Suddenly and miraculously, three people find themselves sitting together in a room, conversing. Moments before, nine people sat alone in three rooms, talking.
Category Archives: Fables, myths & parables
Vision management
To be assigned responsibility for something is almost synonymous with taking care of all the details of some work activity or work product. But rarely is anyone assigned responsibility for maintaining the vision of the whole in the execution of the parts.
A management truism applies: “If nobody is responsible for getting a job done, it won’t get done.”
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If you suggest that vision needs to be managed apart from the details many people will dismiss the thought on the grounds that once you’ve conceived an idea (in the form of a strategy or a concept), and developed a plan to execute it, the whole is contained in the details.
This is untrue.
It only seems that way because the majority of businesspeople are intellectually blind to wholeness. It isn’t that they can’t feel the difference between a whole and a fragmented mess — it’s just that they don’t know how to think about the problem and prefer to ignore it. We let wholes slide, because it’s hard to bust someone for neglecting a whole. It feels very… subjective. Parts are objective, so that’s where we focus.
But ignoring wholes is what makes so many companies competent but mediocre.
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Philosophies have practical consequences, even when we are not aware we hold any philosophy at all. As Bob Dylan said: “It might be the devil / or it might be the Lord / but you’ve gotta serve somebody.” Actually, it is especially when we are unaware it that a philosophy’s influence is strongest, determining our thoughts, perceptions and action.
One philosophy 95% of people in the modern world believe without knowing it, which they have unconsciously absorbed through cultural osmosis and accepted unquestioningly, is atomism.
According to atomism, wholes are made entirely out of parts. Once all the parts are accounted for, the whole is accounted for as well. In other words, wholes are reducible to parts.
Holism asserts that wholes have an existence independent of their particular constitution (of parts). Some holists say that wholes are what give meaning to parts, and that parts deprived of the context of a whole are inconceivable. Reductionistic holists go as far as to claim that all we have is wholes which have been artificially or arbitrarily divided up into parts.
I’m against reductionism on principle. I think wholes have one kind of being, and parts have another kind of being, and that human beings find life most satisfying when wholes and parts are made to converge.
And my philosophy has practical consequences: wholes need management as much as parts do. And when you do not explicitly manage a wholes the parts will overpower, degrade and smother the whole.
This happens to products, to initiatives, and to organizations.
We forget wholes, mostly because we don’t understand what they are and how they work.
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Inevitably and automatically, if allowed to develop by their own logic, parts diverge from the whole.
Parts tend to work themselves out according to the most local conditions, governed more by expedience, habit and myopia than by the guidance of vision. This type of localized logic is made of very crude forces and very tangible considerations.
Envisaged wholes are more fragile, at least at the beginning, before they are firmly established. They must be protected from the roughness of localized logic, like as we fence off sprouts and saplings until they’ve established themselves and no longer need protection.
Envisaged wholes (especially unprecedented wholes) are vulnerable in three specific ways. They are essentially inchoate, elusive, ephemeral .
- Envisaged wholes are essentially inchoate. — We tend to think of vision as being the envisioning of a whole, a detailed picturing of some possible reality. That is not how it happens. Vision is sensing a possibility. Some of the possibility is given in broad outline, and some of it is given in arbitrary detail, but most of it is simply latent in a situation, there but inaccessible to the imagination. As the situation develops under guidance of the vision, the development is recognized as conforming or deviating from the vision. But what is strange is that the vision itself is affected by the recognition. The vision understands itself, reflected in the concrete attempts to actualize it, in a dialogical process of revelation. This is why visions are not directly translatable into plans. The plan must accommodate and support the development of the vision, or it is only a recipe for sterility.
- Envisaged wholes are elusive. — While virtually all people are capable of recognizing and categorizing objects, and virtually every professional is capable of grasping processes and plans, relatively few are able to understand or conceive concepts, even after they have been clarified and articulated. An envisaged whole gains concreteness, clarity and general accessibility in the course of its development, and as it does it comes into view of more and more people. In its early stages, though, the fact of its existence, much less its nature will be far from obvious, and completely beyond the grasp of most people. Those with firsthand experience with vision know this process. Those who don’t either operate by faith and support the process or they undermine it, or they create conditions where vision doesn’t even happen. (In many organization, the wholes are determined solely by leadership; but leadership is earned through success in managing details. The result: the only people able to earn the right to set vision are precisely the ones with absolutely no awareness of vision. They try to provide their organizations with “vision”, but all they know how to come up with are ambitions, metrics, and plans to accomplish what’s been done before.)
- Envisaged wholes are ephemeral. — Because of how they are known, envisaged wholes are very easily corrupted and forgotten. They are revealed in dialogue with concrete actualization. The vision tries to respond to the actualization. If the actualization is not responsive to the vision and moves away from it far enough, the vision will lose not only its hold on the process, it will get caught up in the localized logic of the development and lose itself altogether. This is what is meant by getting “too close to the situation”. The vision holder must maintain the right balance of contact with the situation — close enough to guide it, but far enough from it to see when the development has begun to go off-track. When nobody is permitted the distance, and everyone is required to roll up their sleeves and get mired in the details, the vision’s chances of survival are nil. The problem is not with the vision, nor with the visionary, but with the absence of conditions necessary for maintaining vision.
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The captain of a ship, after charting the ship’s course and pointing it in the right direction, went below deck and grabbed an oar.
Two stories about skin
His overwhelming desire to get out was his eviction notice. He had to leave this place immediately. It wasn’t so much that he needed to not be here anymore. It was that he needed to be there — to know his independence, to look upon his home from a distance and see it whole against the sky.
He stripped some bark from a nearby tree. (As he cut into the tree and peered beneath the bark he felt bad for this tree, for he knew the shame of being seen beneath; but this was immediately eclipsed by an even greater feeling of pride.)
On the bark’s smooth inner wall he created a map. He paused to admire it, and savored calling it good. Then he set off to chart the edges of the world. As he traveled and traced his path on his map, the shape that emerged came to him as good news. Now he knew for certain what he had suspected. With his completed map in hand he left his home behind.
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In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood;
and the snakes will grow like trees,
depositing skin under skin,
in casings of turgid leather,
and they will lie about on the ground
like broken branches.
Crests
Years ago my sister and I were swimming in the ocean as a storm was coming in. The waves were huge and powerful. It was nearly impossible to move from the near-region where broken waves grappled in churning knots, out further to where the wave dropped themselves in permanent quarter-ton suplexes, and further still to where we wanted to be, to where the curls were just beginning to form. Out there waves still had univocal thrust and could pick us up and carry us back over the violence and set us on the shore. But the closer we got to the break line, the harder it was to stand upright and advance. We would get knocked off our feet and thrown to the bottom, and washed back into the brown foamy shallows, our faces full of dirt and our bellies scored by sharp little shells.
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Where the water is deeper, it is more impersonal and disciplined. Out there, waves move through the ocean and the ocean feels the movement running through it. Each individual quart of salty water makes a patient circle like a rider on a ferris wheel, returning again and again to where it began.
But once the force of the wave hits hard ground, everything gets personal. The water at the bottom is smashed into the ground; the water in the middle loses its balance and begins to topple; the water at the top is overthrown and falls on its face. Here, water identifies with the wave and knows itself to be the mover. Every eddy strives to pull the rest of the ocean in its wake. A foaming brood of rivers coil, constrict, crush and swallow each other endlessly.
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Somewhere between the complacency of the depths and the ambitions of the shallows, where the waves touch bottom with the tips of their toes, there is motion that can move us. And when we are moved, it is the residual unified force of the deeper traditions, challenged by the dirty spasms of the everyday, to leap and push and bring order where there are too many orders.
Edenic seeds
A biologist held out two seeds, one in each hand.
“This seed in my left hand is a future tree. If you plant this seed in a sunny spot on fertile soil and keep it watered it will consume nutrients, water and sunlight and grow into a tree.
“This seed in my right hand is a generative principle. If you place this seed in a sunny spot, on fertile soil and keep the soil watered, through the seed nutrients, water and sunlight will congregate and organize themselves into a huge tree.”
“That I can accept,” said the biologist’s colleague; “but your claim that these seeds come from the two trees of Eden strikes me as unprovable, and, frankly, unscientific.”
The explorer and the settler
An explorer discovered a beautiful unsettled site at the foot of a mountain. He marked the spot on his map, and went back to the city for supplies. His plan was to establish a settlement there.
When he returned to the spot nine months later, someone had already begun construction. The explorer thought to himself, “Well, you might have settled it, but I discovered it.”
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We credit ourselves the truths we wordlessly intuit, but credit others only what they articulate.
