The Flippant Philosopher

Another bit of common UN-wisdom is the urging “Don’t cry over spilt milk”. But let me ask, why not? While the statement can be interpreted (and was likely originally intended) to mean “Don’t focus on past failures and let them stop you from moving forward, clean up the mess and move on” in the modern world it has come to be understood (and frequently used) to say “Don’t worry about what happened previously, you can’t do anything about it any way” which encourages people to feel powerless and just accept whatever happens. In that approach there is no “take responsibility for your mistakes, fix your own darn problems, clean up your own stinkin’ mess, and get on with making something worthwhile out of your life!” Instead it encourages a victim-mentality in people to just ignore their mistakes, avoid dealing with their errors, and bow their head to take whatever junk gets dished out to them. Don’t fight, don’t resist, don’t demand better (from yourself or others), just forget what happened yesterday, sweep the failures under the rug, and pretend they don’t matter. In short, it makes people wimps to a greater extent than if they *did* cry over the spilt milk, then cleaned it up and moved on.

One of the reasons there is suffering in the world is that people seem to *only* be able to learn something through suffering. While the suffering can be either their own or someone elses, it seems that always somewhere in the lesson someone suffered. How many of us as children, even after being told that the stove was hot and it would burn us *insisted* on finding out for ourselves exactly what truth there was in that lesson we were told? Perhaps it wasn’t a burner, maybe it was an electric socket or a sharp knife or something else…but we have all insisted on experiencing suffering ourselves to verify a lesson we were told. Of course if we were there when our friend/sibling suffered we learned the lesson as well. We insist on constantly “proving” the lessons each generation…and when we’re in our teenage years we still play the same “prove it” game..and suffer to verify what our parents told us..and when we’re in our 30’s we still play the game in our careers, doing things we know will cause problems because we think we can “get away with it” only to end up suffering for it…and in our 50’s…same game (prove it to me), same rules (it’ll hurt), same results (it hurts). Humanity seems to insist on suffering as a method of learning lessons, and as long as we ignore our failures we cannot learn from them, as long as we ignore our mistakes things just get worse (ignore your weight problem, toothache, or broken leg and see where it gets you) In order for us to learn from our suffering we have to admit it exists, accept it as the consequence for what we did, fix it, and not let it stop our growth. The process of accepting responsibility for our mistakes can be painful..and sometimes we may need to cry about it.

Perhaps we in the modern world need to modify/update this to say “Don’t just cry over spilt milk, do something about it”

Just a thought

-Xenophon

“What goes around, comes around” or so we have been told…but what truth is there in this idea? At its core the concept is rooted in the same soil as “You get what you pay for” and this statement is equally invalid. In addition to what we discussed in “What you pay for”, this commonly held bit of un-wisdom contains additional falsehoods worth mentioning.

First on the list is the realization that this is said almost exclusively in one of three cases; a) to comfort someone who ‘got a raw deal’/got cheated/etc.; b) to warn/chasten someone who has cheated/wronged another; or c) to encourage someone else to take some action which appears to be (and may actually be) against their best interests with a “cosmic bribe” that they’ll get repaid somehow, sometime, later…since the universe/divine/God would then ‘owe them one’ and they can cash in that “supernatural IOU”. I can find no example where the statement is used as anything other than as a threat, a bribe, or solace.

Second is the question of ‘Who makes sure?’ If there *is* some great cosmic scale of justice out there making certain that all right-doing is rewarded (eventually) and all evil-doing is punished (eventually) in order to “keep the balance”, then either someone is actively arbitrating or else a grand-cosmic system has been established that can automatically differentiate between an act done in malice and one done in ignorance. After all, if I do something intentionally trying to harm you then the ‘what comes around’ will be quite different from what it would be if I was trying to help you and accidentally harmed you. For this difference to be established, someone or something must be able to discern my intention and provide suitable punishment/reward based not only on actions taken, nor just outcomes, but both of these in the context of the intention of the one acting. If we are going to say that there is some great cosmic balancer, then we are clearly in the arena of Theology and the debate moves into a discussion of the character of this “Cosmic Balancer” (ie. what are the rules this game of life) which is actually an inquiry into the nature of God/the divine. Are you sure you want to go there???

Thirdly, since everyone seems to agree that the “comes around” part isn’t immediate – what happens if the guilty person dies before the ‘getting even’ is fully meted out? or what about the good person who has a few Cosmic IOU’s left to cash in when he dies? If these go unbalanced, then what??? Unless, of course, we accept some sort of after-life where the scales can be balanced. But then, if there is a life after the one we are currently leading – and it matters not if its a heaven/hell thing or a reincarnation thing – then how can we know where we stand in terms of reward/punishment? In the heaven/hell view we can’t know “when’s enough” in terms of good deeds and sacrifice (the bribe part) to get into heaven nor can we know how much ‘bad stuff’ we can get away with before we reach the point of “Go straight to Hell, do not pass GO, do not collect $200″. If we follow reincarnation’s view then any suffering we encounter in our lives might be our just due or it might be a sacrifice made to obtain a future reward in “the next life”. Likewise any benefit we receive might be due us from good deeds done in a former life that we don’t even recall or it might just be creating a debt our next life will have to pay (without knowing why or remembering getting the benefit) So we lose all sense of cause-effect in the “goes around” world anyway.

So then if we accept that “What goes around, comes around” then we also need to accept both an after-life where we receive “justice” for our actions and a divine “justice-giver” that dispenses justice based on our intentions and actions. IS that what you believe? Unless it is, using this “What goes around…” statement is either lying to yourself and others OR its being hypocritical…neither of which will get you bonus points in the after-life with the justice-bringer.

