Commentary

• Who else should we wish to serve, if not ourselves?
• Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back into you.
• There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.
• There are many things I do not wish to know, wisdom sets a limit on knowledge too.
• The fact that science as we practice it today is possible proves that the elementary instinct which protect life have ceased to function.
• We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live with postulation of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes, and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith, nobody could manage to live.
• The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition for it.
• [too much knowledge causes us to] choke on our own reason.
• Creed of nihilism which I see everywhere is the result of too much learning.
• Any truth which threatens life is no truth at all, it is an error.
• Madness is something rare in individuals; but in groups, parties, ages, it is the rule.
• They honored something in themselves when they honored the saint … self mastery and the will to power.
• With morality, the individual can only ascribe value to himself as a function of the herd.
• Man is the cruelest animal.
• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
• You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
• Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose.
• For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.
• All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
• Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
• Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
• Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
• If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.
• Many a man fails to become an original thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.
• Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
• Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.
• Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
• Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.
• Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.
• How did logic come into existence in man’s head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer.
• Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith… include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.
• What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"  Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
• Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring.
• Men have on the whole spoken of love with such emphasis and so idolized it because they have had little of it and have never been allowed to eat their fill of this food: thus it became for them ‘food of the gods’. Let a poet depict a utopia in which there obtains universal love, he will certainly have to describe a painful and ludicrous state of affairs the like of which the earth has never yet seen - everyone worshipped, encumbered and desired, not by one lover, as happens now, but by thousands, indeed by everyone else, as the result of an uncontrollable drive which would then be as greatly execrated and cursed as selfishness had been in former times; and the poets in that state of things - provided that they were left alone long enough to write - would dream of nothing but the happy, loveless past, of divine selfishness, of how it was once possible to be alone, undisturbed, unloved, hated, despised on earth, and whatever else may characterize the utter baseness of the dear animal world in which we live.

Recently, some political commentators have called for the United States government to become more open; however there are some issues that must be raised.

One that immediately comes to mind is the issue of the economy.  It’s well-known that politicians lie about the reality of economic recession because the truth usually would just make the economy worse.  Some concluded that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s honesty caused the United States to sank even further into the Great Depression.

The reason that the United States federal reserve or any other central bank for that matter, is shrouded in secrecy is because if the federal reserve/central bank is to manage the economy, it must insulate itself from this economy, thus preventing its own intentions from feeding back into the market.

The most important issue is that of war.  A country with an open government is at a huge disadvantage when battling against a country with a closed government.  Nothing illustrate this point better than the Israel-Lebannon War of 2006, in which an open democracy like Israel was portryed by the media as incompetent, chaotic and stranggled by bureacracy; in contrast, Hezbolla, a closed theocratic government, by careful manipulation of the press, was portrayed by the media as efficient and organized.

A better title for Jeane Kirkpatrick’s latest and last book Making War To Keep Peace would be Threatening War To Keep Peace.  Of course, if your enemy doesn’t take your threat seriously, then you would be forced to go to war for real.  The effectiveness of a threat depends on how effectively you can convince your enemy of the seriousness of your threat; which is something the United States is struggling to achieve.

William Deresiewicz, a professor at Yale University, concedes that the modern professor is often a “careerist parvenu.” But if so, it is because he has no other choice; the old-boy network that once allocated teaching jobs among a small elite no longer exists. “[T]he old gentility rested on exclusion,” he explains, “and the new rat race is meritocracy in motion.” And he concedes that today’s professor is far more likely to sleep with his students than his pre-1960’s predecessors, but not with the freewheeling abandon that Hollywood imagines.

Deresiewicz is more interesting when he moves from the sociology of the professor to the sociology of the American public—and why Americans seem so hostile to academics. His proposed explanation is fascinating:

Americans’ traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their children. With the U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated.

via Contentions.

When you are on top of a mirror, ups and downs are reversed.