“Do it right!!!” Coping with poor rhetoric skills.

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I must learn to speak clearly., Rhetoric

It happened again this evening in a conversation with five other people where it appeared that these people automatically disagreed with what I had to say. I spoke of specific things of historical importance as a counter-argument to something that had just been presented and, as usual, people argued vehemently against what I was saying.

The statement that I challenged was that the world was in a state of war and that people were being killed in vast numbers. To me this was utter nonsense, and I responded that we live in a time of astonishing peace. Haven’t you any sense of history?, I said. In World War Two, people were being killed at a rate of five thousand per day for years, and today if a single American soldier gets killed it makes the national news. Another annoying assertion I made was that Genghis Khan and his sons killed a third of the people in Asia and Europe. We live in an astonishingly peaceful 21st century, so far.

A history of major war deaths shown on a logarithmic chart.

I suppose my statement was a bit harsh, but my current point is that it was rejected, and the people present seemed to be miffed that I had said such unpleasant things. Even if my facts were accurate, at least generally accurate, they didn’t want to hear such things.

What I learned from the evening’s discussion was something that I should have learned on my first day in school. You must say things in a way that people will agree with or they will disagree, and if they argue they will become entrenched in whatever they said in their first statement. Perhaps I was partially aware of my problem from tonight’s discussion because I had purchased the Wooden publisher’s book Trivium, and had intended to get started studying it after finishing Quadrivium. Now it seems that I should face my more serious life problem and jump directly to Trivium book V, Rhetoric, and learn how to talk to people in a way that they will understand and accept.

About this time Debbie, realizing I was interested in rhetoric, brought some books over to me from our personal library: Modern Rhetoric, by Brooks & Warren, How to Argue and Win Every Time by Gerry Spence, How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything, by Barbara Walters, Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric by Ward Farnsworth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent by Wayne C. Booth, Pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini, and The Rhetoric of Aristotle by Lane Cooper. Okay, there’s a year’s work just piled on my desk. Did I mention I have a helpmate?

In addition to reading and digesting all of this rhetoric stuff, I must change my behavior. Okay.

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“Do it right!!!” The future is all you can plan for.

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Do the right thing !, Face good opportunities.

It’s obvious you can’t plan for the past, because it’s gone, and it’s just as obvious you can no longer plan for the present because it’s gone too. As soon as you think about “now” it’s gone. You can choose to be mindful of the present but even when you succeed with that awareness of what feels like the present moment it’s already past.

Perhaps what you can do is to generate habits that will spontaneously pop into action without your being conscious of the pre-planning at the moment of action. Most of your actions are like playing ping-pong; you keep your eye on the object of interest and let your body twitch a multitude of muscles to do what you want to do externally. You don’t think about philosophy or some wonderful words of wisdom, you hit the ball in the direction you want it to go in the future moment after it leaves your paddle.

A lot of life is like that, but there is a part of thinking that we like to believe is free will, that we are making decisions. It is in those moments that we are paying attention to what we are going to do. What we are going to do in this moment of thoughtful action and what we are going to do in this instant that will become part of history, an act that is forever fixed history. This decision is thought of as a mental act, and yet it may be a lot more like those moments of playing ping-pong when you just do what seems right and hit the ball so it goes where you want it to go. There’s nothing fancy about it. But one thing that you can do in those moments of decision is to be pointed toward a worthwhile goal.

We bring our whole being into the process of conscious decision-making and ultimately it’s so complex it’s like hitting a ping-pong ball in the right direction.

“Do it right!!!” Be healthy into the future.

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A scale of happiness, A scale of health, A scale of wealth, A scale of wisdom, Actionable suggestions, Do it right!!!, Emotional Thriving scale (ET), Happy Healthy Wise Wealthy, How to live a better life., What should I do?, WQ (Wisdom Quotient)

What is the value of being perfectly healthy on into your physical future? My answer, my opinion if you prefer, is that without perfect health all of Ben Franklin’s virtues, Happy, Healthy, Wise, and Wealthy, get degraded.

