The Reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.
Thomas Edison
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2010.
Almost every review of national history where diplomatic relations are examined will reveal one interesting phenomenon- the winner of the diplomatic interaction will have undoubtedly utilized a policy of diplomatic mischievousness to its fullest effect. Diplomacy is a sword fight of words, where the intents of each opponent is to pigeonhole his opposite into committing to something to the benefit of another at the expense of the committing party. This is where the agency of shenaniganry comes in. The great Bismarck may have best stated the truth of politics and diplomacy as “the capacity to choose in each fleeting moment of a situation that which is…most opportune.”
The simplest shenanigan is to pretend to commit to something, with the caveat that another will likewise make some commitment, in such a fashion that the commitment of one will not be upheld whilst the commitment by the other is held true. The common thread here is to get a country to facilitate some present day concern with the promise that the other country will oblige some commitment in the future, which of course it has no intent of doing.
The mischief of diplomacy that holds the most puissance is that which uses public opinion to sharpen the sword. The ambassador that best sniffs out public opinion to all relevant parties and then angles diplomatic combat to champion his intents by way of public opinion is the country’s hero. Ambassadors that can judge the public mood are worth there weight in embassy gold.
The real Olympians of diplomatic relations are the ones that create diplomatic crises by their mischief and then allocate the blame onto the shoulders of their diplomatic opponents. Diplomatic duplicity by way of unctuous rhetoric that dutifully inflames public support whilst concurrently instigates foreign sovereigns to commit diplomatic blunders are the work of diplomatic genius, with our man Bismarck having set the bar of creating and then profiting from diplomatic crises.
In short, ambassadors and diplomats must exhibit characteristics that man rebukes on the one hand and champions on the other- duplicity as state policy or ignominy defined, the buttery side of this bread is a side best left publicly undisclosed.
Tags: Civilization, Philosophy, Truth
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
Vincent Peale
Tags: Human Nature, Philosophy, Psychology, Truth
One of the catch phrases today that is used to capture all that is evil is “the wave of genocide,” which is literally defined as a social movement with the attempt and execution of the extermination of a specific class of people based on racial, ethnic, spiritual, national, or some other definable class of people. The idea of the magnitude of such an endeavor chills the blood and knits the forehead. Contemplations of such atrocities catalyzes emotions which in turn becloud any level-headed deliberation of a genocidal campaign. Such endeavors become unimaginable and hence become relegated to the house of iniquity with Satan as mayor. And serious thought in this human capacity becomes tainted with emotionally generated self-righteousness, paving the road of future deterrents with self-deluded concrete as its foundations.
With the famous “too many rats in a cage” study firmly planted in our minds, we must not drop the ball of coherent reason and succumb to the irrationality of emotion. Man must strive to look at this problem with a scientist’s indifferent resolve. Without condoning genocide, Bad Natured will not champion the jockey ponying the of masses of stupidity when eyeballing the causes of such atrocities. When too many people are caged together, and especially when they can be cleaved into two classes or denominations, the only logical result for the humanly animals, beholden to both the Rule of 150 and the Rule of Familiarity, would be for one to turn against the other, often violently so. Being self-aware only confuses the motivations for these resultant campaigns of mass murder, where the strongest aggressor whips he and his cohort’s minds into a frenzy of contrived culpability for their woes, which ineluctably land their cross hairs of incrimination onto the weakest of the two sects. When some social catalyst arrives, such as Hitler or the assassination of a country’s president, the social chemistry of convenient accountability creates the condemnation of the aggressors by way of gas chamber or machete, followed by the tsunami of atrocity until the blood that runneth spills over into the consciousness of the conscientious, the crooked fingers of blame bleating and waving wildly in search of the human manifestation of evil. Crooked fingers originate out of crooked contemplations, and this is the point of this whole philosophical endeavor, for it is implored that for the moment, maybe those crooked fingers might be holstered and that man might finally come to terms with the animal that resides within, that the phenomena of self-awareness has yet the puissance to reign in that holdover of biological evolution, and that until this primal creature is honored, monitored, understood, and ultimately under control of that abstruse notion of the self, atrocity by way of rationalization and justification will remain the order of the day…
Tags: Apostasy, Discontent, Human Nature, Philosophy, Psychology, Truth
There is something very melancholy, dreamy, and in the highest degree poetic in a lonely grave…. You hear its silence, and in this silence you feel the presence of the soul of the unknown being who lives beneath that cross.
