http://www.viruscomix.com/page500.html

I approve.

The title sums it up. If I had gone with the sci-fi story, or the homework assignment that took me away from it had been assigned a week later or earlier, I don't think this mess would've happened. But anyway, I switched at the last moment to a short story idea and tried to turn it into a novel.

Not happening. In fact, today I scrapped what I wrote for the short story version because none of it would work with the novel's plot. That put me down to about three thousand words, the last part of which seemed forced. So I said forget it, and just deleted it all.

That felt good.

So I'm not doing Nano. I think it's a really shitty idea, in hindsight. Those four thousand words I wrote the first time were just fine, in their motivated, purposed way. But I don't think writing the sci-fi novel would've been much better, rushed for Nano.

I'm glad I gave it a shot, though. I'm sure that for some writers it's helpful. But those kinds of deadlines and number-watching business isn't for me. Writing a thousand words a day? Good idea -- if you're motivated or inspired to. Otherwise it shows when you aren't, and all you have is crap that ends up trashed.

I've got a lot of homework and need to register for school. I've fallen behind and I've realized the story I'm writing needs some serious replanning if it's going to be a novel. Calls into question the whole number of words I really have written.

Considering scrapping this and skipping nano altogether. Which sucks. In the meantime, I'll try to throw together a better storyline.

Fuck you, nano. I could've done this last month no problem.

What was originally my homework assignment has now become my Nano novel. Originally, I aimed to keep it a short work, but now I don't have to since I'm not using it for the class. I also have about ten thousand words for it, and I'm well on my way to noveldom.

On another note, while having about eight people read the version I intended to be short, some seemed almost offended by the fact I summarized. I had to block an English major on AIM because he would otherwise have never stopped ranting against me and everything that I stood for. I fear he would've died without my taking action.

A rough division exists, clearly. Among amateur readers and non-writers, there were still criticisms of what I wrote, but the fact that there were summaries never bothered them. Among other writers or more regular readers, the summaries were noted as an issue half the time. I asked this pointedly of each person, and they maintained their views.

So there is an idea shared by a few people: Summaries have little to no place in fiction.

The modern view of a story is more of an experiencial nature, I'll grant. A person reads to see the story unfold with their eyes. They don't want to feel like they're listening to a person tell a story so much as witness it. They don't want things to be "filtered". This is the proliferation of the rule "Show, don't tell" stretched far. I can respect the fiction-as-experience view, but to say that a story is worse, either subjectively (in my opinion) or objectively, for not obeying those rules is faulty.

I've been a scene writer for a long time. Most stories I make have no need for even an intro summary paragraph between sections. But I disagree with this strongly, even as I plan to now make another mostly-scene story.

I'll eat a caramel in the name of the writers out there who make more than a little use of summaries. The world may be a dark place for you.

I’ve more or less come up with plots and such for two of the stories I have on the table. I’ve got twenty minutes to make this decision. But it’s a decision that must be made.

Oh, and yeah. The third story. I wanted to change it a bit and make it into something much greater. It could be next year’s Nano, if this one goes fine. I won’t go into it right now, though.

So the first story is the robot story. It’s very action-flick-esque. I think that’s a good argument for writing it. It’s fast paced as hell. I can’t imagine having too much difficulty writing it for that reason. Pumped up fight scenes? I can do that fo’sure. It’s when you want lots of things to quote that stuff gets slowed. I never went into this thinking that Shakespeare would do Nano, is what I’m saying. I don’t find it at all offensive to say I would write an action film in book form. That’s entertainment. It has those things going for it, I’d say.

Second is the sci-fi story. I lean towards this one for reason that it would be less action-movie-like. It still would have plenty of action, but I think it’s less ridiculous for being sci-fi. In the first story, there are mercenaries and soldiers pouring forward and dying (basically) in our modern world. But that’s of course unrealistic, whereas with sci-fi it wouldn’t be out of place at all. It’s necessary in the case of sci-fi and galactic warfare. It doesn’t even make you pause, really. That's how wars would be faught. There is that factor.

Another reason for the second story, it deals with more conflicts. The good-bad idea is challenged. The idea of war is challenged. The killing would be more serious, because the context is serious. In the first story, everyone knows that there could not be thousands of mercenaries willing to step into the line of fire. It’s silly from the outset. The reader knows those are cardboard soldiers, even if I try to make them seem human. It ain't happening.

Those factors make the sci-fi story more appealing to me. Now the question is, do I do that one because I think it’s better or save it? Rushing through it in a month may not be the best way to go about it. But then there’s always editing.

Ok, then. Sci-fi story it is.

I still have a few minutes, so I’ll also paste the email that the Nano people sent. I know I’ll never look at it again if I don’t put it somewhere. Here’s as good as anywhere.

NaNoWriMo Program Director Chris Baty here. It's so great to have you writing with us! Before we get rolling, I wanted to send you a quick guide to our upcoming month of literary abandon.

Here's the plan:

Today: If you haven't already, please make a tax-deductible donation to help us pay for National Novel Writing Month and NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program. NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit, and we've spent nearly half a million dollars getting this swashbuckling adventure ready for 150,000 adults and 35,000 kids and teens around the world. Our goal is to pay off this year's expenses and set aside enough to expand and improve both programs next year. With your help, we'll do it! Thank you so much to everyone who has donated so far!

Tomorrow: Make sure you've set your time zone correctly (it's under User Settings). Some word-count features appear and disappear at midnight on November 1 and November 30, so dialing those in now will save you stress later. Join a local region, and find out when and where the first novel-writing get-togethers (called "write-ins") for your city or town will be held.

October 31: Get your first pep talk email. You'll receive about three of these a week; one from NaNo staff and two from our panel of esteemed celebrity pep talkers. Spam filters love to eat pep talks, so if you don't get yours, just drop by the pep talk page (under Fun Stuff) where they'll be posted as soon as they go out. Our first guest pep talker will be Jasper Fforde; he'll be parachuting into your inbox next Wednesday.

November 1: At midnight, local time, start writing your book. You need to log 1,667 words per day to stay on par. The website will be very slow for the first few days of the event, but with patience you can update your soaring word count in that box at the top of our site. Watch your stats graph fill. Send a link to your author profile to your friends so they can follow your progress. Revel in the majesty of your unfolding story. It's November 1! You are an unstoppable novel-writing machine!

November 2: Stop writing. Wonder if you should start over. Keep going. Feel better.

November 8: As the first full week of writing comes to a close, you will be at 11,666 words. This is more fiction than most people write in their lifetimes, and you did it in a week. Go, you! This is also Municipal Liaison Appreciation Day, a raucous international holiday that celebrates NaNoWriMo's volunteer chapter-heads (the folks who organized the write-in you went to last week). Chocolate, flowers, and gifts of expensive electronics are appreciated.

November 13: Nothing really happens on November 13.

November 15: After the second week of writing, you will be at 25,000 words. This is the approximate length of such legendary works of fiction as The Metamorphosis, Of Mice and Men, and Twilight: The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion. You're halfway to winning! Attend a Midway Party in your town.

November 16: The second half of NaNoWriMo dawns. Writerly confidence builds. Your book comes to life, and characters start doing interesting, unexpected things. Nice. Weird.

November 22: After the third full week of writing, you stand at 35,000 words, the NaNoWriMo milestone universally recognized as The Place Where Everything Gets Much Easier. This is also when you fly out to San Francisco and join us for the Night of Writing Dangerously Write-a-thon, where you'll help us set records for group noveling and candy consumption.

November 25: Novel validation and winning begins, and Word-Count Progress Bars turn from blue (under 50K) to green (over 50K) to purple (over 50k and a verified winner!). Check our FAQs for details on uploading your manuscript and winning. A limited number of 2009 Winner T-shirts will appear in the store. These will make you smile, and will feature a squirrel.

November 26: American Wrimos celebrate the true meaning of Thanksgiving by gathering together with friends and family, wolfing down a huge meal as quickly as possible, and then ditching those friends and family to hide in the bathroom with a laptop.

November 30: By midnight, local time, we will all be the proud owners of 50,000-word novels that we barely could have imagined on October 31. Plan to attend your local NaNoWriMo Thank God It's Over Party, where grins will abound, champagne will flow, fives will be highed, and wrists will be iced.

You did it. We all did it.

December 1: Sleep will fall heavily across NaNoLand, as 150,000 writers close the book on a crazy, oversized dream.

December 2: The "I Wrote A Novel, Now What?" page goes up on the NaNoWriMo site, containing some special items for our winners from sponsors CreateSpace and Scrivener, along with advice on revision and next steps from published NaNoWriMo authors.

December 3: Rewrites begin.

It all starts very soon, brave writer! Here's to a great month together!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

For the month of November, I'm going to try something new. In part, I think I have to do this to succeed with Nanowrimo. In the other part, I think the internet is a big waste of time.

Most of the sites on the 'net don't have needed information. Yeah, every site has information in a strict technical sense, but they're mostly worthless to me.

So here's what I'm doing. No comment threads. I hereby abstain from reading any and all comments on blogs, forums, facebook, metafilter, reddit, etc. These people have nothing worth saying for about 99.9% of the time. It's a time sink. Comments and forums are hell.

In their place, books. I have always been keen on reading, but a lot of the reading I've done has been articles/blogs/forums on the 'net. It's a mistake, though. Books are, hopefully, written by more qualified people, more edited, more thought put into them, and so on. I can very easily say why I chose one over the other: while books are better in most ways, they are not short and easily attainable. It's time to turn that around. And I have plenty of reading material now, anyway.

Why not write-off these sites for the month, completely? Why not go to metafilter and reddit at all? If I had stopped going to metafilter, I never would've read Without Guilt and Justice. I never would've found Faith of a Heretic. These are, probably, the most influential books I will ever read. They changed my outlook profoundly regarding how people should be treated. They changed my idea justice, autonomy, and what it means to be a good person. So complete disconnection from these sites is out of the question. They are sometimes, but not usually, very important.

And I found out why I was feeling lazy and unmotivated. I've got a fever and an extremely unpleasant cold. I hate being sick. I remember the on-set feeling of sickness on Saturday (I think) and I thought I was feeling "better" somehow. Funny. I'm not going to do Nano if I'm still sick, though. I can't imagine trying to plow through while I'm feeling like I'm dying. It's hard enough to concentrate, as is.

I'm going to have to ponder cutting other stuff out for November. I'm not sure what else would help, though.

Maybe school? Haha. But really. There's something else, I don't know what. I think I have some time management program. I'll try running it.

I should probably write about the wedding. I haven’t written much about my life recently. For the most part, that’s because there isn’t much to it. Reading, writing, videogames. In about that order. And I discovered Reddit recently, which adds with Metafilter and all the other blogs I read, so there’s always plenty to see.

Wedding, though. It was in a greenhouse thing. People were dressed up. I taped the ceremony part. Then, at the reception, I existed and occasionally talked, but the music was too loud to do that for the most part. I turned down people asking me to dance because I don’t like dancing. I don’t know how to dance, really, but I think that’s unimportant. I don’t like dancing. I sent a facebook message to one chick telling her not to coerce people to dance.

That’s why I never totally enjoy myself at a social event. Or even school, some days. People are always trying to get me to do something “fun”. They don’t seem to understand that not everyone agrees with them.

I could write more about the wedding, but it’s boring to think about.

Anyway, sister’s in the hospital. She got sick the day after the wedding. She needs surgery, too. They say it’s a common procedure. But still some garbage timing on behalf of nature.

Nano’s getting closer. I haven’t mapped out all the stories I’ve been considering, so I need to get on that. And school is going to be getting rougher soon. Projects and whatnot. I'm feeling lazy, though. Later.

Trendy? Awful?

I'll never do it again.

For a while.

http://hardtoremember.org/dlog/?file=n8wdo

I signed up. I finally did. And I have mixed feelings and expectations about it.

On the one hand, I should have time. On the other hand, I may have nothing real to show for it once it's done. "Done" is debatable. At the end of Nanowrimo, people have a tendency to have fifty thousand words piled like feces.

I have two or three main story ideas I'm trying to choose between. They are:

1. In sixth grade I wrote about fifty pages of a story about the coolest robot trying to systematically kill everyone who made it. I could describe what made it the coolest robot ever, but in many ways that would ruin it. But anyway, the story had a state-wide trek as the main characters tried to get as far away as possible from their electronic serial killer. Then, to give you some idea of just how freakishly horrible the machine is, the gods (yes, plural gods, there were three of them) come to earth to fight against the robot as well. And they find themselves in a massive plot which involves many more lives than their own. It was silly, but also extremely awesome. This one is the summer blockbuster option. I really would like to do it, if only for nostalgic reasons.

