Ashley Hebert > Recent Status Updates

If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them.

Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.

…those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their impulses to another except the emotional strength of the impulse.

…what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism.

These past few pages have brought to mind Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily happy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

…a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

What we call Man’a power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.

If a man’s mind be open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose.

The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.

What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.

All value will be sentimental; and you must confess (on pain of abandoning every value) that all sentiment is not ‘merely’ subjective.

…it is worth inquiry whether there is any instinct to care for posterity or preserve the species.

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people’. People say different things: so do instincts.

A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they say) ‘sentimental’ values have in their background values of their own they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge.

They write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society which they regard as desirable.