When logic fails and
Law of Effect saves: Reverence for daily opinion is how we take the
conclusions of others as our own premises. We, the civilized, live in a
funhouse: the conclusions we draw from each other often thrill or terrify us without
any real basis or corresponding outcome. Nonetheless, civilization herself is subordinate to nature, fencing off only the awareness of the wild. In immediate distraction, we distance awareness
from real, immediate risks. So while it is true that the examination of each up
and down of daily opinion begins with unstable premises, it is also true that not
using the butterflies in one’s stomach as an
impulse for examination is the only way to have a great time on an
unfinished rollercoaster.
A valuable book, A Human Strategy, aphorism 387
387 A valuable book may be torn to pieces without diminishing the human spirit, just so long as the words have already been read and understood. To feel the loss of the book — at its material destruction, even though one had already digested its contents fully and had aligned oneself toward its overall direction — is evidence that one values the non-human being over human becoming , the static thing over the dynamic process . In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism