descend into violent chaos.  America’s not overpopulated, but we have a much lower threshold for angry and irrational resentment than the Orientals, thanks to our having become infantile after 40 years of unrestricted self-indulgence, the evaporation of our educational process and the aberrant notion that we can heal our spiritual malaise by purchasing high-profile merchandise.  There are simply no spurs to empathetic understanding in a nation whose religious worship consists of thanking God for easy credit and whose standard greeting runs, “Get out of my face, you fucking asshole.”

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!

The vital intellectual component of humanity issues from the ability to objectify, interpret and analyze the features of our array of contexts and our subjective reactions to the contexts’ properties and dynamics.  When we reject the basis of objectification, therefore, as by abandoning confidence in the existence of uniformly occurring verities and their methods of operation, and as by substituting feeling for thinking as our singular instrument of “understanding,” we not only disable our intellect, we undo our selves.

Success depends on knowing in your bones how things work in your field of activity.  The successful person beholds the field not as an organized schema but as a dynamic process; his knowledge isn’t acquired by simple learning, it is transferred from the field’s array of energy directly into his nervous system as a function of the totality of his involvement. The successful executive manipulates his knowledge to seize control of a sector of the process in order to improve the sector’s efficiency.  The successful entrepreneur locates an opportunity that no one else has recognized for a creative transformation of the process itself.  The necessary “knowledge”, in other words, is intuitive/intellectual rather than merely intellectual, and if you don’t have it, be content to do your job, and turn to your private life for self-fulfillment.

Obligations don’t mean anything today.  They have become tactical ploys instead of strategic parameters.

Our most piquant memories are of earlier versions of ourselves and of our loved ones we don’t stand the ghost of a chance of retrieving.  Our second most piquant are of splendid interludes of sun-splashed vibrancy and pregnant stillness—dreams of sweet promise— that we subsequently desecrated by the way we chose to live.

Envy is a displacement of the gnawing fear that if we attempted to do something as exceptional as the other person did, we wouldn’t be able to bring it off.  Jealousy is a displacement of the crippling fear that we do not deserve our good fortune.

Understanding something yields knowledge.  Understanding something in more ways than one yields sophistication.  The sophisticated application of knowledge to experience yields wisdom.

Salesmanship consists of convincing a person that he needs to buy something.  Good salesmanship consists of ensuring that the need is a legitimate one.  Selling is just a technique.  Whether its use is good or bad depends on the character of the salesman.

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.

A mind-set manifests itself in different ways in different circumstances.  Psychologically, there is no difference between the 1920s small-town reverend and the head of a contemporary women’s studies department.  They are both authoritarian Puritan fanatics.

Calling All Shrinks: I have irrational, intense, visceral aversions to (1) the idea of eating someone else’s home cooking, and (2) brain teasers.  I possess no talent for the latter, but I don’t think I hate working them because I fear it getting out that I am unintelligent.  There is just nothing at stake in pondering them that I consider worthwhile, which is not the same thing as saying that I think they’re worthless; I recognize their value—and their great attraction for disciplined thinkers—as mental gymnastics, but to me they epitomize pointlessness (honing skills in a vacuum).  I had the same aversion to “writing exercises” when I was learning how to craft fiction; if the technique embodied in an exercise seemed potentially valuable, I adopted it for a story in which I had invested emotions, hoping it would help me in conveying feeling to the reader.  That seemed worth the effort.  As for other people’s home cooking, this is not a “health issue” or the product of any other conscious consideration, much less the manifestation of a subconscious distemper.  I think physiological changes in my olfactory function or perhaps my taste buds, or maybe both, took place a few years back that make me gag on kitchen smells, even prospectively.

My son has an elegantly simple rule for managing subordinates.  He won’t help anybody solve a problem who hasn’t first tried exhaustively to solve it for himself.  When I managed a sales force, I used to instruct my salespeople not to tell me about a problem unless they were also able to propose a solution.