[lit-ideas] Re: Aaaaaargh

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:33:30 -0500

AA:
>> 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. <<

Then maybe you should stop promoting them and argue them.  

Contrary to your low estimation of the members of this list, you're not the 
only one here who is horrified by the cruelty and inhumanity of mankind.  All 
of us (I dare say 'all') know quite well the litany of human failures that you 
chant daily as though you were a lone voice crying in the wilderness.  All of 
us at one time or another have been stymied in our faith in humanity by 
atrocities such as Darfur, Iraq, 9/11, Rwanda, the Holocaust, the World Wars 
and all those that preceded them, and on and on, but most of us are able to 
step back and regain our perspective and continue on knowing that what drives 
the world is the Energy "that holds up Mountains", that "steers the braiding 
flights of birds" and not the promotion of some social nostrums.

Enough.  I'm getting mean and I don't like to be mean.  I'm leaving this thread 
while I still like myself some.

Mike Geary.  







  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Andy Amago 
  To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 1:41 PM
  Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Aaaaaargh


   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.  

   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 th e 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.

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