My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
Interpretation
Cynics see everyone as flawed, while idealists only see flaws in others but consider themselves righteous.
This quote illustrates a dichotomy in how different mindsets perceive morality and integrity. Cynics adopt a broadly skeptical view, believing that corruption and moral failings are universal traits among all people. In contrast, idealists maintain a belief in their own moral superiority despite acknowledging the same flaws in others. This highlights the subjective nature of judgment and self-perception in human behavior.
In practice
This quote can be used during a discussion on ethics in philosophy class to illustrate divergent views on human nature.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
Language is a virus from outer space.
Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation. . . . The most essential attribute of human nature is its mutability and freedom from instinct . . . it is always within our power to change our nature. So it is actually the idealists who are on the mark and the realists who are off base.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
The worldly comforts are not for me. I am like a traveler, who takes rest under a tree in the shade and then goes on his way.
Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
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