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| QUOTATIONS 874-892 |
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| 874. The "production and distribution" of truth must be the most unprofitable of all human pursuits. For not only very few are willing "to buy" the truth, but even if it is offered for free, the overwhelming majority wouldn't take it. The "truth-peddling" must also be the most thankless and even hazardous vocation. For truth more often than not is but an intrusion of reality into the personal world of illusions, phantasy and dreams. No wonder then, that it is treated by all as a "bad news", and the fate of the messenger of "bad news" is all too familiar to everybody. 875. "No" definitely means "no". Moreover, both sexes are equally entitled to use such a categorical and uncompromising expression to defend one's personal integrity and dignity, and consequently have to respect the absolute and unequivocal right of the other side to say it too, i.e. the right of a woman to refuse man's stubborn, despite being unwelcome, sexual demands, and equally valid right of a man to resist the persistent attempts by a woman to always have her way in other personal and domestic matters. 876. Men will forever be subjected to manipulation and domination by the very women they try to relate to not just as the "sex objects", but as the human beings like themselves. For on the "levelled playing fields" which this gender equality produces, women are infinitely more skilful and sophisticated players in the game of relationships than men are. On their part, the majority of women would usually repay such men's "magnanimity" with the more or less disguised contempt or sometimes even with the outright scorn, as the powerful are wont to display toward the weak. On the other hand, against the men who see them as nothing but the sexual objects, the women are not only essentially powerless but, paradoxically, attracted to such men. Furthermore, as far as men are concerned, treating women simply as the sex objects makes men fell being in control and gives them a sense of freedom from manipulation. They sense the first intuitively, and learn the latter by experience, that this is the only way they can win the war of sexes. Thus, the so-called male chauvinism is often but a protective armour the men put on to fight this endless battle. 877. It is better to carry an umbrella when it doesn't rain, than not to have when it does. 878. I suspect that male's ageless obsession with the fast moving means of transportation, like horses and chariots, boats and ships, trains and cars, aeroplanes and rockets, etc. has something to do with man's equally perennial urge to escape as fast and as far as possible the so-called "man's duties and responsibilities". 879. While Success feels mostly self-explanatory and seldom needs farther justification but itself, Failure is forever looking for its cause. 880. There is no great mystery about people. Sufficient time and attention given, you get what you see and what you see is what you get. And if you are getting nothing or next to nothing, then that's all there is. No more. Don't blame yourself, and don't waste your time trying to discover some great story, some exciting qualities, some hidden treasures. Because there are none, and the veil of mystery is but a curtain with an empty stage behind it. Unless, of course, you are looking for dirty little or not so little secrets, which most of us have and do our darnedest to hide. But those do not qualify as mystery, for they are as common as dirt, and as predictable as day and night. 881.How strange and how conventional, how paradoxical and how consistent, how contradictory and how agreeable, how human it is to sense, as most people uncomfortably do, or to be fully aware of, as few painfully are, that our words forever fail us to express what we feel or think, and yet, despite the realization of this frustrating fact, never to stop, but on the contrary to be forced to try again and again to finally succeed in overcoming the loneliness inherent in this deficiency of communicating ourselves to the others. 882. If one considers for a moment that the essential, the crucial feature of a religious cult is the absolute and unquestioning obedience (not only in the matter of beliefs, but even in the most mundane aspects of daily life) of its members to the cult's leader, then it is no wonder that a lot of cults' members are the people with above the average level of formal education, i.e. in possession of diplomas and degrees conferred on them upon completion of the requisite studies by the various institutions of society's sanctioned traditional learning, like schools, colleges, universities, etc. For the underlying foundation of all such institutions is the same kind of obedience of a student to the will and knowledge of a teacher. The last thing these educational establishments want to encourage in a student is independent thinking - one succeeds in them only by following the rules and opinions of those in power - the teachers. Consequently, by substituting a cult leader or a guru for a teacher, the essential feature of the relationship does not change, the basic format stays the same, and it is easier to make one who used to obey a teacher or a parent to obey a guru or a cult leader. It is hard to imagine that the disruptive and disobedient children who consistently defy the authority of teachers and parents or, especially, school dropouts who ultimately reject the very idea of formal education would voluntary surrender their will to anybody latter in life. In the view of the above, it also becomes clear why nowadays we witness such a proliferation of various cults, each one of them centred around a charismatic and tyrannical leader. It is precisely because of the unprecedented in history spread of formal schooling that produces the kind of obedient people which are the stuff the cults are