2. A group of highschool/college aged kids accidentally find themselves involved in a gang. This doesn't worry them that much, and they find a way to get back out unharmed after a certain number of drug deals, minor crimes, etc. Then they have to kill someone for the gang or be killed, and then everything gets out of control. And they find themselves in a massive plot which involves many more lives than their own. While this story would have plenty of action, it'd still be more planning and scheming than the first story. The tension would lie more in the what're-they-going-to-do bit than the action. More cerebral, I suppose.

3. A story in the Sci-fi universe I made that would work as an intro to the general factions and tech. I'd been planning to do a short, maybe like a novella rather than a novel, but a novel would work fine just as well. Especially if it's going to be cranked out. The general idea I had was for a complete non-hero, a regular guy, to be made into a hero by circumstance. It starts when the fleet he's part of gets attacked and destroyed with the exception of a few people. The survivors meet on the planet they crash into, rebels get involved, and pretty soon it's just the main character, his pal, a Lieutenant, and the former Captain. They spend their time trying not to kill eachother, living off the land of the hostile planet, and evading the enemies searching for them. Then, just when it looks like they're about to be rescued, another faction decides to invade. And they find themselves in a massive plot which involves many more lives than their own. This one's a bit slower paced, probably. Moreso considering that I'd be trying to impart a lot of information (as far as I'm concerned) in comparison to what I usually write. In a lot of stories it's enough to say "so-and-so fired a pistol" but in Sci-fi everything has to be named. Everything has specific qualities. The best thing about this storyline is that I can fluff it by making excuses to show off the random crap I've made up. More or less the point of the whole exercise, I guess. Maybe I could put a plot in there, too. That might be pushing it, though.

And why did I type all this here? It's practice. I'm trying to get into the habit of writing whenever I have down time. Usually, I get down time and then often play video games. No more. I have to write for longer because I'm not a fast writer. I must devote more time. I wish I could churn words out like my name was Dan Brown, but my name isn't Dan Brown. It's more like Ban Drown. Something. Anyway, I'm hoping to inundate LJ with posts since I mysteriously gave it up for a while on account of school. Gives me something to look back on somewhere down the road.

Hopefully school will stay simple as it is now. I should have plenty of down time to get writing done. If not, then I guess there's always next year?

Richard Dawkins came up with the concept of the meme, and if he had added nothing else to general human discourse, that would've been enough. Some might say it's a small legacy to leave behind, but then considering how many times you come across the word may make you change your mind.

Dan Dennet didn't want to be outdone, though. His concept is a bit more specific (Thanks to Coyne for blogging about Dennet's speech at a recent atheist convention:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

While the "deepity" is a prevalent religious concoction, the definition could be expanded to be more useful. "Deepity", if its definition were altered slightly, would be a handy word in general conversations and situations.

A number of people have said that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is supposedly the Catcher in the Rye of "our generation". Besides my obvious disagreement of being lumped in with any generation (hence the scare quotes), I can think of no widely-liked book I dislike any more than that one. Due to the fact it's filled with meaningless phrases, mostly, although I have other reasons.

The most famous phrase from Perks is "And at the moment, I swear we were infinite." -- a perfect meaningless statement. Obviously it's attempting to convey an emotion, considering its context, but it still doesn't mean anything. Calling it meaningless is just too kind. It needs a word especially for it. Something that stings. I suggest stretching the word "deepity" to fit these nonsense statements as well. Guilty of sounding deep but providing no information.

Unless Dennet sues me, I plan to use it in this stretched form. Hopefully it can be a powerful weapon.

But it's criticism! True. I'm not big on criticism. I lean far towards the idea that art should simply be allowed to be art. If you don't like it, fine. Don't read it, watch it, listen to it -- whichever the case may be.

The problem is, these cringe-worthy deepities are widespread, at least among laypersons. A scan of amateur poetry forums shows this well enough. It's about on par with misspellings and yet nobody seems to take issue with it. I, personally, will do my part. No internet crusades, but if I happen across one, I'll point it out.

As I have said many times before, I believe the purpose of writing is clarity. It's a task rarely achieved by anyone even when they write as clearly as possible. The last thing anyone should want is more deepities.

I don’t have a lot to say about this, considering I’m nearly the last person to hear about it. It’s already attracted some attention. So a few links, first:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/10/conservatizing-the-bible.html

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/10/conservapdia_has_a_new_project.php

Both pages also have the link straight to conservapedia, should one want to read more than what’s quoted. I recommend the talk page.

But some have speculated that this conservatizing is a hoax. I disagree -- since one of the site’s main hosts Andy Schlafly seems to be directly involved. The guy has a history ( http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Lenski+Schlafly ) of this sort of thing: this is the same person who demanded from Richard Lenski, a biologist, the organism the scientist’s research was based on. So he could disprove it... even though he doesn’t know anything about biology.

I also want to second the idea, mentioned in the links above, that conservatism is turning into its own religion. It’s surprising, in a way, that they’d be so explicit about this. Plenty of liberal-minded people ignore hell, in favor of heaven, or give the brave reply (If anyone is suffering eternally in hell, I would refuse to enter heaven) while others in conservative circles tend to endorse hell with little attention to heaven at all. But in both cases it’s a subtle exercise. It’s a matter of slippery, nuanced interpretation, they say. So this blatant conservafication of religion is, well, apparently something frowned upon, isn’t it? Why else have people been doing it only in the corners of their minds and never out loud?

I will say this: it’s very convenient for me that they’re doing it in an obvious manner. I encourage it, if only for that reason. Their bias is apparent and easy to dismiss. When your religion is bent to the will of your political ideology, I know there’s no reason to spend more time with it.

Unless it turns out to be more of a circus than it has so far, I mean. Maybe an actual scholar will show up and get into it with them. Not that it would do any good for the conservapedians, but it would help undermine conservapedia even more.

A fellow named James Wood has an article in The New Yorker lamenting about religion and atheism. It isn’t online, so I haven’t read it myself, but I’ve read a summary of it. It sounds like it follows the average moderate believer’s rant formula, for better or worse, where the rising popularity of deism and atheism are demonized, while some flavor of Christianity is endorsed. With no evidence put forward (always a shame) according to PZ Myers and his posse. That’s a common problem with the average believer’s disparaging of atheism.

Evidence, of course, is the only way to criticize atheism. That’s the main problem with theist writers today who attempt to transform it. As Wood does, they point out that some people who are smart believe in god, that some people who are smart believe in evolution and science, that you don’t have to be a suicide bomber to also go to church, and so on and so forth. Nobody thought otherwise. The new atheists are not seeing religion as a caricature, as believers tend to see atheism, but they are looking at it as a whole. There is a difference.

Theists certainly have a tendency to say, for example, their sect -- out of the thousands within their religion as a whole -- is the only true one, and therefore the only religion worth mentioning, criticizing. All others are fake, along with other religious beliefs. To criticize religion as a whole is to throw in that one true sect with the rest, and that, somehow, isn’t fair. We aren’t like them! Etc.

But none of these sects which claim to be the true ones -- universally, each of them -- has a smidgen to support it via empirical means. The next one is as evidenceless as the last. What do believers expect? Should atheists spin a game show wheel with every sect and religion on it, and focus on criticizing that one by itself? I’d like to know how we’re expected to choose when they sound the same.

There is the more reasonable alternative, however, where the believer realizes exactly what the atheist has. People aren’t a member of their sect for rational reasons and there’s no surefire sign (if there’s a sign at all) they’re in the right one. Considering their own belief to be above the others is, at least in terms of skepticism, pointless. No one owes it to them. The best option is to lump unfounded claims together until they prove otherwise.

Wood’s article goes on to put forth that "[w]hat is needed is neither the overweening rationalism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity. It could give a brother's account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative. It would be unafraid to credit the immense allure of religious tradition, but at the same time it would be ready to argue that the abstract God of the philosophers and theologians is no more probable than the idolatrous God of the fundamentalists, makes no better sense of the fallen world, and is certainly no more likable or worthy of our worshipful respect-alas."

There’s something here theists don’t understand. Moderate theism is watered down theism, a more recent development. I will agree moderate theism is a much more positive view of religion, but it would be wrong to become allies with it. Moderate theism is now the reason fundamentalism has power. As the new atheists criticize the extremists, the moderates come rushing forward in hordes to draw their fire. The moderates are like people in room filled partially with racists who tell a racist joke. It doesn’t matter that they’re not a racist -- the action of telling a racist joke makes the racists feel justified and in good company. It’s better to tell no racist jokes in such a situation.

I didn’t write this with irony. On a subject where people can claim absolute certainty without evidence, I know I won’t be changing minds. But at least I can reference the occasional theist to this post and give them some insight when it comes to what atheism should be.

Kaufmann wraps up the book with an important question. Do autonomy and happiness coincide? Is it possible to be autonomous and happy at once?

Looking back on what he’s already written, and has been observed in life, about alienation, it’s clear that an autonomous individual will be seen as nonconformist. This may make life more difficult, as most people are conformist. An autonomous person would therefore be an outcast in some situations. Where can happiness be found in those cases?

Any pariah, I expect, already knows the answer: in creativity.

"The creative life involves alienation from others and from society. This alienation will sometimes be experienced as acutely painful, but when one is creative that price does not seem too steep. When one’s creative powers flag and one is dissatisfied with one’s own work, it may not seem worth it. At such times, when one is not creative, one may actually envy those who live a very different kind of life, endow them with a bliss they do not feel, and thus deceive oneself. But when one is creative, one would not change places with anyone - except possibly one who is more creative."

Last paragraph of the chapter:

"Guilt is mired in the past, as is retributive justice. Distributive justice is stuck in the present, but by the time it has figured out how to cope with that, it is dated. We must move beyond guilt and justice. We must give up the pleasant notion that we can have all good things at once. What is best is not things at all but creative autonomy."

Kaufmann also wrote an extremely short bit called "The Serpent’s Promise" afterwards. It stands for itself, I think.

THE serpent was wiser than man and woman and asked them: "Are you afraid?" They answered: "We have been told what is good and evil, and if we disobey we shall die." But the serpent said: "You will not die, but your eyes will be opened; you will see that all gods are dead; and you will be as gods, deciding what is good and evil."

They were afraid and replied: "How can that be? The gods are almighty and know everything. We can never be as gods." But the serpent said: "Nobody is almighty and knows everything. Your knowledge and your power will always be limited. Still, you can decide about your own life, and you need not accept what you have been told."

The man and the woman replied: "Those who told us knew what is good, and we do not know. If we do not obey, we shall be guilty. We are afraid." Then the serpent said: "Fear not to stand alone! Nobody knows what is good. There is no such knowledge. Once upon a time God decided, but now that he is dead it is up to you to decide. It is up to you to leave behind guilt and fear. You can be autonomous."

They answered: "But what are we to do right now to make a beginning?" The serpent replied: "You still want to be told what to do. Perhaps your children will be ready for autonomy."

In the chapter "The Need For Alienation", Kaufmann says that the price paid for autonomy is alienation. He explains the proper use of alienation is that someone is alienated from someone or something else, and that it isn’t unusual.

"Alienation in the sense considered here is part of growing up. Self-consciousness cannot develop without it. Not only is the world "other" (to that extent, alienation is entailed logically by the development of self-consciousness), but the world is also extremely strange and cruel. Hence, as perception increases, any sensitive person will feel a deep sense of estrangement. Seeing how society is riddled with dishonesty, stupidity, and brutality, he [will] feel estranged from society, and seeing how most of one’s fellow men are not deeply troubled by all this, he will feel estranged from them. Nor are these the only reasons for estrangement from one’s fellow men. After all, most of them are a rather sorry lot, and if we find ourselves unsatisfactory as well, that - given some humbition - [will] not reconcile us to our fellow men but add a sense of alienation from ourselves to our plight."

Kaufmann spent a fair portion of the chapter about Marx and workers, and a usage of alienation he disagrees with. I skimmed most of this portion. The rest would be skimmable for me, personally, because I would say that alienation is good and beneficial in many cases. Here are the other take-away quotes from the chapter.

"I have argued that many of the most popular uses of the term are unfortunate. This becomes apparent when we ask, who is more alienated: a writer in America who does not have a television set, or those who spend much of their leisure time in front of theirs? The nonconformist is alienated from society and cuts himself off from the world in which most of his fellow men are dwelling. But for those who operate with some conception of man’s "true" nature and assume that man is essentially creative, as the young Marx did, it should be clear that those who spend their spare time watching whatever fare is offered are "self-alienated."

Anyone who spent art equal amount of time seeing films of comparable quality, or listening to lectures of such quality, might be said to be equally "self-alienated." But (1) few people, if any, spend as much time week after week seeing film after film, or hearing lecture upon lecture, as watch TV. (2) It is doubtful whether enough films of comparable quality are available to many people. (3) Going to a film or lecture requires at least some exertion and a longer span of attention, hence a little more discipline. (4) Lectures usually come in sequences and require some active and at least minimally creative attempt at integration of different lectures and of a fair amount of reading. In practice, therefore, TV is especially debilitating and a good example of what certain writers might call "alienation from oneself."These writers also often claim, falsely, that "alienation from oneself’ is the most basic form of alienation from which all other forms are derived.

In fact, we have to choose between this kind of "alienation from oneself" and alienation from society. "Total alienation" is total nonsense. So is any dream of the total absence of "alienation." The television addict and conformist are "self-alienated"; the writer without TV and the nonconformist are estranged from society and their fellow men. As the term is misused nowadays, our choice is not between being or not being alienated; it is rather between ways of life that involve different types of alienation.

In my terminology, "self-alienation" is the wrong label for the television addicts and conformists who feel at home with themselves. I have proposed a more restricted and discriminating use of "alienation." When I say that alienation is the price of autonomy, I mean above all alienation from one’s fellow men and society, but also a sense of estrangement from the universe and a critical attitude toward oneself."

---

"One important source of alienation from one’s fellow men is their reaction to the person who has more self-consciousness and greater sensitivity than they. He feels that he is unlike them, but they feel it, too, and it is often their resentment that first makes him. aware of the gulf. The Painted Bird is the story of a child. But the autonomous human being who chooses to make his own decisions instead of bowing to authority or going along with the crowd alienates his fellow men without ever having thought of doing that. In that way, too, alienation is the price of sensitivity, self-consciousness, and autonomy."

---

"Finally, the sweeping, indiscriminate attack on alienation is a corollary of a dream of community. In this community there is to be no alienation, nor any room for "the stranger in your midst." Even the kibbutzim in Israel - one of the noblest social experiments of our century - have a strong xenophobic streak. The pressures toward conformity are overwhelming: those who do not fully belong are generally made to feel that fact deeply and painfully; and for a creative artist, life in a kibbutz is apt to prove impossible. The major countries that proclaim Marx as their prophet openly spurn nonconformity and have no room for autonomous individuals. It would be illicit to saddle Marx with Stalin’s terror, but the kind of community that seeks to eliminate alienation is incompatible with autonomy.

In the discussion of decidophobia, I showed how any confrontation with fateful alternatives engenders dread, and how the "craving for community of worship" is prompted by the craving to eliminate such confrontations. The stranger is an incarnate alternative. That goes not only for the Jew or heretic in a Christian society but also for the alienated individual in a community. Indeed, the herd man finds it easier to tolerate the nonconformists who are members of another, smaller herd than to suffer those who stand alone. The autonomous man is a living provocation. Usually he is forgiven only after he is dead."

---

"The New Integrity" discusses integrity, goodness, and virtues.

"The classical American misconception of honesty is that the word is a synonym of sincerity. What is at stake is not merely the misuse of a word but the overestimation of sincerity. While sincerity is preferable to insincerity, it comes nowhere near being the sum of the virtues; it is not even a cardinal virtue. Small children tell all sorts of charming falsehoods with sincerity and might be said to be this side of the distinction between honesty and dishonesty. Many clergymen and politicians proclaim falsehoods with sincerity and might be said to have low standards of honesty; they believe what they say while they are saying it, but only a little while earlier they knew that it was false, and questioned a few hours later they no longer insist that it is true. They cultivate the gentle art of mouthing falsehoods with conviction.

The typically modern misconception of honesty consists of confounding honesty with frankness. This makes honesty even easier to attain. One tells people what one thinks of them and assumes that extreme rudeness is proof of moral superiority. Both these misconceptions are extremely popular because they place virtue within the reach of all. Even if one is extremely partial to frankness, one has to admit that this misunderstanding is born in part of the desire for instant virtue; what is wanted is moral superiority without any fuss or trouble.

True honesty, like courage, admits of degrees. Manichaeans use the ploy of asking, are you calling me a coward? Or a liar? And they assume that if their critic hesitates to do that, it follows that they are courageous, or honest. They presuppose that one is either honest or a liar, either courageous or a coward. In fact, most men are neither courageous nor cowards; these terms are applicable only in extreme cases. We may act more courageously on one occasion and less courageously on another, without having merited the epithet of cowardice or courage in either case. The liar corresponds to the coward, and "honesty" should be used like "courage" to designate a high standard.

What is involved in honesty - or high standards of honesty - is apparent as soon as we reflect on the case of the person who says frankly and sincerely what he himself knew to be false only a little while earlier. Or consider a person who says what in fact he has never known to be false, although it is false and he himself would know this if only he had taken a little more trouble. Neither of these two people has high standards of honesty. Why not? High standards of honesty mean that one has a conscience about what one says and what one believes. They mean that one takes some trouble to determine what speaks for and against a view, what the alternatives are, what speaks for and against each, and what alternatives are preferable on these grounds.

This is the heart of rationality, the essence of scientific method, and the meaning of intellectual integrity. I shall call it the canon. We have seen what speaks against some alternative conceptions of honesty. Now let us consider some objections to this conception."

---

"Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, conviction - one’s own or another person’s - those with high standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us to ask seven questions: (1) What does this mean? (2) What speaks for it and (3) against it? (4) What alternatives are available? (5) What speaks for and (6) against each? And (7) what alternatives are most plausible in the light of these considerations?

Now it may be objected that doing all this is rather difficult. But has it ever been a condition of virtue that it required no great exertion? On the contrary. Next, it may be said that all this is not only difficult but in many cases quite impossible and at other times out of all proportion to the significance of the issue at hand. This is a serious objection and requires an important qualification of the conception presented so far.

Honesty does not entail pedantry. A pedant devotes so much time and energy to trivial matters that he lacks sufficient time and energy to investigate the questions that bear on the most . fateful decisions. Pedantry is the eighth strategy of decidophobia. Honesty entails a sense of proportion, in two ways. First, the pedant is not really a paragon of honesty. He deceives himself. He prides himself on his scruples in small matters, but he shuts his eyes when it comes to big decisions. A person with high standards of honesty will ask such questions as these: What is the meaning and what are the implications of this issue and that? What speaks for giving so much time to this one that I shall lack the time for that one?

Second, honesty requires us to proportion the firmness of our beliefs and claims to the evidence. When he holds a view without having given much thought to the pros and cons and to alternatives, an honest person realizes how tenuous his position is. Whoever has high standards of honesty will not say that he knows something, or even that he believes it strongly, unless he has looked into the matter and found good grounds for his views, and unless he has also considered objections and alternatives. Failing that, he will either suspend judgment or admit to himself and, if the occasion arises, to others that his belief is tenuous."

---

"Obviously, the new integrity goes beyond any ordinary conception of honesty. Even when honesty is not confused with sincerity or frankness, it is compatible with the admission that one did not take any pains to investigate a question and therefore does not know the answer. A person can possess high standards of honesty but very little self-confidence, courage, or humbition. He may be lazy and reluctant to exert himself. But what I call the new integrity involves not only high standards of honesty but also enough courage and humbition to apply the canon to the most important questions facing us. Thus the new integrity involves autonomy, but the two are not identical because autonomy would be compatible with lying."

---

"Was it possible to follow Hitler or Stalin, while living in accordance with the new integrity? Certainly not.

As soon as Hitler came to power, it was unsafe for any teacher to go on teaching as before. One could literally see how many teachers swallowed hard as they said what they knew to be untrue - in history, literature, religion, and biology, and other classes, too. After all, some student might report them to the authorities if they did not toe the line. Even if none did, some student might say quite naively to his father, to a fellow member of the Hitler Youth, or to anyone at all: But my teacher said . . . That might be the end of the teacher’s career; it might even take him to a concentration camp. As time passed, the falsehoods that at first had made some teachers gag went down more easily. The teachers’ integrity deteriorated. Still, might not some teachers, or at least some students, have believed all that they were required to believe? Of course, but only if they did not ask the seven crucial questions.

As for the Soviet Union under Stalin, Solzhenitsyn has shown convincingly in The First Circle and Cancer Ward how one could live in accordance with the new integrity only in a concentration camp or by keeping silent, how silence usually corrupts, and how this corruption spread like a disease through the whole society. The chapter on "Idols of the Market Place" in Cancer Ward makes this point expressly and at length.

In the West so many people are such relativists that they suppose it must be just as possible to swallow Stalinism or Hitlerism as it is to swallow any other world view. And if one believes that American society is just as repressive as was Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, one demonstrates indeed that, but for the grace of circumstance, one might have swallowed Nazism or Stalinism, for one shows that one does not care greatly about the seven questions.

Of course, one could be sincere and a Nazi or a Stalinist. But nobody who applied the canon could have accepted Hitler’s or Stalin’s irrational views, and teaching the canon in one’s classes or openly asking the seven questions would have been a recipe for death.

Few people have ever lived by the canon. Only those who suppose that most people do could possibly suppose that some of Hitler’s or Stalin’s followers did. Under Stalin, the party line kept changing, and his followers were required to change their views overnight, again and again and again. If they believed that whatever he did was best, that he knew better than anyone else, and that whatever the latest edition of the great Encyclopedia said was true, they could escape terrible qualms, but in that case they were decidophobes who did not live by the canon."

---

"In sum, an integrated human being with the classical integrity could follow Hitler or Stalin, but one could not follow either of them with the new integrity. For the person who lives by the canon does not accept an irrational book like Mein Kampf, or a man like Hitler or Stalin, or any man or any book, as an authority; he makes decisions for himself - he is autonomous.

Suppose, however, that a German or a Russian did consider the alternatives and came to the conclusion that it was best, everything considered, to join "the Party." 1 have examined this strategy at length in the discussion of decidophobia: those who decide to commit themselves in such a way that henceforth they will never have to face fateful decisions any more are decidophobes and not autonomous. And those who abandon or sacrifice their intellectual integrity cannot be said to have retained it.

Consider the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, the commanding officer of Auschwitz. In his first-hand account of his chief, Heinrich Himmler, he uses the very phrase that Nietzsche had used in arguing that "the party man becomes a liar": "wishing-not-to-see"! Hoess also says: "Himmler always found it more interesting and agreeable to hear what was positive and not negative." This might be considered a rather common human weakness, but Nazism elevated it into a principle: "Himmler was the most extreme representative of the Fuhrerprinzip. Every German had to submit unconditionally and uncritically to the leadership of the state." When Himmler demanded "surrender of one’s own will," this was in line with the Fuhrer principle and the Nazi Weltanschauung.

Hoess insists that he always complained to Himmler when he saw him - about technical difficulties. But about the annihilation of millions in the gas chambers he had no doubts. Himmler shocked and disappointed him only at their final meeting when the war was practically over and Himmler, "whose orders, whose utterances had been gospel for me," was quite cheerful and gave orders to his henchmen to disappear in the army with false papers. But perhaps the statement that best brings out how there was no room for the new integrity or for autonomy in this whole setting is this: "I must admit frankly that after such talks with Eichmann humane feelings almost seemed to me treason against the Fuhrer."

Hitler himself, of course, was not an autonomous man; he lacked both the classical and the new integrity. His calculated lies and his lack of any scruple about breaking solemn promises suffice to show that he lacked the new integrity, but one might wonder whether he could not have been autonomous for all that, if only he had applied the canon and decided that dishonesty was the best policy. As a matter of fact, however, he was not in the habit of subjecting his irrational convictions to the canon, and he was the kind of man Sartre described in his portrait of the anti-Semite, and Eric Hoffer in The True Believer. Nietzsche’s strictures of the "party man," quoted in my analysis of the third strategy in chapter I, apply to him. We also know that in conversation he could not tolerate any disagreement, and that in the end he became more and more interested in astrology"

---

"What speaks for autonomy, honesty, love, courage, and humbition? What speaks against them? And what speaks for and against various alternatives? Is my code really more plausible than others? Throughout this book I have considered alternatives and objections. I have tried to show how humbition is preferable to guilt feelings, which have loomed so large in traditional morality, and how love and honesty can do better what justice was supposed to do but could not do. I have not made out any comparable case for courage, which is admired almost universally. Courage has been celebrated by poets and tellers of tales since time immemorial. Even so, an autonomous morality cannot invoke any authority - neither that of intercultural agreement nor that of my own moral sense. What kind of appeal remains?

