MicroGroks
Gentlemen: I watched – and rewatched – your hour-plus discussion ranging from shoes, ships, and sealing wax to cabbages and kings. It was, to put it mildly, a sheer delight.
Some years ago, as an intellectual exercise, some friends and I were talking about what we thought was the single biggest advance in human history.
I was born and raised in an American suburb and attended a public high school. We studied the Communist Manifesto in 10th grade. I never encountered capitalist or libertarian philosophers until I had finished my Bachelor’s degree.
Like I’m surprised? Democrats, Socialists, and Progressives stress emotions rather than actual knowledge (the “well, I feel that….” crowd). I’ve found that they just aren’t into facts (or prefer to make up their own – you know, like NH State Rep Debra Altschiller on SB154.
An objective look at the limitation of our knowledge – how difficult is it to know whether we are making good decisions even in our own lives, let alone in those of anyone else? – reveals that in fact we are typically in no position to judge what is good for others.
This is too good not to share. It is a response to comment under a post at The Last Refuge. A commenter states that “The German people did not do enough to oppose Hitler and the Third Reich and look what happened.”
It’s time to get over the panic and fear and get back to work. The President left the hospital the other day. He had a simple message for the American people. He said do not live in fear or let the fear of this virus “dominate” your life.
Recent history is full of events showing society has lost respect for wisdom. In comparison with knowledge, wisdom is now undervalued or has no value at all. The reason knowledge has leaped to the fore is the extraordinary rate of advancement in technology, medicine and other areas of science.
In his 1958 novel George Young coined the term meritocracy. Classicists complain about the word because it has two roots. Merit is from Latin and cracy is from Greek. They claim the term is a hound dog in a thoroughbred language. Yeh, yeh, it’s a niggle. The more correct term would be the all Greek …
