A strange irony is curled up in Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of what was to come.
Nietzsche thought that the belief in objectively true values – a real good and evil, a real right and wrong – was finally petering out. Not much was left in the tank. Soon it would be empty. The age of nihilism would begin.
Bacon, who was wrong about many things, spoke truly when he said, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.”
To keep the government from doing bad things, James Madison and the other supporters of the Constitution proposed relying not so much on written prohibitions as on checks and balances. Other governments had used checks and balances between the social classes. The Framers proposed using them between the branches.
Atheist to theist: “You believe in a God only because you haven’t yet discovered a naturalistic explanation for the existence and properties of the universe.”
People are attracted to some awfully bad rules of life. Maybe you’ve noticed.
Since we are a rational species, and most people aren’t idiots, how do bad rules of life become so popular?
Case in point: The phenomenally successful Nike advertising slogan, "Just do it."