juxtapositions

Mediocre Talents

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, nietzsche No Comments

The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very many bad or mediocre ones.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

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[Beethoven] quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.”

— Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

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Andrew Tate seems to fancy himself as a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, a strong, powerful individual that has risen above society’s norms and become the best version of himself. But besides both men being accused of misogyny, there is nothing else the two share in outlook. Asceticism and a love for eternal, idealised archetypes at the expense of the ever-changing and evolving world of the senses would have left Nietzsche distinctly unimpressed.

— Alexis Papazoglo, “Andrew Tate, Nietzsche and the Matrix“

To Strive With Difficulties and to Conquer Them

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, juxtapositions 2 Comments

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem; and what can any man infer in his own favour from a condition to which, however prosperous, he contributed nothing, and which the vilest and weakest of the species would have obtained by the same right, had he happened to be the son of the same father?

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

— Samuel Johnson, “The Pleasures and Advantages of Industry”

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The greatest and most understated benefit of strength training beyond just lifting heavy weights is that you’ve completed a task you couldn’t do previously. Let’s say I’m working with some 50-year-old trainee who has to squat 275 for two sets of five reps. He’s got a task to complete. Based on the outcomes of prior training sessions, he doesn’t know whether he can do that last rep of that second set of 275. This trainee has a choice. He does the first set, completes all five reps, racks it, and sits down. He then realizes he has to do it again. Now he’s on that fourth rep of the second set and it’s hard — he may get stuck at the bottom of this, he may get hurt. Does he continue for a fifth rep or rack it? His spotter is right there.

The decision he makes teaches him something about himself. This decision transforms people. There are few instances in the modern world when we get to make such a decision. I’ve had people who have been training for years tell me that they’ve noticed people treating them differently. Something has changed in them. What was it? Well, now they know that they can complete tasks with uncertain outcomes that depended entirely on their efforts. This is terribly important for people of all ages, something that you owe it to yourself to experience.

Do you have the guts to try the last rep? If you can make yourself do it, you have proven that you have that courage. This is one of the few ways you can still learn that kind of lesson. Learn it under the bar, then watch it carry over into everything you do for the rest of your life. How can this be any harder than that fifth rep of that second set with 275 pounds? Now you welcome the challenges of the world. You don’t cower.

— Mark Rippetoe

Complexity Appeals to Stupid People

By in foolosophy, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

Complexity appeals to stupid people — it makes them feel superior intellectually, even if they’re making no real progress.

— Mark Rippetoe

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The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outré or specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue”

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I like William James because he speaks of his “raids into philosophy.” He considers common life — a day in Saratoga, for instance — his real feeding ground, and only conducts raids into philosophy to find out what he can get out of it. His mind was far too curious for it to be shut up behind the gray plastered walls of philosophy. I believe I can understand what the professors are talking about in their long words, but I like to see occasional sallies of real insight and horse sense.

— Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist

Even When They Won They Always Lost Themselves to the Sideways Glances

By in foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

So Derek Thompson wants to outsource his research, and, as we saw yesterday, Noah Smith wants to outsource his writing. Is this boredom or frustration with the basic elements of their work universal among journalists these days?

I hope I’m not the only one, but just for the record: I like researching, and I like writing. I like the hard work of making my prose more clear and vivid. I like overcoming my ignorance. I like synthesizing the disparate things I read and then trying to present that synthesis to my readers. I like it all.

— Alan Jacobs

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One of the most brutal and difficult parts of any Zen retreat is that part right in the middle. You’re too far in to just get up and go home. Yet you’ve still got several hours or days of doing the most boring thing in the world — literally staring at a wall — to get through.

That’s the time when your mind really starts pulling out all the stunts it can come up with to escape. The only real escape you have at that point is fantasy. Your mind can spin out endless places you’d rather be and endless things you’d rather do. What’s worse, your mind can come up with lots of places you could be and things you could do if only you weren’t stuck there watching the paint dry. You experience real psychological pain.

And yet, it’s these moments that are the most instructive and valuable. You come to realize that you really have only two choices. You can get up and leave. Or you can settle into this boring moment completely.

If you can learn to do that on a Zen retreat, you can learn to do that anywhere.

Then you’ll stop missing out on 75% of your life. You’ll stop wishing to get your time on Earth over with quicker. You’ll actually live longer, no matter how long you end up living, because you’re really all there.

