Those who attack truth can only fail. Those who protect their presumptions can only fail. Only one of the two however can align the mind to its reality. Truth is too often a presumption that “gets away with it.” Where we succeed, we take pride … in ourselves. Where we fail, truth wins our deepest respect. It is a morality hard enough for reality only if it is of and for that reality. What the senses cut up and take in, cognition returns in its own form. The positive function of cognitive truths is to align the mind to its reality, not to pass themselves off as reality itself – for example, not as air-vibrations provoking a conditioned response of believing itself not to be such. To fulfill its positive function, Truth forever compromises itself for the realization of the moralist. If not, then the morality itself is the original sin.

In society you have to enter first with the answers and are rarely given a chance to present the entire sphere of questions that brought you to the same answers as those who had no questions, but only their inherited ideas.  So, to “set the record straight,” albeit through my own crooked path, I support Equality, Justice, Less Violence and the Democratic system, after having put them to the test and after having explored the dark forest of human behavior which made them necessary.

***

Some forms of cynicism are only an attempt to normalize the crisis of an adored authority who has just collapsed into a real human.  If one can secure the real as a vantage point then the figure escapes moral censure.  Just as it really is natural to be without clothing, one can justify his nakedness by appealing to the human in him, and thus recover from communal shame a sense of normalcy after all.  One creates a concept of realism, as a sort of conduit through which respect might continue to flow toward him, until, as is only natural, the very means of its survival in oneself undermines his self-importance — and so cleanly that he condemns one as a cynic and backs up the plumbing.

***

If he remained completely honest about his vices, an otherwise completely vicious creature would at least not be a hypocrite.  In fact, a completely vicious creature is impossible, for he either pays tribute to virtue through his hypocrisy, as La Rochefoucauld said – or he maintains a fearless honesty and is at least incapable of hypocrisy.  Therefore, he is to the sharp eye neither dangerous to morality nor without educational benefit. On the contrary, it is through him that we see virtue’s invincibility.

***

How can one argue vigorously against an absurdly childish notion without betraying that one actually takes the issue seriously? Had Galileo not recanted, he might thenhave proved himself a sort of religious fanatic after all.

***

Work Ethic, 1) the stamina consequent of the fear of being thought lazy; 2) a moral gymnastic where the inability to throw off the master becomes a virtue again; 3) a unique accounting system where being less greedy amounts to more than one’s contribution to the master’s productivity.

***

Even Cognitive Dissonance: We rarely admit the truth, but we nonetheless alter our direction according to the truth-event and that event’s outcome.  Although we rarely face truth, we frequently back ourselves toward it.

***

If one sails only by light winds, one will rarely capsize, but one will never acquire great skill.  Conversely, if one accepts the greater winds, one must acquire greater skills, and to do this, one might actually navigate toward those seas with the strongest winds. 

***

Fate is an iron string nailed at two ends, with too little slack, and I can only have two high points at the expense of my highest potential. 

***

We lend something instead of making a gift of itbecause we desire it in our possession … but lending something that we want back really ought to go by name of “borrowing.”  The desire itself inverts the transaction so that the other has lent us our dignity.  Then of course he refuses to return the item.  He had lent us our dignity, and now he wants it back.

***

Even a deliberate hypocrisy has obligations.  The threat of its exposure increases in proportion to the height of its ambition and thus limits the hypocrite in a way not unlike a moral principle.

***

Iago’s Gambit: Plain dealing does not appear intelligent.  It is simple arithmetic.  But this fact does not necessarily make intrigue the more intelligent option.  The man who is always scheming suffers from the delusion that he knows all when he only knows much.  He is quite different from that wiser sort which accepts a limit to the intellect.  The evil and the good, the schemer and the provident – in the day-to-day, these are two chess masters who play within a life sized board, and the one counts the pieces and the squares and proceeds shrewdly, confident in his arithmetic, while the other counts the pieces and the squares and trusts that beyond the horizon of his view exist other pieces and other squares: an ignorance for which no additional arithmetic can compensate.  He refuses confidence in calculating the next few moves with the same emphasis that he rejects astrology.  He now appears as simplistic as the simpleton who knows no arithmetic – he appears inferior to the shrewd as well, but his strategy is sound – and precisely where the shrewd has sacrificed probability with his smug belief in the certainty of the next few moves.

Iago plays this sort of chess game with the immediate world against the totality of the prevailing conditions.  He believes in an equation of mechanics which does not include accumulating repetition nor one’s necessary ignorance of the complex forces bearing down on every event.  Thus, he has a certainty … a materialism which is really a complacency: he has a line of reasoning and a description of mechanical effects laid out as if the matter were as simple as a game of billiards.

Time is not on the side of the Iagos and the Macbeths of the world.  Ultimately their method disperses that force which would otherwise have been accumulating in their favor.  They grab hold of a single “key” instance and believe they can then pull a preconceived chain of consequences out of their future, but in doing so they forfeit the advantage of that tendency which overcomes even the best of intentions, which is also to say that it can even overwhelm the hell of one’s necessary ignorance.  A genuine but intelligent good accumulates its force from the tendency of instances; evil believes it can steal an instance out of its own tendency.