Friday, May 26, 2006

Naysayers are life wreckers

"You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light."
- Vicomte de Chateaubriand

This is worded badly, likely due to the translation. No one ever believes themselves as seeing the world in an odious light. It's always "the other guy."

We always believe ourselves to see only "the truth." And we're smugly confident about it.

We have have a tendency to somehow believe that those who have negative opinions about all sorts of things, who believe everyone (but themselves) to be sinners and who restrict their behaviour to the most spartan existence have insight that the rest of us don't have. They don't.

What they do have is the ability to restrict themselves to a world that is so small that they can't find themselves in trouble, by accident, very often. When examined closely, their theory of life is that if you do nothing, you won't get yourself into trouble.

This, however, is not life, unless you view slavery as an acceptable form of life. Self imposed slavery is surely the most absurd form of human abuse.

There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, so long as we learn from them. There is nothing wrong with experiencing tragedy, so long as the experience adds to our understanding of the world aorund us and how to deal with it.

There is nothing wrong with being imperfect. Even with admitting it. It's how we were created. To deny this gets us into all sorts of problems, not the least of which is missing out on much of what life is about.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to show that the world is a pretty good place to live, and to help us to make it even better.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl

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