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).
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.
We can only give away to others what we have inside ourselves.
Too often we spend our time in the past or the future. We need to learn to live now - mentally as well as physically and spiritually.
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?
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