Extra
People think that the law or the Constitution will always provide a failsafe, but that is only a piece of paper if the people have no backbone and don't push back.
So if someone starts following me on the street and gets close enough to put their hand in one of my pockets and just continues on that way every morning I leave my house, for weeks or longer, I don't say, "Hey stranger, I'd like to make an argument why you should afford me some privacy tomorrow." I'd likely say, "Wtf person, you're being the kind of weird that gets the police called on people. Step back. Or better yet, go away to somewhere that I can't see you." But hey, this is the Internet, so let's just all stop thinking as though this all has anything to do with real life.
The religion of Islam will be elevated if it will cease to be a political instrument, as had been the case in the past.
Mainstream media sources about most topics are propaganda, plain and simple. You can call it marketing, you can call it public relations, or you can call it propaganda. Same god damn'd thing. The news is simply a good way to know what the opinion leaders want us to think about various things.
Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?
The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments."War Is A Racket" (1935)
The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
You cannot strengthen one by weakening another; and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant.
The idea that privacy can be traded away transactionally is a misrepresentation. Privacy is a choice; depending on who I am interacting with I will withhold certain information about my life.
If someone convinces a friend or family member of the lie that they can trade privacy for services, then my communications with them are compromised without my consent.
This is all about every being's right to choose to be private. The idea that it's okay to impinge this right as long as someone thought of it as a transaction is morally bankrupt.
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
Each new generation of programmers creates new tools to replace the 'complex' ones that came before without even bothering to understand them.
In my 25 year career I've seen it multiple times. We are all going downhill.
Attention spans in the smartphone era might be preventing people from reading the f*ing manual.
This means that any system or library which has an operating model that must be understood before it can be effectively used[1] simply can't be understood by the majority of programmers today.
[1] The currently popular things in software world are mostly the type of system that lack such a model and which can be 'mastered' by asking discrete questions on stack overflow. This lack of complexity causes a loss of expressive power.
Well, Americans What, nothin' better to do? Why don't you kick yourself out? You're an immigrant too Who's usin' who? What should we do? Well, you can't be a pimp And a prostitute too"Icky Thump"
These aliens, these made-up worlds of ours, are ways of making mysteries mundane. We see beauty and think it truth. Man's measure grips the world, chokes meaning from it. But you can't escape cages by studying their bars. Laws prison licence in slow spaces, snagged time. So the best of science or of crafty fictive lies presses us into true darkness, away from the lamppost. Beware of the snaky swoop of integrals. Math's mad arabesques can conceal far more than they reveal. It's strangeness we must seek, not more urns so Greek, with their Pythagorean certainties. We must live in the jagged outlands, knowing truth may not fit snugly, can be ugly, and all our own."Bleak Velocities"
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
We did not allow them to make an example of us.
nailed it.
Moreover, I'd like to have all the extremist argumentation slapped the fuck down by intellectuals in public. Given the way things are going however, it's as though transparency and public discussion were anathema to those with power to censor.
I mean, it can't possibly be that some jack-ass white supremacist, trash-ass ISIS goon, or wank-ass Hillary Trumponite, were hard to repudiate -- unless your own wack bullshit depends on similar constructions. Then it's really hard without stabbing yourself in the back.
My feeling then, and now, is that IF there is to be an army, then the burden of service should be shared, not assigned to the disadvantaged by one or another means, as in the case of all onerous tasks. That does not imply that those called upon to share the burden should necessarily agree. There are always cases where refusal is justified, and refusal to serve in Vietnam was, in my opinion, one such case. Same always. Garbage collection should be shared, not assigned to the disadvantaged, but if someone is ordered to dump toxic wastes in a schoolyard, he or she should refuse.ZNet forum reply, February 3, 2005
[Q: can you conceive of any form in which you might support American military action taken, like the President's justification, in anticipation of an imminent and dangerous threat?]
