Making myself be really disciplined with my morning today so that I can get more than one aphorism in in the day. Still focusing on Rochefoucauld’s Maximes for now, but doing more than one lets me get a little variety in.
Aphorism 137
Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity. (Maxim 126)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Interpretation
I think there’s a little room to argue that the relationship here is not unilateral, but I generally agree with Rochefoucauld here.
What I have found in my own life is that when I am most honest I push myself to be the best I can be so I can live without shame. Of course I know I have my little faults; I’m not particularly industrious.
I say this after waking up before dawn to go for a run, getting a lengthy morning walk in afterward to get tea (and more exercise), doing a significant amount of reading for coursework, writing two blog posts and change (though I still have to post one), and taking only about an hour and a half of down-time in between these things, but the truth is that today has been shaping up to be a good day compared to average. Being self-employed makes it more important to stay conscious of my faults.
Plus, now that I’m honest about it, I feel more of a need to compensate for my flaws, which is useful.
But one of the things about dishonesty is that it tends to breed other problems.
It’s very easy to become complacent with where you are when you’re not honest with yourself (the theme of the year when I was a freshman in college was “self-deception” thanks to Goethe and Tolstoy), and that makes it easy to let hubris and vanity take over.
And, of course, there’s an importance to valuing yourself. You always have the very basic thing, that you are a being of potential and inherent human value (if you belong to a religious or philosophical movement that doesn’t want everything to just end in chaos and blood), but self-esteem is more than just that. You need to believe that there’s something in particular that you can do, and it’s good to let yourself think that you’re at least passable after it. After all, God looks at his creation and sees that it is good in the Bible, and while we’re pitiable things in comparison to God the Bible also argues that we are made in the same image: the likeness of the creator.
So figure out what you make and be honest with your abilities. If you’re not good at it, get good at it. And let yourself have that confidence. Don’t fool yourself into complacency, but remember that pretty much everyone’s been able to struggle through life to get where they are. Lottery winners and trust fund babies may have had more struggle than they are often made out to have overcome, too, and if nothing else they’ll get theirs later when senescence hits like a truck.
Part of the reason why we resort to vices is that they’re easier than virtue. If you cultivate one or the other it’ll grow, but unless you’re very careful it’s easy to build vice. Only the masters can bring themselves to a state even an imperfect observer can call virtuous.
So figure out what you can do, do it, and learn how to live along the way.
It doesn’t sound easy, but it’s sort of a package deal.
Resolution
Master my craft.
Use honesty as a mirror.
Don’t let doubt destroy potential.
Aphorism 138
The malicious have a dark happiness.
Victor Hugo
Interpretation
One of the things that you observe about the really, truly evil is that they find what they are doing to be not just acceptable, but good.
I’d equate it with the satisfaction of being an artisan. One of the things that I really love about writing is that once in a while I write something and it turns out better than I thought it would be, and it gives me a chance to feel like I have birthed something great.
Evil doesn’t enjoy benign creation, but rather the creation of shrines to the self, the idolatry of the mirror.
I believe that we’re all attuned to the nature of existence. Call it a conscience, as I do, or the collective unconscious, as Jung did, Socrates’ daimonion, or anything you like, but we all have some fundamental realization that the world is greater than us and substantially driven by forces that we are not in control of, and that there is a way that we should behave in response to this.
This is the nature of tragedy that flows throughout our lives, because we are not in tune with the universe and we are not perfect beings. We will eventually face, if nothing else, the fact that we decay.
That’s really a terrifying notion. We may be familiar with the concept of finititude, but we have nothing to use to apply that concept to our own lives, except perhaps sleep. And sleep itself is imperfect, because we know that we will awaken from it. It can also hold its own terrors and mysteries.
Shakespeare got it right when Hamlet remarked that death is “to sleep, perchance to dream” but I don’t think he ever intended to give us an answer to Hamlet’s dilemma.
One of the only ways that we can protect ourselves from death is to make something that lasts beyond our time.
But that’s hard.
Not just in a “you’ll have to sacrifice” hard way, but in a “you’ll have to sacrifice and you’ll never know if it worked” way.
There’s layers of self-doubt to get through, and then one needs to make a big enough mark on reality for it to be reflected forever.
And, if you look at it that way, we’re specks of dust on a larger speck of dust.
How can we leave any legacy worth leaving?
The answer is simple: to set our expectations on what we are.
If you think about it, every human being is made up of cells that can be traced back to one progenitor. We’ve been shaped by our mothers going back for centuries and millennia. One could look at that and say that we’re the product of a biological machine, a sort of cancer that hijacks everything around us and uses it to replicate ourselves. The right (or wrong) sort of person would even go so far as to condemn us for that.
But I like to look at it and see the awe of the cosmos. We are part of something great and massive, so big that we can never hope to be more than a note in a chord in a measure in a song that resonates through time.
I’m religious, so this is something that may not resonate with everyone, but I feel a sense of God’s purpose within us. We’re motivated to live in line with something greater than ourselves.
When someone falls to evil, they replace that prime directive, the goals that God has set, with the desires that they have.
It brings its own sort of happiness, in the vein of Milton’s Lucifer, because we can be our own masters. There’s a price for that: we wind up living in hell. But hell is the place that God (or, again, the collective unconscious or daimonion if you favor a secular interpretation; this will have a different conceptual meaning but it is not all so different in execution) does not reign supreme in, so it is the one place that we can possibly hope to master. The wicked have found their paradise in a barren wasteland, because we can lord ourselves only over dust and ash.
Resolution
Always find joy in creation, not destruction.
Listen for God’s voice, and follow that path.
Don’t put myself above my place.