The good people who love the Microsoft .NET Framework

There are people who are in love with innovation and useful solutions in technology, business and marketing. To them the new Microsoft .NET Framework, new methods of management structuring and the next generation of direct marketing are truly exciting and worth giving a lot of themselves and their life for.

While I was working on my startup the last year I listened to some tapes on the great American entrepreneurs. One man had given a good 25 years of his life to create and bring to market the Xerox copy machine. The story of his struggle could be that of Martin Luther King in terms of sacrifice, determination, and self-trust, only the goal is a copy machine.

This is what struck me as strange - that a man should give his life for a copy machine. Yet as I was saying yesterday, there is something very healthy and good about a country were such an ambition and such a success is applauded. I believe this kind of success was considered degrading by the aristocratic circles at the start of the industrial revolution. It was considered noble to pursue cultural, political, or military ambitions but being successful as a manufacturer of toilet paper, or shoelaces was considered undignified.

Actually - and here I am on board with Luther - I think there are many ways to help people and transform society. And they are not limited to art/literature and politics. Technological changes have a tremendous transformative effect (not always for the better) but this can be a real means of change. For example, the invention of the printing press in by Gutenberg in the 1500s allowed for a central part of the Protestant reformation (that men should read the Bible themselves, which was made possible by Luther's translation into German and the mass production). In general, the printing press took control away from the Church which had been THE source of books, copied by scribes.

I have a very idealistic, socially conscious friend, who has been jailed in protests, and given a lot to trying to change the country: he is studying mechanical engineering with the ambition of creating a source of power that would transform the current dependence on oil.

To me, I still give my respect and love to the men who fashion our very world with their words and ideas - for I believe they are the puppet masters of everyone else. They give us the forms in which we see life.

That said, not many can be like them, and it is good that those with lower spiritual ambitions and lesser intellectual gifts can concentrate on something still useful to their community.

The question is - in a time of globalization and a lack of overarching view of life - who is actually thinking deeply about their community? (I'm going on a tangent here, but its probably connected somehow and its interesting).

“War is war”, “art for art’s sake”, “business is business”. The gods didn’t deny each other’s existence and power. The one God of the Jews and Christians sanctioned business, art and war in his service, but the modern partial system exclude each other and are each incapable of describing a full human life. The artists are dragged kicking and screaming into capitalism (Dada art being the guerrilla war against becoming commodities) and religious men into scientific thinking (the court squabbles over teaching evolution in high schools). The study of natural science, politics, philosophy, literature, fine-arts, and theology are at odds, as they never were in ancient times. For Homer and Plato there are no contradictions between these subjects. The disintegration of these fields is revealed in the disintegration of mutually hostile forms of expression in modern times, for example analytic philosophy’s hostility to poetry.

Are we fated to see the world as we do?

Nietzsche claims that to the most fundamental questions, every man already has the answer predetermined by his physiology and character.
Jack London's Martin Eden, a veritable Hercules with the head of Homer, joyfully accepts the theory of evolution: "I am an individualist. I believe the race is to the swiftest, the battle to the strongest." In such a worldview, he is blessed by nature, and the purpose of nature - a Noah picked by God. Nature has given him the physical and mental distrinction to be master, and in the joy of mastery, he isn't haunted by the cruelty and indifference of nature. He has seen the power of nature - as a sailor - and finds it beautiful.
But consider a man damned by nature with a weak and sickly body and a slow forgetful mind. For him to hold the evolutionary worldview, he would be the damned, the ill-begotten, mistake of nature. Ill-fit to the world, which his body and mind are tormented and confused by. Against his own kind he is constantly beaten from youth in contests of physical prowess, as well as argument. He is faced from childhood with the inferiority of his body - its weakness, obesity, sickliness - and rages at God for it. Still worse, his mind is slow to grasp, and forgetful, and he is ever the fool in an argument - forgetting the reasons why he holds the position he's just enounciated. He cannot win with them, the quick, the strong, and the sharp of mind.
He retreats to those among whom his inferiority is not so apparant, or where he actually holds the upper hand. Above all, he retreats from the struggles of men, in which he cannot hope to triumph, and with his resentment at the recent humiliations, he goes were his kind condemn the strong and the smart. One strong of body but a fool, he would go among the ruffians, who's angry condemnation of intelligent conversation gives away their insecurity. The fox who couldn't reach the grapes tells herself they were sour. The fool who couldn't reach the thoughts tells himselves they were nonesence. But these kind are usually satisfied by the sense of power they possess and the pleasures derived from physical well being, and are therefore good-natured.
If he was weak but clever, he would find those who see the strong as brutes and fools. Once after being thrown down and kicked by an angry man in the marketplace, Socrates was asked why he didn't defend himself, and answered "If an donkey kicked me, should I jump at it and beat it with my nuckles?" However, the strong man can always force a fight, while the clever man cannot force an argument.
So depending on one's natural gifts, one will believe in different ideals of man. Not unusually one finds foolish people who respect and hearken to the smart. When decisions need to be made, or plans drawn up, (whether in a football game, war, or street fight), the quick of mind are needed to see the situation clearly and confidently lead. Generals and quarterbacks need to have agile and able minds, else they show themselves up in the first few encounters.

