#meta ethics

What the herd hates the most is the one who thinks differently. It is not so much the opinion itself, as the audacity of wanting to think for themselves. Something they do not know how to do.

In the twentieth century, everything once held in high esteemhuman nature, science, truth, objective knowledge, art, philosophy, religion, m0rality-had to be debunked. Psychologists sought to show that Man, once considered 'the rational animal', was fundamentally irrational. Freudians found us filled with lust and socially destructive impulses; Marxists found human history dominated by greed and exploitation; sociobiologists found all aspects of human life dominated by 'selfish' drives to reproduce. All three groups found human beings massively self-deceived and considered such supposedly spiritual pursuits as art, religion, and philosophy to be covers for something shallower and far less noble than they appear. Many have remarked on how tiny and insignificant humanity is, how foolish we once were to think ourselves the center of the universe, and how ignorant and helpless we are. Many philosophers, who had once seen their discipline as a rational pursuit of fundamental truths about the nature of reality and our place in it, now denied that philosophy could tell us anything of such truths, if such truths even existed. One influential school of thought declared that philosophers could do no more than discuss how people use words, and that metaphysics, theology, and ethics were all 'meaningless'. Other philosophers declared that there is no such thing as truth, that we can never know it, that we are fundamentally irrational, and/or that objectivity is impossible. American intellectuals attacked what were once their country's most revered forebears-such as Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington-as hypocrites, bigots, and exploiters; they attacked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution similarly. And Western intellectuals attacked Christianity more than any other religion. Modern thinkers have sought to tear down their own society's heros, its religion, its philosophy, its economic and political system-in short, its values.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit…for the nonreligious men of the modern age, the cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.

The first duty of love is to listen.