Today I kiraboshi’d at someone over the Internet.

“I don’t care where you stand on the political spectrum, because my way is absolutely the right way and everyone who voices disagreement is automatically immoral and subhuman!”

Yeah, lot o’that going around.

avenuemuse:

“I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters

Yeah, but this is terrifying. Suffering does not ennoble us. We may be better because we learn things from it, but it is the act of learning and not the act of being miserable that makes us greater.

There is this tradition that Occultists have of the Malakh’habbalah – supernatural beings that punish people and drive them to greater torment, in the hopes that they will be stronger and better. They break a lot of people in the process, but in their minds, those people were weak and wouldn’t have really been good in the long haul anyway. The related argument, long-running, is over whether someone who is deliberately cruel in the name of a good cause is really a good being.

And ultimately, no matter what one feels about using the name of God or the name of a righteous cause to justify their actions, it seems to me that unnecessary suffering is just bad. Death is not the worst of evils; everyone dies eventually. But to suffer for no reason – that truly seems bad. To invent reasons to avoid that conclusion, to justify empty suffering, seems equally bad. For someone to say, these people count more as people, they are more real, because they have suffered – that is the worst kind of distinction one can draw. It tells us that we should, in our heart of hearts, wish suffering upon others.

Do people not count unless they have suffered and can prove it to you?

Distance is really able to show you different things. It’s the same in a debate, or a chess match, or a war . . . and I guess love is war.

Culture is like a suit jacket. It restrains you, it protects you slightly, and most importantly, it greatly affects how other people view you.

People say ‘the suit makes the man,’ but please remember that in the end you are a man, not a suit.