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.

Some people sabotage their own pretensions to individuality through the fear of being perceived as different.  Collections of such people agree to be different together in meticulously codified ways.

If you trust the words of people who say “I tell it like it is,” you not only don’t trust your own judgment, you don’t have any judgment to trust.

Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance?  People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.

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.

Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it?  Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off.  I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.

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.

Anthropologists say the human race became the dominant species on the planet because it’s the most adaptive species; if this is true, it carries the corollary that we learn by our mistakes.  But I have seen so many cases indicating the contrary that I can’t help doubting the proposition—until I think about money, specifically about how the glee of having a surplus of it or the fear of not having enough short-circuits man’s psyche.  What else might explain why a heretofore successful businessman would purchase an acclaimed restaurant, then proceed to amortize his investment by reducing the cost—-and thereby the quality—of precisely those amenities that made the restaurant popular to begin with?

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.

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.

We don’t “make” decisions.  Decisions make themselves.  Sooner or later we catch up to them.

An expert is a person who believes there is no middle ground between expertise and ignorance.

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.

You can trust your eyes provided you keep them open and don’t turn away from terrifying sights.

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.

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.

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.

I once told the production foreman and the transportation manager of a company I worked for: “If you two spent half the time doing your jobs that you waste pretending to do them, you wouldn’t have to put on an act.”

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

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.