I really like this aphorism. I feel like moral life is a difficult beast. It entangles us in words, representations, and ideas. But none of it makes sense unless one chooses to be moral. This is why most famed philosophers utterly fail to write coherently about it. These majors all have skeletons in their own closets that drive their excellence, but to know morality you need to ask the ones who didn’t get their badge of honour. Kant is still top of my list in this domain, nobody else I’ve encountered has dug deeper yet.

Plus, isn’t it better to believe in something you understand rather than just blindly believing what you’re told? As a kid, I blindly believed, and I thought it was wrong to question, but questioning only leads to more understanding, and that can’t be wrong.

I consider the belief to be in a strange kind of way the activity of faith. Belief – even blind belief – can assert a greater religious freedom in some sense, since it disseminates the idea of freedom of the religious doctrine. However, one who believes blindly also trusts in their society, their family, and friends to direct them towards their best interests. In this I see it as a symbol of religion, and something that sets it apart from plain ideology since it is self-reflexive; it is the activity of faith that defines it. I agree that only through self-reflection, philosophizing, and dialectic questioning is it really fully free.

One has to understand oneself and reality in a way that is unique to onself. We're all wearing, how should I say this?, a pair of unique-to-us tinted glasses. The hue of the universe is determined by those glasses and when we self-reflect, as by looking in a mirror, the effect of the glasses is still there.

I know you are going to find my response to this mundane, predictable, and eighteenth century, but I’m going to try to put it in a way that is as little Hegel as possible to avoid us having to unpack that whole logic; but I indeed took the Science of Logic seriously. Do we see mediated Being through the glasses or is that already crossing the ‘objectifying Being’ no-fly zone? In the finite subjectivity view we have dialectically ‘othered’ Being into an objectivity that is a similitude with the idea of persona. That’s all well and good, but to call it an impasse that prevents knowing the outer world inclusive of our inner Being would be tragic.

I think this sort of self is a superstructure, a persona, to go back to Freud. I can lose my persona and yet still experience that loss; so it can’t be an essentially ‘complete’ determination. ‘Ego’ is more appropriate, something that can modularly reference unconscious, subconscious, and conscious drives at appropriate times within a characteristic personality so as to organize them to appear to fulfill drives with apparent fluidity.

It should be a system that fits gracefully in with itself with as little effort as possible. Unconscious motives must remain not worth knowing to itself, so it can rest comfortably inside it’s shell.

I prefer hyperbolae.

It must be discussed. Your post uses Being to describe this universe, so Being is already there acting as it would anywhere else.

I don’t fully agree that the self is an illusion. It’s practically the most authentic thing there is. That is to say, not that it is more authentic, but everything else seems less so.

But so do you. Everything about you devolves into linguistics, including your innermost thoughts and ideology. That’s exactly what makes it possible to speak about you; and what makes that worth doing.

No analysis required. Self and being are objective insofar as the self calls the death instinct characteristic. Is your point that Being is unspeakable as an object? I would both agree and disagree. Unfortunately, it’s not optional, but self-mediating; it’d be way simpler if it weren’t, but that’s the main premise. Using language to discuss it, my sole intention was to bring it into a deeper subjectivity.

OK cutting corners usually doesn't pay. However. it is sort of ambitious to suggest that one has shed oneself completely of the mediated categorization of Being. Much of the category of being takes form before the observer has developed a coherent idea of self. That its substance is neither discretely particular or universal is its more advanced development, but it is prone to organize itself according to a Natural teleology, because it is its characteristic idea. But it's whole universe seems to be consumed into that characteristic idea, like an equation plotted on a graph that is bounded to infinity comprises contiguous points, but a hyperbolic function can have two such possibilities. Being only seems to be comprehensible as a contiguity.