There is a utilitarian argument that does not depend on the hedonism of the English utilitarians. We should distinguish between utilitarianism in the wide sense, which appeals to the consequences of laws or rules, acts or habits, virtues or codes (let us call this consequentialism), and utilitarianism in the narrow, hedonistic sense, which judges the consequences according to their conduciveness to the greatest possible balance of pleasures over pains. I reject utilitarianism in the narrow sense for reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter. But it is the essence of irresponsibility to ignore the consequences, and I can find no good reasons for ignoring them. The only major moralist who insisted that moral judgments must ignore the consequences was Kant, who thought, falsely, that reason could tell us what is right, without considering consequences. The question remains as to the standards by which we should judge the consequences. How, if at all, can one justify one’s standards?

Obviously, one can try to justify one set of standards by appeal to another set; but if one chooses to be rational, one cannot justify one’s ultimate standards, or cardinal virtues, once and for all. Whoever makes one ultimate decision that relieves him of the need for further fateful decisions, is a decidophobe. An autonomous human being asks: What are the alternatives, and how, if at all, are they preferable?

The universal appeal of courage is surely due to the fact that every society is profoundly indebted to some very courageous people and finds it in its interest to foster courage. A society that held up cowardice as an ideal could not long survive. It does not follow that our deep, spontaneous admiration for a person of rare courage is accompanied by any thoughts about the consequences of his acts. Our moral sense has been shaped by poets and tellers of tales; it was inculcated in us in our childhood; and even if we modify it as we grow up and find that some of our enthusiasms do not survive close scrutiny, those we do retain continue to be nourished by a wealth of concrete associations. Because we have had an ideal for a long time, and have felt discouraged and disgusted many times with ourselves and our fellow men, those who suddenly exemplify the seemingly impossible ideal rouse us from despair and earn our gratitude.

None of this proves that it would really be best for all men to reach a very high degree of courage. I have said that courage and cowardice are two extremes, and the optimum could lie somewhere well above the mean, but well below extreme courage. To some extent, this point is taken care of by the fact that we have another word for the undesirable extreme: foolhardiness. But what has been said here about courage applies also to the other virtues, and unfortunately we lack words for excessive love, humbition, and honesty. But if we set up courage, for example, as a cardinal virtue, we shall be lucky if we produce few cowards and some men and women with a high degree of courage. Again, the same point applies to the other virtues.

Excessive humbition, honesty, and love are all self-destructive no less than foolhardiness. Those whose humbition is too great will be tormented by their failure to come up to impossible standards. Those in whom honesty becomes a rage are a menace to others and will also place themselves on the rack. And concern for others must be selective if it is to be effective, and it must be held in bounds lest it become obtrusive and annoying. The Golden Rule is intolerable; if millions did to others whatever they wished others to do to them, few would be safe from molestation. The Golden Rule shows anything but moral genius, and the claim by which it is followed in the Sermon on the Mount - "this is the Law and the Prophets" - makes little sense. Even when love is defined better, it is not the whole of virtue, much less an adequate substitute for a detailed code of law. The negative formulation is far superior: Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you. But even this rule, which antedates Jesus and was advanced by Hillel and, much earlier, by Confucius, falls short of what is needed.

We see this as soon as we consider the parallel to courage. Again, every society is deeply indebted to some people who showed extraordinary concern for others. It makes sense to speak of love in this context, but neither the Golden Rule nor the superior negative formulation describes the virtue of these individuals. They did something positive, but not as a rule anything they wanted anyone to do to them. Those who lay down their lives for others generally have no wish whatever for others to make such a sacrifice for them. The same applies to smaller sacrifices. What is really called for is not the simple projection of our own desires into others, but the habit of trying to fathom what those with whom we deal may feel. That is a minimum. Thinking about how we might help others is the second step.

The case for humbition is so similar to that for courage that only a single difference calls for comment. Humbition has not been celebrated since time immemorial; otherwise I should not have had to coin a name for it. Ambition has been celebrated, in effect, though usually without recourse to this word, and again society has been indebted to ambitious men. But this quality was found not only in the heroes of one’s past but also in many of the major villains. In some societies, humility was held up as exemplary, but one failed to note that those who were admired for their great humility were not people resigned to being of no consequence but humbitious men. My claim is twofold: neither ambition nor humility is as desirable for the survival of society as is humbition, whose social value is immense. Moreover I find humbition intrinsically admirable. When I contemplate the characters whom I admire most, I find that insofar as they possessed humbition, I admire them for that, and insofar as they lacked it, I feel that this was a defect. Exactly the same consideration applies to the other virtues.

Honesty is different in one way from all the other virtues. As I have defined it, it consists of being rational and living in accordance with the canon. (Autonomy consists of applying the canon to fateful decisions, and the choice of norms is a fateful decision.) When someone asks: What is so good about honesty (or rationality)? one might do well to reply: Do you want an honest (or rational) answer? If he were to say no, a whimsical retort in the manner of Taoism or Zen would be called for, and if he were to say yes, one might give him back his own question: What is so good about honesty (or rationality)?

The social utility of honesty even exceeds that of the other cardinal virtues. All language learning, all speech, and all social intercourse depend on honesty, and we simply cannot dispense with this virtue. Much less could we make a virtue of dishonesty. What can be suggested is either that we could get by with something less than very high standards of honesty, or that it might be expedient to permit dishonesty in certain areas or circumstances. In fact, however, in all the years that I have lectured about honesty and the other virtues in a great many different places and in different contexts (it was not by any means always the same lecture), I have been asked occasionally as a matter of principle how I would argue for my set of four, but nobody has ever come up with specific objections or alternatives to the four virtues; nor has anybody ever tried to define areas or circumstances in which dishonesty should be permitted. Under these circumstances, I advocate high standards of honesty with only two limitations: we should proportion our efforts to the importance of the issue; and when honesty conflicts with love we should be honest in case of doubt but not inflict genuine harm on others for the sake of our virtue. It is preferable to be honest when in doubt because otherwise it would become so easy to find reasons for not being honest that this virtue would be honored mainly in the breach."

---

"The classical conception of integrity was compatible with conformity. Some of its greatest proponents actually believed that it entailed or presupposed conformity. The new integrity is incompatible with conformity."

---

"It will suffice here to mention psychological meaning, sociological meaning, and historical meaning. Under the first heading, one might distinguish further between intended meaning (what a person is driving at, or what he is trying to say, although he may put his point badly); emotional meaning (what it means to him, in the sense in which it may mean a great deal to him); and psychoanalytic meaning (assuming that a proposition may sometimes mean more to a person than he himself realizes).

Insofar as the new integrity consists of asking seven questions, it cannot rest content with a wholly superficial and onedimensional answer to the question: "What does this mean?" Discussions of religious claims, for example, are often obtuse because they completely ignore psychological meaning. Not only must we occasionally ask whether the claims of other men mean more to them than they themselves realize, but we also have to push this question regarding our own beliefs. This is often difficult, but it is by no means always impossible. The person who never asks himself questions of this sort is making insufficient efforts to overcome self-deception and to that extent lacks high standards of honesty."

---

More later.

From "wonderchicken": http://www.emptybottle.org/glass/2004/01/never_mind_the_bollocks_heres_the_wonderchicken.php

"[T]hose who are 'serious' about their weblogs should endeavour to write well. I say the hell with that. Write well, write badly, whatever, just create. If you are saying things that stir people, they will respond.

If you can't write well, write with such passionate muscularity that people stand back and go 'whoa!' Make things, reach out to people. If you write well, keep doing it, and get better, and don't kiss ass for personal gain. If not, just go, bash that keyboard, make a hideous, amateurish squall, one to which, if it has some kernel of glorious truthtelling, people will respond. The mass amateurization of nearly everything is good. If you're a gifted amateur, the world will beat a path to your, er, door."

While the subjects at hand in the article are weblogs and how they shouldn't sell out, I think what is said in the quote applies just fine to ordinary writing. It's a question in everyone's mind: is what they make good enough?

Another quote from the article, about critics:

"What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f--kload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."

This chapter is "An Attack On Distributive Justice" and can be handled with the least number of quotes and writing yet (though I'm going to cover multiple chapters). It mostly rests on the same form of argument that Kaufmann took in the previous chapter.

The problems one runs into with distributive justice are the same. There are an innumerable number of factors to consider when deciding who gets what when distributing, for example, money. No strict code could be defined. It’s also impossible to call a final decision "just" if it’s only one among a few other tenable options, as with retributive justice.

One quote seems to wrap up the main idea.

"Even when the decision about distribution is the same, it makes a difference whether we tell those who are not admitted or promoted that justice has been done, or whether we realize how absurd such a claim would be. In the latter case we might say: "These were our criteria, which are obviously debatable. In time we shall probably revise them. Meanwhile we have done our best, first to make them known in advance and then to stick by them without being swayed by considerations of very doubtful relevance. We know from experience that even so we make mistakes at that level, too, but we tried hard to avoid them." To speak that way instead of claiming that justice was done is more honest and loving, more humane, and more mindful of the self-respect of those whom we disappoint.

It should be clear that what I object to is not so much the continued use of the words "’just" and "justice" as it is a way of thinking that affects the way people behave. One can always redefine old words in such ways that the new concepts are no longer open to the old objections. In my books on religion I have shown how many theologians are virtuosos in this art. But the result, if not the purpose, of this practice is that the new concept carries the emotional charge and something of the moral authority of the old term, and does this illicitly. Invocations of justice help to blind a moral agent to the full range of his choices. Thus they keep people from realizing the extent of their autonomy.

Some individuals can manage to use the old words while realizing very clearly how precisely they are using them, and their autonomy may not suffer. But for every person who brings off this feat, there are likely to be a hundred who are kept from understanding their autonomy. Hence it is far better to make a clean break.

The following consideration may help to support this suggestion. We can point to examples of love and honesty, courage and humanity. We do not know in the same way what justice is, as a quality of punishments and distributions. We cannot point to concrete examples. Solomon’s celebrated judgment illustrates his legendary wisdom rather than his justice. What made his judgment so remarkable was that he managed to get at the facts; he found out which woman was the mother of the child that two women had claimed was theirs. Still, this may seem to be a clear instance of a just distribution. But if that were really so, then it would not take a Solomon to make just distributions in cases where the facts are easier to come by. When something is mine and you take it away, anyone who is called in to arbitrate and gives it back to me might then be said to have made a just distribution: I deserved it because it was mine.

In the last chapter I noted that restoration - giving back what one has taken illegally - is not an instance of punishment. It is not an instance of distribution either. I have concentrated on: punishment and distribution and see no need now to go on to discuss restitution; cases of that sort provide no guidance for the many more important cases considered here.

Indeed, Bertolt Brecht’s version of Solomon’s case, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which is based on a Chinese play, suggests that the mechanical application of the view that restitution is right simply ignores the problem of desert, and hence of justice. In the Bible the real mother is also more loving. In Brecht’s play she is merely possessive and has no deep affection for the child, while the other woman does, and Brecht argues that the child should be given to the woman who will take good care of it - and the land to those who will make it flower and bear fruit.

Is that a model of a just distribution? Again it would be more accurate to call the judgment of Brecht’s judge wise and humane. It is future oriented and considers the past solely as a harbinger of the future."

"The Birth of Guilt and Justice" is the next chapter, which concerns itself with "[criticizing] guilt and, insofar as a book can do that, liberate people from guilt feelings. But guilt feelings are being bred all around us, and if one wants’ to keep them from developing in the first place, one has to find out how they originate."

His theory as to the origins of justice and guilt lies in promises.

"Here is the origin of justice, and it is, surprisingly, a single source. The source of the idea that a reward or punishment is deserved is - a promise. And what is felt to be deserved, is what was promised. The emotional response to the promise or to the failure to fulfil it promptly is wholly secondary. If the reward or punishment should be - deferred, or if they never come, in our own case or in that of others, this nonevent may be met with envy or compassion, with self-pity or guilt feelings, indignation or concern, hope or anxiety. It is a mistake to suppose - as Mill did, for example - that some emotion or other is the source of justice. (He picked resentment.)"

---

"The notion that rewards or punishments can be deserved, and often are deserved, is not born in the minds of sophisticated adults, nor is it the result of careful, critical reflection or painstaking inferences. We acquire this notion as children, long before we have learned to think critically about moral questions. Similarly, our ancestors acquired this notion long before there were philosophers or students of psychology, sociology, or comparative religion. Most of us take moral skepticism for granted and find it difficult to imagine the first stage of the development of justice or her birth.