Monetary wealth in abundance means little other than the ability to give it away to family, friends or society if you are about to die. Or, if your health is terribly degraded, as it is when death is near, then huge quantities of money can be plowed into the ground trying to maintain a few more days of drug-induced breathing-coma. Having a Good level of wealth means you have access to medical care and can maintain a good life with paid personal assistance. Okay wealth will get consumed in a few days in a health emergency without some form of medical insurance. A Difficult level of wealth will be consumed in one day without government-sponsored help because at that monetary level few people will have personal insurance. Catastrophic wealth means your health is absolutely dependent upon the kindness of strangers. 

Money may not bring happiness but when it comes to health it can often prevent misery.

Happiness can be had for a while in a Catastrophic situation, even without any wealth, wisdom, or health. One of my most memorable experiences was in 1959 when I visited my father’s father’s brother and his wife in a nursing facility. He was ambulatory but mostly incoherent, but she was bedridden and as alive as an eighteen-year-old girl. Which in a way she was, because I was talking to her about my Grandmother, who was her best friend when they were teenagers. She was so excited hearing about my grandmother’s life and the success of her children, and even of me who was an Air Force pilot at the time. Both she and her husband died within the month, of old age.

The point is that even in extremely poor health situations, even near death, a person can be very happy.

Wisdom, when had in Wonderful abundance, can help in coping with lack of wealth, lack of health, and lack of happy external situations. However, wisdom can also eliminate situations that are not inevitable, unlike death. Wisdom can help bring into existence the best results of all the virtues because wisdom looks into the future and does those things in the present that will bring a long and happy life to you. As I concluded yesterday:

“Wisdom is more valuable than rubies.” “Get wisdom and with all thy getting get understanding.“

Some thoughts on how to “Do it right!!!”

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Do it right!!!, What should I do?

The post, “Do it right!!!” ended with,  “The point is that Happy, Healthy, Wise, Wealthy can be arranged on a scale of 1. Wonderful, 2. Good, 3. Okay, 4. Difficult, 5. Catastrophic and then they can be compared and improved.”

The day after posting that and rereading it I was a little surprised at how obvious the path to a better, or worse, life is and how easily those paths can be described. The next step up the ladder, or down it, is within easy reach from the step presently being inhabited. Most people, by my intentionally defining it there, are living in the Okay situation. When living there it is easy to imagine falling one step into a Difficult situation, and not too difficult to imagine moving up one step to a Good situation. Furthermore, the actions of living those other steps, only one level away, are easily imagined, and occasionally experienced by those at the Okay level. Thus, there is a guide to be found in a person’s experience to identify behaviors to be sought and those to be avoided.

The heaven to be experienced by people living the Wonderful life is probably too many steps removed from a person living a Catastrophic life to be understood and sought by them. For example, the relief from pain found in pain-suppressing drugs only gets them into more trouble because it leads them away from the behaviors found in a Wonderful way of living.

“Go the right way!” is easy to say, but it may be impossible to do for people looking the other way.

Do it right!!!

Tags

A scale of happiness, A scale of health, A scale of wealth, A scale of wisdom, Happy Healthy Wise Wealthy, How to live a better life., \

To get a good life requires getting your relationships to happy, healthy, wise and wealthy right. If any of those virtues drops to a low level you won’t be living as good a life on the others. There may be easy opportunities for improvement on one of those virtues if you do the right thing. However, you might be out of balance with your optimum without even being aware of it, and need to pull a specific virtue up a bit and by doing that discover that the others will also be improved.

These recent posts have been comparing the concept of wealth to the other three virtues because it is more easily quantified. Basically, living a good life means having enough money in your normal social situation so you could live as comfortably as you currently do for over a year without any income and without any severe stress. 1. An ordinary American who is healthy and reasonable with a total estate of a million dollars ($1,000k)  can easily live without income for more than a year without difficulty. 2. But, dropping below one quarter of that amount ($200k) puts home ownership at risk, 3. and dropping below a quarter of that amount ($40k) puts even a rental residence at risk, 4. a quarter of that ($8k) puts a single rental room at risk, 5. a quarter of that ($1,600) is still a lot of money for a short term but it falls far below a year of living a normal life without any income. [ 2019/02/08 Six days ago the divisor was 4. I just changed it to 5 which now feels to me to illustrate the levels better.]

