Sepideh > Recent Status Updates

"...as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them."

"How could any Lord have made this world? She asked. With her mind she had just seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit, she knew that. No happiness lasted, she knew that."

"...She must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering, death, the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer."

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries."

"After WWII researchers found that contact was the only thing that reliably reduced intergroup conflict."

The trait that people high in Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) & Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) overwhelmingly share is their extreme intolerance toward outsiders who seem to threaten their group identity.
People with SDO are threatened by outsiders competing for dominance over their group, while people with RWA are threathened by outsiders who do not represent "the oneness & sameness that makes 'us' an 'us' ".

"This blindness is far darker force than even prejudice. Unable to summon empathy for outsiders, we feel no connection to their suffering. Aggression is permissible. Rules, norms, and morals for their humane treatment no longer apply."

"The human self-domestication hypothesis suggests our worst behaviors toward other groups cannot be explained as mere 'negative feeling' toward others.It suggests we also evolved the ability to dampen the activity of the mental network that produces the unique features of our theory of mind. This allows us to blind ourselves to the humanity of people outside our group when we feel threatened."

"As our species was shaped by self-domestication, our increased friendliness also brought a new form of aggression.
A higher availability of serotonin during human brain growth increased the impact of oxytocin on our behavior. Group members had the ability to connect to one another, and the bonds among them were so strong, they felt like family. Caregiving behavior extended to a variety of social partners."

But our friendliness has a dark side.When we feel that the group we love is threatened by a different social group, we are capable of unplugging the threatening group from our mental network, which allows us to dehumanize them.
Incapable of empathizing with threatening outsiders,we can't see them as fellow humans and become capable of the worst forms of cruelty.We are both the most tolerant and most merciless species

“Why, why had I not known her before? Why had I not seen her when I still had the chance of seeing her? I don’t know how it happened, but I suddenly felt that I had grown old. My youth was somewhere far, far away, somewhere in the past, and it would never return.”

"Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along."

"Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice."

"It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life!"

"This solitude oppressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted. It was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong."

"We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let is rather love one another and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow."

"It isn't that China's state is despotic because it sends its citizens to reeducation camps. It sends people to camps because it can, and it can because it is despotic, unrestrained by- and unaccountable to- society."

"حالا باور دارم که اندیشه های ما تنها در صحنه عمل میتوانند بگویند که چقدر درست اندیشیده شده اند."

"هنوزم که هنوز است نمیدانم که روحم صلح طلب بود یا که میترسیدم!
هنوز نمیدانم که از جنگ در کوه ها و با تفنگ می هراسیدم یا از ته وجود باور داشتم که راه نجات کردستان از لوله های تفنگ نمیگذرد."

"بارها تا نزدیکی انقلابها و طغیانهای درونی بزرگ پیش رفتم اما هربار چیزی از جنس ترس با پوششی از افکار صلح طلبانه مانعم میشد.
بارها تا دامنه کوههای سر به فلک کشیده کردستان پیش رفتم اما مدام اندیشه مبارزات مدنی و فرهنگی به شهرها کشاندنم و قلم به دستم دادند. سالهای سال فکر کردم به کوهها پناه ببرم و تفنگ به دست بگیرم و با کسانی که قلم را نمیفهمند به زبان خودشان بجنگم اما هربار به عظمت و قدرت قلم اندیشیدم پاهایم سست شدند."

"Even more profound is his (Hobbes) influence on how we perceive states today. We respect them and their representatives regardless of whether they are monarchies, aristocracies or democracies. Even after a military coup or civil war, respresentatives of the new government take their seats in the United Nations, and international community looks to them to enforce laws, resolve conflicts, & protect their citizens."

Squeezed between the fear & repression wrought by despotic states & the violence & lawlessness that emerges in their abscence, is a narrow corridor to Liberty.
It's in this corridor that state and society balance each other out. This balance is not about a revolutionary moment.
What makes this a corridor, not a door, is that achieving liberty is a process.
What makes this corridor narrow is that this is no easy feat.

"He heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable lonliness."

"Melancholy was the dominant tone of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy."
- A little cloud

"There was no doubt as to the existence of good and evil, and as a rule, it was easy to see the difference between them. The difficulty began when we looked into the nature of the evil, and among things evil he included human suffering."

"It makes you realize the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every calamity."

"When a war breaks out, people say: It's too stupid, it can't last long. But though a war may well be too stupid, that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."

"Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either."

"I think that if the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."
"As well as God, then."
Chapter 4 is magnificant, there is so much to this conversation!

"Most people need to be looked after like children, and some like the sick in hospitals..."
If only we all could have the compassion!!