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| QUOTATIONS 353-386 |
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| 353. The monotheism of the Jews and paganism of the Greeks both had the cardinal flaws, as far as the ordinary men were concerned: the first - the wrath of God, who was the judge, the jury and the executioner with no possibility of appeal, and the second - the mortality of Man. Christianity, which is essentially a symbiosis of Judaism and Greek polytheism has eliminated both of these original flaws by turning the vengeful God into a forgiving one and by promising the everlasting life to the mortal men. 354. The contradictions of the New Testament are the contradictions between the Jews and the Greeks. 355. Most of the people, most of the times have an innate impulse to seek truth and to act justly. And if their personal welfare is not adversely affected by such actions and, also, if no external obstacles prevent them, they would follow this impulse almost automatically. And that's, probably, as much as could be asked from an average man or woman. Therefore, the injustices which nevertheless are so often committed by the ordinary people are not caused by some inherent in them evil but the result of "misinformation", for they think they act justly, while doing otherwise, because of the false knowledge their actions are based on. A just act, which is based on false information, turns ultimately into its opposite - the unjust one. And the best way to prevent ordinary people from acting unjustly is to provide them with the truth and then trust they would do the right thing upon receiving and accepting it. 356.The Good Ones, like, for example, Mother Teresa working with the poor in Calcutta, or Jean Vanier taking care of the handicapped in France, can only help people who are absolutely helpless, those who want and expect very little and are ready to surrender their desires and free will in exchange. But the able ones, no matter how much is given to them, would never do that, unless forced to, and their ultimate salvation, therefore, lies in their own hands. They should not expect and they shall not receive help from anybody. 357. Suppose an individual, or a group of individuals, like family, tribe, nation, etc., is lacking certain characteristics which by common view are considered to be of some value and, in general, are desirable. What can be done about it? The easiest way out would be to do nothing, the hardest - to try to develop these qualities. But most of the times the two other ways are chosen: one attempts either to prove that those vaunted qualities in reality mean nothing (the sour grapes syndrome), or that nobody else has them to begin with. 358. Alas, I've witnessed more than once the mating dance of immigrants, in slavish eagerness to please their hosts they're crawling on their knees. 359. The ugly hate the beautiful, The dull hate the witty, The dirty hate the pure. It is all envy. The beautiful pity the ugly, The witty despise the dull, The pure abhor the dirty. It is all arrogance. 360. Sometimes, the almost obsessive quest for the perfect definition at all cost (as displayed most famously by Socrates, but to which none of us is completely immune) is but an outward manifestation of our reluctance or psychological inability to accept the things the way they naturally are - complex and manifold and, in some sense, always more or less ambiguous. It is also the expression of our desire, however subconscious, to impose our will on the world. 361. Any definition is incomplete, since any subject has the infinite number of predicates. Therefore those who try to define anything immediately expose themselves to criticism of being wrong, though, in truth, they are probably wrong only in a sense of not being completely, one hundred percent right, which is impossible in the first place. 362. Socrates is constantly dealing in exceptions to refute somebody else's generalization, since for any general statement an exception can always be found. But it doesn't destroy a particular generalization (with the exception of the mathematical ones). It just says that there is no absolute truth in the world of concrete things and if the rule is applicable in, let say, 90% of the cases it is good enough and to ask for more is to demand humanly impossible. Let's take the language. It is described and explained by certain grammatical rules which cover majority of cases. But there are always exceptions, because language is a living thing and grammatical rules can only describe, but not proscribe it. And so are the so-called Laws of Nature (as discovered by Man). We wouldn't deny their validity because they are not absolutely perfect. For how could they be when any physical event is caused and influenced by the infinite number of variables; if we do reject those laws because of their imperfection it will surely destroy science as we know it. 363. The basic flaw in the Socratic/Platonic logic is the arguing almost exclusively from analogy, which is the least reliable method of demonstration. Such types of arguments are weakened even further by comparing not just two but several related notions, thus creating the whole chain of consecutive and analogically similar objects. This procedure, in the long run, can and often does lead to the blatantly wrong conclusions. Let's take B which is similar to A, then let's C be like B and D like C, etc. Depending on the degree of difference (which is always present) within each analogous pair, and also on the number of such pairs from the first member of the chain A to the last D, the total accumulation of the incremental differences is usually significant enough that in all probability D is neither equal to A (as Socrates would like us to believe) nor even has at this stage anything in common with it. 365. Socrates/Plato (in truth they can't be separated) despite numerous and explicit declarations to the contrary, is essentially a spontaneous