— Brad Warner

Moth Thoughts

By in books, juxtapositions, writing No Comments

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

It frequently happens, that a design which, when considered at a distance, gave flattering hopes of facility, mocks us in the execution with unexpected difficulties; the mind which, while it considered it in the gross, imagined itself amply furnished with materials, finds sometimes an unexpected barrenness and vacuity, and wonders whither all those ideas are vanished, which a little before seemed struggling for emission.

— Samuel Johnson, “The Happiness and Infelicity of Writers”

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What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest, those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

The ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems, for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

Cheerfulness Was Always Breaking In

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

Humorists handle thoughts and ideas as golf or billiard champions handle their balls, or as cowboy champions handle their lariats. There is an ease, a sureness, a lightness of touch, that comes from mastery. After all, only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. Seriousness, after all, is only a sign of effort, and effort is a sign of imperfect mastery. A serious writer is awkward and ill at ease in the realm of ideas as a nouveau riche is awkward, ill at ease and self-conscious in society. He is serious because he has not come to feel at home with his ideas.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

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Actually, seriousness is not incompatible with joking. It’s a common mistake to confuse “serious” with “solemn,” and to assume that seriousness of purpose can only be conveyed by solemnity of tone. It’s an understandable error; we do have a marked tendency, we Anglo-Saxons, to answer the big questions with furrowed brow and down-turned mouth. An acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, on hearing of his reputation as a philosopher, remarked, “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” But cheerfulness and thoughtfulness aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s simply wrong to assume that everyone who jokes about serious matters like death and pain is somehow failing to deal with them, that laughter is a childish, evasive response and that the only mature reactions are solemn, somber and po-faced.

Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes

Stuck In the Middle With You

By in eric hoffer, juxtapositions, political philosophy No Comments

The middle class is the least elitist ruling class we know. Not only is it wide open to all comers, but it aspires to a state of affairs in which things happen of themselves and regulate themselves. Unlike any other ruling class, the middle class has found it convenient to operate on the assumption that if you leave people alone they will perform tolerably well; and under no other ruling class have common people shown such willingness to exert themselves to the utmost. It is this fabulously productive, more or less self-regulating chaos of a society that has given the modern age its singular spirit and set it off from all preceding centuries. Regimentation and minute regulation are as ancient as civilization. Small wonder that elitists of every stripe—aristocrats, Marxists, Fascists, priests, power-hungry intellectuals—have viewed middle class society and the modern age as abominations.

— Eric Hoffer, The Spirit of an Age

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The middle class has an important role to play, and it can side with one faction or the other depending on the circumstances it finds itself in. A typical representative of this group might be a highly successful small business owner living in a suburb of a major metropolitan center. He is alienated from the left because it looks down on him for devoting his life to something as boring and small minded as fixing central heating systems instead of overcoming the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. As with the proles, the middle class does not have the bandwith to keep up with political and artistic fashions. While the lower class can’t because it lacks the inherent intelligence to do so, the member of the middle class might be smart enough, but he is either too busy working and forming a family or not very inclined to chase status through the cultivation of certain opinions and aesthetic preferences rather than making money.

…Yet while the Merchant Right is a major force in elections and even governing, it is not one of the major participants in the culture war. This is because the true antagonism is between the upper and lower classes. The middle class (in many cases, the wealthiest class), has more money than the lower class, but its entire identity does not revolve around feeling morally superior to or lecturing the latter. Not being reformers, they just want to be left alone. This stops them from being too angry at either the urban elite or the proles, which prevents the cycle of mutual hostility from starting. Moreover, the two natural elite classes, being of similar levels of intelligence, have more in common with each other than either has with the proles. They socialize and intermarry, and the boundaries between them are more fluid.

— Richard Hanania, “A Psychological Theory of the Culture War“

Showbiz Kids Making Movies of Themselves, You Know They Don’t Give a Fuck About Anybody Else

By in juxtapositions, media/propaganda, writing No Comments

Therein lies the root of the evil that Perez is trying to exorcize. It’s not that the literary world arbitrarily decided to cede all its power to white Brooklyn ladies. It’s that white Brooklyn ladies are the only ones who can afford to be in the literary world. Perez is right that the obsession with elevating marginalized voices only extends to voices who are reciting the expected talking points. He’s also right that the literature of quiet masculine despair is out of style right now (though I predict it will come back around). But he’s off when he says the publishing houses don’t want to hire black female editors and other actual “marginalized” people. On the contrary, the houses would love to hire any such person, almost regardless of their competence level.