Anton Chekhov
Tags: Quote
Today’s leaders seem a complicated lot, duplicitous intriguers whose every intent is obfuscated by some platitude. A simple breakdown of human character can help clear the way in our understanding of both leaders and followers, shepherds and sheep. In doing so, our classification system will merely entail the incorporation of two traits of man, intelligence and empathy, and from this we can better understand the hierarchical system of humanity.
Let us start at the top and then work our way down:
1. Political and business leaders are those with high intelligence and little empathy.
2. The middle classes are those with high intelligence and high empathy.
3. The lower classes are those with low intelligence and high empathy.
4. The criminal classes are those with low intelligence and low empathy.
Of course, people are not so easily pigeonholed into such simple classes, but an argument can be made that such a classification approximates our hierarchical structure. At the top of the food chain are men that are highly intelligent and that are not constrained by their conscience, allowing them to makes grave decisions without emotions clouding their judgment. These qualities allow them to intrigue their way to the top of the social heap, and once there these conniving qualities, unrestrained by empathic manacles, allows them to act in a fashion that allows them to remain in their elevated position.
The average middle class Joe is intelligent but is harnessed by his sense of right and wrong, his conscience, by his endowment of a heightened senses of empathy. He also cares too much about how he might be seen in the eyes of others to allow for the shenanigans of his dreams to come to fruition. This is the class of discontent by way of unrealized desire.
In the lower class folks what we have are rather unintelligent masses whose concern for others keeps them in check. Almost romantic in scope, the peasant class has little by material standards but has the greatest capacity for a community-based lifestyle. As long as they are not being taken advantage of by society’s upper crust they may in fact be the most contented of classes as they do not manufacture desires to be filled but instead only have their most basic desires coupled with their community to keep them satisfied.
At the bottom of the heap we have the peoples whose paucity of intelligence and empathy lead them to a life of crime and punishment. This class forever endeavors in get rich quick schemes that seem too easy because their limited intelligence does not allow to see the obvious dangers that their shenanigans are fraught with. Their low empathic characters likewise keep them unconcerned with the considerations or perceptions of others.
There you have it, the politically incorrect system of sociopathic class gradation for the hierarchical totem pole of man. Unsavory though it may seem, proving it wrong will demand the might of specious equivocations based upon convenient foundations of reality, precepts solidly entrenched as reality in the minds of humanity that is currently appreciated here on Planet Earth.
Tags: Apostasy, Perception, Philosophy, Truth
Modern economics are a gargantuan complex of numbers and psychologies, national moods and dealers of clairvoyance, making any general study of economics an almost forbidden affair. In cahoots with the philosophy of Bad Natured, only economists tend to paint a veritable picture of human nature. Unfortunately that picture is hung in the back alleys of capitalism, hidden from the general public for fear that its disclosure might create a social upheaval in the bloated system of corporate politics. We here at Bad Natured are not so inclined towards reticence and discretion.
