John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

In the end, everyone who refuses to accept that negative reinforcement must be included in any system of reinforcement designed to mold human beings is a hippie.

Cynicism is one of the ways a “rational” mind revenges itself on the world for not being magical.

The value of all gods is that they are hollow. If they were not, we could not put so much into them.

How often I confuse the psychology of Job with that of battered wives! Wait: perhaps I am not so confused after all.

Glass Shapes that Make Us Drink Too Much

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear.
What deafness may we all not possess?
What senses do we lack that we cannot see
and cannot hear another world all around us?¹

I am endlessly amazed that the most moving religious passages, outside of Ecclesiastes, are found in the Frank Herbert’s invented Orange Catholic Bible.

1. Frank Herbert : Dune : Quotation from the Orange Catholic Bible↩

Kaufmann notes the failures of the common proverb that “powers corrupts”: the causal chain is too much shortened. “It is not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible”, he says. This too can be extended: “power attracts the corruptible, because, knowing that power must bring with it a responsibility that no one sane could bear, we can be sure that those who seek it must be so unencumbered by feelings of duty that they have no worries about such an enormous duty being given to them. Power is only desirable to those who have no sense of duty — and hence those who cannot be trusted with power.”

But since others put off accepting power, power goes time and again into their hands. In history, there are few, if any, Cincinnatis and even fewer Numas.

Each year convinces me more that I am far too concerned about the aesthetic value of my lifestory as a work of pure narrative to ever be lastingly damaged by anything that happens to me.

¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden — respondió Sancho –, no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.¹

Quite possibly the greatest epigram to a work of philosophy ever used.

1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra : Segunda parte del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha : Capítulo XIX↩

We prefer the stories of tragic failures over those of effortless victories.

The traditional vision of utopia is an image of a society that cannot be built using the pieces we have access to: humans, with their inescapable need to construct social hierarchies and their inexorable requirement for sexual exclusivity, cannot create nor live in without destroying a society in which all men love and respect one another.

Given that we accept that such a society is impossible, the task of improving society amounts to something very different: the ideal society is that in which those who can benefit one another are brought together and those who can only harm one another are kept separate.

Incidentally, this is, to my mind, the major purpose of the group-oriented family structure that Huxley’s Island proposes.