The Experience of Clarity

260 Our public “morality” : The justifications for our inherited customs, which we defend tooth and nail for the sole reason that we have inherited them. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

87 One purchases a religious faith with expenditures of truth; hope, with expenditures of means. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

261 Moral behavior : Not only that which keeps a people together, but also the justification for their staying together. Immoral behavior : Breaking rank, breaking away, becoming incomprehensibly simple ... unforgivably self-possessed. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

88 One cannot overflow with gratitude without implying that one has more than what is sufficient, not less.  It is a contradiction even to ask the question: Why would an overflowing spirit need Hope?  Only the empty spirit needs hope. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

261 Moral behavior : Not only that which keeps a people together, but also the justification for their staying together. Immoral behavior : Breaking rank, breaking away, becoming incomprehensibly simple ... unforgivably self-possessed. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

262 Conceptual Shell games: To be “Moral” in society is to begin with the answer provided.  To be “immoral” is to begin with a question.   That which manages to justify our beginning with questions can only be “amoral.”  It is not “moral” in so far as it begins with the question.  It is not “immoral” in that it has managed to justify such questioning.  Even the actualization of honesty, they would have us believe, must be “amoral.”   It is difficult to imagine a society where it is forbidden to expose the con-artist, and yet that is precisely how its morality survives.  If I expose this actualized honesty as the only possible kernel under their shell of “amorality,” my head bounces around in a basket.  If I palm this kernel of actualized honesty, loudly and boldly shuffling these emptied concepts, “morality” – “immorality” – “amorality,” their heads bob in approval.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** ...

89 Hope is a species of fear.  It increases to the precise degree that our chances for success diminish. One most fervently appeals to Hope when one’s resources are at their lowest, when one is closest to the certainty of hopelessness.  Hope is thus more closely related to hopelessness than to its own proposed object. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

263 Public “Morals” and the Solitary Hunter: A true integrity respects the myriad offspring of existence ... both predator and prey.  It never tries to reconcile two opposing, but necessary arguments.  It maintains an ecological balance that will be destroyed if a species is allowed into an incompatible habitat ... for example, if our highest ambition were to stalk its prey within the meadow of “accepted morality.”  To tame the wilderness ... to make an organic process “moral” ... is to grope with a pale, hairless hand into the very depths of nausea.  When will we understand our world?  The lamb shall never lie with the lion ... although the lion may very well lie with some lamb. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

90 If our dissatisfaction with sufficiency should result in hope, then our hope would be a form of ingratitude.  Conversely, if satisfaction with sufficiency should result in gratitude, then our gratitude would preclude hope. God's creation is either sufficient or insufficient.  If sufficient, any hope is ingratitude.  If insufficient, our hope is extorted by God. God created the world.  God does not deceive.  God, being good, desires our successful outcome.  God being omnipotent, His creation must then be sufficient for us to bring about our own successful outcome. If sufficient, man does not need hope.  A man only hopes to the degree that he doubts the sufficiency of God’s creation.  If he has no doubt, then he does not hope.  The love for and the certainty of the sufficiency of God's creation kills hope. Many claim that the mechanist attempted the murder of their God ... and not that of their hope.   And in actuality, if God's ...

264 Morality : “Concerned with accepted rules and standards of human behavior.” The word, “accepted,” is where every external morality ends, for once we have proven the moral point to ourselves we have nothing more to do with its social “acceptability.” A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

91 Someone who reaches a conviction of hopelessness may only be honest with those same conditions with which the self-deceiver anesthetizes himself with hope.  Usually, however, the hopeless man either has no resources sufficient to his task, believes he has none, or he has not the inner resources to transcend his inherited morality and its condemnation of ambition.  In short, he cannot find within himself the right to appropriate real goals ... self-affirming goals .  To suffer from hopelessness, one must have been incapable of either self-deceit or wicked thoughts. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

265 Amorality: Concerned with testing and measuring the rules and standards of human behavior, as far as is humanly possible, beyond the interests of one’s group and forever holding judgment between peace of mind and the struggle for honesty ... not to mention all of the other conflicting interests dwelling within one’s private laboratory ... “private,” because it is the only laboratory possible. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

92 The Natural Selection of Hope: In a desperate but apparently futile predicament, it is the one who insists upon mechanical efficiency that is the pessimist and the one who cares nothing for it that is the optimist.  And so out of one hundred optimists and an equal number of pessimists, each of the optimists blindly and therefore confidently “ knows what to do.”  In the random scattering of their efforts, each in his stubborn endurance provides a yield for the law of natural selection: one optimist makes it ... while all one hundred pessimists have not so much as lifted a finger, for they have not yet made a distinction between their complacent belief in certainty and their certain ignorance of total conditions ... and dead men telling no tales, the lesson of blind optimism now appears invincible.  Likewise, Hope is often a product of self-deceit: it is a mental escape from an apparently hopeless situation.  It nonetheless has the beneficial function of leavi...

266 Amorality is an attempt not to be “evil,” just as much as it is an attempt to disregard the inherited “good” — yet better understood as the attempt not to be an accident.  Amorality is the attempt at a real self-control.  It is the pursuit and application of those mechanical forces which account for human conduct. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

93 It’s not enough to be cheerful; you also need the flames of hell at your back to really get the respect.  There is nothing more insipid than untested cheerfulness.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

267 The only constancy with the public moral authority is its claim : “The rule is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” The rules themselves however are anything but constant. With private becoming , as I progress from stage to stage I also progress from “rule” to “rule.” The method of becoming has a constancy of its own, something which manifests itself as a “moral principle” ... or at least as a physical tendency toward the private recognitions of higher and higher “moral principles.” A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism