where we stand

Sunday, March 29, 2009
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WHERE WE STAND
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Russians gave communism a bad name and Americans did the same with capitalism. The next “fail-safe” or “best” system, whatever it may be, will also bite the dust by its dedicated supporters as surely as communism and capitalism. It is almost as if the destiny of the best were to be the worst.
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Armenianism: the triumph of dogmatism over solidarity.
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It is the most assertive among us that are the most insecure.
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What we are is not a monolithic structure but fragments of what we could have been.
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We are constantly bombarded by lies that encourage us to hate our fellow men. It is almost as if the function of our “betters” were to make us worse.
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Pablo Neruda: “I only know the skin of the earth, / And it has no name.” After “All men are brothers,” the best argument against nationalism.
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I see a clear parallel between what contemporary composers have done to music, what artists have done to art, what politicians have done to statesmanship, with what economists have done to the global economy.
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Monday, March 30, 2009
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SOCRATES
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“We approach truth only in the proportion as we are farther from life.”
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ON OBJECTIVITY
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Objectivity and passionate involvement are mutually exclusive concepts – unless of course one develops the difficult art of thinking against oneself, which means assuming one is wrong even when – especially when – one is absolutely certain of one's moral superiority and infallible judgment.
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ON UNDERSTANDING
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To understand and solve a problem, one must be objective, and one must be objective for purely selfish reasons – to improve one's chances of survival. Cultures that are not tolerant of objectivity or dissent (in this context, two words that might as well be synonymous) have a short lifespan. Think of the Soviets, the Nazis, the regime of the Young Turks, and more recently, the Nixon administration. Closer to home, think of all the dissenting voices in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the last century that were ignored by our revolutionaries who to this day emphasize their heroism instead of questioning their judgment.
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DEFINING EVIL
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To know what must be done and not do it.
To know that what one does is wrong but do it anyway.
To know that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” and to divide it anyway.
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WORTH REPEATING
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The surest way of moronizing a nation is to brainwash the people into believing they are not just smart but smarter than any other nation, and anyone who dares to say otherwise is an enemy of the people. I speak from experience. The more moronized I was, the smarter I thought i was.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
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STRANGE BUT TRUE
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What a strange world we live in!
Chief executive Rick Wagoner (the one who traveled to Washington by private jet to ask for a handout) is getting $23 million for bankrupting General Motors as the management is demanding more concessions from the workers.
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The best argument against women's intuition and men's IQ (if such a thing exists) is the high rate of divorce.
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In the struggle for justice there are no losers. Even if you lose you may inspire others to carry on the struggle, or you may wear down the opposition even if it is by an invisible fraction of an inch.
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No one can be as ignorant, or rather, as infatuated with his own ignorance, as he who pretends to know and understand everything. I would even go as far as saying, the safest way of judging a man's knowledge and understanding is by the number of times he is willing to say “I don't know” and “I don't understand.”
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One of the most difficult things in politics is separating friend from foe – especially the kind of foe who knows all the right words and can easily guess what it is exactly that you want to hear.
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It is only after the obvious solution is rejected that a problem is declared insoluble.
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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DON'T BE A FOOL!
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A wise man (it may have been Aldous Huxley) once said that our planet is the insane asylum of the universe.
It is said, “There are forty-three kinds of insanity.”
Or, to paraphrase Tolstoy, “Every insane person is insane in his own way.”
There is a school of psychology that says, since the social order in which we live in is insane, the function of psychiatry is to replace one form of insanity with another.
Consider the case of Christians who believe the Bible to be the source of all wisdom, including scientific knowledge.
Chief executive officers who believe they deserve million-dollar bonuses after bankrupting not only their business but also the global economy.
After reading one of my commentaries, a Mekhitarist monk is quoted as having said: “He is an intellectual and all intellectuals eventually go insane.” Which may suggest that we are better at diagnosing insanity in others than in ourselves. Either that or we assume to be the norm and any deviation we label as insane.
We may know how to survive, but do we know how to live?
We brag about our literature but we suppress free speech.
Don't be taken in by appearances.
Don't believe everything you read in the papers.
There are as many lies in the speeches of our speechifiers and the sermons of our sermonizers than there are forms of insanity.
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