The good gardener
A gardener had a policy of treating all the plants fairly, giving each its equal share of water, sun, fertilizer, etc. According to this gardener, the plant’s health was its own responsibility, seeing that the plant itself was the sole variable in this situation. “Every plant is given exactly the same advantages, has the same opportunities. The good plants flourish and the bad ones perish.”
Advice to the drowning
An objective lifeguard shouted practical advice to a drowning man: “Stop panicking and you’ll be okay; but if you keep panicking you’ll drown.” The man continued to panic and eventually did drown, proving the lifeguard right.
Iridescent irritants
Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…
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A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.
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An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.
Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.
Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.
It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.
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Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.
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We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.
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We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.
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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.
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Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.
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Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.
Aesopian cactus
According to the cactus: “During a drought you see what a plant is really made of.”
Beyond deism
Santayana: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
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An estranged couple went on a road trip. Fearing a meltdown they avoided the subject of where they were going. Instead they bickered about one another’s driving. “You’re driving too fast.” “Stop riding the clutch.” “You’re making the car lurch with your heavy brake-foot.” “You keep weaving into the shoulder.” “Your music is making my head throb.”
Whenever he got control of the wheel he headed toward Las Vegas. Whenever it was her turn she headed toward Vermont.
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America, founded at the height of the Enlightenment on the principles of the Enlightenment, puts its full faith in methods.
We’ve always been deists. We believe the clockmaker God, as witnessed to by our Founding Fathers, his philosophe-saints.
We believe in a holy trinity of systems: the scientific method, the free market and the system of government outlined in the United States Constitution. These three systems, operating by mechanical principles, automatically crank out truth, prosperity and goodness, respectively.
The mechanism can only be gummed up by the bloody subjective mess contained in human hearts.
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In politics we don’t talk about how we want our lives to be. At our best we talk about what policies are effective or ineffective, and at our worst we talk about what policies are innately good and innately evil. And then we measure key indicators of a success none of us have reflected on in the terms that matter: the quality of our daily lives.
In education we don’t think about the kinds of people we wish to cultivate. We argue about what educational theory is most effective in practice and which ones are pure theory and wishful thinking. Or we fret that we’re teaching our children excessive obedience or/and excessive disrespect for authority. We administer standardized tests to help us measure whether we’ve achieved our end-goal, which increasingly is defined by whether the students are scoring well on standardized tests.
In commerce, we don’t ask ourselves what the success and prosperity we pursue means to our lives as we live them. We especially don’t think about the bulk of our waking hours we spend working. The trials and tribulations of work-life will be rewarded in the after-work-life: little weekends and the big retirement. Each company sets success metrics, by which it judges how it is doing. How each company does is a tributary which flows into how the nation is doing. The better things go the better things are. The numbers tell us precisely how much better or worse everything is.
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Practical advice: If you don’t know the answer to the question “Why?” answer instead the question “What?” or “How?” Most people are more sensitive to texture than text, and will notice only that what sounded like a question was followed by what sounded like an answer
To really close the matter support your answer with quantitative measurements. Cover any question with six feet of data, and it will be as silent as if it had been put to rest.
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If we were each to lay out and clarify what we really value and need and we were to talk in good faith about practical possibilities would we end up despising each other more than we do when we keep everything private and hidden?
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Can a person who talks about an all-powerful invisible hand really be called a rationalist?
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians
Auditioning the scalpel
A surgeon was considering the purchase of a very expensive scalpel, and decided to test it before buying.
He started with general-purpose knife functions. “This scalpel might be a special kind of knife, but it is a knife, after all, and it should function as a knife.”
So the surgeon sliced up an apple with it. Then he used it to whittle a stick into a tiny toy soldier. Then he made a wood engraving with it, tapping on it its handle with a small hammer, using its tip as a fine chisel. Then he used it to pry open a paint can.
The scalpel really did make an adequate all-purpose knife.
Then he tried to operate on a patient’s heart. He found it rough and imprecise. “I might as well be using a jack-knife. This confirms what I always suspected. Why pay for an expensive scalpel when a jack-knife works just as well?”
(“Besides,” he said to the nurse, wheeling the dead patient out of his operating room, “our surgery business has really been slowing down.”)
Eden retold
Adam-in-Eden reached out and grasped knowledge as something that is grasped. At that moment he became simply: Adam.