made of. Finally, I don't think it would be a too far-fetched inference to connect the vaunted German education system, which had produced so many excellent engineers and scientists, with the production also of the kind of people who not only willingly but enthusiastically, even passionately succumbed to the "terrible attraction" of Hitler - Der Fuhrer(The Leader), who, by the way, (see Mein Kampf, 1925) never made a secret of his desire to be the absolute and supreme ruler of Germany and considered it to be one of the best qualities of the German people their ability to unquestioningly obey such a leader (and alleged inability of Jews to submit to the authority as one of the worst traits in their racial character). At this point, I feel compelled, almost unavoidably, to make a slight digression. As I mentioned above, as early as 1925 in Mein Kampf - the mixture of autobiography and political manifesto (not a surprising combination for a man, who saw himself as destined to change the history of mankind - the sure sign of maniacally messianic personality) Hitler unequivocally stated his views on the overwhelming advantage the rule by a single and absolute leader has over democratic form of government. The very important part of Mein Kampf , the part which is often overlooked and neglected, being overshadowed by Hitler's antisemitic ravings and expansionary theories, is its rather skilful critique of the Weimar Republic's inept and widely despised democratic institutions, the critique which Hitler used to prove that democracy wouldn't work in Germany and what it needs is a Fuhrer - the supreme leader. It is only by understanding this obsession with the idea of Dictatorship and the total submission of the whole nation to one man, who embodied this idea, the submission which had made Nazi Germany to all intent and purpose a nation-wide cult, one can understand how The Holocaust could have happened. For the German people were, in general, no more antisemitic than the other European nations, certainly no more than the Poles or the French, and Hitler was neither the first nor the last politician afflicted with the seemingly incurable disease of antisemitism. For, to paraphrase Jesus Christ, "the anti-Semites will always be with us". What made the terrible difference, what made the extermination camps possible was the absolute power this particular anti-Semite possessed and was able, as if driven by the madness of consistency, to use it as the means to his ideological end in the implementation of the Final Solution, and to do it without not so much as a squeak from his totally obedient subjects. Yes, Power does corrupt and not only those in position of power, but also and to the same degree those who are subjected and submissive to it. This is the most important lesson to be learned from the big cult, like Nazi Germany, to the small one like Branch Davidian in the USA, and all the intermediates in between - they all lead to and eventually end up in a bloodshed. And the only thing which still remains in question is whether Humanity as a whole and not just few enlightened individuals is willing and able to learn anything from its slavish and bloody past. 883. Don't you think that telling not to put all his eggs in one basket to someone who has only one egg is somewhat redundant? 884. As a "first generation" immigrant, I have to suffer from the split identity disorder (the common immigrant's malady which goes with the territory, so to speak) without having a luxury, which the "second generation" seems to be overindulging in, "to look back in anger" blaming the parents for the mess it is in. But I have nobody to blame, for before buying the one-way ticket into unknown, I should have spent more time thinking about the meaning of the saying that "between two stools one goes to the ground". And isn't it what the immigration is all about - the desperate attempt to sit simultaneously on two stools with the predictable results, alas? I, personally, have spent the last 20 years waging an uphill battle to defy this proverbial wisdom. Whether I gloriously succeeded or miserably failed is for the others to pass the verdict, me being emotionally unbalanced and high-strung most of the times and therefore not in the best conditions to judge objectively myself. 885. The parents of the "second generation" Canadians often find themselves in an unenviable situation of a double jeopardy. For they not only have to endure the "generation gap", this universal scourge of parents everywhere, but also must suffer from their particular predicament - "the immigration gap", since their children, eager to assimilate as soon as possible, view the parents as the burdensome impediment and embarrassing liability. 886. It had been proven beyond the reasonable doubt by the thousands of years of human experience that there is no better building material in nature to bridge the generation gap between an old man and a young woman than money. 887. One never lives fully either in body or in spirit. It is always the different combinations of both, in which body and spirit are seldom in equilibrium. The pendulum, the "I", the "ego" perpetually swings between the two, attracted as if by magnets now to one side, now to another. Sometimes the body prevails, the other time it is the spirit that takes over. It all depends on the circumstances of the moment, or/and one's disposition and constitution. As for myself, I was never physically healthy enough to allow my body to have a full life. Nay, even a half-full. My spirit, or rather my intellect, took always the lion share of my being. For a being is what they call nowadays "zero sum game", and what is subtracted from the body is added to the spirit and vice versa. Sooner or later, everyone has to discover, both for his own and those around him sake, which side in his particular case is predominant and to learn to live with, and to make the best out of it. 888.Why