Saturday, September 18, 2010

comments

Thursday, September 16, 2010
**********************************************
THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND
***************************************
When a religion, or any movement for that matter, acquires a leader, it becomes authoritarian, which means, the authority of the leader becomes an issue of paramount importance, and those who dare to challenge it face death – either spiritual (by excommunication or expulsion) or literal (by fatwa).
*
One of the curses of authoritarian belief systems is their ruthless exploitation of fear. A God of love, compassion, and mercy does not rule by intimidation and blackmail. This may suggest that organized religions are inventions not of God but of the Devil.
*
When imams and popes preach love, they speak with a forked tongue. That's why only the naïve and the ignorant take them seriously. As in all organizations whose central concern is power, only unprincipled mediocrities, and ultimately bloodsuckers, killers, and child molesters are promoted.
*
We need rules and we need enforcers of rules, true, but history tells us some of the worst offenders and abusers of law and order have been the police.
*
Those who speak of another world are charlatans because we know nothing about it and what we pretend to know is nothing but a figment of our imagination.
As for the world in which we live: we know very little about it, and the only thing we know with some degree of certainty is that it is occupied by “weeds, rubble and vermin” (Nietzsche).
*
If a member of a party or organization were to tell me 1+1=2, I would immediately reach for my calculator to make sure I was not being bamboozled, hoodwinked, and flimflammed.
*
Herbert Butterfield: “The blindest of all the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not posses them.”
#
Friday, September 17, 2010
**********************************************
SUCCESS
***************************************
At the age of thirty-one he was charged with sedition, arrested, tried, found guilty, condemned to death, and executed.
Was he a success or a failure?
More recently, as a teenager he joined a quartet of singers who composed their own songs, eventually achieved fame and fortune, and became, in his own words, “more popular that Jesus Christ.”
Was he a success or a failure?
*
To define success as achieving fame and fortune is the surest recipe for promoting failures. If failures outnumber successes a thousand to one today it's because children are brainwashed to believe their options are limited, and their options are defined by the inflexible laws of demand and supply. As a result, a less than mediocre lawyer, accountant, or dentist is equipped to make more money (the surest index of success, we are told) than say, a prophet who may alter our perception of reality for centuries to come.
*
Gulbenkian probably spent more money in a single day than J.S. Bach made throughout his life. If asked whether he would like to be Gulbenkian or Bach, my guess is, the average American (who may pronounce Bach Batch) will choose to be Gulbenkian.
*
Ask a mother, any mother, whether she would like to see her only son crucified at the age of thirty-one, my guess is, she will say she would much rather see him live to a ripe old age as a mediocre carpenter.
*
Early this morning, in Nabokov's INVITATION TO A BEHEADING, I read the following passage in which an executioner delivers the following line to a condemned man: “...you must not be childish. The public, and all of us, as representatives of the public, are interested only in your welfare – that must be obvious by now.”
It's always the same story: the very same people who urge you to follow a path that is not your own, pretend to have your best interest at heart.
*
To those who say not everybody can be a genius, allow me to recount the following anecdote. About fifty years ago, a little girl by the name of Minou Drouet published a book of poems that was immediately hailed as the work of a prodigy. Jean Cocteau's comment on this prodigy: “Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet.”
*
Every child is a genius because the Kingdom of God is within us.
#
Saturday, September 18, 2010
**********************************************
TWO ENEMIES
***************************************
To trust someone means to make yourself vulnerable to betrayal.
*
I have had some sinister experiences in the hands of authority figures who pretended to know better.
I have earned the right to trust no one.
*
If I am proud of anything it's the fact that what I write has no cash value – or so I am told by individuals who deal in cash.
*
Dealing with people who deal in cash:
I can't imagine anything more carcinogenic.
*
My guess is, in the next world – if there is one – money will be abolished. Which means the annual income of a prince and a pauper, or a benefactor and a poet will be the same.
*
I have written two kinds of books: propaganda and anti-propaganda, and of the two, the propaganda books have sold many more copies.
*
I did not set out to write propaganda books. I wrote such books at a time when I was led to believe it was my duty to lie in the name of patriotism; and when I lied I did not think of it as lying but as speaking a self-evident truth.
*
We are told, in science to be right means to be slightly wrong, because in science, as in many other disciplines, there are no final answers, and if there are, they are known only to God who so far has consistently refused to share them with us.
According to Karl Popper, scientific as well as political solutions “can never be more than provisional and are always open to improvement.”
There is no such thing as history, only historic interpretation.
And according to Sartre, “history must be constantly rewritten.”
*
What does it mean to be an Armenian?
First and foremost it means demanding justice for past injustices.
Let's demand justice by all means, but in the process let us not commit a greater injustice.
There is more to life than past crimes against humanity.
Let us not allow our obsession with Turks to turn us into pillars of salt.
We have enemies, no doubt about that. But we also have an enemy within, and of the two, the second can inflict more damage.
#

No comments: