When he looked back on his disagreement, he no longer agreed with himself. But did he reverse his position? No: he agreed with his adversary still less.
Looking back on his disagreement, he no longer thought it was important. Does this mean he should have let it go? No: disagreement matters only when agreement has value.
Some apologies demand apology, but they must be eaten.
When you look at an eye you do not see its sight; to know what a thinker thinks is not the same as knowing his thought.
To many, epiphanies seem impossible because they can’t foresee what they’ll be. But this is one essential quality of an epiphany.
*
An imminent epiphany is not dark; it is invisible.
An imminent epiphany is not indistinct or fuzzy; it is nothing.
An imminent epiphany is not tiny in the distance; it is nowhere.
An imminent epiphany does not announce its impending arrival; it is not in transit.
*
In the world of epiphanies, “fuzzy front end” happens late in the process, after the hardest work has been done.
Inspired people make inspired things. Inspired things tends to inspire people who work on them. Inspiration begets inspiration.
Often people think of duty as a person does in the absence of inspiration. But with problems demanding inspired solutions it is one’s duty to find, generate, protect and transmit inspiration. Doing one’s duty dutifully won’t do.
To be persuaded of something is not the same as being compelled to accept it.
Reason persuades.
Logic compels. Logic is the law of thought.
Reason is lawful, and it honors logic’s laws. But reason honors more than logic, and it has resources that extend far beyond logic.
*
Logic is a courtroom, and it judges what goes on beyond its walls. The court cannot predict or determine the possibilities of life or the cases that might be brought before it.
*
Logic can be abused.
It can be brandished and used as an instrument of intimidation. Used skillfully it can show the limits of another man’s intelligence. And it can also be used to wear a person down. It can detain and exhaust and irritate, like a filibuster.
*
Being sued and taken to court is a painful process. Even if you think you are right, it can interrupt your life, strain your patience, drain your resources, and grip you with anxiety, because, despite your convictions, you might lose. The lawyer will do his best to make you settle out of court…
*
Next time someone tries to persuade you, pay attention: Is this using reason to show you a way to understand in a new way? Or is this person brandishing logic (or its cousin mathematics) to get you to settle for something?
If you think reality has the last laugh on an ostrich who dies with its head still buried, you do not understand ostrich logic.
It is very hard to think clearly about problems, and it is for this reason — and this reason alone — that people so industriously focus on solutions.
*
Muddling: trying to answer unasked questions or resolve undefined problems.
Muddling is the great vice of large organizations who have tons of resources to waste. Big groups of people get together and decide what to do without clarifying why something needs to be done.
People act like the sense that a problem exists and needs solving. Everyone kinds of agrees something needs to be done. Good enough!: what is that something, so we can get to work doing it? Let’s ideate on what to do, and make a plan!
*
When I hear someone generalize about “ideas”, assessing the value of ideas versus things, or groups, or actions, or plans, etc., I immediately know that person has an impoverished sense of ideas.
For such people, ideas are just anticipations of things that can be made, groups that can be formed, actions that can be performed, plans that can be executed, etc. Ideas are mere mental images of entities that can be brought into other kinds of existence.
Yet, people like this call themselves “idea people” — and have no idea how wrong they are.
*
What is true of “idea people” is doubly true of visionaries.
The world is stuffed with “visionaries” who imagine things, actions, plans, organizations, goals (and other stuff you can picture in your mind) — who then mentally sketch out what they imagine, so that others can picture it in their minds, too. The whole group sees the same image, now.
That’s what a visionary does, right? This is, at best, half right.
But what else could a visionary be?
Are you unable to envision anything beyond that? There it is: that beyond that you cannot envision until the moment you finally glimpse it — that beyond is the visionary’s element.
It would be difficult enough if the ocean bottom were just deep. However, it is also dark, heavy, ambiguous with debris, silt and vegetation, and populated with ferocious eyeless creatures that bite, grab and crush anything that lives.
*
Monophonic or harmonious difficulties rarely occur outside the domain of games. In real life, there’s nothing, nothing… then deafening cacophony of trouble.
Some people listen to other people because they are genuinely kind. They want to allow the other person to feel heard and to experience dignity and belonging. What is experienced is charity.
Some people listen to other people because they’re trying to be good listeners. They imitate the genuinely kind. Occasionally they seem kind. Others listen in order to flatter. Occasionally they seem respectful.
Some people listen to other people in order to learn the things other people have to teach them. Such people are curious.
Some people listen to other people in order to be liberated from themselves: they want an alternative truth to escape into. They run into the front door, through the house, and straight out the back door.
Some people listen to other people, even to people who are clearly deluded and confused, not in order to enter their delusion or confusion, but to learn just enough to find their way out of their own old truth. Even to you, they listen intently, only for the silences.
Some people listen to other people as an ascetic discipline: the vacuum that stands between understandings hurts us. Steadfast suffering of perplexity makes a soul strong and clean. Perplexity is a desert, and listening leads us there.
Some people listen to other people because they can find a seminal idea hidden in any mind, of any kind, and in their fertile soul grow this insight into an unprecedented idea.
Outrageous: a rebel can no longer expect to be rewarded for refusal to cooperate.
*
In a glut, nothing is better than something.
*
Diets are counter-natural. Yet nature demands them.
Some people need to be given tasks to do.
Other people need to be given things to make.
Other people need problems to solve.
And finally, some people are only happy finding new problems.
*
Each of the four types of worker will turn whatever work they have into the kind of work they do.
A task-oriented person (whether that person is a fry-cook or CEO) faced with the requirement to make a thing, or the need to solve a problem, or a chaotic situation pregnant with opportunity, will play a matching game. He will look for cases that resemble the one he is facing. Then he will find processes (“best practices”) meant to bring that category of case to a successful conclusion. Only when he has strung together a series of algorithmic steps and begun executing them will he feel in his element, and feel like he is really working. For the task-oriented worker, working is executing techniques.
A craftsperson (again, this could be any role ranging from custodian to executive) will try to turn whatever situation he faces into the need for some kind of artifact. It might be a product, or a slogan, or a presentation… whatever it is, it will require him to roll up his sleeves and start carving, sanding, tweaking, polishing — and now he is working. For the craftsman, working is making.
A problem-solver (of whatever role) wants to understand the end-goal, the clear objective, of what he is doing. All his efforts are trained on “moving the needle” and accomplishing what he has set out to do. To this end, he will use processes and he will use the crafting of things to get him there, only feels like he is working when he sees progress toward a goal. For the problem-solver, working is accomplishing.
A problem-finder is unlikely to be anything other than an entrepreneur or a hermit, and is not really worth discussing.
What a great quote!:
“Our age’s good fortune. — There are two respects in which our age may be called fortunate. With respect to the past we have enjoyment of all the cultures there have ever been and of their productions, and nourish ourselves with the noblest blood of every age; we still stand sufficiently close to the magical forces of the power out of whose womb they were born to be able to subject ourselves to them in passing with joy and awe: whereas earlier cultures were capable of enjoying only themselves, with no view of what lay outside — it was as though they lay beneath a vaulted dome, of greater or less extent, which, though light streamed down upon them from it, was itself impenetrable to their gaze. In respect to the future there opens out before us, for the first time in history, the tremendous far-flung prospect of human-ecumenical goals embracing the entire inhabited earth. At the same time we feel conscious of possessing the strength to be allowed without presumption to take this new task in hand ourselves without requiring supernatural assistance; indeed, let our undertaking eventuate as it may, even if we have overestimated our strength, there is in any case no one to whom we owe a reckoning except ourselves: henceforth mankind can do with itself whatever it wishes.”
You can’t lose with a quote like this. Whether or not it is factually true, it is morally true: it reveals a hope worth cultivating: a pluralist interpretation of e pluribus unum.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit…
On the continuum of quantities, myriad stands closer to one than to infinity.
And a pluralist who believes in myriad truths stands closer to the absolutist with his one Truth than to the relativist who believes in an infinite number of truths.
But nobody is forcing us to chose between inferior conceptions — unless we are not up to a superior conception.
*
Be careful when presenting an either/or, and especially when it is obvious that only two options exist: You are putting your intellectual limitations on display.
*
Are you wise to philosophy? Then don’t do philosophy. Avoiding philosophical thought is the best strategy for honoring and preserving your miraculous inborn wisdom.
*
Many have confusion, and many have answers. Only an elite few have questions.
Most people are simply too naive to recognize that a clearly posed question is an enormous accomplishment.
They think a question is only a means to an answer, and that if you already have an answer, questions are regressive or superfluous.
So in situations where questions need to be understood, confused people are ready with techniques, plans of action, goals, examples — anything to fill up the void of confusion. But voids of confusion do not need filling, they need clearing. Filling them only adds more confusion. And that’s where the confusion came from in the first place: from other confused minds.
*
Only equals can collaborate as equals. Non-equals need hierarchy — with those who would prefer equality at the top.
*
Four categories of people:
Some people get so used to not fully understanding, that they come to think of understanding as just intuitive knowing, or just producing an explanation.
Some people split the world up into different domains, and have different standards of understanding for each: Some things can only be intuited, other things can only be explained. Such people are naive.
*
We have names for permanent naivety.
Studying etymologies, the world turns elemental — up and down, over and under, toward and away, turning and going, climbing and jumping, throwing and putting and taking, together and apart, before and after, mother and father and child, authority and public, trade and credit.
*
When I was being taught to paint, the teacher limited my palette to titanium white, cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow light and ultramarine blue.
In one corner of the ring, a trainer is telling a boxer that he is completely blowing this fight, that he’s worked and worked and come this far only to piss it away. Where is his will to win? He’d better find it fast. In the opposite corner another trainer is telling a boxer that it’s all ok, that he only needs to remember the three things they’ve worked on together. It’s second nature, now. Stay focused and positive. The bell rings and the two boxers meet again — fists, heads, hearts, bodies and coaching. It is spiritual heterogeneity against a backdrop of purified trauma.
One note on quitting Facebook. There seems to be three basic attitudes on quitting:
What does it mean to be a “douche”? (And I will never stop putting that term in a plastic bag of quote-marks, to prevent accidental skin contact.) I believe a “douche” is someone who enjoys a state of petty arrogance. *
I see no incompatibility between these three attitudes. It’s good to do, it’s hard to do and getting off does indicate some degree of arrogance, not necessarily exceeding the minimums to escape the category of “petty”. *
(* NOTE: the last two paragraphs are examples of “douchey”, as I understand it, and so is this note.)
I’ve deleted all my Google Reader feeds.
For a variety of reasons I’ve quit facebook.
Now is a small town.