So there is this image I saw on Twitter and I think I can say a few things. The first thing is that every generation almost always lambasts the next generation for infractions real or imagined.
ON clothing, this is what Montaigne had to say (and before you go on about argument from authority, no I am not quoting him as an authority on dressing I could as well have quoted Mark Twain who says c
lothes maketh the man)
Had we been born with a necessity upon us of wearing petticoats and breeches, there is no doubt but nature would have fortified those parts she intended should be exposed to the fury of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done the finger-ends and the soles of the feet.
And maybe some people were born yesterday, but we know that many peoples from different nations went about their business naked. The morbid obsession about nudity is in my view, a problem of the Abrahamic religions.
I have lost several phones over the years and each loss has been different. On one occasion my phone was stolen while i was in traffic and talking to a friend & it had contacts even of my enemies which I had not backed up. I have been unable to talk to these enemies since. I don’t know how or where I lost my virginity but I think people are usually more concerned with the virginity of women. That is what is traded. It is their bodies that are controlled. Not a man’s body.
I must have missed the memo that required people to drink or smoke. But I have always known to fit in certain groups, people have always had to do certain things. So maybe, the problem is not the society but the groups the author of this is in. He or she can be easily cured by changing groups. He could join a church choir for example and have holy sex 🙂
I know nothing wrong with a bathroom. Take photos wherever you feel great, even if it is in a coffin. This life is once only.
If temples are not places of socialization, why eve go there?
“If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods”, said Shelley, “knowledge of nature is made for their destruction.” I think it is this simple thing that explains why worshiping a god, that every reflecting mind acknowledges does not exist, has become difficult. At the same time, one wonders why a wholly perfect being would want, command or even desire worship?
If it was true that lies have become a reality only in the 21st century, there would be no world wars or slavery because these depended on deception for their execution. Or how do you justify the Inquisition? Was it not based on lies that they, the Inquisitors alone, had the correct way of worship, that is, the possessors of true religion.
While I am no woman, I think no one wants to get HIV/AIDS or get pregnant left right and centre.
It is possible the pizza hut is next to your block and the ambulance or police or fire department is several blocks away. It is sensible the pizza guy will get home quicker, plus you need your pizza hot. But this is not just a 21st century problem. It is a problem of how governments and societies allocate public goods.
As to people becoming toxic, how do we explain the killing of Socrates or the excommunication of Spinoza? Was it not a result of intolerance? But then, I think history is not the friend of this author.
If the question of money and family had not been a problem in the past, it is unlikely the philosophers of the past would have spoken about it. A little browsing through the archives will yield such sayings from the 15th Century monk who said all rich men are thieves.
There is the story of the prodigal son in the bible. It is really a matter of irony that the person who authored this BS quoted the bible at the end but forgot this story. And unless evidence is adduced to the contrary, people have been sex for as long as humanity has known how to fuck.
Caesar, that murderous general played with the minds of his armies and led Rome to a civil war. I don’t know what this person is on about.
I will end here by quoting Mark Twain extensively on human nature. You can disagree with it, but I find it quite hilarious. He wrote
“I regard these Laws as established. By the terms of the Law of Periodical Repetition nothing whatever can happen a single time only; everything happens again, and yet again, and still again — monotonously. Nature has no originality — I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats — repeats — repeats — repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true. When she puts together a man, and is satisfied with him, she is loyal to him, she stands by him through thick and thin forevermore, she repeats him by billions and billions of examples; and physically and mentally the average remains exactly the same, it doesn’t vary a hair between the first batch, the middle batch and the last batch. If you ask, ‘But really — do you think all men are alike
then continues to say
Yes, I answer, and Nature repeats those. There is nothing that she doesn’t repeat. If I may use a figure, she has established the general intellectual level of the race at say, six feet. Take any billion men and stand them in a mass, and their head tops will make a floor — a floor as level as a table. That floor represents the intellectual altitude of the masses — and it never changes. Here and there, miles apart, a head will prefect above it a matter of one intellectual inch, so to speak — men of mark in science, law, war, commerce, etc.; in a spread of five thousand miles you will find three heads that project still an inch higher, men of national fame — and one that is higher than those by two inches, maybe three — a man of (temporarily) world-wide renown; and finally, somewhere around the circumference of the globe, you will find, once in five centuries of waiting, one majestic head which over tops the highest of all the others — an author, a teacher, an artist, a martyr, a conqueror, whose fame towers to the stars, and whose fame will never perish, never fade, while time shall last; some colossus supreme above all the human herd, some unmated and unmatable prodigy like him who, by magic of the forces born in him, turned his shoe-hammer into the scepter of universal dominion.
Now in that view you have the ordinary man of all nations; you have the here-and-there man that is larger-brained and becomes distinguished; you have the still rarer man of still wider and more lasting distinction; and in that final head rising solitary out of the stretch of the ages, you have the limit of Nature’s output. “Will she change this program? Not while time lasts. Will she repeat it forever? Yes. Forever and ever she will do those grades over and over again, always in the same proportions, and always with the regularity of a machine. In each million of people, just so many inch-superiorities; in each billion, just so many two-inch superiorities — and so on; and always that recurrent solitary star once in an age, never oftener, never two of them at a time. “Nature, when pleased with an idea, never tires of applying it. She makes plains; she makes hills; she makes mountains; raises a conspicuous peak at wide intervals; then loftier and rarer ones, continents apart; and finally a supreme one six miles high.
Ignorance in the information age, I think, is intentional.
Random thoughts 