Why don't you generalize it, and say, can you conceive of any action which any state might take? Sure, you can imagine such things. Let's say you're in Iran right now. [audience laughter] It's under attack by the world's superpower, with embargoes... It's surrounded by states either occupied by its superpower enemy, or having nuclear weapons. Little way down the road is the regional superpower, which has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and other WMDs, and is essentially an offshore US military base. And has a bigger and more advanced air force than any NATO power, outside the United States. And in the past year has been supplied by the global superpower with 100 advanced jet bombers, openly advertised as able to fly to Iran and back to bomb it. And also provided with what the Hebrew press calls special weaponry, nobody knows what that means, but if you're an Iranian intelligence analyst you gonna give a worst case analysis, of course. And has actually been publicly provided with smart bombs, and deep penetration weapons... They have a terrific justification for anticipatory self defense, better than any other case I can think of.
But would I approve of their bombing Israel, or carrying out terrorist acts in Washington? No, even though they have a pretty strong case, better than anything I can think of here. Just as the Japanese had a much better case than any that I can think of here, but I don't approve of Pearl Harbor. So yeah, we can conceive of cases, and in fact some of them are right in front of our eyes, but none of us approve of them. None of us.
So if we don't approve of them in real cases, why discuss hypothetical cases that don't exist? We can do that in some philosophy seminar, but in the real world there're real cases that ought to concern us.
If we do not expose the plea of security and separate the parts that are valid from the parts that are not valid, then we are complicit.
Let us not forget that human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.
What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living.
In This Blind Alley
They smell your breath lest you have said: I love you. They smell your heart; These are strange times, my dear. They flog love at the roadblock. Let's hide love in the larder. In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends they feed fires with logs of song and poetry Hazard not a thought: These are strange times, my dear. The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night has come to kill the light. Let's hide light in the larder. There, butchers are posted in passageways with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers: These are strange times, my dear. They chop smiles off lips, and songs off the mouth: Let's hide joy in the larder."In This Blind Alley"
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
(or even "better", make undesired thoughts unthinkable)
The world gets improved in fits and starts, in small ways more than in large ones, and thanks to the unseen, unthought infrastructures that undergird it more than the civic or scientific or artistic victories we celebrate in the streets or in the theaters.
It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.
Affirmation
I believe in living. I believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. I believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs. And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. I believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. I believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path. I have seen the destruction of the daylight, and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted. I have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. I have walked on cut glass. I have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference. I have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if I know any thing at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. I believe in living. I believe in birth. I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And I believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port."Affirmation"
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
To be an effective trader, basically what you do is step in to a transaction between two people and shove them far enough apart that they can't communicate. Then you go to the seller, tell them that you and your buddies are their only market and you will pay them $XYZ for everything they have. A real low-ball figure. Do your best to put them in the fucking poor house.
You then take whatever you bought to the person who was already interested in buying it, and tell them you and your buddies are the only source for whatever it is you bought, and if they want any of it they'll have to pay you $XXYYZZ. An absurdly overvalued figure. Do your best to put them in the fucking poor house.
What's going on is that traders at no point are about facilitating exchanges between two parties. Every step of the way, their goal is to screw everybody who's still holding a single red cent so hard that their fillings fall out, and then collect those fillings -- gold, too, is an investment.
Your neighbors may shit in their pool. They may not even be aware that they’re doing it. They might think shit is just a natural consequence of having a pool. They may hop the fence at night and shit in your pool, oblivious as they are to the difference between shit and not-shit. That doesn’t mean you give up and start shitting in your pool, too. You clean it up (even though it’s not your mess) and you go back to enjoying swimming in a nice sanitary place where poops don’t hit you in the face when you come up from underwater. You invite your friends over, because swimming in a nice clean pool is more fun for everyone, and it’s more fun for you if you’re not swimming alone. As a result, if your friends decide to dig pools in their backyards, they know shit and pools are not irrevocably linked and they work to keep theirs clean. Slowly, you all hope, everyone will see how much nicer that makes swimming.
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism are too obvious to be pointed out. This does not mean that Nazism was gangsterism, as has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity.
