When a man has his proper station in life, he does not hanker after what is beyond him.
What is it, man, that you wish to have?
“I am content if I am in accord with Nature in what I will to get and will to avoid, if I follow Nature in impulse to act and to refrain from action, in purpose, and design, and assent.”
Why then do you walk about as if you had swallowed a poker?
“I would fain that they who meet me should admire me, and cry aloud, ‘What a great philosopher!’”
Who are these by whom you wish to be admired? Are not these the men whom you generally describe as mad?
What do you want then? Do you want to be admired by madmen?
—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.21
I have often made the mistake of trusting the wrong people, and so I am now especially committed to getting a better sense of the workings within someone’s character.
I obviously cannot read their minds, but I can certainly learn a few things about their values by observing the consistency of their actions, whether the words and the deeds really match.
This must be done with great care, for it is easy to form a hasty judgment, and impressions have a way of being quite slippery. Nevertheless, with a patient and attentive eye, I can see a bit more about what makes them tick.
In many cases, as long as I keep my own presumptions in check, a general picture can emerge. The difficulty is usually in either my own bias or in my failure to look behind the initial appearance—the essence only reveals itself by looking in from as wide a range of angles as possible.
I have discovered the hard way why the Stoics are so wary of hypocrisy, since anyone concerned first and foremost with the increase of the virtues understands why it is necessary to be only one man, not to shiftily play at being many.
Sometimes the old phrases are the best: No one can serve two masters. Where one thing is the priority, everything else must be a relative and subservient preference.
Many years of trying to be a faithful Roman Catholic have given me a nose for sniffing out the players. If they tell me to obey the teachings of the Church, and then they go about fondling the boys and girls when they think no one else is looking, I’m fairly sure they are not to be trusted.
Many years of working in academia have given me a bitter taste from being surrounded by the performances of the pretenders. Though they say they are lovers of truth, their manipulations expose them as lovers of pride. I’m fairly sure they are not worthy of being called teachers at all.
There are certain terms from my adolescence in the 1980’s that I wish had never stuck around, like “awesome” or “homeboy”, but I do wish another had never left our vocabulary. One of the worst insults we had in my circles was to call someone a “poser”, or if we were feeling especially refined, a “poseur”.
It gets right to the heart of the matter. If, after sound deliberation, you think it to be right, I would encourage you to go ahead and do it.
But if you are thinking of putting up a smokescreen of propriety while groveling in the filth you secretly favor, I would respectfully ask you to grow a pair. At the very least, show some integrity.
Can I dedicate myself to philosophy on the one hand, and then also long for fame and fortune on the other? While I may prefer pleasure to pain, or luxury to poverty, my preferences cannot be my ultimate measures.
Once you tell me I can have it both ways, that I can have my cake and eat it too, I now know as much about you as I need to know. I wish you well, but we cannot stand together at this time. I would be glad if you got back to me later, after you’ve thought it over.
I'm still working on this one. I'll think I have it down, that I'm comfortable in my own skin, then I'll get around a certain group of people and hear things come out of my mouth that sound snotty and snobbish as heck.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat related...my husband and I ended up at a parish that doesn't have a catty, half dead, or "purity test" culture. I have other friends who insist that "proper" liturgy (Latin, TLM, mantillas, etc) is super important, and I used to think something similar, but after all the BS I've seen...not so much. The parish where we are now has lots of kids, a couple people who come to mass in short shorts, easy access to the sacraments, a pastor who doesn't showboat (one way or the other...you know what I mean) and a surprising lack of old church lady territorial-ness. Feels like heaven.