Originally, both in the history of humanity and in infancy, what is held to be deserved is what one is told is deserved or to be expected. If a command to do something is followed by a promise, then it is assumed that those who fulfil the command deserve what was promised (have it coming to them), and that justice is done when they receive it and injustice when they do not.

Similarly, if a prohibition is accompanied by the promise of a penalty, it is assumed that those who transgress it deserve the penalty; that justice is done when they receive it, even if the punishment should be quite brutal; and that it would be unjust for the transgressor to go free or to receive some other penalty instead. At this stage justice does not necessarily presuppose a law. All it presupposes is a promise that accompanies either a command or a prohibition.

Here I disagree with Nietzsche. Arguing against a theory that had sought the origin of justice in resentment, he claimed that justice comes into being only after "a stronger power" imposes a law to put an "end to the senseless raging of ressentiment among the weaker powers that stand under it . . . ‘Just’ and ‘unjust’ exist, accordingly, only after the institution of the law. . ." The first sentence that I have quoted in part seems unduly influenced by Aeschylus’ Eumenides, a play that Nietzsche, as a classical philologist, knew well, although he does not mention it, and the conclusion that "just" and "unjust" make sense only after "the institution of law" is surely wrong. In childhood one acquires the notions of "just" and "unjust" without the benefit of laws; unsystematic prohibitions and commands, delivered ad hoc and coupled with spontaneous promises of rewards or punishments, suffice. There is no good reason to believe that in the early stages of a culture "the institution of law" is required before justice can be born.

The initial sense of what is deserved is usually exceedingly unsubtle and insensitive. It depends on some authority or other - a parent, teacher, priest, or ruler, for example - who tells people that this is the way things are, that if you do, or fail to do, this, then you must expect and you deserve that. (This is the birth of justice - the beginning of what I have earlier called the first stage in her development. The criticism of such promises, of custom and convention, rules, laws, and arrangements, comes much later in time, and I shall deal with it shortly.)

In this initial phase it does not follow at all that if somebody else does the same thing, he deserves or must expect the same reward or punishment. On the contrary, a child may not do what his parents and perhaps his older siblings may do, or even have to do. Rank, station, and sex are usually considered important at this point. Priests, noblemen, and servants are not expected to perform the same acts, and are not treated alike if they do the same things. The same goes for generals and ordinary soldiers. Zeus marries his sister and rapes the daughters of kings as well as some kings’ wives; but what is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox, as the ancient adage has it: quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi."

---

"What has happened to justice and desert in our time is similar to what has happened to God. A child’s idea of God is intelligible, but many adults consider it naïve. They are more sophisticated and disown such notions. They readily explain what they do not mean when they avow their faith that God exists, but the more they pride themselves on their lack of superstition, the less clear it becomes what they do mean."

---

"In the discussion of retributive justice, I stressed the crucial role of religion; but up to this point my theory of the origin of justice has underplayed the importance of religion. The last question about justice that needs to be answered here will permit me to make up for this omission.

Why have men so seldom tried to work out in detail visions of a just society? Because it is impossible to specify distributions and punishments that would be just. Although my thesis that this is impossible may be novel, something like it has been felt very widely, if vaguely, by legions of people for thousands of years. Instead of trying the impossible, they have simply postulated that after death everybody will receive what he deserves - whatever that may be. Dogmatic assurance about this supposed fact has been accompanied by an impressive lack of detail.

As far as punishments were concerned, a sort of pornography developed; at times, men’s imagination ran amuck, and under the flimsy pretext of justice one wallowed in cruel fantasies. The eternal punishments of Sisyphus and Tantalus in the eleventh canto of the Odyssey are not justified by any crime that bears a relation to them; only later ages furnished superabundant rationalizations. The penalty was dreamt up first; the reasons for it were invented later.

It is striking that in Homer’s afterlife there is no inkling of any reward. In Christianity heaven is usually nothing but words: bliss, being close to God, or angels with harps. It is hardly original to remark that listening to harps for thousands of years would be hell; but note the complete vacuity of the traditional insistence that after death virtue is rewarded, and each gets his just deserts. As children, we are led to assume that such phrases as "just deserts" are meaningful and have very specific contents; but on reflection it appears that there actually is no content. Or, if you prefer, what content there is does not bear thinking about. It is an embarrassment."

Next chapter! "Against Guilt". Kaufmann’s aims are laid out in the first paragraph.

"WITH THE DEATH OF JUSTICE, the tyranny of guilt comes to an end. For without justice there is no guilt. To say that anyone is, or feels, guilty is to say that he deserves, or feels that he deserves, punishment. Once it is seen that nobody deserves punishment, it follows that nobody is guilty or should feel guilty."

Guilt is important for, mainly, the following three reasons.

"1. Guilt feelings are held to be necessary for the moral health of those who have done something immoral. Remorse is held to be part of the punishment they deserve, or at the very least a prerequisite for reform.

2. Guilt feelings are held to be something one owes those whom one has wronged. Such feelings are supposed to restore, at least in part, an interpersonal balance.

3. Guilt feelings are held to be necessary for the protection of society. Nobody can watch people all the time in order to keep them in line. Hence it is held to be imperative for them to internalize punishment and to torment themselves when they do something immoral. If they did not know that this punishment was certain even if they should not be caught, it is believed that they would behave even worse than they do anyway.

My attack on guilt and guilt feelings will involve a critique of these three theses. But the addiction to guilt is even more widespread than these theses suggest.

Many "liberals" believe that their guilt feelings supply the psychic energy for their good works. Where would they be without guilt?

Many "radicals" feel the same way and in addition seem to feel the need to find other men guilty of heinous wrongs. Righteous indignation is a source of energy for them. Where would they be without guilt?

Many "conservatives" believe that all men are guilty because they are finite - they themselves no less than their fellow men. If they are Christians they speak of original sin."

In response, a barrage of quotes:

"Guilt feelings are a contagious disease that harms those who harbor them and endangers those who live close to them. The liberation from guilt spells the dawn of autonomy.

Typically, guilt feelings make those who harbor them feel wretched. The claim that this is precisely what they deserve depends on the conception of justice that I have criticized. I have argued that it is impossible to determine what precisely men deserve, but it may be felt nevertheless that those who have done something immoral deserve some suffering and therefore guilt feelings. As a matter of empirical fact, however, guilt feelings have no particular tendency to be proportionate to the wrongs that they feed on. It is not in the least uncommon for a person to have immense guilt feelings that revolve around a relatively trivial occasion, while he has none or hardly any in connection with what would seem to warrant them much more. What is even far more obvious is that very decent people of great moral sensitivity often torment themselves over minor wrongs, while less humane people feel little or no remorse over outrageous deeds that have brought immense suffering to others.

A critic might grant this much and still protest that those who have done wrong deserve some suffering and ought to have guilt feelings that are at least vaguely proportionate to the evil they have done. But in line with my account of the origin of the concept of desert, I claim that any specific suggestion concerning what is deserved depends ultimately on some appeal to authority, and that we should abandon the notion of moral desert. We should ask not what we deserve but whether the three theses that I want to attack are true."

---

"Finally, those who feel guilty usually feel, more or less like the antihero of Camus’s novel The Fall, that if they feel guilty, you have no less reason to feel guilty. This conviction does not depend on your having been the wronged person in the first place, although in the case of husband and wife this reaction is the rule when one has wronged the other. When a parent feels guilty over having done something seriously wrong in bringing up a child, he (or she) will normally feel that the other parent should feel guilty, too. And one is infected by being held responsible. Guilt craves company; guilt obtains company by contagion."

---

"In intellectual and artistic endeavors and in sports it is obviously possible to be sharply self-critical without harboring guilt feelings. If the desired goal is that one should not be self-righteous and that one should try hard to rise to a higher level of existence, guilt feelings establish no high probability at all that one will move in this direction; what is needed is a fusion of ambition with humility. Once again I have to coin a word to move an important idea clearly into focus. I shall call the fusion of ambition with humility humbition.

Humility and ambition are widely considered antithetical. I hold no brief for either as long as they appear separately. But their fusion, humbition, I consider a cardinal virtue, along with courage, love, and honesty.

Virtues are habits that can be cultivated, not qualities that one either has or lacks. Thus courage depends in some measure on vitality and therefore comes more easily to some people than to others; yet it is not unteachable. Some swimmers readily dive into the water, while others have to overcome a deep inner resistance, but most people can acquire the necessary courage, especially if they begin at an early age. The same applies not only to other behavior that requires some "physical" courage but also to the "moral" courage that is needed to defy any compact majority. Courage always requires some self-confidence, another trait that, like courage itself and all of the other virtues, admits of degrees. There is no virtue without courage; humbition requires courage (the counsel of timidity is to lie low instead of risking failure) ; love takes courage (fear shrinks at the prospects of rejection, loss, or disappointment); and honesty is not for those who are afraid of losing friends or cherished illusions."

---

"Humbition involves a sense of one’s limitations, accompanied not by resignation but by the aspiration to rise to a higher level of being. Those whose ambitions are petty can realize them and feel satisfied. Those whose aspirations are loftier keep feeling how far they fall short of their standards, but keep trying. They are too proud to be satisfied with their achievements. They are their own severest critics."

---

"The person whose morality is oriented toward shame rather than guilt is concerned about what his peers will think, out there. He fears being embarrassed, humiliated, laughed at, despised. It might be thought that guilt feelings arise typically when one feels that one does not live up to the expectations of others, and that guilt feelings are therefore other-directed. But this suggestion rests on faulty observation. The person who cares deeply about the opinion of his peers and about the expectations they have concerning his performance is likely to feel deep shame when he lets them down. Guilt feelings are much more likely to arise vis-à-vis one’s parents, especially if one feels that they have made great sacrifices and that they therefore deserved better - even if they themselves do not feel that way. Guilt is tied to desert; shame is not.

Those who have fallen short of their own high standards in painting, writing, or sports are clearly sensible when they do not feel guilty, nor need they feel shame. It is reasonable for them to try to criticize their own performance carefully, to ask themselves what went wrong, and to map strategies for doing better next time. And if there is no next time and the failure is somehow irrevocable, they may well feel keen regret, but they would be unreasonable and neurotic if they felt guilty. Is the situation basically different in the case of moral failures? Why do so many people assume that moral failures call for guilt feelings?"

---

"How, then, can one account for this intuitive certainty? First, wrongs that in our culture were at one time believed to be transgressions of divine law were considered sinful, and it was axiomatic that whoever sinned was guilty and deserved to be punished. Thus a Jew who has been brought up on the notion that it is sinful to eat ham will usually feel guilty when he does eat ham, long after he has lost his religious convictions. And few actions elicit more profound guilt feelings than masturbation.

Second, the easiest way to impose one’s will on others is to imbue them with fear and guilt: fear that they will be punished if they disobey, and guilt feelings even when no punishment materializes. Priests have not only inculcated guilt feelings but have also devised various rituals to remove them - rituals that, however diverse, have one feature in common: they deepen the dependency of the poor guilt-ridden flock upon the priest.

The easiest way to manipulate others is not necessarily the best way, nor does it happen to be as efficient as is widely supposed. Certainly guilt feelings have not kept people from masturbating. But it is far easier to tell a child that anyone who does a certain thing deserves to be punished than it is to give good reasons for not doing it. Hence parents, and whole cultures, frequently rely on guilt feelings precisely in connection with prohibitions for which they cannot furnish rational justifications."

---

"We must distinguish between guilt and responsibility. We cannot dispense with the concept of responsibility, which will be discussed at greater length in a later chapter. It does not follow from any of my arguments that it is irrational for a person to say: You can rely on me; I accept this responsibility. On the contrary, something is wrong with those who will not accept responsibilities. Now, if one has accepted responsibility and failed, one may be (but need not always be) responsible for the failure. Even if one is responsible for it, it does not follow that one should feel guilty, although in German one would say, meine Schuld, which may seem to mean mea culpa, "my guilt" - but which really need not mean more than "my fault." We cannot dispense with the concept of "my fault" or "my responsibility," but we should transcend the notion of "my guilt."

Let us try to work out more fully the contrast between "my fault" and "my guilt." Each of these two concepts belongs to a little family of related terms, and it may be useful to juxtapose them in two columns. The family in the first column is under criticism here, while that in the second column might replace it.

past-oriented ---- future-oriented

guilt ---- fault

remorse ---- regret

contrition ---- humbition

self-accusation ---- self-criticism

wallowing ---- planning

The wish to have the past different is understandable but irrational. If it actually were different, much else would be different, too. As a passing fancy, such a wish requires no censure, but if it is pursued seriously, it leads one into confusion and inconsistency, or to a pervasive negation of oneself and the world. And those who say no to themselves rarely say yes to others. Or, to put the point more concretely, those who torment themselves hardly ever manage to give others joy.

