#335

"Why the hell do you write a blog???" a teenager asks me.

"Cuz I'm old," I reply instantly. Much the same function as your rude-assed reveal that you've read my screen from behind being because you're a twerpy little kid with half a forebrain, I say to myself--of course, to say so aloud would be bad diplomacy. Like John Adams, though it is in my nature to be as frank and forthright as possible, I am mindful--when able--of my diplomacy, my courtesy, and my respect for the infinite mystery of the other and their path in existence, so similar to and different from my own. All of us being small ships in the same stormy sea, bristling with as much cannon as we can float, fostering peaceful relations is important. Too often, interactions take the form a broadside and a fusillade right back, when tacking intelligently would be far the superior maneuver.

Perhaps I've mentioned it before--not sure, won't bother to check--my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP, the Mediator. No matter how many sharp edges I generate--and publish on my blog--interpersonally, throughout the fracas of life, I present all smooth roundness. Honesty is the best policy, yes, but the best presentation for honesty is a gently sloping Aristotelian path towards a Nietzschean/Platonic ring/sphericity. I have always held that the Socratic method is best turned towards oneself or the abstract in a level field than applied to others; the object lesson in that was presented magnificently and unequivocally by the man himself. The polemical style is also best reserved for the written word. 

In short, you don't have to be a jerk about being right. You can be Right, which is Good, and it could get you killed, which if not strictly Bad, is for the most part at least Counterproductive.

*

Rereading what I've just written, it strikes me that a Nietzschean ring interpolated three hundred and fifty-nine times one point each time around a stable centerpoint is a Platonic sphere. The centerpoint is Aristotle. The field is Socrates. Everyone else just observes and reports. Geometrically speaking, of course.

--JL