Push it into space and it gets worse, instructively worse. In space there are six directions — then which is which? Where do they zero? You would need the center of the universe to fix them. Who cares; back to earth. Even taking earth's center and six fixed points, the axes I picked were arbitrary out of infinite possible ones. Direction will not stand on its own feet no matter where I plant it.
The conclusion I reached, and it feeds straight back into time-and-space: direction is merely relative, not real. East and west are not real directions at all — they are combinations of directions, dressed as primitives. Even with a reference point our directions are inaccurate. So when we someday travel in space we will need a fixed reference, preferably something that does not move. Space is not the neat grid we pretend. It is relative all the way down — which is exactly why I will not finish defining it cheaply.
I work in two registers, and I will name the second one so it is not mistaken for contradiction. One builds the system — careful, structural, willing to leave questions open. The other has an opinion on everything, right or wrong, and is not afraid to be wrong out loud. The same mind produces both. The harder, surer, more polemical register that follows is not a break from the work — it is the work applied to the world, without the patience for qualifications. Both are how I think. Neither is the whole of it.
Darwinism is strong over weak, and it is basically evolution. So how is it wrong for a strong mind to outwit a weak one? Our society has gone anti-Darwinian, and in cradling the weak it hinders the very evolution that made us. I ask it plainly and I do not soften it: is it better to cradle the weak? I say no. We have stunted our culture's path and made ourselves a less productive country.
Take that into fraud, where it bites hardest. Your social responsibility is to better society. A society improves by improving both the whole and the strong individuals in it. To defraud — to con, to lie for gain — is to exploit a weakness in society, and that is only Darwinism taking effect. The weak are not meant to succeed; preventing them is, in this cold arithmetic, what serves the long evolution. I lay the argument out as it stands. I do not pretend it is comfortable.
And consider the hackers, because they make the cold case turn warm. Without people probing the limits of our security we would sit open to attack at our weakest. The fraudster, the con artist, the liar, the hacker — each tests a weakness so the strong can shore it up. So I send my thanks to them. Looked down on as they are, society is better for the pressure they apply. The strong testing the weak is not only permitted. Sometimes it is the service.
Here is what has gone wrong at the root: morality no longer falls to the individual. Law in America has become the greater moral code — the agreement we sign to be part of society. But the law is built to protect the individual, and over years and years moral and legal have blended into one thing. Now political correctness supersedes logic in case after case. I believe this is the fall of America's dominance in many fields, and I believe it is self-inflicted.
Understand which cradling I mean, because the distinction is the whole point. Protecting those who lack physical ability — that is not the problem. The problem is the cradling of the *mind*. We treat it as a birthright to advance through the educational system, and in doing so we diminish the accomplishments of those who actually earned the advance. We are making things too easy. Mercy to the body is decency. Mercy to the mind is rot.
It is not only school. We no longer expect the best anywhere — not youth sports, not the workplace, not our leaders. We stopped demanding the best of the best and started accepting a slight bump over the minimum. We breed a country of just-good-enough. And a nation that does not ask for greatness will, with perfect reliability, stop producing it.
Two generations of this grows a new flaw: entitlement. If everyone always "wins," a person feels owed without ever having done their best. Our obesity problem most likely grows from the same soil. The average now feels entitled to what the elite have — and, in the same breath, believes the elite are not entitled to what they earned. Both feelings come from never having been asked to earn anything.
So I will say the unpopular thing: we are not best served by a democracy. We are best served by the right choices, and only selfless, knowledgeable minds can make them. Luckily we are not a democracy — we are a republic, which *can* put great people in power. The cruelty is that the great ones are precisely the ones who do not want into the political system. Basically, we are screwed — and I would rather say it than flatter you.
Where did philosophy go? Everyone has opinions; no prevalent philosophers remain. Plenty pose, but none history will keep beside the greats. Why is there no modern Aristotle, no new way of life or thought? The philosopher is supposed to be the cream of the thinkers — yet society has no place set for him, so where did he go? Successful, addicted, or just ordinary? I cannot find him, and that absence is itself the alarm.
Aristotle wanted philosopher kings — the brightest as our leaders. So ask: are we led by our seekers of wisdom? Given the things our politicians do, plainly not. Our smartest are doctors, scientists, engineers — but book-smarts is not street-smarts, and a scholar with worldly understanding still may lack the capacity for original thought that founds a new movement. To be a scholar is not to be a philosopher. The chair Aristotle built sits empty.
The philosopher is dead, and here is what dies with him. No one is left to dissect what we "know." No one asks why and then hunts the answer. We no longer doubt what we hold true — and there was a time like that, when the world was thought flat. We chase easier life through invention and technology, never better life through thought. One person tackles one corner; no one takes the whole.
Strangest of all: in an age where everyone has an opinion and a megaphone, no one is famous for being a philosopher. We make people famous for being bad at things — but the public cannot name a living philosopher. We have leaders of fields, the so-called experts, and people trust experts and keep no room for a philosopher. The expert answers inside the box. No one is paid to question the box itself.