Although I often feel refreshed at the use of formal logic for philosophical purposes, doing this mechanically runs the risk of risk of losing sight of the general philosophical project. The technocentric post-industrial mental complex treats the use of all advancement as extensions of our robotic limbs. This ideological view makes it an absurdity to do work for nothing. That – I think – runs against the grain of its main premise of philosophy that allows us to escape this cell by re-awakening ourselves to the contingencies of ideas and precepts.

Does knowing we had five apples, added ten, and now have fifteen apples really get us very far towards a topography of vision, symbol, quantity, extension, existence, etc.?

And yet, something like visible light can 'travel' several hundreds of thousands of miles through a vacuum as a potential, never touching matter as we know it, finally reaching our retinas or photographic equipment only to affect us with the sights and images we call reality. I find that challenging to grasp with the classical intuition. There seems to be a new and different type of intuition being formed there. A physical effect emerging from the self-reflexive nature attributed to the potential. I think it really breaks down the divide there a lot. For instance, is kinetic energy something that exists in the sense of being 'out there,' when we look more deeply into it and find there are a number of potentials being fulfilled and unfulfilled based on how it is being observed? It's almost like the physical world is affected by a sort of creativity.

I think it's a deeply human trait to be attracted to crisis. Somewhere deep within I take enjoyment out of analyzing, imagining, and even sometimes producing scenarios where life is at stake. And when I open up the crises, they don't seem fearful at all but very small, whereas when I run away from them they seem big enough to follow and squash me.

To go without crises means to fully overcome mother nature, and achieve some type of philoso-scientific utopia. By that I mean a place where humanity could gain control over outer and inner nature. But why wait on a state that we see very far off and only existing in imagination when there are real states of harmony with nature that we have experienced and know can be achieved?

I think overpopulation is the solution to the two other – and most other – problems. How to do it ethically is the real problem. How can climate change exist when there aren't enough human beings to consume the energy to cause it? How can corruption affect us all when we exist in smaller and more localized groups? How can there be shortage of work when one knows how to exploit natures fruit oneself? In mother nature's eyes, strife is the way to ascend, and excess comfort and ease the way to descend.

The ego seems to be the self's tendency to apply a degree of value on itself.

I think psychoanalysis focuses on childhood for good reason. This is the point in life where our outer reality and inner being are most undifferentiated with a priori determinations. I heard that when very young children play the game, 'peekaboo' they find it stimulating partly due to their having not fully found the belief that when something is out of sight that it still exists. It is here that the differentiation between anxiety and fear with excitement and desire find their most free play of equality and contrast. I think as we grow older we grow to develop more complexity in what fear and anxiety mean to us, but they still contain the traces of this equality and contrast. When we most need to explain and defend our fears, the mind returns to this undefined place in an attempt to free itself from external stimuli that no longer meet its structural demands.

I imagine inspiration of a drug like a confrontation between mammals. One mammal destroys the other and gets hurt in the process. Nothing can be made of the hurt out of itself, but the hurt stays in the animal’s memory as essential to itself. Like a pointer that points to a state of disarray.

I don't think so. I think they had a project for a new way of socioeconomic life.

Was there ever a call out directly for radical change? Besides, what’s so radical about the working class controlling their path in collective will power? We consider that normal today in the form of guilds, unionization, labour parties, and practically nobody dares call themselves a Marxist.

TCM was less than a hundred pages long and it didn’t contain the itinerary for socioeconomic life in detail, but set forth the types of ideas that life would be built upon; how capitalism could revitalize itself from the core identity. I’m not an expert on Marx so someone can please correct me if I’m wrong, but the subject of Communist government did not represent a large portion of Marx’s work.

By this you mean the slowly evaporating working class will more and more make their values the subject of social exclusion and stigma?

I’m not totally clear about where antinatalism fits into all this. Do you mean a Marxist would find it immoral to raise children under a system so contrary to their version of social good? It’s not clear if Marx had ever claimed to have created a blueprint for a good world; could you define this good you claim Marxists are looking for?

