Learning that life should or shouldn't be full of something is useless. So is philosophy useless except, sometimes, for describing. Ideas like weak/strong are useless. Giving humans in training what they need, such as, for starters, seeing them human enough not to hit them, is the answer. And that's the very thing that nearly everybody fights tooth and nail against. I tell ya, after promoting ideas such as good parenting and promoting looking at unconscious drives as the issue that makes the world go round, and doing it for years, and being all but waterboarded for it, and not having the ideas entertained even in the abstract, there's no question but that there is no hope for humanity. Much easier to just bring it on, as Bush said. I know, but I don't care. Anymore. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Geary To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: 9/28/2006 2:06:11 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Aaaaaargh AA: > You don't know and you don't care. Thanks for making that clear. Well, I do care (in my way), but I don't know. Neither do you. Neither does anyone -- not definitively. We create narratives to make sense of the world and we call it History, and some are quite learned narratives, but who can explain why they themselves do anything they do? You posit "bad parenting" as the cause of all the evil in the world. And I agree that "bad parenting" often produces people full of anger and hate and resentment -- but not always -- and I certainly don't believe that THAT explains the world. We are but fancy, naked apes. We come into the world knowing only one thing -- how to suckle. All else is learned. Including the notion that life should not be filled with violence and strife. Even this notion should be suspect though. As indeed all notions must be, lacking God's imprimatur. Perhaps this notion is but the propaganda of the weak, of those kept alive by the strong. Love, tenderness, kindness -- could these be simply the virtues of losers? Who's to say? Maybe Nietzsche and Hitler and Bush are right, maybe in the long run destiny belongs to those who are strong enough to crush the weak and stamp out those who would nourish 'niceness'. Maybe those whom you think of as good are dragging humankind down, keeping human progress anchored in sentimentality, delaying the dawn of Strong Mankind. That's always a possibility, you know. Perhaps your "bad parents" know a truth that you are ignorant of in your "wouldn't it be nice" Weltanschauung. Think, Irene, what we could achieve if we could just rid ourselves of those who drain our resources to no end but their own whiny, dependent survival. So, no. I don't know. I just go according to the Weltanschauung I've inherited. I don't care that I might be wrong. Don't care that the Hobbesian epithet: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" might truly be the case of human existence because (1) I can't do anything about it if it is, (2) I've found too much solidarity, too much wealth of wonder, such astonishing kindness, and overwhelming intelligence to ever be tempted to believe that Hobbesianism could possibly be the case of the world. However, it does seem a bit short to me, but I'm sure my grandkids will say: "He lived a long life." I hate the young. Mike Geary Memphis I don't know, but I do care.