Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

  I cannot go to bed, since someone on the Internet is wrong. Yet it is not just someone; it is everyone. Nor is it any individual; few individuals I've met are ever wrong. It's rather the entire "everyone", the "they" which do not want for you, the individual, to Know. It is the Internet Itself, in fact, that seems devised exclusively for propagating error, and I fear that, as I write this, I am feeding into that same error... though, if it's dismissed contemptuously by the Internet, then I may yet correct it.   With some people, you encounter them and must assume that they are childhood friends. They never argue, leastwise not with one another, they are always kind to one another, speak with ease, as though they could vouch for the other's character and trust the other with one's life, where in my own experience I've been acquainted with some men five years and still was horrified by their betrayal, even more so by the fact I had not se...

  “Protagonist” is not a syndrome, but it does exist as a condition. Life is narrative; the finest ethicists, psychologists, and playwrights (MacIntyre, Jung, and Shakespeare) have agreed upon this fact. Each one of us is the protagonist of one’s own story; “All the world’s a stage”.   The functions Others serve within this story are quite secondary, as supporting roles. That’s not to say that we ought only to regard them as the means to our private ends. Each one of them must be acknowledged as the lead role in that person’s narrative, although that person’s narrative is not one’s own. Yet all these narratives comprise a larger narrative which lends an objectivity to every anecdotal subjectivity. Without this narrative, no objectivity is possible, since it is narrative which lends a meaning to existence.   Nor is this position to deny irrationality as something of a universal constant. No protagonist exists without antagonists; the Universe Itself provides an end...

In an age of rampant media consumption on all fronts, the danger of forgetting to distinguish fact from fiction is too real. Yet often those who draw the heaviest and darkest line between the factual and fictional are those most prone to be deluded by their “realistic” worldviews.   This especially is true of those who make too stringent a distinction in between “objective” and “subjective” facts and notions. The distinction in between these two dimensions of experience is simply a distinction of dimension, not of substance; saying something is “objective” rather than “subjective” is like saying something is the width but not the height; this mathematically is the truth, and it is crucial to the recreation of a figure, yet one can’t divide a table purely into height and width. Subjective and objective facts are inextricably connected and, at heart, they are one and the same. We only make a point to tell the two apart depending on the context.   Much like separating Church and ...

[I dedicate this, too, to Hazmat, of the Pudding Folk, and David, of the Squishy Puffs, as well as anybody else who represents the Softness of the Times:]   Perhaps you’ve known someone who was an addict. If you have, you know that it’s an awkward place to be the friend of one, and it presents you with a difficult dilemma.   On the one hand, you can intervene, you can insist “sobriety is better”, as an absolute, for you would never wish for anyone to live with all the problems which accompany addiction, in addition to the problem of addiction in itself. If someone does not want to change, you *make* that person want to change, for you are well aware that he is not the only soul at stake, and, even if he had the right to throw his life away, he would *not* have the right to harm the lives of others who inevitably suffer on behalf of his affliction.   Yet temptation tantalizes all. The righteous path is not without alternatives, and the alternative to intervention i...

Yes: I value the opinions of others, insofar as I can vouch for their integrity. Yet that requires that they fervently believe that what they say is true, that they can stand beside it, put it into practice, and uphold it as a sacred principle, as though it were a Higher Power which compelled them. It thus follows that, so long as an opinion is valid, one must validate it not by merely practicing that view within one’s own life, but by holding others to it. One cannot impose morality on anyone, because morality is binding on us all, in equal measure, and one’s only burden is to fathom it, to the extent one can, and to uphold it. That is not an imposition; it’s an obligation, and, without it, we have nothing. You once asked me: “At what point is it an evil to impose one’s views of righteousness on someone else?” I’ll answer with the obvious: at no point, whatsoever, since it is impossible. Where Righteousness is what’s at stake, one can’t “impose on someone else”, as though one posed a...