TCM was producing a superstructure from the aims and premises of capitalism; in some ways refining it. ‘Buy local,’ ‘return of analog,’ the need for nations to become economically self-reliant, and the need for stability in the meaning of currency are some examples of social phenomena that intersect with Marx’s ideas, but they have mostly been subversive ideas.

We have a future that is somewhat bleak for those who are emotionally invested in consciously building this superstructure. However, I don’t think it’s solely a personified reality-authoring that Marx and Engels had in mind. It is also a type of refinement of existing attitudes and values to their ideological core.

Insofar as society has changed since Marx, there are no real ‘Marxists’ as far as people who build on his work exactly as it was. We are interpreting and modifying in accordance with modern life. But there are ways to act out his thought other than nationally.

Anything ending with ‘ism’ that was generated by popular culture and isn’t a coherent body of thought, is just a name given to some sort of excessive or exaggerated belief (positivism, deteriorationism, etc.). If there’s no coherence, you don’t have a true ‘ism.’ Where is the rationality in antinatalism?

The goal of life is survival and happiness. Some people define their survival is such a way that they choose their death in sacrifice.

How is it possible that life itself could have a goal, when it has no interests, desires, or appetites of its own?

But does it matter if they don't score high in math, logic, and language??

Tests are all about making definitive expectations and having them met. They don't truly provide or reveal knowledge so much as they allow us to see our ideal image and to make it real. This double-meaning is part of the word 'test' itself, like 'testing for bacteria,' 'testing for covid19,' 'testing for intellect,' etc.

Though I'm no Schopenhauer expert, he seemed to philosophize without reference to rational spirit. I hold this as key to Schopenhauer's idea of boredom. Where in the rational spirit there is no problem in the state of 'emptiness,' from an existential-material viewpoint there is no escape from the problems associated with it. Anyone from this existential-materialist point of view will inevitably come to the conclusion that the human condition is essentially corrupt by nature. There is still no serious counter-argument.

Schopenhauer's more cynical material is intelligible due to its lack of any reference to absolute idealism. This is where it can trigger a defense mechanism for many who claim 'there is no boredom,' because relatively speaking, there isn't. However, if you would see things from Schopenhauer's reference frame you would see a totally different picture. Essential to his reference frame is: the concept of individuality, the holistic validity of an intellectualizing will, and the absence of any factors of this universal intellectualizing will lying external or extraneous to the ideas and concepts of its consciousness.

'Absolute idealism' is a little oxymoronic, and also difficult to swallow; especially at the cusp of the industrial revolution more and more coming to rely on the cynicism of a boundless and unforgiving drive toward capital growth; the "cracking the omelette," so to speak that intrinsically counters this form of idealism. I think his point of view fits in well into this schema. Can a rationalizing spirit also experience pain and boredom without material activity? Of course, but in actuality it will oppose it. Because Schopenhauer affirmed his existence was amongst a will not to oppose, it was reasonable to have taken such a viewpoint for itself.

Well not to be semantic, but in what sense do you use the word ‘question’? Part of the inner soul searching of religion is questioning oneself and one’s life choices.

What you may mean by ‘questioning’ is a sense of liberality to doubt, dissolution, and/or dissent that is avoided in many religions. This appears to me a rational structure to the pursuit of truth. In knowledge too, we seek to avoid excess egotism and arrogance in favour of diplomacy and clear vision (albeit at risk of inversion) as a path toward objectivity.

This type of structure of unquestionability can be found everywhere. It’s essentially the structure of keeping something from dissolving away. It amounts to the particular form of religion and differs in its defining character. Is there a universal issue here, or is it just a problem that religion hands itself down in non-conscious form that bothers you? Or maybe the particulars of individual interpretation...

