Monday, November 10, 2008

I would ask you

I would ask you to examine your fears. Which of them are rational and which of them are just deeply ingrained Pavlovian responses.

I read a book a long time ago called the Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. At the time I probably smoked more dope than I should have and spent too much time inhaling (as Barak sez, it was the whole point). But to this day there was a passage that gripped me. One of the characters spent the first couple of minutes analyzing folks he met then when he figured out what type of person that character was, he would hand that character one of two cards.

  1. The first said "There is no friend anywhere."
  2. The second said, "There is no enemy anywhere."
Maybe a lot of folks in the tin foil hat crowd had better take a deep breath and think about things. What are the true dangers facing us? What are the consequences of our actions or lack of actions? What issues can we have an effect on? Which issues are out of our pay grade?

You have an impact in this world. But unless you can clearly identify what are the threats and what actions are available to you, you will not survive.

Calm down folks. Take a big breath, grab a beer, sit on the front porch, and think.

What are the facts? Again and again and again what are the facts?

Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the "unguessable verdict of history"—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future, facts are your single clue. Get the facts!


Robert Heinlein

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

3 comments:

Mayberry said...
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Degringolade said...
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Mayberry said...
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