Society has always needed someone to shake it so the culture can evolve. Technology gets shaken constantly, and we watch it leap. But society itself is on autopilot, drifting toward a dark and lifeless existence — morality blurred into law, the utilitarian cast out. We need a light to head toward. We need a philosopher back to shake things up. Fill that void and society benefits. Leave it, and we live and die without a second thought to why.
We are becoming anti-social, and I want to know if apathy has become acceptable. We are social beings — by definition we need one another — so why do we ignore each other in person? Pass someone, catch their eye, they nod, they say hello. And people increasingly cannot be bothered to answer. I have started thanking people merely for acknowledging that I held a door. That is how far the floor of common courtesy has dropped.
The real subject under the manners is apathy, and a quiet ignorance growing with it. People do not care. We are forgetting what made the culture great — the societal bones of the country. The worst of it: the people who *do* care will, after enough small decencies go unnoticed, give up too. Then one day we all wake from this indifferent trance and find ourselves longing for the subtle decencies we are throwing away right now.
A word about ecosystems, by way of a phone. People are getting locked into them and stop looking at what better things exist. It is brilliant strategy — do it right and your customers can never leave, and it only worsens. But we should not be lemmings for these companies. And it runs past technology: we are a nation of content, doing too much without asking what might be better, being passed by nations bent on improving how they do things.
I bought the unfamiliar phone for a minor inconvenience, and I am using it as a small parable. We sit so comfortably in content — as a person, as a country — that we will not trade a little ease for something better. I hope we learn to make the sacrifice: to leave our content for a more blissful and productive nation. The whole social critique is one sentence wide. We are too content to improve.
Notice the word the social critique keeps landing on: *content*. A nation of content. Too content to improve. It is the same content from the theory of states — the balanced floor, swept off by nothing, but also reaching for nothing. What is wisdom in a single life can be decay in a whole culture. The state that keeps a person sane may be the state that lets a country rot. I let that tension stand; I do not resolve it.
We all carry good and bad, and the trick is simply to appreciate the good. Easier said than done — but if you are a decent person, the bad in your life is mostly outside your control anyway. And if the bad *is* within your control, then you have only yourself to blame and probably are not so decent. So make peace with the random uncontrollable bad, and enjoy things for what they are. You cannot taste the good while chewing on the bad.
Two concepts hold up the whole attitude. First: you cannot understand good without knowing bad or evil — take the good, take the bad, and there you have the facts of life. Second, and larger: perfection is a balance. Unless you would rather believe you live in an imperfect reality — and I refuse to, since I am here and would hate to be inside something broken — then a world must hold both good and bad to be perfect.
So drop the utopia. A world of only good is not perfect — it is unbalanced, and missing half of what makes good mean anything. This good-and-bad reality *is* the perfect life, and the work is to enjoy it as such. I will use "perfection" in this structural sense here — balance, the scale holding both pans. Elsewhere I use the word to mean something else entirely. Watch which one I mean; I will not blur them.
The other perfection — the one that is not about balance — is this: perfection is not something we can achieve or even notice, because we are too blinded by our own ignorance to see it in ourselves. We are blind to our own perfection. So do not spend your life searching for perfection. It is not a thing you reach by looking harder at yourself.
Instead, spend the search differently: look for the person who sees the perfection in *you*. We are blind to our own, and we need another to see the great person we are. When you find them, believe their view of you — do not cast it away as nothing. This is the closest thing I have found to the meaning of life: not to become perfect, but to be truly seen as such by one other.
For a long time I felt I was missing something and did not even know what to look for. Now I know, and the not-knowing is over: the ultimate goal is to find my perfection — to find the one who sees it in me. I may be missing that person still. But I am not alone in the missing. Everyone needs to find that person. The search is the thing we share.
Now morals and ethics, which I cannot discuss without society as the backdrop — they do not stand alone. My position: a person's morals and ethics are defined by the social groups they associate with. Beneath that sits one underlying value, either selfish or selfless, and that value sets how the person perceives every moral choice. Morality is not handed down from above. It is absorbed sideways, from the company you keep.
Here morals tie back to Controlism, and the join is the soul. Your actions and thoughts can be shaped by values instilled by family, religion, society. How much they shape you depends on how your soul interacts with your mind. A strong soul will not carry a moral code at all — it determines what is right on its own, not by outside forces. The strength of the "I" is, in the end, the strength of your independence from inherited morals.
A few hard lines on reality I would rather argue in person than write, but I will set them down. Perception can only be body- and mind-related. Reality is only the physical. Existence is everything. Three different sizes of claim, and people mash them together constantly. Keep them separate and half the old confusions dissolve. Perception is narrow, reality is wider, existence is the whole.
I side with Descartes: I think, therefore I am. That much I will stand on. But be careful of the deceitful creator — the one who could be feeding you a false world entire. I do not resolve that doubt here; I only refuse to pretend it away. The thinking self is bedrock. Everything built on top of it still has to be checked against the possibility that the builder was deceived.
On types of people I hold a position that resists most personality systems: there is no fixed way to type a person, because I strongly believe in the ability to change. Same with morals and ethics — it comes down to the soul's power over mind and body. Sort people if you must, but know the sorting is provisional. Anyone can move. A theory of human types that forgets this is sorting statues, not people.