Literally the opposite. — javi2541997

Sure maybe, but don't you find this impulse to question everything stems from a desire to know truth in your individuality? Is that so different from what God-lovers do? Looking at some parts of the Bible, it seems to come from a place of sound reason in the sense that excessive forms like greed, gluttony, lust, deception, and pride do tend to be self-destructive. That isn't a long road from Aristotle's golden mean. What we do in philosophy will inevitably involve religion since both have the intended effect of directing followers to more reasonable and rational ways of thinking. In ideality both aim to produce a love of wisdom that enriches the self and leads to a higher mental state.

What about the interior self, emphasized by theologians and philosophers throughout history, what was the basis for that? Doesn't the word philosophy itself mean something like, 'love of wisdom?' The philosophically liberated and wise self is pretty much your version of Jesus Christ. It it fully rendered and unquestioned.

LOL, seriously though. Something massive leaving creates a void that creates a vaccuum.

If they're off base, they will fail the exam.

All hail the mighty examination, the true judger of all...

Doesn't this super-materialism just look like Christianity with the crust cut off?

The elephant in the room is what exactly you mean by 'dogma.' Looking at the definition online this came up:

a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. (Oxford Dictionary)

So when we say that religions claim things to be 'incontrovertibly true,' what does that mean? If I say, "Jesus died for our sins," am I claiming that there was a person named Jesus who really died and it was because of a group of people around him, or is the 'truth' of this statement something beyond the pure material representation? In my observation many Christians seem to have the view that accepting the statement as true without having individuals making this distinction is not considered a problem; this generalization characterizes it to us as dogmatic. But in reality, it's just not feasible to have such a massive number of people truly making this distinction. That's a product of its form, not just its content. Is there any reason to believe the apparatus of traditional philosophical inquiry you call 'true inquiry' would not take the same form if it were widely studied?

Don't we see the same scene in philosophy when we allow freshmen to study Plato and give them a pat on the back even when they're totally off base? We see a light at the end of the tunnel, just as the religious people we snuff our noses at do.

Is ordinary life not also a type of true inquiry? Not to sound offensive, but your zeal for true inquiry sounds a lot like a form of dogma. Why do you need this true inquiry?

Ideas and concepts lead to actions, beliefs, notions. Don't you think so?

As much as we hate to admit it, I think we in philosophy rely on dogmatism to the same extent that any religions we can name do. Even the idea that there are philosophically enlightened individuals and non-enlightened ones presupposes a philosophical system. So any system by nature has individuals who aren't going to think about its concepts and ideas in their consciousness; does that make them lesser human beings? Personally, I believe that to be narcissistic, and Christians are right to avoid it because it goes against their teaching. Expecting everyone to be a philosophically free thinker is like expecting everyone to know how to calculate the electric field of a dipole or to know all the Latin names of all the plants in their home town; ironically, such an ideal system wouldn't function properly in actuality.

Question: Why do we want children?

Why could mean 'for what...' and it can mean 'what is the reason for...' It's like the movements of a mechanism; the parts don't solely have to have a final cause and there is no necessity for reason. Another question you could ask, 'Does it seem rational to realize having children?'

Then there is a natural power that exerts itself on the human body to procreate. From this point of view the question presents itself, 'Is nature good in its own right?' Then there are a whole bunch of other questions about what it means to be an individual with freedoms and liberties. So all in all it has basically every difficult question in one, but possibly every answer in one.

A few things seem clear to me about this:

- There are no organisms on Earth that could sustain unlimited population growth.
- Given human ingenuity, there are lessening limits on human population growth.
- There is currently no gauge between economic growth and population growth. We don't know for sure that capitalism doesn't rely on either population or technological growth for economic survival.
- It is not possible to state population as an unequivocal cause of the enviroinmental problems, global pandemics, and abstract bipolarization of socio-economic life that most individuals call current issues of the day.
- It is pretty easy to see how a coordinated reduction in reliance on population growth and technology in developed nations, in its ideality, would solve the three aforementioned problems.

Is it possible to have a thriving capitalist economy without population and technological growth? Is it possible for human beings to be held in equilibrium in their number and technological capability by nothing but their own collective volition? There is one main difficulty with the 'let it sort itself out' approach: if our socio-economic system is contingent on growth in population and technology then when natural limiting factors arise there will be individuals who are interested in acting against movement in the direction of harmony. If those individuals also had most of the power, then it would mean disproportionately large scale suffering compared to the relative ease of few.

"What exactly does it mean?" (What does that mean more precisely?)
"How do we know that it is so?" (How do you know that?)

There seems to be another factor implicit in your two questions. What are you referring to by 'meaning'? This could be a reference to personal significance (ex: "The gesture meant so much to me") or to a known system of affects (ex: To fall means to momentarily lose footing and accelerate by gravity), or possibly something else. Your second question, "how do we know that this is so" suggests that your are limiting your scope to an accepted perspective or an finite apparatus. Is true knowledge really a process at all? Certainly we can say there is a process for attaining and validating facts, but I'm not convinced in the necessity of a such a repetitious process for finding knowledge.

1. Definitions
2. Justifications

Might I suggest a third term, 'Significance/Relevance'? Is it enough to know without questioning why that entity wishes to know? Why, for instance, should we give equal weight to a discussion about philosophy and a discussion about the infinity of supernatural and ungrounded things? If we did, we would not have enough time to investigate anything in real depth.

I believe the fundamental nature of the problem is the misapplication of technology, and that, applying the right technologies we could sustain a large human population indefinitely.

While what you say may be true, is all we concern ourselves with in life mere sustenance? What about the quality of life and stability of the solution?

On one hand we have a technological solution that is:

1) Quicker to implement at first, but may be so complex that no unlearned individual could well understand its methodology.
2) Will require constant oversight, innovation, and adjustment by specialist and engineers.
3) May fulfill immediate needs but possibly not subtextual needs such as love, belonging, sense of purpose.
4) May compile itself with further issues, such as issues relating to finitude of energy resources and the environment.
5) In a massive population individuals will feel more insignificant and isolated. Crime and exploitation of governing systems is more likely.

Then you have another solution – reduction of the human population – that:

1) Takes longer to implement but is exceedingly simple in concept so that almost anyone could understand it.
2) Requires individual intervention.
3) Could possibly be more difficult to implement, but this is not really measurable until after the fact.

Then the pros of the tech solution:

1) Allows us to go on with our casual lives without much more individual intervention.
2) Larger population probably equals more technological innovation.
3) Do not need to get involved in extensive government reach over individual activities.
3) May be able to colonize other planets, though this is kind of a pipe dream at this point.

Then the pros of the reducing the population solution:

1) No longer any concerns about environment. Will probably repair environmental/geological damage.
2) Less competition for the pleasures of life; a generally easier and simpler life.
3) Less 'group-thinking,' as in the reduction of personal responsibility. Individuals will feel a greater sense of citizenship and belonging.
4) Smaller population probably equals more cultural innovation (art, philosophy, etc).
5) Less need for oversight, except in the sense of keeping the population in a globally decreasing state.

It seems exceedingly easier to imagine more pros and less cons for the depopulation solution, and the pros seem better and cons less aversive, but maybe that's because I already have that solution in mind. Perhaps you could elaborate on how you might lay it out differently.

Words and mathematical symbols often form separate spheres of meaning despite their basis on comparable activities of the mind. Symbols in mathematics are used less frequently as a social language than their alphabetic counterparts. We tend to think of verbal languages as fulfilling social needs and mathematical symbols as fulfilling contingent personal needs, because writing down symbols in mathematics can help us to conceptualize certain kinds of relationships more effectively than verbal ones can. Those symbols tend to take on a life of their own, eventually through habitual usage becoming fixed in their personal-narrative meaning.

At the heart of it, it sounds like the question is about the absolute linguistic unit versus the relational. We find that 'equals' has a meaning in the mathematical community that is more intentionally defined than the one in our casual usage. Do we hold fast to those meanings and furtively ignore their linguistic significance in favour of reproducing completeness, or accept the synchronic meaning freely as separate and referential to a mathematically absolute definition? I think in any feedback system we have to understand there is an underlying dicrete-ness to its idealization; that – excluding special cases – something can be determined as one thing and simultaneously negate another, not solely in a formal sense but also in terms of content.

When we perceive we can negate as well as posit; create something that cannot have being at the same time we imagine some other aspect of it as 'being there.' In our outer world there is thought to be one set of physical laws that negate others, but there could be other physical laws present not meeting certain conditions of sensibility.

I digress...

It is interesting, but it would be all the more interesting if it weren't soaked in the whole Oedipus Complex of removing the artist (father) in substitution for the viewer (surrogate). It gets tiring...

Well imagine an instance where you are in a restaurant job, say a dishwasher. Your manager judges your performance based on the dishes you can wash in given time. The manager realizes they cannot judge you specifically based on the result alone, but must watch you to make sure you are doing it right.

They see you fumbling with dishes, observe your behaviour to be agitated, and see that you do not wash nearly as many dishes as your coworkers. They thus judge your performance to be poor in this job. While this sounds like a purely mechanical act of measurement we might also look closer at the grounds for judgement and find holes. Were there distractions, what is this individual's past experience like, how fast do they learn, are there any other ways they contribute to the company, etc.

These other factors are attenuated because the story of the evaluation is in emulation of nature in the belief that in order for the company to operate as a business and succeed it must provide quality and quantity of output. We made a snapshot of this person (or the 'plot') and applied a cultural schematic of what they should be able to correct in themselves versus what they should not be. That scheme is not synthetic, but rather analytic, and thus does not derive from pure principles that can be laid out.

That dishwashers are judged in this way should comply with our practical rationality and our reason. However, the quality and quantity of the judgement is done internally and so is the necessity for it – in itself. Thus the whole process is a type of story that is for itself: a reproduction of our structures of belief and feeling. And the awareness of the process and its internal contradiction is what is brought down upon the individual who can truly perform at nothing.

A performance is in some ways like a story, a telling of narrative or a viewpoint on a system of space and time. The structure of evaluation – or the basis for translation from quality into quantity – is like the plot of the story or the events we see on its exterior. The story includes our quest: to find an individual with pattern discernment and problem solving from which we cast a narrative that sets the groundwork for how this quest will be represented and embodied. The quest is a test of our right to be an individual in society and an act of the individual itself.

A musical performer, for instance, who can play the right notes at the right time tells us they have developed a concentration and ability to succeed. That they have accomplished the quest which was either directed at or involved ticket-buyers signifies an aspect in ourselves we wish to emulate: the accomplishment. Comparing one musical performer to another ingrains our value determinations into fixed quantitative measures from which we decide the specific ingredients that will characterize this ideal.

In my view, performance – like art – is a reflection of society. In the business world this often means comparing against a certified copy and finding quantitative results, which shows how it reflects that side of social life. Partly shared by itself and us, the reflection has its guiding principle in will-power. If the story involves the plot of shedding individuals who are unfit to be citizens of the nation, as in the individual who cannot perform at anything, that quest can still be accomplished without immoral or unethical rules in the form of suffering.

And the justification for rules is that there needs to be a standard of measure. If you're being evaluated, they have to have a written guideline on what they're measuring so that, not only they could see whether you're a good fit to the company, or they need to put you on performance improvement plan, or just outright fire you.

There is a meaning in which the performance merely states whether or not someone's action met with what they were expected to do by another individual or collective. In the above sense it states that a result was not met and lays no further claim to why, but the word is commonly directed at an individual as a form of criticism. So on what grounds is performance laid against someone and under what justification do we say someone has a performance problem that is their own, and not just one that exists somewhere directed at something?

There is a sense in which performance means not just a binary yes or no, but instead a whole spectrum of different degrees. This implies a transition from quality to quantity that relies on some firm basis that includes some content that is characteristic to it. In the arts we can talk about a concert performance or a ballet performance not having any certified good copy in which to compare it with to see how closely it aligns, and yet we still talk about good and bad performance. Sometimes we're discussing an expressed expectation or even the expectation not being fulfilled, like a magic show.

I'm interested to know would you say in response to the hypothetical situation where someone were poor in performance everywhere they went. If they tried as much as possible to correct it themselves on some grounds they would turn around and say, "This is not my fault." As far as the expectation/reward scenario goes it doesn't seem like this person would ever be qualified to say this; only the authority would have that power.

When we say someone is underperforming or not performing at all, it means that that individual is not meeting the expectations set forth by the institution – be it the academia, workplace, or competition. It is hard for some people to accept this because it restricts creativity and it is a direct assault to the individuality.

I might ask what are the expectations based upon? I imagine you mean that the answer to the question lies is in the following line,

I cannot stress this enough, the justification for rules lies in feasibility and optimization.

We optimize, but the structures we are optimizing are ultimately for us. OK Jimmy then gets an 'F' in gym class because he fails to catch the ball. Someone might say that catching the ball is a structure optimized for us to perfect our visual and spatial sense in the best way possible (according to experts). This system maximizes happiness. It is the optimal solution to the differential equation of what will cause the least suffering.

So we judge the 'form' to be 'completed' in the performance on the most optimal distributed quantification of quality. The system is judged in a preliminary state, and is left to determine itself in a replication of that state until it is deemed unfit to work. Performance is a type of lottery system of morality. He/she who is raised in the appropriate way, with the correct genetics, at the right time, and under the right conditions to satisfy this equation is levered up to a luxurious life and those who draw the failing ticket drop down to the lower ranks.

Then if it is so determined, isn't performance itself a sort of arbitrary quality since it is so categorically determined by contingencies of a subject's life? One might help themselves to a certain extent, but it is ideal that certain individuals live a tormented existence by their inability to perform at everything because they do not and cannot have the facility to change themselves to satisfy the equation? This I suppose is based on a type of social emulation of nature.

A certain activity comes with a checklist that defines the performance of someone/something that's executing that actvity.

So in your view, it is only a matter of quantities of reflecting certain qualities. Individuals fall in line with these qualities to varying degrees, such as are outlined either expressly or implicitly in their upbringing and through concepts presented to them as normal in family life. For instance, performance in education is measured in the quantity of how well someone can remember certain ideas, how deeply they understand them, and how appropriately they can apply them, each is given a certain alphabetical value A, B, C, D, E, F according to the quantity they have been assigned. All is fixed and deterministic.

This is all well and good for the 'how' of performance evaluation, which we would be safe to expect to be fixed and determined in some way, but it leaves the what and why unanswered. Form seems to dissolve when it is exposed to the light, so we naturally avoid exposing its underlying mechanics. But when imposing such a rigid quantification as we do in our daily lives ("I don't enjoy this or that performer, I performed poorly at work/school/sport") it seems to imply a certain order that begs for justification. For example, a child who despite their best efforts tries to get good grades in the end is still given a failing mark for bad performance. What form are they failing to master, is it the form of academia or the form of the subject that they are trying to learn?

If it is the latter, then would it be unreasonable to suggest that given the near unlimited forms that subjects can take that there might be another form better suited to each failing student, which is merely overlooked by others for convenience? Or are we to conceptualize a world where the forms are more or less arbitrary, and people should take them as a symbol of the vocation and class they have been assigned by society?

I think there are two overlooked qualities of greatness: First it is preceded by equal greatness of criticism and culture. Second, it is ever willing to be overturned and succeeded.

If you’re searching for pride and vainglory you likely won’t be met with an audience who can share your mission. If you had no interest in anything greater to come, how could your work defend its purpose?