Kevin Perez said to dmb: Sounds like ego to me. dmb says: By "ego" I'm guessing that you mean pride. In the Freudian sense, everyone has an ego except psychotics and dead people and so it would make little sense to complain about such a thing. But if you mean that critical examination and doubt are motivated by pride, by a lack of humility, then your complaint makes sense. In fact, this would be a classic example of the kind of complaint Nietzsche leveled against traditional religion, which has invented all kinds of mechanism to prevent any critical examination. He thought the Christian prohibition against pride was chief among those mechanisms. He deeply resented what he called its "slave morality". I'd always thought he had contempt for religion because he was a Nihilist, but did some reading recently and learned that isn't true. Actually, he held religion in contempt because, he thought, this slave morality was nihilistic, that it turned virtue into vice, that it was a religion based on resentment of excellence and achievement. Thus, the prohibition against "pride". And it seems to me that you are duplicating this attitude. Against the suggestion that critical examination is superior to obedience and conformity, you have invoked the "ego", as if doubt were some kind of personality flaw, as if skepticism were a sin.
As you may have guessed, I think the opposite is true. Sure, there is such a thing as excessive pride and arrogance is nothing to be proud of, but I'm extremely suspicious whenever humility is invoked this way. When its used as a stick to beat up critics, it only validates Nietzsche's complaints. I'm guessing this is going to upset you. That's not the goal. Its just a side-effect that I don't know how to avoid. But I guess that's part of the point. We can't let such sentiments get in the way of our inquiries. If we let that kind of sensitivity block us from a frank discussion, then pride or ego really does become a problem. That's when it becomes a muzzle, a censor. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Interest Rates NEAR 39yr LOWS! $430,000 Mortgage for $1,299/mo - Calculate new payment http://www.lowermybills.com/lre/index.jsp?sourceid=lmb-9632-19132&moid=14888 moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