We have all heard the statement that “Its better to give than to receive”…and I can agree with that as long as we’re talking about things like Blame, Guilt, and Death. Otherwise I have a serious reservation about the Kantian Altruism implied in this idea. Before we even look at the accuracy of this statement (which I feel would be a real waste of time) I challenge anybody to find someone who *truly* believes such garbage is universally applicable. Lets face it, even the martyr makes “the ultimate sacrifice” hoping/expecting this will yield an improved position in the afterlife. And what of the atheist, like my friend Demonax??? He *has* no afterlife to seek a better position in through such sacrifice – but he does have progeny whose situation he would hope to improve through “sacrificial giving”. Why the focus on such extreme giving? Simply put – If you expect to convince me (or anyone) that you really believe its better to give than receive you have to show that the giving is not merely a ploy to receive something of greater value than you gave. If you give *for the sake of* receiving, then you have to admit that getting is better than giving, since *that* is your objective in giving. Since we can’t find anyone who can provide a valid example of this “Giving is better” altruistic idea nobody can truly know IF giving really is better since nobody has actually done it.

If I claimed that chocolate-covered pomegranates were tastier than mocha cappuccino, but also told you I’d never actually tried the pomegranates you would naturally, and properly, discount my statement as either (at best) a personal opinion/hypothesis without factual data or (at worst) an effort to manipulate your actions towards pomegranates and away from cappuccino. In no case would my opinion be considered valid…but if I’d actually sampled both then I could provide my opinion, based on my personal criteria…and so in this case the question must also be asked regarding “Better to give than receive” …better for whom and by what standard? If you hold to “Giving is better than receiving” who benefits? The receiver, the stores during Christmas, the card industry, and perhaps your afterlife/progeny….but is it better for you? If it is, then you’re actually receiving some benefit that improves your situation, so you’re a net receiver in the mix and not a net giver – so the statement fails. If its NOT better for you, then the statement is false and so it fails.

Perhaps the statement could be altered to something like :

“Its easier to obtain benefits by giving than by overtly pursuing receiving” … nah too long

“Its cheaper in the long-run to give than to receive” …. but that depends on what you define as “cheaper”

…well, in any case, I think you see my point. Its clearly NOT better to give than receive – except in the areas of Blame, Guilt, and Death where everyone would admit they’d rather be on the giving end than the getting-end…but then I don’t think that’s what those who parrot the “Better to give” tripe are talking about when they mindlessly repeat it to comfort you in a loss or encourage you to sacrifice more (for their personal gain)

We have all heard the saying “You get what you pay for”. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s totally wrong; and what’s more…it doesn’t even make sense. Let’s face fact, if that were true, we’d be able to determine quality by price. Sounds fair enough, except for the fact that you CAN’T determine quality by price. If a seller knows that the buyer equates price and quality, then he will raise his price to create the appearance of quality, even when he’s selling junk. In fact the profit margin is great in that situation, its cheap to make low quality stuff sold at a high price so everyone thinks its high quality..and the huge net goes into the sellers pockets. Sure, once people realize he’s “ripping them off” he’ll go out of business pretty quickly (with a hefty profit) and just as quickly start some other sales thing with another low quality, high price item. Getting rich off the masses who honestly believe that they will get what they pay for. Of course the other side of the error is also true, if you always get what you pay for then there is no such thing as a “good deal”. Anything you buy at a discount, on sale, or otherwise reduced price automatically means its of lesser quality. So you can’t ever actually get anything worthwhile for a price less than its worth. In short, if you believe that you get what you pay for, then you can never get ahead and any time spent “shopping around for a better deal is utterly wasted. Since time is the only commodity that we all share in equal abundance and which we can never make any more of, nor do we know how much we have left, we don’t want to waste time. Thus we need to stop looking for “good deals” and just get on with our lives.

Still skeptical? Okay, I’ll prove it to you. Do you think you’re underpaid for all the work you do? Do you deserve more money? If you’re like most people you completely agree with the idea that you ought to be getting more money for the work that you’re doing – which means that your boss is getting *more* than he’s paying for. Are you a boss? Do you have employees who goof off when they are “on the clock” and ought to be working? Take long breaks and lunches? Who come in late and leave early? Then you’re getting *less* than you’re paying for.

So then, any way we look at this thing we can see that its false. You will either get more than you pay for (if you negotiate well, search hard to find a good deal, etc.) or you will get less than you pay for (if you negotiate poorly or get scammed.) If we all got what we paid for, car dealerships wouldn’t need salesmen – just a posted price and an order-taker (who needs to be working just enough to justify his job, but not more than that).

C’mon, this is an easy one. We all know that great minds don’t think alike, they think for themselves. If great minds thought alike then the patent office would be gone. Great minds are something that society as a whole opposes, specifically because they don’t think like everyone else. They don’t fit in, they don’t “toe-the-line”, they don’t play ball by the rules. How do we know they’re great minds then and not some crazy whacko? Real simple – they succeed. If its a stupid idea, but it works…then it wasn’t a stupid idea. Success excuses virtually any fault. The poor man’s crazy is the rich man’s eccentric, and vice versa. So if you think you’re a genius and no one appreciates you just remember this, if you really are a genius they won’t appreciate you and if you’re actually just a nut they won’t appreciate you either, so learn to enjoy being on the outside.

We have heard this encouragement from others to essentially “hurry up and do something”, usually to do what it is that they want us to do. Is it really in your best interests? If they are encouraging you to act before you have had time to think it through completely, then the odds are that they are less concerned with your interests and more focused on their our interests. The other time we hear this is when we’ve missed a deadline of some sort, and we are criticized, usually by someone who acted and succeeded, for ‘overthinking’ when we should have acted. However, if we would have acted hastily and failed, then we would have been criticized and told we need to remember to “Look before you leap”. So no matter if you leap or hesitate, the simple answer is Success is good and failure is bad.