21 Things I Know

Lists seem to the rage as of late so I thought I’d offer my own.

1. People will accept wrong answers when alternative answers aren’t available.
2. There is a great tendency to attribute deliberateness to what is more easily explained by  inertia.
3.  We tend to hold people, particularly those in authority, to standards we are unwilling to hold ourselves.
4. Narratives provide explanations.  (See #1)
5. Intellectual pursuits are more often than not just another another form of entertainment.
6. You will be rewarded by being correct more often than not by your cynical assessments of people.
7. Per #6, people really want to believe that there are average people who are exceptional.
8. Every obstacle in life is an opportunity to learn something about yourself until it isn’t.  At that point, it is just coping with life, something people you formerly called losers have mostly learned to do.
9. Battered wife syndrome is common.  Rather than thinking oneself deserves better, one thinks others should be forced to experience similar suffering.
10. Very few people can emerge from poverty by being thrifty.  The more common course is through increased income, at least for those who emerge.
11. Too often what is traditional is defined as what was popular two or three generations ago.
12. One should be more conscious of one’s people’s history than one’s country’s history.
13. One’s view of the value of independence is inversely related to one’s present relationship with it.  See libertarians who are university professors and small business owners wanting their children to be lawyers, accountants, or otherwise secured professionally.
14. The idea that your employer could be judging you by your Facebook posts shouldn’t cause you to question what you put on Facebook but should cause you to question how your employer has the right to be vested in your life.  (My FB is corporate safe for the record.)
15. Women enjoy sex more than any man will ever realize.
16. People who treat sex as an all explaining phenomenon tend to be boring and not insightful.
17. There are a significant number of people that do not enjoy children, work, or church, but observe their duties dutifully.  Likewise there are people who enjoy any of the above and fail to perform their duties.
18. Ideological rigidity and mass popularity are not coincident, regardless of whose blowing the smoke.
19. Any concept of sin that is not concretely personal is either some form of univeralism or simple demagoguery.
20. Reading critically does not mean doubting what you read.  Reading critically is about recognizing simplifications that elide complexities and adjusting your understanding accordingly.  (This one was stolen.)
21. Arbitrarily attempting to return to some point in history is not respecting the wisdom of those who walked before us.  It is pitting one group who walked before us against another.