More specific in totalitarian propaganda, however, than direct threats and crimes against individuals is the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings and, later, mass murder perpetrated on "guilty" and "innocent" alike. People are threatened by Communist propaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly behind their time, with spending their lives uselessly, just as they were threatened by the Nazis with living against the eternal laws of nature and life, with an irreparable and mysterious deterioration of their blood. The strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the "scientific" nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses. And it is true that the advertising columns of every newspaper show this "scientificality," by which a manufacturer proves with facts and figures and the help of a "research" department that his is the "best soap in the world." [1] It is also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the "only soap that prevents pimples" may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who don't use his soap. Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with "scientific" proofs ceases once they are in power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to serve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for entirely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans.
But there is nothing more to the frequently overrated similarities between mass advertisement and mass propaganda. Businessmen usually do not pose as prophets and they do not constantly demonstrate the correctness of their predictions. The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from the more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological origin, of socialism in one instance and racism in the other, show more clearly than when their spokesmen pretend that they have discovered the hidden forces that will bring them good fortune in the chain of fatality.
There is of course a great appeal to the masses in "absolutist systems which represent all the events of history as depending upon the great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history of the human race" (in the words of Tocqueville). But it cannot be doubted either that the Nazi leadership actually believed in, and did not merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the following: "The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and life, . . . so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty. The more insight we have into the will of the Almighty, the greater will be our successes." [2] It is quite apparent that very few changes are needed to express Stalin's creed in two sentences which might run as follows: "The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more do we conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into dialectic materialism, the greater will be our success." Stalin's notion of "correct leadership," [3] at any rate, could hardly be better illustrated.
Totalitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its technique of making statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits. However, totalitarian ideologies did not invent this procedure, and were not the only ones to use it. Scientificality of mass propaganda has indeed been so universally employed in modern politics that it has been interpreted as a more general sign of that obsession with science which has characterized the Western world since the rise of mathematics and physics in the sixteenth century; thus totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which "science has become an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man." [4] And there was, indeed, an early connection between scientificality and the rise of the masses. The "collectivism" of masses was welcomed by those who hoped for the appearance of "natural laws of historical development" which would eliminate the unpredictability of the individual's actions and behavior. [5] There has been cited the example of Enfantin who could already "see the time approaching when the 'art of moving the masses' will be so perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet-will possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substance," and it has been concluded that modern propaganda was born then and there. [6]
[1] Hitler's analysis of "War Propaganda" (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter vi) stresses the business angle of propaganda and uses the example of publicity for soap. Its importance has been generally overestimated, while his later positive ideas on "Propaganda and Organization" were neglected.
[2] See Martin Bormann's important memorandum on the "Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity" in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 1036 ff.
[3] Stalin, Leninism (1933), Vol. II, chapter III.
[4] Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," in Social Research, December, 1948.
[5] See F. A. v. Hayek, "The Counter-Revolution of Science," in Economica, Vol. VIII (February, May, August, 1941), p. 13.
[6] 1bid., p. 137. The quotation is from the Saint-Simonist magazine Producteur, I, 399."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery."Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946)
Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.
Consumer goods suck. You keep buying them.
The average consumer is an idiot, so the bean counters keep milking them. Let's stick RGB lights in what used to be the BMW, you know the ultimate driving machine. The entire consumer market is rotten. TV? It's going to come with smart apps. Get one from NEC that's meant for commercial use.
The average consumer wants this stuff. It sells. They want pizzaz over functionality and durability. They want shiny stuff in a bigger box.
The Onion is reality. I don't think corporations/businesses are to blame. We're not voting with our wallets and instead regressing into buying more fricking touch screens. The average consumer is extremely ill-informed, sometimes that's due to the lack of time, but more often than not, it's due diligence.
The industrial, military and commercial market doesn't mess around. They want to purchase equipment that works reliably and performs to a specification. It's professional and their livelihood depends on it. It sort of self filters the entire market. Shitty things drop off the radar due to poor sales.
