Day 2981, butterfly.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I am an idealist, and as such, I have no place in this time and world. In a political sense, this means that in my ideal world, everybody understands themselves and thus, the world, and in such a way that it is clear for everybody where to go and who can walk in front. I don’t claim to know what all fits in my ideal world, but I do know that many people in the past had an ideal and tried to force the world to follow that ideal. I think, for example, of the Khmer Rouge 40 years ago in Cambodia. Pol Pot had an idea of how people could live together. He studied in France and probably had some lofty ideas and ideals but never realized that the lessons from history are that you cannot force a society in a certain direction. He persuaded his fellow believers to kill millions of people in the name of progress, an idealistic world. 

The list of dictators that moved whole societies into destruction is long, and even our democracies breed ideas and ideals that come with destruction; look at the waste we make and the hatred many people have for each other. People are, for the most part, good, but as soon as they become part of a statistic, they show another color, and in modern democracies statistics rule.  

So, I am a revolutionary who doesn’t believe in revolutions. Someone told me once that if you want to catch a butterfly, you can run around and try to grab it, or you can look for the best place to sit, hold your hand up, and wait. The goal is not to catch a butterfly but to be there when it lands and enjoy the place where you sit in the meantime.  

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe – well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, ‘who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,’ but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”
H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old

Day 2980, Emma.

Daily picture, Quotes

“Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.”
Emma Goldman, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Day 2978, 5852 days ago.

Daily picture, My thoughts

smile

Come inside! And when you do, the first thing you see is a big smile. Big smiles often hide something, and most of the time, it’s something damaged turned into a peaceful look down, with a smile, on all those smalltime problems surrounding the smiler. So you see a smile when you come inside and closer. Also, here, it’s hiding something you can only see when you come really close or if you stay exposed for a longer time.

The smile is a good tool; it protects the surroundings from all the darkness and lowness you feel for them and the words you want use to tell them this; the smile can prevent you from talking, just smile, don’t talk is a motto you will find inside of me and a lot of smilers

There are many different smiles, the one I talk about is almost always there as if it’s grown into your face, as if time and sorrow worked together and carved it out, molded your face into a permanent state of happiness.

Time and sorrow need a tool to carve and ease the pain. Anger is the tool that cuts and eats away your life and flesh and is a great carver for permanently marking a body and, thus, a mind. Grace in mind and body is the anodyne that comes along to ease the pain and brings balance to the life behind the smile.

This gloomy, shiny smiley stench coming from this carved-in face, penetrating my brain, has a soothing effect on my daily life. It calms me down and sands away all the rough edges of this overactive brain that, even I believe, sometimes belongs to a sleepy doofus.

Smiling through life when you have eyes on you. When you are alone, the world is blind, and you just…are…Your face is…just a face without expression because what is an expression without eyes to reflect on?

The smile of a liar.

Day 2975, gifts.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

183 Getting angry and punishing have their time. -Getting angry and punishing are our gifts from the animal world. Humans first come of age when they return this gift from the cradle to the animals. -Herein lies buried one of the greatest thoughts that humans can have, the thought of344 an advance upon all advancements. -Let us go forward a few millennia with one another, my friends! There is a great deal of joy still reserved for humans, the scent of which has not yet blown as far as our contemporaries! And indeed, we might expect to have this joy, even promise it to ourselves and testify to it as something necessary, if only the development of human reason does not stand still! Some day, we will no longer have the heart for the logical sin that lies concealed in anger and punishment, whether practiced individually or socially: some day, when heart and head have learned to dwell as closely to each other as they now still stand apart. That they no longer stand as far apart as they originally did becomes fairly visible by gazing upon the whole path of humanity; and the individual who surveys a life of inward work will become aware with a proud joy of the distance that has been overcome, the approach that has been accomplished and he can, upon this basis, risk having even greater hopes.

Day 2974, just stop.

Daily picture, My thoughts 
The best thing you can do in life is to study history and repair what's left of it. This way, in a thousand years, curious minds can only study what we have repaired and not what we have distroyed.

Let's fix the past and don't think about the future. Let's just stop for a while.