Happiness is largely an independent quality from money but we can arrange it on a scale in a similar way. 1. Perfect happiness is having daily enjoyable, meaningful things to accomplish with family, friends and thus living in a whole world with kind actions with everyone. 2. Good happiness is filled with pleasurable activities done together with family, friends, and community. 3. Okay happiness is having fun things to do with family and friends and community relationship mostly in the form of a job done as something to make money for oneself. 4. Difficult happiness is found in trying to make friends with people found in public places and just hanging out together. 5. Catastrophic happiness is when nothing seems to work, people can’t be trusted, and pleasure is only found in a release from pain found in large doses of drugs.

Health is measured independently of money, happiness, and wisdom but it can be arranged in a similar way. 1. Perfect health is to never have a physical or mental limitation of any kind. 2. Good health is to have minor problems once a year, like a cold, but always able to do all normal physical things with ease. 3. Okay health is to have a few chronic problems but they only impede a few activities so it is living by just avoiding doing those strenuous things. 4. Difficult health is a chronic problem and requires daily attention and some serious medical tracking. 5. Catastrophic health is a constant problem with frequent severe challenges to do anything and feeling rotten is a good day.

Wisdom is seemingly a totally independent virtue from those other qualities, but it too can be arranged on a scale. 1. Great wisdom is the cultivated ability to see all things clearly and thus be able to make optimum actions for making the whole future world function harmoniously. 2. Good wisdom is the ability to see the present clearly and adapt to its needs in ways that work out well for everyone within that world view. 3. Okay wisdom works well for seeing present needs and responding to them well enough to get needed things done and avoid serious trouble. 4. Difficult wisdom doesn’t see relationships between cause and effect accurately and sometimes makes serious mistakes that cause frequent personal problems and problems for others. 5. Catastrophic wisdom has a relationship with reality that causes serious problems for oneself and for everyone near and for all society in general.

The point is that Happy, Healthy, Wise, Wealthy can be arranged on a scale of 1. Wonderful, 2. Good, 3. Okay, 4. Difficult, 5. Catastrophic and then they can be compared and improved.

I will seek to understand you.

Tags

Be kind to everyone., Listen occasionally., Try to understand.

There is a tendency when entering into a conversation for me to answer the question the other person states with a direct answer. To me, this seems like a reasonable thing to do, but it doesn’t work out as well for the other person as they would like it too because I tend to actually answer their question. Typically a person will begin with some form of “Hello.” to which I reply with some form of “Hello.” That’s okay so far, but they will typically say something like, “How are you?”

Unfortunately, that sometimes begins a disquisition on that subject. “I never really thought about it. Hmm? I feel pretty good today; it’s been two weeks since that cold began. I started my cold cure a little late, and so the cold got an overnight head start. It was obviously a cold when I got up. My question was where are the Tamiflu tablets? I found them in a minute, but the expiration date was 2014. Should I take them? An article I once read said that pills are okay long past their expiration date, except for diabetes pills, if they had been stored at cool room temperatures. These had been intentionally stored in an internal room in an internal closet that was probably the coolest place in my house on summer days. Anyway, I took the Tamiflu tablets for the next two days. You know the research says that after you have a temperature from the flu they are actually counterproductive. They must be taken on the first and second day to be effective. Also, I began my twice-a-day hot bath regime to stimulate my body’s flu-fighting processes. So, I raised my temperature to 101 degrees twice a day with 106-degree baths. After the third day, I just took one hot bath because the flu seemed to be suppressed and I wasn’t noticeably sick. Only that first day was I sick enough that anyone would have noticed, and I told my old buddies that I might be catching a cold and stayed well back from them when talking. It was about the third day that I got out in my garden and started doing really hard physical labor for a couple of hours each day. I was clearing out everything flammable from around my house. Did you see what happened to Paradise, California? Check out the before and after pictures. It looks just like Bend, with all the Ponderosa trees. Oh. … How are you?”

Do you see my problem? A simple question leads to a disquisition that probably feels like the proverbial Inquisition of Medieval times. Most people interrupt me after the first sentence and I am good about shutting up if anyone interrupts me.

My resolution—it can’t be a New Year’s Resolution any more because it’s almost February—but my resolution should be and can be … I will seek to understand you! Just saying I will listen more and talk less doesn’t work because if you just happen to say something interesting I will drop off into an Inquisition-like disquisition.

