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 ‘rationality’ Category.
Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
If you believe that Liberals stand in the center while Conservatives occupy the far distant fringes of the right, reflect on this: Thinking “Hitler” all the time and never thinking “Stalin” when the subject is political orientation is like evaluating the humor of Laurel and Hardy without Hardy.
Don’t altogether ignore people who can’t speak coherently or to the point, because they may have authentic insights but not be able to formulate them constructively. Be wise rather than just intelligent, and appreciate every notion deriving genuinely from experience.
The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
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!
We don’t “make” decisions. Decisions make themselves. Sooner or later we catch up to them.
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.
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.
Race against Time: As science strives to produce humanoid machines, we humans independently strive to convert ourselves into automatons, that is, creatures that respond to stimulation wholly without considering what they’re doing. There is every chance that authentic humanity is going to be more faithfully perpetuated into the future by computerized robotics than by us.
Today’s vast multitude of ideological polemicists are the descendants of the Greek Sophists (5th century BC) who corrupted the purest and most creative strain of intellection the world has ever experienced for the paltry sake of personal gain. Today the gain for the ideologues is the indoctrination of young people and other unwary souls. These people are Sophists, as I said. But where is our Socrates?
The lack of a sense of responsibility leads to self-deception, and this is one of a slew of contemporary American “behaviors” (i.e., behavioral syndromes) against which the sweet-reason approach is powerless to effect change and therefore pointless to employ; others are depression (resulting from the long-term repression of impulses), addiction (escapism masquerading as courageous self-discovery or outrageous self-expression), the chronic inability to keep a promise (“I lied,” “things change,” “I’m moving on”), blaming someone or something other than oneself, saying that one has a disease in order to show that “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is that these sad and threadbare devices are defensive mechanisms applied when people actually need to assert themselves to overcome the fear arising from the insecurity that typifies society so conspicuously. The rising popularity of “extreme sports,” in which people fling themselves off thousand-foot cliffs, for example, with no great assurance that they’re going to land on the ground as anything but a splat, signals the severity of our anxiety. Those of us who don’t leap experience the right impulse (close your eyes and jump) but are afraid to act on it lest we wimp out or look stupid, which we really are for not responding; but we’re not in a condition to appreciate that. And because of our own insecurity we want to cut the clearly maladjusted plenty of slack—we “empower” them, to use another current catch phrase. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional syndrome we adopt metastasizes along with our unabated insecurity until we’re offering even greater slack to those guilty of committing actual crimes; fully crediting them for any of those blame-deflecting excuses cited above they care to indicate, because we believe (however absurdly) that we could well stand in their shoes some day and be in need of all the slack that we can get. The moral of this unhappy exposition is that society is crippled for everybody when a large enough number of its members refuse to accept the discomfort and inconvenience of self-investigation and behavior change as the price of putting an end to the pathology. America’s prosperity, which makes it easy to dissociate cause and effect, insures that this is going to be the way things are for a long time to come.
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.
Can it be surprising that a people who allow appearances to govern their opinions and existence should always be addressing the symptom rather than the disease?
The fact that many people today communicate in disjunctive squeaks and croaks accompanied by an array of primitive gestures, supplies the ultimate response to a proposition first voiced c. 1967: “Don’t let the rules of grammar get in the way of your self-expression, man. Let it all hang out.” Dropping the rules of grammar resulted irresistibly in the self’s no longer being linguistically expressible by a large percentage of the population to any degree at all.
The prevalence of unachievable ambitions and unrealistic expectations—we encounter them every day—is an indication that the real-world intelligence of the population has recently been plummeting like a barometer before the onset of a hurricane.
Throughout history, thinkers have proposed a variety of analogs, conceptual models and templates for human nature—not just metaphors, but finely wrought constructions whose dynamics and characteristics were supposed to yield an orienting insight into man’s condition, if not a working understanding thereof. We’ve enjoyed the benefits of Platonic duality, various kinds of rational schemas, a number of religious representations, abstract mathematics, a blank slate, Queen Nature, steam and combustion engines, cybernetics, and today the computer. Personally, I think we ought to study the object of all this brain-sweating directly, aiming for HUMAN BEING as the template for people. But if crafting a non-human model is mandatory, then I propose the squid: its head is made of jelly, when you try to get involved with it you become entangled in a writhing mass of venomous tentacles, and in situations rife with threat it undergoes a nervous reaction that obscures itself and its vicinity with squirting jets of opaque blackness. I’ve met thousands of people who conform to these parameters.