As abstruse as our economic infrastructure has come to be, there is one simple aspect that deserves cool deliberation. Our economic system is unwaveringly dependent upon unlimited growth. In other words, were our current system to stabilize itself in a zero-growth fashion, it would falter. OR, when the resources that our economic system demands be infinite instead reveal their finite nature, economic collapse will result. By account of our current system, it is as if man has based our economic system on the utilization of the resources of the entire universe but in fact is limited to those remaining resources that our planet has to offer. Unless we succumb to fairy tale logic, when the ignored limitations of the Earth’s resources come front and center as a real-time phenomenon, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
Now we at Bad Natured are all for branching out into the universe, looking for planets chock full of iron and water and maybe even energy, but man had better get his ducks all in order and foment such a search instead of persisting in the bitter and mindless squabble over the dwindling Earth-bound resources at hand. Better yet, maybe another planet will occasion an atmosphere conducive to human colonization. With all of our current technology seemingly directed towards enhancing our silly need for hand held devices of music, connectivity, and personal branding, maybe we should invest in a sidereal campaign and concentrate our efforts towards fomenting such an atmosphere on some presently uninhabitable planet. Unless man can suddenly champion an economic system not based on a fantastical notion of infinite creation of products to satisfy an equally infinite demand for consumption, a materialism driven by the discontent found in a self-aware creature that has traded in his sense of community for a finite moment of greed contented, man had better light a match under the butts of NASA’s ace scientists such that we will have a home to export our Juggernauts of posterity, the ceaseless consumers of the morrow.
Genruk
Tags: Civilization, Discontent, economics, Philosophy, Truth
This was the first time in his life that he had been set, roughly, face to face with a lie. He had never known before that in this world besides sweet pears and cakes and expensive watches, there exist many other things which have no name in children’s language.
Anton Chekhov
Tags: Apostasy, Discontent, Human Nature
The Middle Ages, when feudalism predominated the social structure, may have also marked the heights of humanity, at least from the perspective of human nature. With Europe dotted with miniature kingdoms, with lord, knight, and vassals enclosed by the medieval stone walls, what better expression of humanity can be found that could rival this great era through its adherence to the realities of human nature?
Flouting the fantastical notions of egalitarianism, the hierarchical nature of man was supported with aplomb, letting man’s natural order of things to come to fruition in the old fashion habit of letting man earn his way to the top through capacity, aggression, and inherent dominance. In doing so, humans came to exist in a fashion that accorded full support of his natural behavioral inclinations. This is not to say that life was easy and without strife, but that the source of man’s discontent was real and not merely contrived. Man’s struggles were real, for life is a struggle, which is the natural order of biological inevitability. In the first world man, this notion no longer exists in the masses, where the instinctual basics of life are all too accessible, and to make up for this lack of a genuine struggle, humans, in order to create an atmosphere that feels genuine, strives to creates strife and struggle out of thin air, with the drama queen rightfully sitting on the throne in this court of the easy life.
The Rule of 150, with the Rule of Familiarity as its shadow, are shown their full respect in the feudal kingdom. These rules, coupled with man’s capacity for empathy, kept untoward strife and mischief down to an acceptable minimum, and men are much less inclined to profit through disreputable shenanigans levied against those within their community. The small micro-sphere allotted for reasonable numbers of humans to be housed together in a fashion such that facial recognition of its members was near if not ubiquitous. In doing so, xenophobia and other expression of human nature were obviated by the Rule of Familiarity, at least within the bounds of the moat’s interior circumference. Man’s natural inclinations towards apotheosis also found repose in the feudal kingdom, culminating in the divine respect to the lord of the land. As well, the natural fears of shame, humiliation, and fear of banishment likely kept the locals from misguided endeavors that would threaten the overall harmony of the whole.
Surely there was war between the kingdoms, but their wars were limited to knights or samurais avenging some slight or other insult and were not the atrocious wars seen today, where material pursuits and genocide seem to be the dominant intrigues of martial endeavors.
As such, the feudal community had all of the requisite elements for a group of humans to exist in relative harmony compete with an inherent and natural behavioral police force to keep its inhabitant for disturbing the peace beyond acceptable means. Opposed to the ubiquitous strife, discontent, loneliness, and suffering that today’s modern world has to offer its civilians and citizens, the feudal community might just have been the height of humanity, and unless men come to view themselves in an honest light as to their veritable animal nature, it seems unlikely that humanity will ever come to surmount the social acme of feudalism.
Genruk
Tags: Human Nature, Philosophy, Truth
Your Say