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“I and my rhinoceros, said the tick-bird.” — Sotho proverb, quoted in Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 1970
Connections
Society
Kudos
“Did you hear what Howells once said to a boring author who was trying to wring a compliment out of him? ‘I don’t know how it is,’ said the author, ‘I don’t seem to write as well as I used to do.’ ‘Oh, yes you do — indeed you do. You write as well as you ever did;– But your taste is improving.”
— From a letter from John Jay Chapman to Margaret Chanler, Nov. 30, 1911
The Other Half
Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár was almost never awake until afternoon. Once when he was forced to get up early in the morning because of jury duty, he looked unbelievingly at the people crowding the Budapest streets and asked, ‘Are they all jurors?’
— Shirley Motter Linde, The Sleep Book, 1974
Having Words
It’s said that Samuel Johnson resorted to unconventional methods to win a debate with a Billingsgate fishwife:
He called her a noun, a pronoun, an adverb, and she hesitated. He vigorously charged her with being conjunction and preposition. She wavered. And when at length with stentorian voice he accused her to her face of being a parallelopipedon, she broke in disorder and fled in the utmost confusion.
(Frederic Coudert, “Lying as a Fine Art,” 1873.)
Taking Pause
‘Theft’ is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of ‘rightfully owned property’ — and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as ‘theft.’ Thus, the statement ‘All property is theft’ has an internal contradiction: to use the concept ‘theft’ while denying the validity of the concept of ‘property,’ is to use ‘theft’ as a concept to which one has no logical right — that is, as a stolen concept.
— Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963
Amara’s Law
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” — Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future, 1978
(“A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.” — J.C.R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future, 1965)
Verdict
In 1955, the New York State Employment Compensation Board ruled that “There is nothing inherently repulsive about a Van Dyke beard and a swimming-pool attendant cannot be fired for growing one.”
The Moral Superiority Illusion
In 2017, University of London psychologists Ben Tappin and Ryan McKay asked 270 subjects to evaluate both themselves and the average person as to traits describing morality (honest, trustworthy, fair), agency (hardworking, knowledgeable, competent), and sociability (cooperative, warm, family-orientated).
They found that nearly all the subjects inflated their own desirable moral qualities irrationally. The more desirable a moral trait appeared to the subjects, the more likely they were to ascribe it to themselves.
“The belief that one is morally superior to the average person appears robust and widespread,” they wrote. “We find that moral superiority represents a uniquely strong and prevalent instance of ‘positive illusion.'”
(Ben M. Tappin and Ryan T. McKay, “The Illusion of Moral Superiority,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 8:6 [August 2017], 623-631.)
Out of Joint
“A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time. He alone knows the correct time, but of what use is this to him? The whole world is guided by the clocks that show the wrong time.” — Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims
Supervision
“It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about the serious problems afflicting the world and I tell myself, I must talk to the pope about it. Then the next day when I wake up I remember that I am the pope.” — John XXIII