materialist, albeit without being fully aware of it himself. In his arguments he is always mixing the material and the spiritual, matter and mind. The world of inanimate objects, animal world, man's world - they are never completely separable in his thinking but are always viewed as identical and the laws which govern one, being universal, govern others as well. When faced with the interlocutor who fails to understand the psychological motivations behind human actions, Socrates/Plato gives examples either from Nature or from the practical activities of men, and, after establishing their laws and correlations, proceeds to thoughts and feelings of men And by doing that he not only doesn't separate the material world from the world of ideas, but also, by always using the former to explain and elucidate the latter, he unconsciously reaffirms again and again the primacy of the first over the second, the matter over the mind. 366. I am not looking for a company of the like-minded people. All I ever wanted is to be with people who wouldn't mind if I speak my mind. 367. In Plato's Republic the soul is regarded as consisting of the three parts: the reason, which seeks knowledge, the passionate or spirited element, which desires honour, and the appetitive part, which craves the satisfaction of the body's functions. But I will put this " holy trinity" - Reason, Honour, and Body - in somewhat different relationships. I would say that body uses reason to make its appetites look honourable. 368. The persistence of the stubborn, single-minded individuals invariably triumphs over the passive indifference of the masses. And that's what makes them so successful. If, for example, the statement like " ugly is beautiful" is repeated over and over again, seemingly infinite amount of times, eventually, despite the obvious fact that it violates the very notion of common sense, the resistance of the listeners will be broken due to sheer psychological fatigue and they will give up and agree even with such a preposterous statement as this. The same thing happens with the ideas preached continuously unaltered by the obsessed intellectual fanatics during their entire lives: sooner or later they will break the resistance of their audience even if what they preach doesn't make any sense. For instance, Plato had been drilling into his listeners and readers heads for sixty years the absurd ideas about the incorporeal and immaterial "good in itself" , "beautiful in itself" , etc., until even the most sceptical of them had finally given in and agreed with him simply because at the end they did not care any more. 369. The so-called Western democracies, while ostensibly proclaiming equal opportunity for all members of their societies to participate in the governing process, have created during their long history a very complex network of institutions and procedures which effectively deprive the greatest majority of exercising it. And , while in a totalitarian state an average man knows for sure that he is powerless, in a democracy he feels , but due to such a sophisticated deception, is never completely certain whether it is really true. 370. How much easier life might have been had everyone talked only about what one really knows. 371. By using the extremely rare nowadays knowledge of the classical languages like Greek, Latin, Hebrew, etc., as the sine qua none to the privilege of not only analysing but simply discussing the Great Classics of Antiquity the modern classical scholars have created and effectively maintain the virtual monopoly in this field, the monopoly jealously and even arrogantly guarded by them to the detriment of many appreciative "lay" readers of the Classical Literature. 372. The survival of any political system depends on having the sufficient segment of population to continue believing (with or without justification) that they have more to gain than to lose by preserving it. From time to time and from place to place the relative size of this segment (and its "bottom line") varies, but the principle remains the same. Therefore, those in power, in order to survive and to maintain their privileged position, have to know, somehow, this magic number and do everything possible to prevent it from falling bellow such "a critical mass". For if it is allowed to happen, nothing could then stop the quickly accelerating deterioration and collapse of the whole system. 373. Men dealing with women (and vice versa) always feel as if some invisible wall separates them from each other. And it seems that the only way this wall can be penetrated ( a pun is not intended) is through sex. But this is only an illusion as millions of men and women, who had tried it and still failed to breach the Wall, have discovered. Moreover, quite often they find themselves to be even more estranged after sex. So, maybe the ancient cultures who kept the genders separated and accepted this Wall as natural were more realistic than we are and thus, hopefully, spared themselves the pain and suffering a question "What do women want?" inevitably leads to. 374. Women, almost instinctively, as the others "females of the species" in the animal world, are always trying to attached themselves to a "dominant male", viz., one who is either the strongest, or the wealthiest, or holds the highest position, or simply the wittiest and the most popular member of any particular social group. And they do it for safety and protection not only from the others, less desirable males, but also from the competing females. 375. The pure ones want everybody to be like them - pure. Their reason is love (and their survival depends on it). The dirty ones want everybody to become like them - dirty. Their reason is hate (and their power based on that). 376. My life is but a chain of experiences turning, as if by magic, into premises from which I'm constantly forced by I don't know what to make the conclusions. 