Let me try to determine the laws within a man which compel him toward a given philosophy.
1. To see himself as a success.
Even if a man claims he is the greatest sinner, fool, coward. He will only claim all this if he believes the making of those claims makes him successful (as in Christianity), or believes it an act of courage to admit these things and overcome them. Or, there is some other ideal he can fall back on, as a child does into the role of a capricious innocent.
However, its not so simple as choosing the viewpoint from which one looks best. Since one already has a viewpoint from which the choosing itself is judged.

Why did Augustine convert to Christianity?

To be continued ...

Is Justice Possible for the Weak?

The weaker creatures, people, nations, always depend upon cunning, deciept, flattery, to achieve their aims. In the struggle for survival, whatever works is utilized without moral qualms. When the Acheans won the Trojan War through the treatury of the wooden horse, they were no doubt ashamed that they could not win in open combat, but happy non the less. Cunning, a deciept of the worst kind, had triumphed, and the Greeks would subsequiently employ deception as a justified tool, when in desperate straights. Consider, the battle of Salamis against the Persians, when an utterly outnumbered Athenian fleet decemated the Persians by luring them into a thin channel with a seemingly traitorious message from the Athenian general, informing the Persians where the Greeks were to be expected(this was suppose to be a kind of bribe). The Persians fell for it and were slaughtered as their fleet was unable to maneuver in the tiny straight and were surrounded.

The story of man is of cunning used to survive in a world whose forces overmatched man's. The magic of fire kept the wild beasts back.

We talk of moral action as something everyone must equally obey. But I think its crazy to consider theft immoral when the thief is compelled by hunger. Perhaps, not even hunger, but the needs of a proud nature are sufficient. As Thomas More noted, a spirited nature will pick the life of the theif before that of the beggar. It is no wonder that peoples who find it difficult to break into the regular American marketplace work in the blackmarket of prostitution, drugs and crime.

Consider Prussia under Frederick the Great, a tiny state in the middle of Europe with such behemoths as Russia, France and the Austro-Hungarian empire around it. Frederick was a man deeply consciensious who had real moral character, in the desire to make Prussia a power in europe, he had to often decieve, make then break pacts, and play the part of a wily opportunistic militarilistic state. It was by this means that he gained Prussia a reputation which other nations feared. It was only with this respect (born of proven battle-hardness) that Prussia could free itself from the demands of the great powers and achieve some independance.

Is it not so with us. A man who is physically fearsome and ready to fight is given more leverage by those around him, kept a friend for the benefits of his protection, and given respect. A man with great wealth frees himself from slavish dependence on employers, customers, and fear of small punishments (speeding tickets, etc).

Racist insanity in America and Germany during WWII

Some notes from lectures on world war II, I've been listening to:
Blacks were barred from any of the higher offices of the army, kept mostly in basic service units , but largely kept back even from those, at a time of great labor shortage for essential military industry. Once a black fighting units were created they were led only by whites, and perversely, by mostly southern officers. Stopping at a restaurant in America, a unit of black soldiers was told to go around back and ask the kitcken, while German prisoners of war were supping with beer and merriment in the restaurant. A race right in Detroit in 1943 led to 29 blacks, 9 whites, dying and 900 injured, and began when white transportation employees began violent protests against the promotion of 9 blacks to driver positions. Similar occurences, of smaller scale occured repeatedly, with an actual shootings between black and white soldiers at in a Texas army base leading to 4 dead. Blacks and whites were segregated completely through the war.

120,000 Japanese Americans (anyone with ONE JAPANESE GREATGRANDFATHER!!) imprisoned. Once freed in 1944, the American Japanese army units which fought in Europe would be THE most decorated units in the army.

While Hilter's monstrous genocide is well documented, what struck me is his final statement before commiting suicide in the summer of 1945:
It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939...those who carry the real guilt for the murderous struggle, this people will also be held responsible: the Jews! ... But before everything else I call upon the leadership of the nation and those who follow it to observe the racial laws most carefully, to fight mercilessly against the poisoners of all the peoples of the world, international Jewry.