The Experience of Clarity

Introduction Habit is satisfied by maintaining its own inertia, whether by removing an obstacle, by returning from a diversion ... but usually by simply persisting, that is, by doing nothing at all .  An accustomed thought ... a concept upon the screen of consciousness must persist.  An accustomed action too must persist.  A concept and an action that accompany each other do not have to “match up” or “be consistent” – they only need to persist alongside each other as they have persisted before. In sum, for the inertia of a habit to persist , right or wrong, society must remove every obstacle presented. Now, what should happen if the habit-script were a mandate for an action which threatened the inertia of the script itself?  For example, the actualization of a chant for “fearless honesty”?  This inherited (and therefore revered) message sets the stage for a passion play.  The herd receives its Holy Habit, but the chant requires an action which supe...

1 If he remained completely honest about his vices, an otherwise completely vicious creature would at least not be a hypocrite.  In fact, a completely vicious creature is impossible, for he either pays tribute to virtue through his hypocrisy, as La Rochefoucauld said – or he maintains a fearless honesty and is at least incapable of hypocrisy.  Therefore, he is to the sharp eye neither dangerous to morality nor without educational benefit.  On the contrary, it is through him that we see virtue’s invincibility. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

2 There are some of us who are falling and for whom questioning the bottom is an attempt to find a bottom. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

3 One’s own hypocrisy is certain when one plucks out the eye on self-interest.   A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

4 The difference between truth and dogma is that truth does not need to resist an attack. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

5 Those who attack truth can only fail.  Those who protect their presumptions can only fail.  Only one of the two however can align the mind to its reality. Truth is too often a presumption that “gets away with it.”  Where we succeed, we take pride ... in ourselves.   Where we fail , truth wins our deepest respect.   A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

6 I claim that two plus two equals four and another one-ups me with his more optimistic answer of five. Only a pessimist would survive the argument.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

7 When your whole world is built upon a lie, there is an important stage where truth arrives only as the great destroyer. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

8 When a thing is not what I say it is, I tell a lie.  But the word itself is not the thing it designates, in the same sense that the finger pointing to the North is not the North.  In this sense all explanations are not the realities they believe themselves to be, and to “get back” to their source-experience is to sneak forward into another reality.  A thought is a species of expression.  A thought that is its own source-experience is as impossible as to put an apple back on the tree.  One must let those thoughts go and pick a few others off of this new experience.  It is the best we can do.   There is the thought, its source, and its target. These “three” are only a singular misunderstanding.  When one accepts their “separation,” one sees explanations flicker between true and false by the power of their contradiction, as the pieces take themselves briefly for one another.  What happens? Reality precedes cognitive projection...

9 It is a morality hard enough for reality only if it is of and for that reality. What the senses cut up and take in, cognition returns in its own form.  The positive function of cognitive truths is to align the mind to its reality, not to pass themselves off as reality itself — for example, not as air-vibrations provoking a conditioned response of believing itself not to be such.  To fulfill its positive function, Truth forever compromises itself for the realization of the moralist.  If not, then the morality itself is the original sin. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

10 One is often guilty of cynicism because one had a share in the villain's cruelty by exposing the victim to his own duping. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

11 Wherever the beauty in the lie is its truthfulness, its preachers will cultivate cynics.  These ugly ones indulge the power to shock from under the cloak of integrity. The herd circles and tightens in defense.  The lie becomes stronger, and strength is beautiful. The sheep do their part.  Weakness comes with the grip of its own insecurity.  They grip their answer with greater strength when it exists to do away with the question that atomizes them into the real.  Too frightened to investigate ... ignorance is a weakness so immovable it refutes itself in behavior as a kind of strength after all.  Reality steps upon the resilient presumptions of man, and error rises up with the human power to deny it.  The cynic does his part.  He presents the rude truth.  The flock circles and tightens in defense.  The lie actually becomes stronger in proportion to its insecure relation to its own source.  And strength among one’s own is...

12 Is it really pessimistic to deconstruct all mentalisms that obscure one’s own comprehension?  I suppose it could be, but mostly for those whose tender presumptions are so vulnerable that their thoughts exist to pre-empt other, more relevant thoughts, obscuring precisely the reality that makes this evasion possible, and with such an outrageous insecurity and solid ignorance, that thought itself experiences the resistance as a stout courage and unlimited source of mental optimism ... of faith in the anti-real.   A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

13 One should be very careful when denouncing cynicism. It is sometimes how we avoid the pain of taking a hook out of our jaws. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

14 The public sees no difference between a lack of restraint and cynical truth.  But a finer intellect can see this from two angles.  First, the public sees no difference between conventional propriety and Truth, and second, both the lack of restraint and the exposure of self-interest prick the undiscerning in the same spot, in the same way.  This is why today we have one word — “cynicism” — for two very distinct events and how Diogenes’ legacy has doubled its original ambiguity.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

15 We may love our enemies, but not under the same conditions with which we love our friends. A word is a sound designating something.  Where we use one sound for two distinct situations and their respective behavioral reactions, we really should invent another sound.   As it is now, our seeing different behavior under singular labels is what others can only see as our cynical treatment of moral concepts.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

16 Our Nihilism: Self-deconstruction feels very much like self-annihilation — and even appears so much like an attack on morality itself that one can only shrug one's shoulders at the accusation. We cannot waste our time debating others within the realm of body-relations when our own cerebral-effect has not yet understood cause-of-thought. We are still deconstructing thought into machine language.  First things first, or so we’d like it, for consciousness is already a second-stage event, and then in getting lost in herd-thought ... we are not even second -rate thinkers. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

17 Some forms of cynicism are only an attempt to normalize the crisis of an adored authority who has just collapsed into a real human.  If one can secure the real as a vantage point then the figure escapes moral censure.  Just as it really is natural to be without clothing, one can justify his nakedness by appealing to the human in him , and thus recover from communal shame a sense of normalcy after all.  One creates a concept of realism, as a sort of conduit through which respect might continue to flow toward him, until, as is only natural, the very means of its survival in oneself undermines his self-importance — and so cleanly that he condemns one as a cynic and backs up the plumbing.     A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

18 It is possible within the throes of a passionate suffering not only to find alleviation in the realization that it inspires others but to actually leap to other side and enjoy the promotion of one’s status.  If one is talented enough, the drama fools even oneself, serving society well as an inspiration for others in their suffering.  We cannot pity others too much, for then we are either the accomplices in their self-deceit or the dupes of our own.  Nor can we seek to expose or debunk the object of pity, for then society will lose yet another moral agent and set a cynic between itself and its realization. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

19 On telling soft people hard truths: I would not undo what I did ... for only by that act do I know what I know now .  I would not undo that act therefore even though in this new knowledge I vow – cursing myself – never to repeat the error. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism