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Tag: ethics

  • Theme:

    Humor and Efficiency (Right & Left Brain / Open & Closed mind)

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    1–2 minutes

    To be creative you must be open, which means to be humorous (seeing the odd angle) requires an open disposition. Once you have made a decision you must be efficient: practical, linear path making.

    To do both at once is to accomplish nothing: procrastination or chaos is self-defeat.

    Knowing when to release from the left brain impulse of rationality and invoke the holistic story-telling flow of the right brain -closed vs open- is how even the mediocre can transcend.

    To be the best, you become a conductor of groups of people, opening them and then focusing on them, letting them dream, and then motivating them to produce.

  • Theme:

    naivety as virtue

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    1–2 minutes

    Our naivety can be a virtue.

    When wisdom accepts brutality and evil out of an overly weary and worldly common sense, aspirational hope is patronized.

    This brand of wisdom accepts the unacceptable, promoting a moral deficiency of stagnation.

  • Theme:

    Predators and parasites

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    1–2 minutes

    Some people are an annoyance: they will suck off of you and bother you and steal your energy and resources. These people have no desire to become self-sustaining but do not actively intend harm.

    The acceptance of the parasite allows a space for the camouflaged predator to approach. The predator is self-sustaining by ruining you completely.

    Some people allow the parasite, which opens them up (softens them) to the predator. Others maintain a vigilant stance against any suffering by refusing empathy, which protects them against future predation.

    The difficulty is judging people: beyond the parasites and predators, a third option is a person who requires a boost before weening themselves into self-sustaining behavior.

  • Theme:

    On being “right”

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    1–2 minutes

    Thinking you are right is the fastest way to enter a power struggle.

    Once in a power struggle, there’s always a winner or loser. Or one party decides passive-aggressively to be magnanimous while holding on to a grudge.

    Your assuredness cannot help but become an interpersonal conflict, which means it was never about converting or enlightening people but about alienating them.

  • Theme:

    Morality vs Metaphysics; classical vs modern

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    1–2 minutes

    Modern sensibility is metaphysical, while classical is moral, according to Albert Camus.

    Metaphysics is asking “what is” – such as what is being, or perception- while morality is the ethical consideration of the right or good. Modernity is a recursive evaluative question rather than a value judgement.

    All of that confusion to say: we value the question over values.

  • Theme:

    Being right is pointless

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    1–2 minutes

    People attempt to be correct. By winning the game, you gain assurance that your viewpoint is correct, and you establish ego legitimacy or intellectual superiority: you become righteous.

    The scariest thing is somebody clever and self-assured, convinced they are right. This method of engagement abandons empathy or curiosity, instead equating “rightness” with domination.

  • Theme:

    leisure: the highest human virtue

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    1–2 minutes

    Aristotle suggests the highest human virtue is leisure.
    Not producing (or consuming) is when you can self-reflect and pontificate.
    Every other action, such as war, politics, or vacation, serves some other function.

    The real question is: if we have forgotten how to serve ourselves, we must always serve a function.

    {from Oliver Burkeman, “4,000 weeks” }

  • Theme:

    The proximity trap of sin

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    1–2 minutes

    To sin is to "miss the mark," and the consequence of sin is the distance from God.

    However, in God’s shadow, the close proximity creates hell.

    The further we wander, the more extravagantly we "miss the mark," and the freer we become by escaping the gravity of the goal. The mark becomes impossible to hit at some magical distance, thus irrelevant.

  • Theme:

    embalmed in injustice

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    1–2 minutes

    It is easy to succumb to justice: dadgummit, we are in the right. However, being "right" prevents you from living fully.
    There is definitely a type of vital energy in rage, but it is a narrow range of living: a trap of intensity that drowns joy.
    Within this trap, we live in a state of strained repetition: embalmed in injustice.

    “He was embalmed no longer in injustice.” Phillip Roth, The Human Stain

  • Theme:

    Wrong in the name of right

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    1–2 minutes

    Doing wrong in the name of right seems obviously wrong. Virtue can shift into justice, and shade into justification.

    But how do you know what is right?

    The right is known because it endures, while means/ends instrumentalization contradicts itself.