He was Adam who lived in a place called Eden. He could live somewhere else, too. He could be Adam in another garden or in a desert or in a jungle or in a city. “Listen, I could live on the motherfucking moon,” said Adam.
He was as a god, mastering this new world full of objects with his new explaining, predicting, controlling knowledge.
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Adam forgot who he wasn’t, and so he forgot who he was.
He wasn’t exactly wrong about anything he thought, but he was never right enough.
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“Dude, I have knowledge of God. Don’t fuck with me. Me n’ God’ll smite thee. Just saying.”
Magic was the first technology. It wasn’t too good, but the rush was addictive.
Aesop’s fable: The captain and the oarsmen
The captain of a lost ship reasoned thusly:
“If I were at my destination I would no longer be lost. What separates me from my destination is distance. Distance is traversed through the rowing of my oarsman.
“If it is untraversed distance keeping me from my destination and the responsibility for traversing distance belongs to the oarsmen, it is obvious that my oarmen are to blame for our being lost!”
So the captain orderd his navigator and all his officers to report immediately to the galley. He called the oarsmen before them, rebuked them and had them flogged. Then every man, officer and crew alike, grabbed an oar, and together they sat straining in the dark, rowing and rowing and rowing and rowing across the distance.
A nonclarifying clarification of Birth of Tragedy
Despite all appearances, the star of the Birth of Tragedy is Hermes. Hermes is implicated in the union of Dionysus and Apollo in tragedy, and is the primary object of the study. Further, Hermes is the subject of the study, the author.
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Imagine a herm with the face of Dionysus on one side and the face of Apollo on the other.
Such fusions are made possible by and manifest Hermes. Without Hermes, the realities of the world would be as numerous, as various and and irreconcilable as the myriad eyes of the giant, Argos.
A face is made possible by and manifests Apollo. Without Apollo, there could be no objects of intention: consciousness would dangle in a state of “conscious of…?” Even on the other side, the question of “who is conscious?” is detached and unresolvable.
Hermes is the ethical face of Dionysus: the “outwarding” of what is purely “inward” (to use a common but misleading dichotomy), the inward being what would remain if one could subtract the sum from the whole of this reality we share and call the world.
An apocryphal Aesop’s fable
A loan shark appeared at the door of his debtor, demanding payment.
“I can not pay you,” said the debtor, “but further, I will not pay you.”
“OK, then!” laughed the loan shark, “Let us part ways, both discredited.”
Twos
I used to feel ecstatic riding my bicycle, knowing that this beautiful, simple machine, powered by my own body, could carry me anywhere I chose. I could go to work, or I could pass right by work and travel all the way to Tennessee, or deep into the north. I’d fantasize about maintaining a secret storehouse with all the tubes, tires, chains and spare parts I’d need for a life-time. I’d be free forever.
Now I ride my bicycle and I know that with each bump the frame is gradually weakening. The chain and all the parts are slowly corroding and grinding themselves down against each other. The tires are unrolling themselves into the road like tape, leaving an invisible path of rubber particles everywhere I go. I will need to replace it, bit by bit, by pieces made by other people. Maybe someday no original parts will remain, and this bicycle will exist as a tradition. I am riding over streets made by people, to places valuable solely because of the people there. And what is going on in my body? It is corroding, sickening, healing, weakening, strengthening, replacing its own substance, but its terminus is inevitable. As I ride, I rethink and resurrect the words of people who wrote and died, and I think about living people. And the things I think and have rethought in reading are meant to be told – they demand telling – if someone can hear them.
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If humankind were to perish I’d want no part of what remained. We are in this together; and if we can learn to accept and love this inescapable fact (and stop trying to fantasize ourselves out of it), we can seize our freedom to make our time here together easier to love. Life is still vast.
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Space repeats itself in time. Each moment contains the entirety of space. Space and time repeats itself in each subject. Each subject contains the entirety of space and time. We are forced through time and we move about in space. What about subject, I and We? Can we “move” there? Have you moved or been moved in the interlapping being of an other?
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An admittedly weird digression:
Hermes was the messenger of the Olympian gods who moved infinitely quickly, at the speed of thought. What sort of messages do you suppose he transmitted? Facts?
Janus, the double-faced Roman god of doors, was related to Hermes, and I think he can provide us a clue. From Wikipedia:
Historically, however, Janus was one of the few Roman gods who had no ready-made Greek counterpart, or analogous mythology. We can find in Greece Janus-like heads of gods related to Hermes, perhaps forming a compound god: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In the case of these compounds it is disputed whether they indicated a herm with the head of Athena, or with a Janus-like head of both Hermes and Athena, or a figure compounded of both deities.
