The Happier feeling of freedom within and without Institutional Affinities:



If you believe that you can do what you want, just not the way you want to do it, you will soon “want” what they want.  The need to find affinities with your own culture is that strong. The comfort in the absence of an opposing viewpoint is a normal feeling of freedom.  Defining your cultural inheritance, on your own terms, is more than discomforting. Outlining the bricks and iron bars to your cell increases the feeling of imprisonment at a time when your actual progress toward freedom accelerates. The feeling of freedom found in a successful retreat into conformity is a kind of happiness, but so is each stage in a process toward a more genuine freedom.  No one who endures the sacrifices of the latter envies any type or degree of greater happiness in the former.

Popular posts from this blog

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
Read more
The Ascetic Impulse: We think we deliberately hurt ourselves when it is simply that we do know which version of ourselves will satisfy our needs more fully. We try on a personality as if trying on new clothes. Bizarrely, the self we beat up has heretofore been a complete stranger.
Read more