Solitude is not simply being (choosing to be) alone (and not thinking of society).
Learn to be indifferent to things you can’t control (the tyrant)
In the community, I’m less focused on my material needs, and more humble.
“Everything is problematic”: My journey into the centre of a dark political world, and how I escaped
As an activist friend wrote in an email, “The present organization of society fatally impairs our ability to imagine meaningful alternatives. As such, constructive proposals will simply end up reproducing present relations.” This claim is couched in theoretical language, but it is a rationale for not theorizing about political alternatives. For a long time I accepted this rationale. Then I realized that mere opposition to the status quo wasn’t enough to distinguish us from nihilists. In the software industry, a hyped-up piece of software that never actually gets released is called “vapourware.” We should be wary of political vapourware. If somebody’s alternative to the status quo is nothing, or at least nothing very specific, then what are they even talking about? They are hawking political vapourware, giving a “sales pitch” for something that doesn’t even exist.
Pursuing ‘Purpose’ at the Expense of Family
Consequentialists determine whether a decision is right not by the motivations we bring to it or the duties we have, but by its overall outcomes. If a decision ultimately helps more people than it harms, then that was a good moral decision.
.. As he develops as a character, Kyle realizes that the moral dilemma he thought he had is no longer a dilemma at all. The duty he has to his family is stronger than the duty that he has to his country because as a father and husband, he has a core obligation to take care of his wife and kids, and no one else can satisfy that obligation. Protecting others in war, on the other hand, is a responsibility he can pass along to someone else. “In the end,” he writes, “I decided [Taya] was right: others could do my job protecting the country, but no one could truly take my place with my family.”
On Truth: Belgium Didn’t Invade Germany
Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau’s riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”
If relativism needed a bumper-sticker slogan, it would be Nietzsche’s dictum “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche was inclined to write as if truth were manufactured rather than discovered, a matter of manipulating others into sharing our beliefs rather than getting those beliefs to “agree with reality.”
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