Substack Notes Roundup #3
Freedom, time, conformity, and more...
Another collection of my most recent Substack notes plus some things to reflect on. Enjoy!
How to lose friends and infuriate people: argue in bad faith, try to score points, and resort to personal insults.
Works every time.
“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Freedom is a concept often misunderstood.
Similar to a polyglot who achieves freedom of expression by submitting to the rules of language, so do we have to surrender to the Most High so as to become truly free. Earthly things don’t matter. Our service will only make them tyrants, such is their fate. It is the heavenly things - Truth and Love - that have the capacity to fully transform our lives.
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
What most people imagine a utopia would look like. No more toiling away as comfort, security and abundance will eliminate necessity. Perfect harmony will be achieved.
Well, this is also what the Time Traveler thought from these first glances.
Do not assume that someone's rageful response to your views invalidates them.
It is their job to control their anger as much as it is your duty to refine your thoughts before you utter them.
People show their true selves in how they deal with their problems and how they respond when you share yours.
If oversharing can be used against us then perhaps a bit of sharing might do the trick and give us an idea of the kind of person we’re dealing with.
When you decide to follow a highly unconventional road most people will turn against you. Do not be deterred. Find a way to make it work if indeed this is your calling and have faith.
Then watch how the same people will call it talent instead of hard work and perseverance. An instinctual response meant to hide the fact that, despite being capable of great things, most people can’t find a way to realise their potential.
Conformity is the death of spirit.
Reflections
The Devil favours the small sins. A lustful look, an unnoticeable burst of anger, cowardice masked as pacifism, the slow buildup of inarticulate resentment caused by the dullness of everyday life.
He doesn’t need murderers and great evildoers to populate his halls, though he desires them the most. He will gladly settle for self-deceiving humans whose despair and faux-virtue pulls them ever closer to him. For they are more in number and quantity is all that matters in the end.
An attempt at demolishing a virtue doesn’t actually hurt the virtue since its value is inherent. Rather, it makes the accuser himself less virtuous. An attack on truth doesn’t dethrone it from its place among the highest of values. Rather, it distances the attacker from it, it separates him from what is good.
The same is true for anything that is objectively of high value. Beauty, art, stories, faith; no matter how much we try to make these things unimportant, or even worse optional, we’ll only end up making ourselves poorer instead.
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I haven’t read the Time Machine in several decades so I forgot the primary message of that passage, or maybe I never understood it in the first place. Today I understand it. Today I realize how pathetically ignorant we have been to reality. Our focus on comfort and “self-actualization” means we are in great peril.
Having just spent a week in Padova, I find none of this surprising.