The more complex our social arrangements are, the more effort is needed to keep them running. This belonged to the common sense of social life long before it was codified in physics as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Living creatures die; so do cities, nations, and civilizations.
Recently, as we were visiting his church out of town, an acquaintance who works hard to bring in the sheaves greeted me and my wife with the friendly remark, "I like people who believe in something." I wondered: Do the people we casually describe as believing nothing literally believe nothing? Or do they believe something after all?
Hear me talking for eight minutes about Why Stoicism won't make you happy on the Catholic Culture Podcast. (Interviewer Thomas V. Mirus.)
Allow me to update a post I wrote in 2020 about Donald Trump and social class, because the topic is broader than Trump. Let me begin with what I said then.
Self: Actually, it is all about me.
Reality: Thinking and saying it make it so.
Truth: See Reality.
Sex: Okay if it doesn’t hurt anyone. Never hurts anyone.
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historically fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can't a woman be like that?
Why does every one do what the others do?
Aristotle famously said that a meaningful statement is either true or false; there is no in-between. This is called the Law of Excluded Middle. However, a great many people say there can be in-betweens, and even try to axiomatize the idea. Sometimes this is called “fuzzy logic.” I think it’s fuzzy thinking.
Sometimes it’s fun to speculate about things about which we know nothing. For animal lovers, one of these speculations may be dead serious.