377. For someone like me, who has an instinctive mistrust of any proposition which is not self-evident prima facia and yet presented as such by this or that writer, it is very difficult to read most of the philosophical writings. For they seem to be literally permeated by such propositions, with some of them even being used as the corner stones of their main hypotheses. 378. The crises of overproduction that had been regularly shaking the world economy during the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries and of which the crisis of 1929 was only one, though the most infamous instance, can be considered now, in the view of the environmental disaster the world is facing today, as cruel to Man but, in the long run, beneficial to Nature. For those crises have been preventing, if only for a short time, the mankind from using her natural resources to produce consumer goods in quantities nobody needed. Thus the crises of overproduction had been operating according, if we may say so, to some kind of the restrictive "law" that Nature "had created" to protect itself from the irrational activities of Man. Unfortunately (for Nature at present, but in the long run for Man as well) since the Great Depression of 1929 many artificial tools have been devised by man to interfere with this "law" of Nature, all of them, explicitly or implicitly, designed to keep production going by continuing consumption, even when everybody who could had already bought everything he needed. And while these artificial tools did help the production to go on uninterrupted, and thus kept millions of workers employed, they had a devastating impact on Nature, whose limited resources continued to be wasted when it was not necessary for sustaining human existence, which is the most that Nature owes to Man. 379.Some of us are never able to fully recover from the trauma of childhood upbringing , which , in retrospect, seems to have been designed primarily to break every bone of a child's spirit and ,unfortunately for many of us, has succeeded in doing that. 380. Though, allegedly, everybody is looking for truth (for it seems to be an almost universal claim), in reality, we are all just seeking the justification of our truth, the proof that we are right. As a result, it is, psychologically, very difficult for any one to accept anything that contradicts one's version of truth. 381. Most of us sooner or later realize that we cannot, for whatever reason, change and become what we, rightly or wrongly, perceive to be a desirable ideal. To reconcile ourselves with this failure and to alleviate the disappointment it produces, we, instead of continuing stubbornly to pursue an unattainable ideal, change an ideal itself and choose, of course, the one which is the easiest for us to reach - we proclaim what we already are to be the ideal. Some, the most self-centred and self-assured ones, even use it as a point of departure. But then they have to convince others (spending, sometimes, their entire lives doing so) to accept it as true. 382. Listening to some Jewish humorists and comedians, whose sole purpose of writing or being on stage seems to be to laugh at, or even to viciously ridicule everything "Jewish" (trying, apparently, to ingratiate themselves with largely anti-Semitic audience), one is moved to wonder if, in another time and other circumstances, they would have also laughed... all the way to the gas chambers? 383.Our prejudices are much stronger than our convictions. For while the first are the product and expression of emotions, the second are the result of reasoning. But as perception always precedes understanding, so feelings and emotions precede reasoning in the process of one's personal development. Thus, the prejudices, which are, again, produced by emotions, are acquired earlier in life than convictions, which are the outcome of reasoning and it takes a lot of living for the power of reasoning to reach its full maturity. Thus, being older in time, the prejudices are more deeply embedded in our psyche and that much more difficult to erase or to change. Also, reasoning, being by its very nature a manifestation of the universal, could be appealed to and relied upon to change one's convictions. But the language of emotions is highly individual, which makes communication of feelings difficult, especially when attempts are being made to convince others to feel any different than they already do. Again, using the language as a metaphor, the prejudices can be compared to a mother tongue, which we learn easily without thinking in the early childhood, while the convictions will always remain a "foreign language", no matter how well we mastered it. One could learn and unlearn several foreign languages, but the mother tongue is the only one that stays always with us. That's why even the most progressively thinking and "politically correct" individuals are not completely immune to the incurable disease of the most vicious prejudices, this beast of hate and injustice rising its ugly head often against their will. To suppress these base and primitive emotions, lurking in the depth of out subconsciousness, requires constant vigilance and never ending struggle with ourselves. 384. A gentle person cannot act viciously even if he knows that, under the circumstances, this is the only right thing to do. And, vice versa, a vicious person, as a rule, cannot act gently even if he is convinced that, in a given situation, he has no other choice. The very nature of each personality takes over and overrides the knowledge and conviction that contradicts it. The amount of psychological energy which has to be spent to overcome the natural inclinations is too great for any human being to possess it continuously and at all times. 385. The only way to be if not loved but, at least, tolerated by everybody is by being a total failure. 386. Contrary to the popular mythology, America is not a melting pot of diversities but has always been and still is a pressure-cooker of conformity. |
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