So much of what people call "conviction" is actually a willful disregard for facts that might change their minds. It's dangerous because conviction feels like a good attribute, while its opposite—being wishy-washy—makes you feel and sound like you don't know what's going on.
The strategy of having strong beliefs, weakly held, is often helpful.
When I was young, my dad gave me a paperweight that read, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" That's what I was thinking about when Daniel and I wrote, "We will be Number One in the world," on a cocktail napkin. . . .
Most of the chefs on the 50 Best list had made their impact by focusing on innovation, on what needed to change. But as I thought about the impact I wanted to make, I focused on the one thing that wouldn't. Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.
Daniel's food was extraordinary; he was undeniably one of the best chefs in the world. So if we could become a restaurant focused passionately, intentionally, wholeheartedly, on connection and graciousness—on giving both the people on our team and the people we served a sense of belonging—then we'd have a real shot at greatness.
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
The concept of obligations takes precedence over that of rights, which are subordinate and relative to it. A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds. The successful fulfilment of a right comes not from the person who possesses it, but from others who recognize that they have an obligation towards that person. The obligation takes effect once it is recognized. If an obligation is not recognized by anyone, it loses nothing of the plentitude of its being. But a right that is not recognized by anyone amounts to very little.
-Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
This should be interesting.
Been reading that the idea of a 50-year mortgage is being bandied about. Lots of commentary about why this is a horrible idea. The amount of extra interest the home buyer would pay—if they kept the mortgage for all fifty years—over a more traditional loan is staggering. But, while it is not for everyone, it could have its uses. It is essentially an interest-only loan. If your intent is to only live in a place for a few years, and you believe housing prices will still be inflating, then it could be a very viable option. Just be careful to avoid any pre-payment penalties. It is certainly not a panacea for the affordability problems we are currently facing.
Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.
Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.
Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.
I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.
I wish all who read this a very happy Thanksgiving. Yes, even the jerks; it’s never too late to change. Remember to thank America for maximizing your opportunities. But it is – inevitably – capricious and sometimes venal in distributing its rewards.
Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.
Warren Buffett, from his last annual letter
They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home.
This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore—where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere—is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can't help but be: a part of our world.
Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Humanity's capacity to invent solutions to its problems and to identify how to make things better has proven to be far more powerful than all of its problems combined.
-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order
Dear Kit,
I was so pleased to get your letter of November 12th a few minutes ago. As you can see from the length of time it took to get across that our mail has been almost nil for the past month or so. Right now the APO is specializing in clearing our Christmas boxes, so the letter mail is more or less overlooked. This sort of puts us between the dive and the deep - for we want our boxes and yet honestly think the letters ease the loneliness and homesickness that is so deep in our hearts. . . .
When Terry told me about the new baby I was happy as anything for both of you. And I can easily understand you joy and eagerness for the little boy or girl to round out your lovely trio.
I certainly can understand the worries of people about what kind of world the baby will be brought into. The life you and Terry and I and everyone else are living just now is certainly a miserable one and far from pleasant. Yet this much I know, the people of all countries will see to it that when this hell on earth is finished we will see a life and live a life that will be worthy of human beings and Christians. I know that even on my lowest and bluest days I have put into combat during the past two years never have I doubted that once the war was over we could manage to pull the strings of our lives together and forget all we have had to put up with. No one can ever realize just how precious and pleasant and hopeful life can be until it is almost snatched away. I have had one or two close calls that left me so scared I didn't realize how lucky I was. Then I knew so deep within my heart that it almost hurt that even in the midst of the most terrible war man has known just to live and be with people is worth all the hurts and agony man inflicts on man.
No Kit, a little child brought into the world at such a time as this is probably more fortunate than ever.
I seldom thought about this before I went into combat, but one begins to get a far different slant on all that life means. If you could see what these fellows go through for each other, how much each one depends on his buddy simply for his life, then you could know and appreciate all this talk of mine. Very few GIs are sentimental enough to talk about things like this and yet the American boy overseas is the most sentimental guy in the world.
Somehow out of all this madness and blindness the people of the world will find the true way of life as Christ taught so long ago. No matter how it may seem to us at the moment, there are the ever encircling arms of God to lead us through the blindness into the light. Something I saw before I went into the service comes back to me now—it runs on this order:
Kit, this must sound very jumbled and rather incoherent but I have been grasping for words as I write. How I wish I might be sitting with you and Terry. I know so well that it would be far easier to talk to you about this and then I could get across what is really in my heart and mind.
There is so much to live for and so many pleasant things to do for and with close friends, that it honestly hurts to be here.
But then two years of combat makes a man sentimental even though there is seemingly nothing but cynicism and bitterness in his heart. . . .
With my best wishes and love to each of you for a Merry Christmas!