Those who say "my fault" regret what they have done without plunging into remorse. "Remorse" comes from the Latin remordere, "to bite again," and thus offers us the same image as the German Gewissensbiss, the bite of conscience, and Agenbite of Inwit, familiar to many of us from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Remorse is a gnawing torment, a way of punishing oneself for a wrong done in the past, a form of self-torture of which one might say, using Biblical language, that it is one of those things that do not profit. Similarly, contrition involves signs of grief or pain. But prolonged and insistent self-reproach and mental anguish move people in the wrong direction.

"Regret" is admittedly a rather weak and colorless word, deflated by abundant social usage. What is needed is a combination of humble regret with a resolve to change. What is crucial is to liberate oneself from the tyranny of an irrevocable past and to ask what can be done here and now and tomorrow."

---

"What makes good sense is asking yourself what mistakes, if any, you have made, how you might do better in the future, and perhaps also what sort of advice you could give others in situations resembling the one in which you have failed.

The difference between guilt feelings and humbition is not by any means a mere matter of words. What is at stake is an altogether different outlook and direction of the personality.

Guilt feelings involve a refusal to accept that what is done is done. The person who nourishes them is stuck at some point in the past and cannot go on beyond that point to build a future. He rejects his past deed and his present self, and he supposes in his Manichaean way that the alternative is to applaud his past deed and to congratulate his present self, which would by evil. In sum, he is caught in the spurious alternative between the bad conscience and the good conscience. I reject the good conscience as well as the bad.

An intellectual conscience need not be either good or bad. Rather, the person who has it is conscientious, thoughtful, and sensitive. One should think of the social conscience in the same way: to have a good social conscience would be tantamount to having no social conscience, but it does not follow that one must have a bad social conscience and feel guilty. The person with a social conscience that is not morbid is concerned about the sufferings of the oppressed. This point can be extended to conscience in general. The person with humbition has a conscience, but neither a good conscience nor a bad conscience. He cultivates self-criticism, finds fault with some of his past deeds and omissions, realizes that but for those deeds and omissions he would be a different person now, in a different situation, and accepts his present self and situation (and by extension also his past) provisionally - as the raw material of his future."

---

"It may be objected that if the head of a government had ordered the destruction of large numbers of civilians in another country, he ought to feel guilty. But my arguments imply that there is no good reason why he should. Any guilt feelings he might have would not enhance in the slightest either his moral stature or the well-being of others. What would enhance both? Stringent self-criticism and the decision to use all his powers to prevent similar crimes in the future.

Are guilt feelings nevertheless necessary for the protection of society? If this sort of punishment were not assured even when the law does not catch one, wouldn’t most people, or at least a great many people, behave still worse than they do now?

In the 1950s students were asking the very same question about belief in hell. And then about belief in God. Now that relatively few students or readers of a book like this would press such a question about either hell or God, one must ask whether guilt feelings are not the last dike.

Seeing that even the certainty of eternal torment did not keep people from murder and perjury, theft, burglary, and fraud, it seems exceedingly implausible that the fear of self-torment and guilt feelings should be a powerful deterrent now. You may object that committing those crimes did not entail the certainty of everlasting tortures; one could hope for absolution. True enough, but conscience is even less unbending than the church."

---

"In the case of surgeons it is clearly better and safer to rely on their humbition than to count on their fear of guilt feelings. The same is true of other professionals. But will humbition keep people from committing crimes? Obviously, not so reliably that society can dispense with the police, with courts, and with other deterrents. But insofar as education can deter people, it seems entirely reasonable to trust in humbition - along with honesty and love and courage. Raising children on these virtues and teaching pupils the habit of self-criticism, high standards of honesty, and fellow feeling for other human beings would make for a better society than does the traditional emphasis on guilt feelings."

---

"Suppose you were offered a chance to live in a lovely place, in the middle of a large garden, with a view of lakes and mountains. You had no chores to do; the company was splendid, the food excellent, and whenever you felt like it you could take walks or swim. If you had some project and wanted to write, that, too, could be easily arranged. Considering the condition of most of your fellow men, should you poison this paradise with guilt feelings? It is the thrust of my whole argument that you should not, but that you would be lacking in humanity and love if you considered the situation quite unproblematic. I am against the good conscience and the bad, but not against having a social conscience.

This case may look unrepresentative, but actually most professors and students, as well as legions of other writers and readers, live, at least figuratively speaking, in a beautiful garden. They live in a protected environment that shuts out the misery in which so many millions suffer. For anyone in the garden to feel that he deserved his good fortune would be really insufferable. To torment oneself with self-reproaches or to make life in the garden disagreeable for the other guests because nobody deserved to be so well off, would be stupid and help no one. What course remains?

The case is very similar to that of the survivor. It is a common mistake to think of either case as somehow quite exceptional. Every one of us is a survivor, and most writers and readers have always dwelt in gardens. Desert is a confused notion, and the world is cruel and capricious. The question facing us is what we are to do with the opportunities that come our way.

One answer is: Refuse them because they are not offered to everyone. Show your solidarity with your fellow men by not entering the garden; or, if you are inside, leave. This answer makes sense, unless you could help your fellow men more by using the opportunities offered you. If you could, but leave nevertheless to soothe your conscience, you are weak and place your peace of mind above the welfare of your fellow men.

The best solution is to find a project that will benefit humanity, in line with your limited talents, and to make the most of your situation. If you can acquire or teach skills and knowledge in the garden or write books that may help others more than what you could accomplish outside, stay without remorse; and when you no longer can, leave without remorse.

That sounds very simple, yet I argued earlier that it is impossible to satisfy all claims. There is no just distribution of concerns, of energies, of time. Looking back over a year or more, we can never honestly say that we have done the best we could. Is there not ample reason, then, for self-reproach? For self-criticism, yes; for self-reproach, no."

---

"It is in dreams that guilt feelings, if one was ever raised on them, survive the longest. Even the person who succeeds in putting an end to continued self-torment is quite apt to continue, at the very least for a while, to punish himself in his dreams. He may know that he does not really have suffering "coming to him"; but when he falls asleep, he forgets.

Some apologists for guilt will grasp at dreams and treat them as authorities - when they can be used in support of guilt. But this involves a double standard. Sophocles’ Jocasta told Oedipus that in his dreams many a man has lain with his own mother, and Plato, too, said that in dreams the part of the soul that is not rational "does not shrink from attempting to lie with a mother or with anyone else, man, god, or brute. It is ready for any foul deed of blood, and . . . falls short of no extreme of folly. . . " If it is the irrational elements in us that find expression in such wish-fulfilment dreams, why should we hesitate to consider our self-punishment dreams irrational, too? Only reason can decide what is irrational; and I have tried to show that guilt feelings are irrational.

None of this implies that we should ignore our dreams or that all dreams are equally irrational. A person may repress guilt feelings simply because they are painful, and he may persuade himself that he was not at fault when in fact he was. In his dreams he may punish himself for faults that, when awake, he would deny. He must still ask his reason to help him decide to what extent he was responsible and, more important, what it would be best for him to do now.

To charge a person with guilt is to judge that he deserves to be punished. To tell him that he has made a mistake, or even that he has grievously wronged another human being, does not imply that he deserves to be punished. Nevertheless I have argued that we need to retain the institution of punishment for future-oriented reasons. To live together, people have to prohibit some kinds of conduct, and prohibitions without penalties are ineffective in the face of temptation. If we always waived all penalties, the law would cease to deter men, and the kind of conduct that we sought to prevent would flourish. Hence we punish offenders, but we should not insist that they deserve their punishment. Some of them may well be morally superior to the prosecutor, the judge, and the prison guards. But aren’t the prisoners, or at any rate most of them, "guilty," while the prosecutor, judge, and guards are "innocent"? This is the kind of Manichaean simplicity that I have tried to transcend.

If desert and guilt are out of the picture, does it not follow that we might as soon punish the innocent as the guilty whenever that would seem to promote the good of society? Or rather, since I have rejected "guilt" and "innocence": might we not punish those who have not broken a law and claim falsely that they did? Since honesty is one of my four cardinal virtues, I obviously should not do that. Nor do I believe that such dishonesty would promote the good of society. (I shall return to this point in the last two chapters.) If we admitted honestly that we were punishing for a breach of the law a person who in fact had not broken it at all, we would undermine the law by making clear that one might as well break it because one stands to be punished either way."

---

"The apologists of guilt often repulse all criticism with the old ploy of the theologians: the loaded alternative, alias Manichaeism. We used to be told that we had to choose between Christianity and crude materialism. Now those who defend guilt are wont to claim that the alternative is to have no concern for our fellow men and no compunction about rape or murder. They think that if you have no sense of guilt you are a psychopath.

Admittedly, there are some people whose social conscience depends on resentment and is ultimately rooted in self-hatred. When they make progress with their analyst and manage to have a satisfying sexual relationship, their political activism ebbs away. People of this type are rather like the earnest students of a decade or two earlier who used to say that a person who does not believe in God (or hell) simply has no reason for not committing rape or murder. They were deeply troubled and afraid of what they themselves might do if they ever lost their faith. Millions have discovered that one can care for one’s fellow men and refrain from monstrous crimes without belief in hell or God. Surely, self-criticism and a social conscience can survive the death of guilt.

Finally, it may be objected that only excessive guilt feelings are a menace, and that the same is true of a complete lack of such feelings, and that we really need a moderate dosage. A middling amount is admittedly less harmful than a heavy dose, but a study of the latter shows more clearly how the poison works. My position does not depend on advocating a good conscience in place of the bad conscience, nor a lack of conscience. The good effects that are claimed for guilt feelings can be had without this poison. To liberate oneself, one must break the chains of guilt."

To be continued on the morrow.

The next chapter of Kaufmann’s Without Guilt and Justice is titled "The Death of Retributive Justice". I’ll attempt this with as few quotes as possible to still get the point across.

The overall point, though, is clear enough. Mankind moved from disproportionate senses of judgment, usually from a divine source ("In eighteenth-century England the punishment for treason began with hanging; then the offender was taken down while still alive and his entrails were cut out and burned before his eyes; and then he was beheaded and quartered."), and moved on to proportionate, rational punishments. Kaufmann credits this to the decline of religion, at least in terms of morality.

Otherwise we, as the western world, would have moved backwards (in my opinion, and probably Kaufmann’s), via one of his observations:

"Consider St. Augustine’s claim that all men deserve damnation; that God elects a few for salvation although they do not deserve it; and that the damned cannot complain that God is unjust. After all, says the saint, nobody is punished worse than he deserves, and the fact that a few fare better than they deserve merely shows the infinite mercy of God.

Such reasoning is specious. First, such arbitrary inequality of treatment is what philosophers call a "paradigm case" of injustice. For it is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition of "just" treatment that like cases are treated alike. Second, Augustine’s God exemplifies anything but infinite mercy. In connection with this last point, consider Dante, whose concern with proportioning punishments to crimes was second to no man’s. He gave the most beautiful and eloquent expression to the traditional Christian view of justice. In his sublime inscription over the gate to the inferno he stressed the eternity of suffering - the word "eternal" recurs three times in the nine lines - before concluding:

Abandon, as you enter, every hope.

But it is the central triplet about hell that requires comment here:

Justice moved my Architect above,

What made me was divine Omnipotence,

The highest Wisdom and the Primal Love.

The power of Dante’s poetry in the original Italian evokes admiration, and almost twenty centuries of Christian teaching have helped to keep most readers from being struck by the enormity of this incredible perversion of the meaning of justice and love. The only parallel that comes to mind is bound to sound like blasphemy, but it requires some shock to awaken those who are not shocked by Dante’s lines and by the Christian view. Over the gate of Auschwitz those who entered saw the words: Arbeit macht frei - "work liberates."

One can still wander about this camp for hours, walk through barracks, stare at mountains of shoes and hair, at ovens, and then see those words when leaving. Those who take language lightly and have no love for words may feel that this inscription adds nothing to the horror. Yet it is the ultimate in brazen cynicism and dishonesty - a final, almost unbelievable, affront.

