sayisms

give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. teach a man to fish and a bunch of feminists will complain about inequality.

a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single incident of domestic violence.

a friend in need needs to pull himself up by his own god-damned bootstraps.

absence makes the heart grow fonder. abstinence makes the balls go blue.

all's fair in love and war. sorry about your std.

april showers bring may flowers, which we'll need for the ensuing flood casualties.

where morality fails

life tends to be an evolutionary tautology: that which survives and sustains itself (through fitness) is life, because life is, by definition, that which survives and sustains itself. unfit ("maladaptive") life-forms eventually cease to bear offspring and slip through the cracks, leaving mere echoes in nature's graveyard. dead men tell no tales they'd say, though tales may be told of dead men. the same theme applies to ideas and character traits, doubly so if these are of genetic origin. take morality and kindness, for instance.

imagine a utopia where everyone in the population is kind to one another: when one falls, another steps in to help him up; trust is not even a word in their vocabulary because distrust doesn't exist so they've never had to define it! now introduce one schemer, someone who acts intelligently towards (solely) his own interest. the schemer will eventually game the entire population and if they don't learn to game the schemer (by becoming schemers themselves), they will be overrun. at the same time, if everyone becomes a schemer the population system starts to fail because a lack of victims means that schemes no longer pay off. neither of these extremes are sustainable. the former requires an absolute blissful ignorance (not likely), the latter becomes chaos (likely to fail).

one would think then that life may go on if civilisation were to find a stable equilibrium, somewhere in between these extremes. one strategy might be to take the middle ground between morality and intelligence: you start off giving others the benefit of the doubt and treat them kindly, and reciprocate their reaction from then on. if they don't game you in response to your kindness, you trust them; if they game you, you game them back from then on. according the linked article, this middle ground between morality and intelligence, which lies very close to the heart of "fairness", is a golden rule for behaviour, in a game-theoretic way. but in life there are no golden rules. life's uncaring whims require a jeet kune do approach, a form of no forms and all forms whose roots lie in the golden paradox that "there are no golden rules." or as an older, wiser, less impulsive person might say: "even gold may erode with the ravages of time and circumstance."

it's not unwise to think that what should matter in determining the philosophy you apply to a situation is the totality of the situation at hand: all its specifics and all its context weighed together to devise the most efficient response. but efficiency is a dangerous word: it is always intelligent, but it may or may not be "moral". what happens when morality meets efficiency? can they be reconciled? what would be the essence of an efficient morality? we don't have to speculate, we can see it all around us: individuals banding together, exercising great kindness at local levels (family, friends, tribe, team, country) to advance their own cause but at the same time acting against the cause of others on a global level.

the truth is direct and simple: our own intelligence conspires with our circumstances to circumvent morality when it no longer yields a beneficial return. morality, it would seem, is situation-dependent. at some point it becomes un-scalable: the more people in a population, the harder it becomes to calculate an optimum solution for everyone and the easier it becomes to revert to self-interest.

our chosen philosophical oxymoron of the day, efficient morality, would exist perhaps on the verge just before morality fails (as an adaptive strategy to life). past that point lies a slippery slope to a cynic's pyrrhic wet dream: an ocean of schemers.

the point of failure cannot be manoeuvred solely by attempting to inculcate kindness in humans; a hungry man is an angry man. biological impulse wins that race by a mile. we can, however, attempt to control the conditions that destabilise the verge. that is, to balance our behaviours we must attack the circumstances that generate them. in boring physical terms this means we must balance the supply and demand for resources by 1) controlling population growth and 2) working on new technologies to better provide (food, energy) for the population. this sounds neither noble nor glamorous, but it is necessary. if it is true what the cynics say -that moral actions barely exist outside the forms of a façade, a conspicuous commodity exchanged for kudos in the modern world- then as populations continue to grow, putting pressure on resources and making it impossible to provide for everyone, it is not improbable that we as a civilisation are nearing a point where morality fails.

mindfulness: chew it over

a monk once said that when you eat you should eat thoughtfully, without rushing. this way, not only can you enjoy all the subtle variations of tastes on your tongue, your body can more accurately assess its need for nutrition and you'll be less likely to overeat.

my own experience is that engaging other people is not unlike the process of a meal, where the food is the information of human intent or action (words for example). before reacting you should mull it around just for an extra second on the mind's palate. if it is bitter or scalding, with time and practice, you may learn to wash it down with something pleasant, or breath in air to cool it down, and avoid having to spit the whole thing out at the other person. of course, if you are constantly fed sour fruit, you should refrain from eating at that table altogether.

the superficial

in an age where critical thinking is for the squares, i often find myself surrounded by circular reasoning. actually, that may not be the best title: "recursive idiocy" may be more apt a description. where do i see this phenomenon today? in the transmutation of words, which once had underlying meaning and context, to labels, now used for simplistic characterizations that are both highly efficient and grossly inaccurate under scrutiny. for example: someone becomes a celebrity simply for being well known, or something is called art because its creator calls himself an artist, or using the word negro on a census form creates an uproar just because a word with multiple contexts has one negative context. in this world of politically correct, contextually incorrect, labels a child growing up today might think that the statement "Check here if you are of Negro descent" is more cause for concern than "African-Americans are at greater risk of unfair sentencing in the penal system."

seraphim sayings from my novel to be

such is the power of its grasp, that one cannot escape the throes of despair merely through meta-cognition. tis will alone, in its purest form, that saves a soul from the deepest pit of melancholy. tis will alone that draws it through the stifling ash of tragedy to the free air above.

some beats!

headlines

a UN delegate has proposed walkout practice to make leaving in disgust a more coordinated spectacle. "timing is everything!" said the delegate to AP news, "there's always that one guy who gets up too early, when the speaker is just warming up. sometimes we have a laugh at that but honestly this is the UN not amateur hour!"

"we also suffer the opposite problem," continued the delegate, "the slow pokes among us often fail to demonstrate their revulsion in time to prevent that one inevitable iota of substance from popping into the speech. it ruins the entire exit as it dampens the outrage we feel when the speaker has unleashed his second string of revolting statements about our actions in his third world country. ideally, we should be up and walking by the time it gets to be scathing or searing criticism."