Pearls
by Chuck Norman & Others
“. . . first three or four were the large ones. Entering lakeside bungalows, they drowned people in their beds.
When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned – the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucata’tans and Floridas would be under the Sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rain streaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after a rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up – his ticket in his hand. Almost at once he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed.
As the night returned to quiet and the ground . . . . .”
Excerpted from the book by John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain. The statement in made by a petroleum exploration geologist referring to the 1959 Madison River Earthquake in southwest Montana at Earthquake Lake.
“ . . . . intellectual development for undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, and dualistic view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and contingent one. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solutions and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of their college courses especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, “science and mathematics still seem to offer hope.”
(and I might add fundamentalist religion and extreme politics!)
“Nevertheless
regression into dualism is not a happy development, for it calls for an
enemy. Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves
surrounded: they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This
attitude requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any establishment and
can call forth in its defense hate, projection and denial of all distinctions,
but one. The tendency is toward paranoia.”
Comments by William J. Perry Jr., of Harvard reported in an article by Alston Chase, “Harvard and the Making of the Unibomber”, Atlantic Monthly, June 2000, Page53.
“
. . . . it disappoints him because it demonstrates how widespread what he
considers to be a wrongheaded conception of capitalism has become.
Capitalism, to Gilder, is not about making money--at least not in the grasping,
individualistic sense. It has been a source of great irritation to him
over the years that the right wing has been almost as hard on the capitalist as
the left: the two sides may differ on the merits of capitalism as a
system, but they tend to agree that the individual capitalist is a figure at
of, at best, ambiguous morality, driven by greed or, to put it gently, rational
self-interest. To Gilder this is not only offensive, but inaccurate.
Rational self interests, he argues, leads to caution, of a sort that might keep
an existing enterprise in business but will never generate the kind of radical
innovation that leads to new companies and large fortunes. The true entrepreneur
has no time to stop and perform calculations. Instead, in love with the beauty
of his idea, he rushes imprudently forth, gambling all he has on the chance to
create something new. Rationality and prudence are for socialists, (and
bean counters!) who believe that the future may be calculated based on the
past; capitalists, who know that the future depends on human acts of
creation and is thus incalculable, leap blindly into the unknown.”
“The Guilder Effect”, May 29, 2000 New Yorker, page 105. An article about George Gilder by Larissa MacFarquhar.
-
A little more objective site on our hero
The only thing we own that can not be taken away from us is our soul. Interesting how many people are so willing to give that up for something which can.
-
The corruption of incest is not limited to matters of the flesh. Corn grown too close together is stunted, just like people.
-
Any spec of slime can reproduce. It takes "character", however, to make a difference.
-
It is not the tests that we choose to take that matters, much. What counts is the baby left at the doorstep.
-
There are six billion people on the planet. Anyone can deal with friends and family. Success, however, is measured largely to the extent we deal with the other six billion.
-
Your children are born with dreams. Don't destroy them. You will pay dearly if you do. Stop and think how you would have liked to have been regarded as a child. Think very carefully. Then treat your child accordingly. You can't possibly go wrong.
-
Love is about growth, not dependence.
Love is about commitment, not convenience.
Love is about caring, not control.
-
We are our own tyrants. We eliminate more choices for ourselves than any tyrant possibly could.
-
At the basic level, we have a choice between despair and possibility. Of the two, despair has the only guarantee.
-
Institutions tend to propagate myths in order to perpetuate themselves.
-
The object of hatred is rarely the cause. Hatred is a chronic disease caused by an unresolved conflict or an overwhelming irritant that is directed at a vulnerable target. Only the insecure, cowards and people with large inferiority complexes hate. Once the demon of hatred gets comfortable inside one of us, he is very difficult to remove. A chronically angry person will never admit they are angry and often the very suggestion that they might be angry will paradoxically put them in a rage.
-
There are two kinds of people in this world. There are those who are basically “Why not?” people and there are those who are “Why should I?” people. Which group of people would you like to identify with? Which group of people do you suspect you mostly belong to?
-
e mail chnorman@mwt.net