The whole Third Reich lasted barely more than twelve years, Auschwitz only about three - a drop in the bucket compared to the eternal torments of hell. But what on earth could one liken to the Christian hell if not a concentration camp? And what to the Auschwitz inscription if not the infinitely more fateful claim that eternal tortures are compatible with, and were actually devised by, the greatest love that ever was - and by justice?"

Even if justice is attainable, the idea of disproportionate justice is the worst kind and what religion has promoted.

Nevertheless "we" moved on to proportionate justice. This is best defined by the simple phrase "eye for an eye" as already mentioned. Moral rationalism. Finding a purely logical argument against it would be tough, but there are reasons it has failed, and would be unjust:

"First, attitudes towards criminals have changed to the point where the demand not to hate them but to remain mindful of their humanity no longer sounds utopian. This change is due in no small measure to some nineteenth-century novelists. Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo come to mind along with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Their depiction of suffering was nothing new, and the image of prison conditions in the nineteenth-century novel is no more cruel than much that can be found in earlier literature, including Dante’s Inferno. What is distinctive is the novelists’ attitude toward these conditions and the sympathy for the criminals that is evoked in the reader. The culmination of this movement is reached at the turn of the century in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, the novel for which he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901.

Second, we have developed a kind of second sight. To say that we have become more perceptive in psychological matters would be an understatement, not because our age is so perceptive, which it is not, but rather because the psychological obtuseness that prevailed until quite recently is almost unbelievable. Again, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy deserve much of the credit for this change, along with Nietzsche and, above all, Freud.

To tear down the wall that respectable people had built up between themselves and those who were "abnormal," these writers approached it from two sides. Unlike Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Freud did not think much of the dictum that one ought to love one’s enemies, but far more than any Christian saint or theologian, he showed that our enemies, and criminals for that matter, were not essentially different from ourselves. One did not have to accept his theories in detail to be strongly affected by this implication of his work.

The other approach to the wall is much less obvious. In Paul W. Tappan’s massive standard text on Crime, Justice and Correction, for example, all ten references to Freud (in seven hundred fifty pages) concern the light he shed on criminals. But Freud - like Nietzsche, whom Tappan does not mention at all - also turned a searchlight on respectable society, illuminating the unedifying motives that come to the fore in punishment. Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal."

Kaufmann then suggests, to counter everything so far, that "[t]he critical evaluation of a law is centered in three questions: What purposes does it serve? Are these purposes good? And does it serve them efficiently?"

Note the lack of the words justice, retribution, and deserve. He goes on to say:

"1. Punishments can never be just.

2. Even if a punishment could be proportionate, it would not follow that it ought to be imposed.

3. The preoccupation with retributive justice is inhumane."

For the first: "The first thesis means that a punishment can never be deserved or [wholly]* proportionate. If the nine-year-old child sentenced to death in 1832 for smashing a window and stealing two-pence worth of paint had actually done these things, and if the penalty conformed with precedent and custom, that would not entail that the punishment was deserved and just. The same goes for a man broken on the wheel for stealing a piece of cheese."

The main point being that punishments are given primarily by custom. A human being doesn’t deserve to be punished merely by what’s traditional for the time period.

To sum up this chapter overall:

"The moral rationalist avoids the frightening task of weighing alternatives; he claims that reason demands such and such a penalty, backs up his claim with a proof a la Kant, and shuts his eyes to objections and alternatives. The moral irrationalist relies on authority, most likely on God’s revelation or the law, and then engages at most in exegetical thinking. The autonomous human being uses his reason to eliminate various alternatives, but finds that after this he is still left with several tenable positions between which he must make a choice. He may have little doubt that his choice is better than many that are clearly inferior, but he will not have the arrogance to claim that the penalty he chooses is the one that is proportionate, deserved, and just."

And a few quick ones I have nothing to comment on but still think are worth noting:

"Punishments are needed, invocations of justice are not."

---

"On reflection, murder is probably the only crime of which large numbers of people still believe that it is somehow self-evident that it calls for a particular penalty: capital punishment. It is assumed that the feeling that murderers deserve death is inscribed in the hearts of men, and that only modern reformers have forgotten this ancient truth. I shall confine myself to this example and show how wrong this assumption is.

In his study of Primitive Law, A. S. Diamond has shown that all early and what he calls "Early Middle Codes" punished homicide with fines, and in the many more or less primitive tribes he studied, pecuniary fines for homicide outnumbered capital punishment by a ratio of better than five to one: 73 percent versus 14 percent. In the remaining 13 percent the punishment was also a fine; the slayer had to turn over to the family of the slain a number of persons - women, children, or slaves. It is only in "Late Middle and Late Codes (including England, 1150 and onwards)" that intentional homicide is taken to require capital punishment.

In his discussion of the old Icelandic saga, Burnt Njal, Diamond quotes the narrator as saying admiringly of one of the heroes: "He was a strong man well skilled in arms, and has slain many men, and made no atonement in money for one of them." The same kind of admiration is not uncommon to this day; but the point here is that homicide was considered "a purely civil wrong, a matter for the individuals or families affected to avenge or compromise as they think fit."

---

"The liberal mind was fond of seeing all of human history as a steady progress from primitive cruelty to [modern]* humanity. Seen in this mythical perspective, Hitler’s atrocities looked like a scarcely credible throwback into barbarism. In fact, many scholars have come to the conclusion that neither primitive tribes nor antiquity match the cruelty that gradually developed in the penal codes of Christian Europe. Ancient Rome went the same way, though not quite so far, and was far crueler in the end than in early days. In Mexico none of the earlier civilizations matched the cruelty of the last one, that of the Aztecs. And the five books of Moses have no inkling of the Gospels’ eternal torment or the tortures of the Inquisition.

The last point that still needs to be made about retributive justice can be put into three words: desert is incalculable. Not only is it impossible to measure desert with the sort of precision on which many believers in retributive justice staked their case, but the whole concept of a man’s desert is confused and untenable. This claim is as fatal for distributive justice as it is for retributive justice, and I shall deal with it at length in the next chapter."

The next chapter, for tomorrow.



* - Corrected typos.

Good, relevant things come from Metafilter. Like links ( http://taimur.sarangi.info/wgaj ) to a book/article titled "Without Guilt and Justice" by Walter Kaufmann.

The focus of the book is on autonomy and the ways in which people avoid it. Kaufmann argues this takes ten forms (primarily).

The following quotes are what I found most interesting or important or something I simply had to note. I plan to go through it all after I've finished the whole, which won't be today, unfortunately. Bolding, mine.

"I have considered seven ways of avoiding autonomy: (1) religion, (2) drifting, (3) allegiance to a movement, (4) allegiance to a school of thought, (5) exegetical thinking, (6) Manichaeism, and (7) moral rationalism. It is possible to systematize these seven strategies under two headings: First, avoiding fateful decisions, possibly excepting the one decision not to make any more fateful decisions (methods 1 to 5); second, making fateful decisions, but stacking the cards in some way so that the choice will make itself and there is no possibility of tragedy (6-7)."

---

"One strategy for avoiding such decisions is religion. In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov the Grand Inquisitor shows at length how the Roman Catholic church has liberated people from the burden of having to make fateful decisions. His disquisition left its mark on Sartre and Fromm. Oddly, however, in Dostoevsky’s the case is made out only against the church of Rome. The Grand Inquisitor claims that the “craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man”; for, I might add, any confrontation with fateful alternatives engenders dread. He argues that to save men truly one must take possession of their freedom, and he suggests that what people ultimately want is to be united “in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap.”

There is no suggestion in the novel that the same charges could be brought against the Greek Orthodox church, or that other religions, too, have told men what is good and evil, right and wrong, thus obviating difficult decisions. Religion says: Do this and don’t do that! Or: Thou shalt, and thou shalt not. Instead of inviting us to evaluate alternative standards, it gives us norms as well as detailed applications. In fact, religions have evolved traditions that shield the observant from situations in which tragic choices might become inevitable.

The most obvious illustration is monasticism, which requires one great decision, once – to renounce the freedom of making major decisions. A Jesuit’s position in his order is a little less extreme. As usual, there are degrees. But those who become monks or nuns no longer need to face such fateful decisions as how to live, with whom, where, what to do, and what to believe. As a rule one does not even decide to submit to the authority of a religion: one is born into the fold and then confirmed at the threshold of adolescence before one has had any chance to explore alternatives and make a choice. One does not so much decide to stay as one does not decide to leave. Decidophobia keeps one in the fold.

Of course, this is not all there is to religion; and I have dealt at length with other aspects of religion in other books. Nor is allegiance to a religion always prompted by decidophobia. Perhaps this point is best made by choosing suicide as an illustration. I am not including this among the ten strategies because relatively few people have recourse to it. Still, it is often prompted by the inability to stand alone and make fateful decisions. Yet it need not be inspired by decidophobia. In many situations a human being may choose suicide with open eyes after considering what speaks against it and examining the major alternatives. Suicide can be wholly admirable. Nor need it be primarily an act of either fear or courage; it can also be an attempt at revenge or a form of protest. Similarly, not every member of every religion is a decidophobe."

---

"Drifting represents another, even less deliberate, strategy. It comes in two forms. Model A is extremely popular with those over thirty without being confined to them: status quoism. Instead of choosing how to live, with whom, where, what to do, and what to believe, one simply drifts along in the status quo. All decisions are made, none need to be made. Some people need a regular supply of alcohol or tranquilizers to remain satisfied with Model A.

This form of inauthenticity is readily perceived by many students. A few go to the opposite extreme: Model B. One drops out, has no ties, and is not guided by tradition; one has no code, no plan, no major purpose. One lives from moment to moment, rarely knowing in advance what one will do next. Model B can also be lubricated with alcohol, but since World War II this kind of drifting has been associated more often with other drugs. Conversely, in the past opiates have often reconciled the oppressed to the status quo.

Some of those who have drifted into Model B are afraid of making almost any decision. If they hitchhike, they go wherever they are taken. They leave things to chance. Everything depends on whatever impulse happens to be felt at the moment."

---

"Allegiance to a movement is the third strategy.

Such allegiance, again, is not always decidophobic. Some movements have little bearing on faith and morals, goals and life styles. If so, membership is marginal, although it may still be prompted by a fear of standing alone and some sense that there is safety in numbers. Total immersion, in which no crucial decisions at all remain to be made, is the exception, not the rule. Most of the strategies I shall consider from now on have a less total effect than the first two: usually, they work only in some areas of life."

"Others have joined parties or movements or retained their religion without any sacrifice of the intellect. They live in a tension, occasionally acute, between their loyalty and their intellectual conscience. As usual, there are innumerable possibilities and degrees."

---

"Allegiance to a school of thought sounds like a mere variant of allegiance to a movement, but it is actually importantly different. Membership in a movement is generally palpable and overt, and one’s consciousness of it is usually crucial: it helps to give one an identity. Allegiance to a school of thought can be like that but usually is not. Typically, it is quite unselfconscious and even denied outright. When granted, it is often felt to be irrelevant.

Those who belong to a school of thought are usually more interested in their small differences with fellow members than they are in what they have in common. These differences can be spelled out without much trouble, and in their publications those who write develop differences of this sort. What one has in common with those with whom one differs is much harder to specify. Distance is required to behold such family resemblances, and those inside the family lack this distance. But they rarely find it difficult to say who does not belong."

---

"The basic decision has been made, usually without one’s being conscious of making any decision, and the choices that remain are small enough to be enjoyable. One has chosen the game and the rules and can have a good time planning one’s moves. Microscopism spells safety. ... Alternatives do not call for painful choices but can be ruled out of court because one does not do things that way. Those who present them need not be taken seriously and therefore do not call the decidophobe back to freedom."

---

"Exegetical thinking differs from interpretation. Indeed, I shall use the term in a distinctive way to label the fifth strategy. Interpretation is inevitable; exegetical thinking is not. Exegetical thinking assumes that the text that one interprets is right. Thus the text is treated as an authority. If what it seems to say is wrong, the exegesis must be inadequate: the interpreter is wrong, never the text.

...

Exegetical thinking permits the exegete to read his own ideas into a text and get them back endowed with authority.

The exegetical thinker avoids standing by himself and saying what he thinks; for he might be wrong and would not know what to say if others followed his example and said what they thought. Such a situation would call for the evaluation of alternatives and invite the use of reason and the assessment of evidence. He is suspicious of reason and associates evidence with science and positivism. There would be no telling in advance where the argument might lead. Moreover, the result would be provisional, pending further evidence and argument. Confronted with the prospect of acrophobia, the exegetical thinker looks for a prop, for something to lean on. Being a man of words, he finds a text."

