Six thoughts over nine weeks

TUESDAY 5 JANUARY 2021

12:11

To share or not to share – your chocolates or nuts in the fridge, the bananas you actually bought for yourself, the money in your wallet that you thought you were only going to use to pay for your own meal. The bigger question is, who do you want to be? A wealthy person, in terms of attitude and bank balance, who likes to share, or a person with a little money, a few nuts or pieces of chocolate, or a bunch of bananas, but who deep down believes that a lack of resources is the true state of affairs, and if he shares, whatever he has will not be replaced?

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You are to a large extent responsible for the environment in which you live your existence, the environment in which you have sensations and experiences that you collectively call your life. This environment includes the atmosphere created between you and the people with whom you share your living environment – at work, at home, even in public places.

14:05

Don’t think in terms of true or false, but in terms of probability: How likely is it that something happened, or happened in a specific manner?

SUNDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2021

One man asks another: “Don’t you feel embarrassed, even ashamed? You failed at doing what a good son ought to do! You didn’t buy your parents a house, and if your sisters didn’t also make a contribution, they wouldn’t have been able to survive on just what you sent every month!”

The other man answers: “I used to feel embarrassed, even ashamed. To some extent I still do. But I also believed, for a long time, that the make money game was rigged against creative people, against true believers, and against lost souls looking for something to hold on to, for their place in the world, for who they’re supposed to be, or could be.”

WEDNESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2021

Imagine an author favoured by the political and cultural elite publishes a book and Amazon bans any negative or critical reviews. How can you determine the quality of the book if no dissent is allowed from the official and approved narrative?

SATURDAY 6 MARCH 2021

In his book, Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson explains how certain aspects of Western culture gave Western soldiers, military leaders, and governments a critical advantage in military conflict from the Ancient Era to the twenty-first century.

The very last item in the glossary gives a description of the word, Western: “Generic adjective for European civilization that grew up in and west of Greece, and shared core values that originated in classical antiquity, including but not limited to constitutional government, civil liberties, free exchange of ideas, self-critique, private property, capitalism, and separation between religious and political/scientific thought.”

According to Hanson, adopting and developing these aspects of Western culture would make non-Western nations like Iran, China and North Korea more dangerous than the wide-scale import of weapons and technology developed by Western scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, and companies.

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