by
Steve Hagen
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You are the final authority. Not me. Not the Buddha. Not the Bible. Not the government. Not the president. Not Mom or Dad. You. No community of philosophers, scientists, priests, academicians, politicians, or generals--no school, legislature, or parliament, or court--can bear responsibility for your life, or your words, or your actions. That authority is yours and yours alone. You can neither get rid of it nor escape from it.
Of course, you can pretend to give up this ultimate authority, or ignore it and act as if you haven't got it, or try to give it to someone else. But you haven't really gotten rid of it. You gave your authority to someone else. You chose to deny or ignore that authority. You made the decision to lie to yourself, to pretend that you lack this authority.
Right speech doesn't rely on judgment or discriminative thinking. In judging we weigh everything out. We base our speech on some conceptual frame that we've arranged to accommodate ourselves and process ideas--like, for example, that the Gestapo are inherently bad, and the people upstairs are inherently good. This is precisely the thinking that got us into trouble in the first place. Indeed, it's the very thinking that produces both the Gestapo and the fugitives.
Instead, we have to simply see the situation in all its pain, conflict, difficulty, and contradiction, and see how it is we become so confused. Then, and only then, can we speak and act in a way that's conducive to awakening.
ties into the way I think about redpilling - sometimes it's more complicated than "you are in the matrix and machines are bad"
being able to reconcile complicated and perhaps contradictory ideas
In many ways, we create a bigger problem when we put people on a pedestal in our speech than when we cut them down. Whenever we make anyone--a minister, a teacher, an athlete, a genius, our ancestors, the Buddha--bigger than life, it's easy for both you and your listener to forget that the person you're discussing is a human being. And with the passing of time, the person will only become larger until, like Paul Bunyan, they're sixty ax-handles high.
We tend to bunyanize the people we admire. But this is very dangerous--particularly if your hero is a teacher of the buddha-dharma. You'll forget that you're made of the very same stuff they are. You'll forget that, like them, you're completely equipped to see Truth right here, right now.
If you keep putting an enlightened person (or, more accurately, your concept of "an enlightened person") on a pedestal, you'll miss this critical point, and get lost in confusion. As long as you think enlightenment is something special, you won't wake up.
the obverse of the kill-your-heroes idea and just as dangerous as expecting perfection
I remember hearing a fellow talking about the Nazi doctors on the radio. He described these people as monsters, subhuman. It's true, of course, that we human beings have done monstrous things. But none of is anything other than human. Indeed, it's because we're human that we are capable of such monstrous actions. If we don't realize this--that every sadistic murderer is human, like us--then we overlook the fact that we have the capacity to act as they do.
We have to realise what we are. That range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.
this ties into my thoughts on the role of the system in determining human behaviour
The balance scale, I argue, was the image to which he kept returning for reconciliation of his varied ambitions, beginning from his naming of his first protagonist--an LB--after a standard unit of weight, money, and work (from the Latin libra, balance) and continuing through his romancing of IRS balance sheets.
this feels kinda BS to me
[...] Wallace also argues that literary texts are ideally engaged with proving existence: Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress should have been titled "I EXIST", which Wallace says is the "signal that throbs under most voluntary writing--& all good writing" [...]
why I write! see note 83
Unlike Pynchon, however, Wallace does not wish to dump the legacy of Calvinism; he seeks to build fictions around work and the fervent call to work, an activity he recurrently sees not just in terms of the labor theory of value but, through the lens of Hegel, as the only way of creating a fully viable self. Whether through an executive washroom attendant, diligent cruise-ship workers, or an actuary who dies prematurely of a heart attack, Wallace consistently makes work heroic and tragic, its lack, avoidance, or meaninglessness a sign of his most lost, and, in the realm of laborless capitalist value extraction, most evil figures. Absorption in work seems to be a reliable antidote to depression and feelings of worthlessness. Hegel's bondsman is a recurrent trope, as is metaphysical slavery in general.
need to think about this more FLAG
The denigration of work, the celebration of efficiency, and the worship of the market are all hallmarks of the ideology that has dominated the United States since the late 1970s, neoliberalism. [...] At his most political, Wallace chronicles the long-term infiltration of neoliberal ideology into the American and global scene. Reagan's union busting plays a role in my analysis of Broom, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) figures in Infinite Jest, which repeatedly makes ideas of freedom and trade, those neoliberal bywords, cross from political and economic spheres to the complexly interpersonal.
mildly interesting
Wallace weds to the perspective of Hardt and Negri a Wittgensteinian awareness that there can be no metaphor capacious enough to capture language's operations.
just thought this was a nice sentence
[...] the drug's use of "cattle-endocrine derivative" (B 149) suggests, via the etymological links between cattle and capital the making of humans themselves into pliable capital.
is it just me or is this total BS? not only is it probably unintentionally, it's hard to see it as anything more than a coincidence