May

1

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.” - H. L. Mencken

(Quoted in Bejan, Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies)

Duncan Coker writes:

I recently spent time at a conference on a college campus that included input from many grad and undergrads. I was expecting intolerance towards any but the most agrarian of ideas. I was pleasantly surprised to find more openness, nuance, and free speech that I had anticipated, leading me to change a few my own preconceptions. Point is, it's good to get out in the wild and test long-held beliefs, empirically. The virtual world can become a confirmation bias factory.

Nils Poertner comments:

quite often we just learn things from our ancestors (societal beliefs) which we take for granted - but by closer inspection, they aren't necessarily true and are far more fluid. it seems as if society is run by the lowest common denominator at any point if time (as if we are afraid of ourselves or the greatness of the other human fellow). but perhaps one needs to see "through" this and try solve some of our own little paradoxes and take it easy. see also the early Carlos Castaneda on that - before he experimented with drugs.


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