What you are = what is good

Wednesday 7/1/26

People aren't going to defend intelligence and effort. They're going to vehemently oppose them and those who exhibit those traits or who extol the importance of learning/knowing and trying hard. (This vehemence can be unexpressed, but it will have total internal sway with how they regard these traits in others and dictate treatment/behavior on whatever relevant/available level.) People will wish to shout them down. They are going to defend ignorance and laziness because they are themselves ignorant and lazy. What you are = what is good to people now. They don't strive or change. They won't muster any more effort than they think they have to with anything. It's paramount that their thing has to be a termed/insisted on being/believed to be (as fully as possible) a good thing because they aren't going to be or do any other thing. What you are also translates to all that you're willing to be.

As far as what's perceived as "good" goes, these same people have numbers on their side; it's basically just them, as the masses, against a few stray people (with less of these left come the close of each day). Sociological gang-up. A kind of brute-mass inversion of what is accepted as reality/how it is. That doesn't make it real.

But those same masses can't tell what anything really is anyway. They won't stop and think long enough to try and they've lived for so long--existed--in such a way as to have lost that ability if they even wished to put it to use.

They want what they want things to be via the act of say-so, and it is say-so, rather than seeing, thinking, processing, accepting, adapting, growing, that makes for the basis of their reality, such as it is as an oxymoron. But who knows this? Who isn't like this enough to know it? And if someone does, what are they to do with that knowledge?

Those holdouts usually end up being absorbed by the masses. They alter themselves--reduce themselves--in order to fit in, a kind of "if you can't beat 'em, find a way to shut your brain off and devolve with them" variant on the old "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" maxim, which even in the best of times wasn't ever meant to do anyone any real good. A proper maxim has our best interests in mind.

That's if they can. Those who are too intelligent, moral, and strong, can't so readily find a way to fool themselves and reduce themselves. Doing so goes against the deepest part of their nature. The more they are truly these things, the harder it is. They cannot act on say-so. They answer to reality, both external realities and the reality of their true nature.

The purer that nature is, and how faithfully and earnestly that nature is cultivated and grown, the more resistant it is to the hammer blows of the outside world. But now we're talking someone who isn't a product of their environment, and instead their own internal constitution, will, mind, choices, and intentions derived and actuated from reflection, which is to say we're also now we're talking about the very best of us, which is further to say, people so rare as to scarcely exist in our world.

They're like the lone holdouts of an otherwise extinct species. They are also, ironically, the people the world needs most, but the world, for the reasons we've been discussing here, won't have them, never mind welcome them and seek instruction from them and inspiration--and a bit of direction, or a reminder--from what they model, which is also what they are.

As for the "because of my say-so" people, who's to stop them when there's no thinking and there's basically only them, and they all agree with each other because they are the same? They're allied in their ignorance, unchecked in what they think can be their forcefulness. They can "out shout" because they are millions against any given one person who isn't like them. They've changed the rules but not the reality, which is a distinction that hardly matters given that those rules are looked at as the reality by their makers, which is virtually everyone.