But people from marginalized backgrounds don’t go into publishing. They can’t afford to. Working in publishing requires being paid a salary that is not at all commensurate with your education level and cost of living. Being a senior-level editor requires wearing nice clothes and living in or near one of the most expensive cities in the country while, in many cases, earning less money than a postal carrier in Cleveland. It often requires breaking into the business by doing an unpaid internship and then taking an entry-level job that requires supplemental income from your parents. There are exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions). But by and large, if you are the first generation in your family to go to college, you are not going to become a book editor or a literary agent. You are not going to get an MFA or run an indie literary journal like Hobart, much less be a (probably unpaid) editor at one so that you can quit in protest and then tweet about it. You’re going to get an engineering degree or go to law school.

— Meghan Daum, “Who Killed Creative Writing?”

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If journalists once fought the powerful on behalf of the powerless, in twenty-first century America, they are the powerful. While the average pay for a journalism job is quite low at around $40,000 a year, that’s because entry-level jobs pay so little; at the higher levels, journalists now make quite a bit more than the average American. More importantly, journalists now have social and cultural power, and they are overwhelmingly the children of economic elites. After all, to even be able to make it on $30,000 a year while living in the most expensive cities in America (the only ones left with a functioning journalism industry, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of local newspapers), you have to come from a family with enormous economic privilege who can help you out. Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

We Are All Actors In This Life

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

Sometimes people tell me I have “heterodox” or “dissident” views. The first term is favored by classical liberal and centrist types, while the latter is often used by right-wingers, who are also prone to calling themselves “heretics.” These words have always made me cringe, and it’s probably useful to explore why. My general feeling is that there is usually no legitimate justification for using them, as they encourage a kind of unreflective tribalism, lead to alienation and self-pity, and distract from what could be more productive debates.

A healthy marketplace of ideas should keep the focus mainly on which ideas are correct and which are wrong, not on social desirability bias and what the mob is thinking. To approach a conversation from the starting point of thinking about which ideas are “standard” and which are “heterodox” strikes me as the mirror image of “read the room.” The “read the room” crowd is telling you to shut up because what you’re saying is unpopular. But people who always talk about their ideas being oppressed are generally trying to guilt you into taking minority positions. Neither approach is healthy.

— Richard Hanania, “Please Don’t Call Me ‘Heterodox‘”

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Under the spell of that humbug of fame or power, a man is soon prey to other incidental humbugs. There will be no end to it. He soon wants to begin to reform society, to uplift others’ morality, to defend the church, to crush vice, to map programs for others to carry out, to block programs that other people have mapped out, to read before a convention of what other people have done for him under his administration, to sit on committees examining blueprints of an exposition, even to open an insane asylum (what cheek!) — in general, to interfere in other people’s lives.

Yet there is a secondary social humbug, quite as powerful and universal, the humbug of fashion. The courage to be one’s own natural self is quite a rare thing. The Greek philosopher Democritus thought he was doing a great service to mankind by liberating it from the oppression of two great fears: the fear of God and the fear of death. But even that does not liberate us from another equally universal fear: the fear of one’s neighbors. Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the audience in a part and style approved by them.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Iron Bonds

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

[Society] is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

— Edmund Burke

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So let me say something a little meatier: you owe it to yourself and the millions of lives that generated yours to live as though you appreciated it.

— Mark Rippetoe, Strong Enough?: Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

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There may seem to be a bit of superficial irony in juxtaposing these two, but no. Gratitude is an essential part of both conservative philosophy and physical fitness, as I understand them. I’m not only grateful for my own ability to move freely, increase my strength, and optimize my diet, but also for the combined knowledge of countless others which has made it possible for an ordinary individual like myself, living in an ordinary small town, to benefit from it at an affordable price. I’m grateful to be training on a Friday evening and to look around at the others and think, These are my people. They could be out doing anything else to enjoy their weekend, but they’re here, putting in the hard work after hours. There’s a partnership there that transcends the petty egoism which supposedly motivates gym-goers. We owe it to each other.

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