I enjoy the question of what divine thoughts moved through the split brain of Janus? Was it an inner dialogue? Was there a witnessing consciousness somewhere above or below? Was he of two minds, or one… or three…?
The paradox of good listening
In our content-glutted world, listening is exalted above speaking. There’s many people talking and few people listening.
Human beings are creatures of the foreground. We like to take the direct path. If few people are listening the solution is: Start listening. Right? Isn’t that a satisfying answer? Don’t you feel virtuous when you take the attitude of the good listener and let the other do all the talking? Don’t you feel charitable?
But let me ask you this: If you perceive it this way – that all honor is due the listener… are you really listening? Or, taking it from a different angle: when someone needs to be heard, is the need essentially one of needing some silent space and a friendly face? Or something else?
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The paradox: We listen to the degree that we value what is said. Unless the listener experiences the value of what he hears – unless he is genuinely grateful for what is being said – he’s not actually listening at all. Valuing doesn’t have to mean agreeing, it means valuing the shared being of conversation. A conversation of this kind has itself (as a shared whole) through its part-icipants.
The resolution: Start by refusing to listen to what you can’t value; but even more importantly, don’t speak what you do not spontaneously experience as valuable yourself. If it doesn’t move you saying it, it won’t move the other hearing it. Don’t say it, write it, sing it, paint it, build it, dance it. Wait attentively and openly for your vision to come to you from within or from without.
There is no shame in waiting. There is tremendous honor in waiting.
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Have you ever experienced the liberation of art?: a deeply persuasive presentation of a new way to be in the world?
Art that does not radiate a new existential possibility around itself is not art, but mere entertainment.
It does not matter if the art “moves” you emotionally, as long as you are moved within the same old world as before. That is mere sentimental jostling, and it seems like a big enough deal until you’ve experienced a true shift at the depths.
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Your universe is a planetarium. You look out into the starry, plaster dome and you see infinite space. You look at the projector at the center, and it is an object, furniture.
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We no longer expect enough. But do not worry: desperation is on its way and it will liberate us from our drab satisfaction. Nothing but genuine intense pain can liberate. Until then vanity and fear conspire to imprison us in cozy complacence. I have nothing to say to someone who has never suffered and known the disorientation of despair.
I’ve always loved people in deep crisis, and also people on psychedelic drugs; both listen urgently enough to hear the radically unexpected.
“Lord we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven…”
Skepticism
Skepticism is the practice by which a thinker interrogates obviousness, givenness and assumedness until everything he “knows” falls apart in his hands. What can be done with the broken pieces of former truth?
For one kind of thinker the pieces become an exhibit of the nonexistence of truth. He breaks pieces into smaller pieces to renew his faith in factlessness, a willful refusal to know any particular thing as true. For another kind of thinker the pieces are disillusionment. He glues them back together into a recollection of the past, and makes skepticism taboo, and this is his faith, a willful commitment to know particular things as true. (For both truth is conceived as constituted of particular true knowledge.)
There is a third option. Actively do the breaking, but pause regularly and allow the pieces to reconstitute themselves. Observe as a gentle scientist, walking around like a sculptor – within, without and upon – the fluidly rearticulating shapes, noting everything, omitting nothing. Especially note the feeling of ethical freedom and ethical rebinding, and the influence of others.
David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College, again
I think maybe Wallace wasn’t really giving advice to those graduating students in that commencement address. It seems possible that he was pleading for mercy: “You might not understand specifically why I am how I am, but please allow your misunderstanding to be a compassionate story…”
Maybe philosophy is nothing other than a practical, factical attempt to make the fragile people at home in this world with us. We can make the world tough and habitable only for the tough… but then we will be surrounded by tough people and we might wonder why the world is so dull and flat and devoid of possibility. The best beauty is delicate. Enlightened strength is moved by fragility and sacrifices to it.
(By the way, do women understand that if they gain ascendancy in the world, men will become the beautiful ones? Women will have to learn the art of human connoisseurship. Until then they will be insufferable tyrants. Look at the ERA parades, and look at the average modern wife: Hell on Earth. This transition to female dominance has sucked and will continue to suck until it resolves and women know how to love from a position of strength.)