The boat you see here is caled Dyrafjeld. I help with the restauration and hopefully this will extend the life expectancy well over what you can expect. You can read more here:http://www.dyrafjeld.no/index-eng.php

Day 2972, a matter.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims

88 How we die is a matter of indifference. -The whole way in which a human thinks of death during the fullness of his life and the blossoming of his strength does admittedly provide very telling testimony about what we call his character; but the hour of death itself and his demeanor on the deathbed hardly matter for this at all. The exhaustion of an expiring existence, especially when old people die, the irregular or insufficient nourishment of the rain during this final time, the sometimes very violent pain, the untried and novel nature of the whole situation, and far too often the attack and retreat of superstitious impressions and  anxieties, as if dying mattered a great deal and bridges of the most terrifying kind were being crossed- all this does not allow us to use dying as testimony about the living person. Nor is it true that a dying person is generally more honest than a living one: instead, almost everyone is tempted into a sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious comedy of vanity by the solemn demeanor of the surrounding people and the repressed or flowing streams of tears and feelings. The seriousness with which every dying person is treated is surely the most exquisite pleasure of his entire life for many a poor, despised devil and a sort of compensation and partial payment for many deprivations.

Day 2970, how to catch a war.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I don’t write much about politics and what’s happening in the world. I try to understand it by studying history and philosophy, but that’s more about the mechanisms of wars and other pains we humans like to inflict on each other. Maybe liked is not the right word, but I still think that in 5000 years, history books will precisely write that about us humans in the pre-civilized age; they loved to make each other miserable, why else would you poison the environment, don’t feed the whole population and start wars for vanity, pride and money. 

The thing is that most people just want to live their lives, and for most of us, that’s already enough of a task. But a smaller group inherited the trades that make them frontrunners and not followers like the rest. Putin and a handful of people have the power to steer a whole country and large parts of the world into ruin. Bush and his clique did the same, and the list goes on and on. Democracy is supposed to be the cure, and in some sense, it does a good job, but that’s only because all the other forms of government fail even harder; it still can’t stop dictators from rising to the top.

In Holland, we just had our yearly Memorial Day, and we stand still by what happened during the Second World War. At the same time, a quarter of the people voted for a racist party that had, til not so long ago, a point in their party program that promised new voters that all Muslims would be banned from Holland and their religion criminalized. Most people can only listen to the drummer and goosestep the direction ordered, and the drummers know that. 

I don’t see a solution. We are all different, and most people are still not seriously interested in the reason why they do the things they do. Most people can be talked into reason, but that’s part of the problem; they can be talked into all kinds of ideas. My motto for the future would be: don’t believe your own thoughts and those of others, at least not at firsthand. 

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”
Hermann Goring

Göring was the second highest-ranking official tried at Nuremberg, behind Reich President (former Admiral) Karl Dönitz. The prosecution levelled an indictment of four charges, including a charge of conspiracy; waging a war of aggression; war crimes, including the plundering and removal to Germany of works of art and other property; and crimes against humanity, including the disappearance of political and other opponents under the Nacht und Nebel decree; the torture and ill treatment of prisoners of war; and the murder and enslavement of civilians, including what was at the time estimated to be 5,700,000 Jews. (Wikipedia)

Day 2969, more of Nietzsches notes.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book Three: Principles of A New Evaluation 

539 (March-June 1888)
Parmenides said, “one cannot think of what is not”;-we are at the other extreme, and say “what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction. “

540 (1885)
There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes-­ and consequently there are many kinds of “truths,” and consequently there is no truth.

Day 2966, attached.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Quotes

When I started my journey into the world of what there is to know about us humans, I liked to go to one of the many second-hand bookstores in the town close to where I was living. For little money, you could buy a few books, and often I read the introduction and then decided if it was worth my time. One of these books was written By Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist with some provoking thoughts. The titles of some of his books speak for themselves: The Fear of Freedom, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics and The art of loving . From this last book, you can find some quotes and links to the pages of the book at archive.org

“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.” The Art of Loving

“But actually, people want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies. Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.” The Art of Loving

“Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.” The Art of Loving