The Applicability of the Tragic to "Real" Life

1) We die. We are fated to die. The best, the brightest, the strongest, the richest, the ablest--all die. No effort to prevent it is ultimately successful. We can no more outrun our fate than Oedipus can his.

2) The knowledge we need to make the right decision, on those occasions when such knowledge may be said to exist, is always attained after the decision has been made, when, right or wrong, it is too late.

3) The decision that leads to self knowledge--which can thus lead us to an understanding of, for example, the best way to spend one's life--is always different from the decision that leads to the best way to spend one's life. Does one choose to give one's life to art--forsaking job, family, security, reputation for the sake of art? Then one will always attribute one's failure to the market, to time, to history. On the other hand, should one choose to be an art historian, then one might come to the realization that one never could have been an artist--that one didn't have "the stuff." Enlightenment! One should have pursued science.

Math and Metaphor

I don’t know much about math. But it has always astonished me that those who do can sit down with pen and paper and calculator and work with numbers and learn from the numbers the facts of the universe from the atom to the whole shebang. The way the numbers work reveals the way the universe works, which observation either confirms or challenges. I see here an analogy or perhaps something much more than an analogy, a co-form, a second side of the same coin, a co-pattern, the same paradigm (I know there’s a word for this, sym-structure) with metaphor. Metaphor reveals the nature of the universe, the nature of the psyche, the cause of action. It too however must be tested and confirmed.

Sad News for Mr. Lincoln

Capitalism, in some form, may be the most suitable economic system for a democracy. It is not, however, democratic. Capitalism prefers plutocracy. Anyone who needs to have that proven to them is perhaps not intellectually capable of understanding the proof. It’s self-evident. Capitalism cares nothing for people, nothing therefore for equality or justice--or for ideology of any kind. Money makes money. Money uses people to make money. If allowed, money will use whatever system if finds itself in to make money. Whenever capitalism and democracy live together, one will dominate the other. Whenever capitalism dominates democracy, democracy disappears. Democracy becomes plutocracy, as is evidenced today in the United States of America. That country fancies itself a democracy for the single simple fact of universal suffrage. (And yet today even that is subtly or not so subtly under attack under via what is euphemistically being called “voter i.d.” laws.)  I have no interest here in detailing how this depressing state of affairs has come to be. It’s not hard to trace the economic and technological “perfect storm” that has coalesced to wreak so much havoc in so short a time. But what matters is that something be done about it. Democracy must become, again, the dominant partner in this relationship or we will have to declare the experiment a failure. We will have to report to the spirit of Lincoln that a nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal cannot in fact endure.