A Commonplace Book

That older and greater church to which I belong; the church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness.

Millions of sensible people are too high-minded to concede that politics is almost always the choice of the lesser evil. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," they say, "I will not vote." Having abstained, they are presented with a President who appoints the people who are going to rummage around in their lives for the next four years. Consider all the people who sat home in a stew in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey. They showed Humphrey. Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black.

The taste in my mouth was like brass.

Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy's wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy's goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger's wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul's terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good. but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one's feet.

The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

The new class of corporate chiefs, global managers, genetic engineers, and money speculators will reduce language to the level of utility, function, and management. Evil begins not only with words used with malice, but also with words that diminish people, land and life. The prospects of evil grow as those for language decline.

Steve Arlo [Ben Stiller]: There aren't evil guys and innocent guys. It's just... It's just... It's just a bunch of guys.

The very fact that it's possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

You are always an agent. When you don't act, you act. When you don't vote, you vote. When you accept the loony logic of some of the left that there is no political value in supporting the lesser of two evils, you open the door to the greater evil. That's what happens when you despair, you open the door to evil, and evil is always happy to enter, sit down, abolish the Clean Air Act and the Kyoto accords and refuse to participate in the World Court or the ban on landmines; evil is happy refusing funds to American clinics overseas that counsel abortion, and evil is happy drilling for oil in Alaska; evil is happy pinching pennies while 40 million people worldwide suffer and perish from AIDS; and evil will sit there, carefully chewing pretzels and fondly flipping through the scrapbook reminiscing about the 152 people he executed when he was governor, while his wife reads Dostoyevsky in the corner. Evil has a brother in Florida and a whole bunch of relatives; evil settles in, and it's the devil of a time getting him to vacate. Look at the White House. Look at France, look at Italy, Austria, the Netherlands. Look at Israel. See what despair and inaction on the part of citizens produces. Act! Organize. It's boring but do it. The world ends if you don't.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

In himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first. But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative. The splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.

..that was another lecture Bachmann would have dearly loved to give to these swiftly risen managers of the post-9/11 boom market in intelligence and allied trades... It warned them that however many of the latest spies' wonder toys they had in their cupboards, however many magic codes they broke and hot-signals chatter they listened to, and brilliant deductions they pulled out of the ether regarding the enemy's organizational structures, or lack of them, and internecine fights they had, and however many tame journalists were vying to trade their questionable gems of knowledge for slanted tip-offs and something for the back pocket, in the end it was the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defense scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military officer who's been passed over for promotion, the lonely sleeper who can sleep alone no longer, who among them provide the hard base of knowledge without which all the rest is fodder for the truth benders, ideologues and politopaths who ruin the earth.

At the extreme of greed are kleptocrats. At the extreme of insensitivity to the pain of others are psychopaths. At the extreme of preference for getting their own way are tyrants. Although people with such characteristics are rare, they have a knack for getting themselves into precisely those positions where their traits are most damaging. Kleptocrats do not aspire to become monks; they want to be bankers. Psychopaths do not dream of being nurses; they strive to be soldiers. Tyrants do not plead to be social workers; they scheme to become politicians.

At the core of all successful societies are procedures for blocking the advancement of such men.