Wieviel Schönes ist auf Erden Unscheinbar verstreut; Möcht ich immer mehr des inne werden: Wieviel Schönheit, die den Taglärm scheut, In bescheidnen alt und jungen Herzen! Ist es auch ein Duft von Blumen nur, Macht es holder doch der Erde Flur, wie ein Lächeln unter vielen Schmerzen."In der Stille"
Remember that your path will be difficult, at times unbearably so. All your loved ones will die. All your plans will go awry. You will be betrayed and abandoned. And you cannot escape death. Life is suffering. Accept it. But once you accept it, once you accept the inevitability of suffering, you must still accept your cross and follow your dream, because otherwise things will only get worse. Be an example, be someone on whom others can depend. Do not obey despots, fight for the freedom of body and soul, and build a country in which your children can be happy.
For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight."Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility"
There are significant strategic interests [in Oceania], and there's a lot of stuff going on that's important. Not just the United States. For example, France is doing some really vicious things there, in fact they're just wiping out islands because they want them for nuclear tests. And when the socialist government in France is asked, "Why to do this?", they say, "Well look, we have to have nuclear tests." Well, if you have to have nuclear tests, why not have them in southern France? [audience laughter] Why have them in some island in the Pacific?
Well, the answer to that is clear, after all they're just a bunch of little brown people or something. But you can't say that exactly, especially if you're a socialist, so something else is said.
Arms are instruments of ill omen. When one is compelled to use them, it is best to do so without relish. There is no glory in victory, and to glorify it despite this is to exult in the killing of men. When great numbers of people are killed, one should weep over them with sorrow. When victorious in war, one should observe mourning rites.
If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.
I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.
Once it sinks in how fucked we are, we need to examine why. Why is because we have some faulty thinking. Why do we have faulty thinking? Garbage in, garbage out. Figure out what the garbage is and who's shoveling it in your trough. First clue, follow the money.
The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business - ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few, if any, checks and balances. Most people in power like this system of doing business and do not want it changed.
Today we have marketing departments that say things such as “we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."
On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the “appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.
Sure, having a walkable urban center where everyone lives close to the things they need and they don't create dystopian traffic is great.
But company housing, tenements, indebted servitude, working hours from can't-see until can't-see, is all a spectre from our not-so-distant past which we have mostly forgotten about. Well it's coming back. A labor revolution gave us such amazing leaps in dignity and basic humanity which were sorely lacking after the eruption of the industrial revolution. We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can.
People in America are just not educated enough about the horrors of the labor revolution. Our own, not the communist's overseas. Unions exist in this strange historical agnosticism, and people only know them as some kind of cartoon, a mob-ruled bureaucracy that enables hilariously lazy laborers to cite ridiculous rules and get in the way of progress. Well they weren't always that way. It is not common human decency that stops the captains of industry from merely hiring private police forces to mow bad workers down with rifles and artillery. That's our past as well as our cyberpunk future. That stuff can come back if we don't keep maintaining the levee between it and us.
People have an instinct to normalize and rationalize things which happen slowly compared to a human lifetime. Well there's a very real and disastrous difference today in how people work and maintain a decent living. It's becoming more and more like back when a decent living was only reserved for the insanely wealthy, the richest of the rich. Everyone else toiled in disease and squalor fourteen hours a day, breaking their bodies, without any possessions of their own; everything belonged to the company, and they worked just for the privilege to live a week at a time. It really wasn't that long ago. We like to hope that if it comes back we'll still be behind the fence of the upper-middle class, safe from the horror. But the vast majority of us won't.
Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.
Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.The Third Notebook, December 9, 1917
We don't make a photograph just with a camera; we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.
The Obama Administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact it is doing it all over the world. Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists maybe in history. The drone assassination campaign, special forces operations, all of these operations are terror operations.
Yes, people who are bullied often respond overly sensitive. That's not because they need to grow a thicker skin, it's because the damn skin has been flogged away by incessant bullying - and that has to stop first before they can recover properly.
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent `ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are `potential officer material’. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.
The true significance of what is going on has been concealed by the use of the abstraction Man.
[..]
What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man’s conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
[..]
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation.
[..]
Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. But if the scientists themselves cannot arrest this process before it reaches the common Reason and kills that too, then someone else must arrest it. What I most fear is the reply that I am `only one more’ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all previous barriers set up against the advance of science, can be safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it must be like the numeral series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before.
[..]
But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.
If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.