They crucified him and the criminals there, one on his right, the other on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” They divided his garments by casting lots. The people stood by and watched. Luke, Chapter 23 I recently had a pint of beer with a friend who […]
″‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.‘” Lewis Carroll Many people expound on terrain theory being a replacement for or […]
The price of greatness is responsibility. Winston Churchill A common sentiment in contemporary society is that rights must be balanced by responsibilities: that it’s all well and good for people to advocate for their rights, but they must also be mindful of their responsibilities. Implicit in this reasoning is the separation of rights and responsibilities […]
Understand what sort of witchery, subtlety, and hypocrisy belong to tyranny. Marcus Aurelius The most essential characteristic of tyranny is hypocrisy. Tyranny is the devolutionary weaponization of structure against that structure’s own evolutionary design. It is the hypocrisy of holding society responsible to the established standards of systems while simultaneously using the systems to betray […]
Thinking is the act of awakening from the waking dream state brought about by conceptualization. The mind conceptualizes how something “is going to work” as a source of vision and coherence, and as a basis for choice, but it’s not that it goes to sleep afterwards, the process of conceptualization is sleep itself, virtually no […]
A moral system valid for all is basically immoral. Friedrich Nietzsche Sam Harris gave a Ted Talk on objective morality some years ago (link included below) which is basically mistaken. Although I can agree in spirit with the sentiment he expresses, namely that there are morally repugnant actors in the world that need to be […]
There are two important ways of understanding society. The first is as a community and the second is as a set of systems; in fact society is simultaneously both of these things. A community is a group of people of any size, and it can be categorized by any number of factors. It can be […]
Postmodern realization is ascendant following the realization that valuation and meaning are not intrinsic to things. This realization is extremely provocative and interesting, and leads one to extensive consideration of the constructed nature of meaning and its many ramifications. One begins to unpack and examine the various valuations the culture uses to recognize intrinsic meaning […]
The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie. William Shakespeare A friend of mine defines rationality based on its etymology in the word ratio, which expresses one thing in terms of another. Rationality, then, is a recognition of proportion, which requires that we see things in terms of the various other things that […]
Two general realizations with respect to meaning exist prior to the postmodern one, the elaboration of which helps to highlight much of what is taking place around us. The first can be referred to as premodern, and the second as modern. In the premodern relationship, meaning is externally constructed, and the realization that there exists […]
The Meta Monocle 