• floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    The main ingredients of conservatism are greed, hatred and ignorance. Coincidentally these are also the things the Buddha identified as the sources of all human suffering.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” ― Socrates

      Greed and hatred weren’t that much of a problem for Socrates apparently, but they both agree that ignorance is fucking bad. And the Greeks had two words for it (at least), separating a lack of ability from a refusal to understand.

      https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/

      “The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”