is it that an Englishman once assaulted by a black concludes that all Blacks are violent, or once cheated by a jew believes that all Jews are dishonest, and yet, never makes such sweeping generalizations upon being assaulted and cheated by his fellow Englishmen, and not just once but many times over? Is it because by doing this he would, by implication, accuse himself of being violent and dishonest? And who is willing to do this? 889.In order to combat racism, chauvinism, xenophobia, jingoism, etc. which are but the different names to describe the essentially similar phenomena of malicious prejudice, i.e. dislike or even extreme hate of somebody not for what he actually does, but for all those terrible things he is allegedly capable of doing and is inevitably bound to do, it has to be established first of all, and with the utmost possible at the present time degree of certainty, whether this seemingly timeless and universal pattern of human behaviour is "natural", that is biologically programmed into the human species, or "unnatural", being the product of historical development of human society. Now, if racism is "natural", then it's a part of Life and can only be eliminated with life itself. What we should do in this case is try to alleviate as much as possible its most pernicious symptoms and manifestations, and to learn to live and cope with the rest, as if it were a force of nature, like a hurricane or an earth quake. On the other hand, if racism is "unnatural", but man-made so to speak, then its historical, political, economical, social, etc. causes have to be found, for until this is addressed any solution will be partial (and short lived) at best. And once the causes of racism are ascertained to be true ones, the utmost efforts shall be applied by the whole society (for everybody is effected by it) to eradicate them one by one and step by step, depending on the practical considerations of the moment, until they are totally destroyed. Personally, I'm inclined to think that the "prejudicial" mode of perception is but a survival mechanism, and as such must be considered as an innate trait of any biological organism, the trait which has achieved in human species its highest degree of development. The way this mechanism functions is aptly summarized in the proverb "Once bitten twice shy", which describes exactly how the process of generalization works. For all our ideas about the world without fall more or less into the category of "premature generalizations", since in order to survive we have to arrive at them as fast as possible. There is no time, ordinarily, to gather sufficient data of numerous particulars, for life seldom gives us a second chance. It is better to err on the safe side then wait until complete certainty is achieved. For again, it must be absolutely crucial for our survival to make "hasty" generalizations about the thing which can potentially harm us, no matter how remote the possibility of this seems at the moment. All things considered, these prejudicial tendencies serve us most of the times rather well, and the mistakes made because of them are more often harmful to others than to us. It is also worth mentioning, that to speed up this vital process of generalization, we rely heavily on the experience and testimonies of others, often without questioning their veracity, all in order to save time and be prepared for some possible danger that could face us any moment soon. Now, from all that has been said above, it is clear that the best and, perhaps, the only way to alleviate, if not to eradicate the horrible consequences of racism, chauvinism, xenophobia, jingoism, etc., lies in weakening those natural tendencies of the hasty generalization, which are at the roots of our prejudices, by providing as safe environment as possible for each and every individual and thus drastically reducing the necessity to protect oneself by the means of premature and therefore inevitably prejudicial generalizations. Finally, to return as an afterthought to this widely accepted opposition between "natural" and "unnatural", or as it is more often referred to "nature and nurture". I tend to believe that whatever is classified as "nurture", i.e. the influences the family, society, politics, economics, etc., have on the formation of an individual's personality, are all but the secondary causes, the product and extension of the first and primary one - the necessity to survive. As, for example, the different ways family treats and brings up the children in different cultures could be explained as the specific survival strategies developed in a particular culture to successfully respond to its peculiar environment, and then through a successive practice by several generations is begun to be looked at as a norm. But because those secondary causes are usually removed by several degrees from the primary one, the illusion of their separate distinctness is created and believed, when in fact, the difference between the "natural" and " nurturing" causes of human behaviour is not essential but superficial, and the so-called "nurture" can always be traced back to "nature". 890. Words help us to discover truth. The truth helps us to find the words. 891. Some people are so self-hypnotized by their own words, ideas and theories that, as unfortunate as it is, the only thing that can wake them up to reality is a personal tragedy. 892. The fiction writers, at least the best of them, must be truly exceptional people. For they seem to have this amazing ability not only to penetrate and expose the minutest details and nuances of a single individual's life, but also to soar high enough above it to give all of us the opportunity of a much larger view of Life in all its totality. By comparison, the rest of us not only do not possess this unique combination of such opposite abilities, but seldom enjoy either of them separately. |
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