Affectionately,
Dan
This is part of a letter my Dad wrote to a dear friend. Despite the heading, he was probably in Belgium, not Germany. The Battle of the Bulge started three days after he wrote this letter, and he participated in said battle. He enlisted, at age 29, shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was part of the Ninth Infantry that chased Rommel across Africa, fought in Sicily, then landed in Cherbourg on D-Day +3. He entered Germany and then was sent back home in early March of 1945, just before the crossing of the Remagen Bridge. As I grew up, Dad would NEVER talk about the war. It was only after returning from the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day at Normandy that he said he had a collection of old letters and offered me the chance to read them. Quite the gift from a father to a son. He died of congestive heart failure at age 84. I miss him still.
A salute to the veterans.
A mark of wisdom isn’t choosing quality over quantity or vice versa. It’s recognising that coffee and political philosophy require excellence, while daily steps and moments of stillness require accumulation.
Master this distinction and build a life that’s well-crafted and abundant; quality where it counts, quantity where it compounds. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is more.
Know the difference. Go be human.
The dominant modern belief is that the soundest foundation of peace would be universal prosperity. One may look in vain for historical evidence that the rich have regularly been more peaceful than the poor . . .
-E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
The war against terrorism is not, strictly speaking, a war against nations, even though it has already involved international war in Afghanistan and presidential threats against other nations. This is a war against "the embittered few"—"thousands of trained terrorists"—who are "at large" among many thousands, and even millions of others who are, in the language of this document, "innocents," and thus deserving of our protection.
Hunting these terrorists down will be like combing lice out of a head of hair. Unless we are willing to kill innocents in order to kill the guilty—unless we are willing to blow our neighbor's head off, or blow our own head off, to get rid of the lice—the need to be lethal will be impeded constantly by the need to be careful. Because of the inherent difficulties and because we must suppose a new supply of villains to be always in the making, we can expect the war on terrorism to be more or less endless, endlessly costly and endlessly supportive of a thriving bureaucracy.
-Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers, 2003, containing the essay, A Citizen's Response
We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them. The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves. For intractable nature is both around and within us. The exasperating "life" which is at once loveable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and a curse, is also the life or our own bodies.
-Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
The constituent parts of the state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities. Otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will of a prevailing power.
-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Years ago, living as I then was in Connemara, I moved house. It was all of five or six weeks later that I had reason to open a cupboard in the kitchen. On a shelf of it were some potatoes that the previous occupant had left behind. Drawing only upon their own energies, these tubers had sprouted so naturally and so self-sacrificially as it were that now they were withered and shriveled, and cut off as they were from soil and sun, the sprouts were long and ghostly, almost transparent.
Desperately, they needed inhumation.
Desperately also, does modern humanity need to find ways, ritual ways, of living and expressing its affinity with nature. With Stoics, I believe that there is a sumpatheia ton hollon, a universal sympathy, that runs through all things, that connects all things to all things, and it would I believe be good for all things, including ourselves, if we lived from that sympathy.
In this we might need a little of what Karl Marx was pleased to call the idiocy of rural life.
-John Moriarty, Dreamtime
Here then is a Peripatetic who is standing his ground, a man on a walkabout without real wanderlust, a man who is, in the Borgesian formula, the perfect reader - that is to say, someone who has re-read the same passage endlessly, someone who is prepared to privilege a quorum of old religious scrolls over the lazy, aphasic multitude of brisk paperback bulletins in our three-second timespan culture . . . There is something magnificent about his single-minded oppositional stance in our deconsecrated world; and to watch him perform his rain-dance on the astroturf is to witness an ecumenical invocation of all human spiritual authority.
-Aidan Carl Mathews, from his review of Moriarty's Dreamtime
.................. a new sculpture, of Ella Baker, is up at the OSU-N campus:
I use the term radical in its original meaning–getting down to and understanding the root cause.
President Trump argues that Senate Majority Leader John Thune should use the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster and get the government open again. I’d argue that you should be careful what you ask for and maybe Trump should acquaint himself with the Chesterton’s Fence theory.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Thing, Chapter 4
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
-Robert Frost, Mending Wall
More than an ideological shift, it’s important to have a candidate who taps into public disdain for politics-as-usual. Even if they can project a more moderate image, this is the ingredient that continues to elude the current crop of Democrats.
It’s not just that Democrats have gotten too liberal. It’s that by opposing Trump on all fronts, they’ve been tricked into adopting a posture of defending the elite norms and institutions Trump attacks. And they’ve lost a focus on regular people in the process.
-Patrick Ruffini, from this edition
Is that the point of philosophy? To read interesting stories and lessons to feel smarter? To impress friends? No.
The point of philosophy is to make you a better person. To make
your life better. And through that, to lift up the lives of the people around
you.
Reliability is magnetic because humans are hardwired to avoid
risk, so once you prove yourself trustworthy and reliable, you become the
default choice for opportunities without ever asking for them.
.......................................of half of our housing affordability issues too:
When shop classes were
tossed, so too went a number of practical skills related to organizing,
measuring, and safety; skills that many of us still use when making minor home
repairs.
The omission of such
classes is especially irritating as many of the students who went on to college
would have been wealthier and happier had they instead gone to trade schools.
-Michael Wade, from this episode
Posts
All Comments