---

"The sixth strategy is Manichaeism. The Maanichaean insists on the need for a decision, but the choice is loaded and practically makes itself. It is like being asked to choose between two dishes of food and being told that this one is poisoned and will make you sick, while that one tastes incomparably better and will improve your health and expand your consciousness. All good is on one side, all evil on the other.

Inconvenient facts are ignored or denied; the falsification of history becomes an indispensable crutch; and uncomfortable arguments are discredited as coming from the forces of evil. There is no need for quandaries that keep men sleepless.

It is easier to ridicule this strategy than it is to resist it. Indeed, it has been so popular in so many different periods and contexts that one may wonder whether man is not doomed to think in black and white. But he is not. The ancient Greeks, for example, resisted this temptation to a remarkable degree.

...

When Thucydides, who called himself “the Athenian,” recorded the epic war between Athens and Sparta, he breathed the same un-Manichaean spirit. He did not even suggest that both sides were equally justified. He realized that as a rule wrong clashes with greater wrong.

...

Zarathustra had taught his people that there were two great cosmic forces: light and good versus darkness and evil; and he summoned man to help the former to vanquish the latter.

Some Zoroastrian ideas gained entrance into Judaism without achieving any great prominence in the Old Testament. But the New Testament speaks of the sheep and the goats, the children of light and the children of darkness; and according to both Matthew (12:30) and Luke (11:23) Jesus said: “He who is not with me is against me.” In Christianity the Devil became a far more powerful figure than Satan had been in the Hebrew Bible; he became the Evil One, the Lord of Hell; and humanity was split into two camps – those headed for salvation and those headed for everlasting torment.

Even so, Christianity did not follow Zarathustra all the way. In the third century another Persian prophet, Mani, preached a more Zoroastrian version of Christianity: Manichaeism. For a while its impact in the Roman Empire rivaled that of Christianity, and Augustine came under its spell. Eventually the church condemned “the Manichaean heresy,” and as a religion it died. But Manichaeism is far from dead if the name is used inclusively to label views in which history is a contest between the forces of light and darkness, with all right on one side.

The perennial appeal of Manichaeism is due not only to the fact that it flatters its followers but also to the way in which it makes the most complex and baffling issues marvelously simple. There is no need for difficult decisions; the choice is perfectly obvious."

---

"The seventh strategy is much the subtlest of the lot. I shall call it moral rationalism. It claims that purely rational procedures can show what one ought to do or what would constitute a just society. There is then no need at all to choose between different ideals, different societies, different goals. Once again, no room is left for tragic quandaries or fateful choices.

Various philosophers have devoted considerable acumen to the development of different versions of moral rationalism, and one cannot prove all of them wrong in a few paragraphs. But my critique of the idea of justice in the next three chapters will join this issue and should show that moral rationalism is untenable."

---

"The eighth strategy for avoiding autonomy is pedantry. It plays a central part in the creeping microscopism mentioned earlier; and I have noted previously that as long as one remains absorbed in microscopic distinctions one is in no great danger of coming face to face with fateful decisions."

---

"The ninth strategy is the faith that one is riding the wave of the future. This, too, is usually part of a mixed strategy and frequently associated with religion, allegiance to a movement, belonging to a school of thought, or Manichaeism. But even if the later Sartre did not succumb to these four lures, he certainly deserves a point for this faith in addition to the point he gets for exegetical thinking, and this is a very telling objection to his later work. Sartre endows Marxism with authority because it is “the philosophy of our time” (1960) and the wave of the future, and this exempts him from any need to see what speaks against it and what speaks for various alternatives..."

---

"The tenth strategy, finally, often spells total relief, like the first two: marriage. At first glance, it looks quite different from the others and therefore out of place. But it is probably the most popular strategy of all. When getting married, legions of women have echoed Ruth’s beautiful words (which in the Bible are not spoken to a husband): “Your people shall be my people, your god my god.” Henceforth they agree to make no more fateful decisions; they will leave that to their husbands. This pattern is deeply ingrained in many cultures: it is what a woman is expected to do when she gets married; and she is supposed to get married."

---

"The ten strategies could be arranged in a table as follows:

A. Avoid fateful decisions
1. Strategies involving recourse to authority: 1, 3, 4, 5, 9.
2. Strategies that do not involve recourse to authority and are compatible with going it alone: 2, 8.
B. Stack the cards to make one alternative clearly right and remove all risk: 6, 7.
C. Decline responsibility: 10."

This comment that is somewhat about bullying, from Metafilter, hits on a few interesting subjects:

I think many school environments promote [learned helplessness]. It's exactly what should be eliminated.
Something I saw a bit ago reminded me of something I saw a while back. You get people who are trainers - and this is true of anyone in authority but it's a hallmark of an autocratic or dogmatic systems of teaching - and say the student does something wrong or fouls up. In this case, say, the student doesn't respond properly and does something that gets them shot, stabbed, or otherwise gravely injured. There were (and still are) trainers who would say "You're dead. That's it." or some such and end the scenario.
Always stuck me as odd. Because, having been gravely injured, it doesn't just end. I mean someone shoots you, you failed, and what, you're supposed to roll over and die?
Anyway, forgot where I read it, but just reminded me off all that.
How people need to be trained when they fight, whether for combat, self-defense or whatever, is exactly the same way they need to be taught for non-practice professions and/or abstract concepts.
If a teacher asks "What's 2+2?" and a student says "5" or something - the choice there is either to say "Wrong" or to discover how the student came to that decision and give them the tools to properly figure it out.
So too - if a students is "shot" or "stabbed" what I've always done is handicap them and make them continue. Ok, your arm is gone. Let's tie that up. Ok, now what?
Because giving up is absolutely not an option. And I don't allow them to accept that they're "dead" or some such. Back in the day it might have been said that a samurai can still perform at least one action even though their head was chopped off.
Today - the emphasis is on the instructor and his ego.
Me, I'm proud if one of my students beats me. It means I've succeeded. And, far from the cliche' of "I'm stronger than you now!" I've found that it only gains me even more respect. And in part because it's a two way street. They know that they may have beaten me, but they can never surpass me because, at best, they can only kill me.
So too, they internalize this. They become unbeatable. They cannot be defeated, only killed.

And yet, socially, that's what many schools - and I mean public learning but I've seen it in martial arts in sports as well as combatives and hell, in military warfare schools - instill. That authority is final, that they have to take it because blah blah blah is "in charge," and, perhaps charitably, that belief comes from wanting them to learn/survive/overcome/etc. and so it's altruistic - but that's not empowering them.
Bullying is one facet of that.
In fact it's inevitable, to my mind, in that environment (as I've seen it myself amongst men who get their first real muscles and their first sense of true confidence in their abilities). I'll wait for the research paper since that's anecdotal - but again, I've seen it first hand.

Arbitrary - or even seemingly arbitrary - authority always gives rise to independent sources of it. Because hey, I'm strong, why then shouldn't I exert my will?

And on the other side the victims are shown that authority must be maintained - that is - perhaps the bully's right to bully is lesser, but that's only because his power is less, not because - in practice albeit not in express policy - the power he's using is wrong.
So they despair or become resigned to their position and perhaps harbor anger (justly) for years which may explode (unjustly, as we've seen in Columbine, et.al) or simply smolder and there's a ruefulness there of ever finding a method of applying legitimate pressure to a just outcome.
And indeed, options may be limited when it comes to that. That is not a reason to fail though, or be inactive or focus on one's own position. Dispair is not a solution, nor is indifference which in this case is its own punishment.
And it doesn't take a lot of brains to think up methods to seek redress and fix the system. Simply refuse to cooperate with humiliating acts whether they're from a bully or from the school system. Stand on dignity - no matter what fear tells you.

I think a lot of parents miss that. And don't support their kids that way. If, in the case of the asst. principal who strip searched that young girl - for what? aspirin? - if that was my kid, my daughter, she would know that both her parents would support her refusal to be humiliated in such a manner (to the point that her father could possibly come to the school and put a bullet in the asst. principal). Same thing with bullying, same thing with everything else - Non serviam.

Not to say that doesn't come with consequences and hardships. And not to say that people won't disagree with your method, but it's your life and that's where the final responsibility lay.
And God damn if people don't want kids to know that whether they're protecting them or making them little clones of themselves or just wanting them to sit still and shut up and be orderly.
But we don't deal with order. We deal with people. So we have to make opportunities to have those people fulfill their potential.
I get a student who performs a combination perfectly - well, that's not life though. And it's not what's going to happen in the street or in the field or on some oil platform or whatever. The goal isn't to replicate the method, but to internalize responsibility for one's surroundings.

As far as that goes that'd be the supremacy in subduing the enemy without fighting as the pinnacle of skill that Sun Tzu (and Bruce Lee if you've seen Enter the Dragon - although he gets it wrong) talks about. As a bystander involving oneself in someone being bullied, you seize the control of the environment. As a fighter, fighting a bully oneself or intimidating him into not fighting, this is not winning, this is merely protecting oneself.
Not enough. Because the enemy remains. And the enemy is endless, really. Especially if you're on the defensive. One might fight, even kill, one bully or a hundred, but the real enemy is bullying.
To prevail against that, one needs to destroy the enemy's strategy, so - use the environment against him.
A lot of the mistakes being made here are focusing on the various tools we ourselves have or on the strengths the bullies have. Both perspectives must be combined.*
When I do that - and perhaps some folks have another take - the solution I see is, as the article alludes too - albeit poorly - bystander participation in eradicating bullying (as better outlined by some above).

*"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu
posted by Smedleyman at 1:59 PM on August 14 [1 favorite]

I've been thinking about the subject of risk a lot lately. How the average situation plays out. How it probably results, defeat or success.

While I've been thinking in terms of life in general, this is mostly because of Arma 2, self-described "Ultimate Military Simulator", because life and death are at the front of every situation. What happens if an AI squadmate misses the shot at the enemy tank? He gets peppered with bullets, quite likely. But this doesn't mean everything ends. It means the situation has changed (unless we assume the AI squadmate is the perspective we're viewing the situation from, and that he's dead). It's an overcommeable setback, and it's one I've worked around more than once.

In terms of "real life", it's typically less drastic. Taking a risk and failing results in wasted time. Possibly money. These thoughts are quite reassuring nevertheless, and they greatly help when you realize you're catastrophizing some small event, like a speech or somesuch. (Thankfully, I have none of those planned.)

What is clear about risks is that their outcomes tend to pile up. Ordering a second squadmember to take out the tank, and having him fail... But this is material, and ordinary life typically isn't. On a battlefield you shoot or get shot, of course. Ordinary life is mostly traded words, for better or worse. The effects are "only" emotional, abstract.

That difference is important, and what it means is this: No one can fail at ordinary life so much that they can never make a comeback. Things may be rough, but it is -- to relate to the battlefield -- like having infinite allies to send after the tank.

The commenter writes about authority that it's often established by force. This is where bullies get the idea, some would suggest. What's clear is that it isn't actual authority. One person can physically beat the other or kill them even, but nothing about that makes them worth more, their views more accurate, and so on. The commenter rightly points out that authority (to distinguish from a might-makes-right mockup) should always be questioned.

Lastly, "bystander participation" is not just a solution to bullying. It's a solution in many other instances. What is important is the principal of not allowing people to feed off others, instead of one where it's taken as something to ignore.

I’ve been following a "debate" on a forum recently. The theist, who apparently owns a different forum, came on to this one looking for blood. He appeared to think that some members of the forum had, for some reason, been on his other one. There is no reason to think that, but he persisted nevertheless. His first post displayed a weak and barely concealed fuck-you-all attitude for posting on his forum.

Response? Uniformly fuck-you-back.

Ghandi: "Be the change you want to see in the world." People should know this, instinctively. Granted, I didn’t, but it is obvious once you’ve seen it in practice. The poster in question decided to emulate just the opposite. If a quote encompassed his philosophy, it would be: "Be the change you don’t want to see in the world." It doesn’t even make sense. Why put more crap out into the world if you think it’s crap?

Maybe it’s more compelling emotionally at the outset. The poster may be hopeless about it. But the poster has only engaged himself in a situation where he will be on the end of numerous insults and a conversation that, without a doubt, will go nowhere. If he had been polite, I guarantee he would’ve gotten a more welcoming response from some of the other posters. Without a comparison, we can’t say for sure, but I would wager that a polite entrance is more likely to pay off emotionally as well. Just not at the outset.

I also guarantee that some posters would be rude despite a more friendly attitude. No way around that, and it has to simply be taken in stride. Again, compare the Ghandi and anti-Ghandi quotes.

I’m considering telling them all to just start over.