However, if I have in my mind that I will seek to understand you, then there is a possibility that I could control my tendency to offer my truths and listen to you instead. Trying to understand anyone is difficult because they are made up of a multitude of conflicting habits constructed out of years of responses to complex situations generated by conflicts with partially understood interactions with people who are themselves coming from a poorly understood miasma of partially misunderstood largely confused complex social situations.

There is so much confusion in the sanest of us and so much good sense in the craziest of us that our best option is always be kind to everyone.

What should I be blogging about?

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How to live forever., The future of humanity, What should we be doing?

There is an infinity of problems that one can spend a lifetime of energy trying to understand, dodge the negative effects of, and find methods for using their positive aspects. This blog has explored many of them with the general hope of helping humanity survive and improve its situation. I like the phrase “To help them live and live more abundantly” which is attributed to Jesus. When seeing what Elon Musk is doing with his time and effort it is obvious that he is applying that same strategy. One of his goals is to eliminate the burning of carbon-based fossil fuels, which if it continues will make human life in the future much more difficult.

One of the projects that I pursued with a couple of years of blog posts was the Earth Ark Project. It is a workable method of saving nearly all of the planet’s plant life and many of the other life forms too for revivification in the remote future. The cute animals of the Earth, including humans, need those plants to survive. The current seed banks of the world are saving only a relatively few species, so they are probably missing some of the critical ones needed for the general stability of the whole ecosystem.

The Philosophers Squared series is important to me, and my personal friends claim it is their favorite subject of my blogs. I am currently studying the Quadrivium and will soon begin the more basic subject, Trivium. These are the subjects studied by the Classical Greeks and the style and strategy of education through the Renaissance. It is mostly stuff that a modern person doesn’t need to know, but it is a mental workout of amazing things about our world. Those subjects and the theory of Designa presented by Wooden Books publishers have given me a shocking appreciation for the quality of the works of our ancestors.

My current thoughts on saving humanity are based on the realization that we are a transition species to something potentially much grander. We now exist in a brief moment in time where we have the technology and the knowledge of how we can make a huge impact on the whole Universe. Our life as a human species will always be measured in years and perhaps thousands of years, but we presently have the potential to create beings that will function for billions of years.

It will be dangerous for us to create our replacements for the distant future, but in that long run, we all will be organically dead but they can be brought to eternal life, and in that form we can live forever.

Moses’ Ten Commandments compared to Jesus’ Beatitudes.

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Evolution of an idea, human survival, Jesus' Beatitudes, Moses Ten Commandments

Moses lived some six hundred years before his Ten Commandments were written down about the year 830 BCE in what is known as the Elohist document. ( See, 1st Presbyterian. Bishop John Shelby Spong – Unbelievable page 211.) There are three versions of the Ten Commandments: Exodus 34 – Deuteronomy 5, – and Exodus 20 the usual version. Here is a brief list.

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Ten Commandments from the Bible
I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy
Honor thy father and thy mother
Thou shalt not kill
Thou shalt not commit adultery
Thou shalt not steal
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s house)
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s wife)
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s slaves, animals, or anything else)
You shall set up these stones, which I command you today, on Mount Gerizim.

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That list is derived from the Jewish Elohist scholars and appears to be a truncated one culled from the commonly known much longer list published on stone-stelae at Delphi, Greece, created by The Seven Sages. Those stelae were sent to all cities in the known world where there were Greek-speaking people.

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That is a copy of yesterday’s opening to this blog, but today’s will be a little different because Spong on page 191 of Unbelievable writes of the parallels between Jesus’ life and message as being patterned after Moses’ life and message. “All three of these gospels were originally created we now recognize, to provide Jesus stories for the seasons and Sabbaths of the synagogue’s liturgical year. That is why the story of the crucifixion was told against the backdrop of the Passover and why Matthew placed what came to be called the Sermon on the Mount against the synagogue’s observance of Shavuot, or Weeks, the day set aside to celebrate God giving the Torah through Moses at Mt. Sinai.”

That and the following pages show many parallels between these two men’s lives, but what was significant was that each of them went up a mountain to receive God’s message and then presented what they found as a set of ideals to be lived by the believers.  Moses gave the Ten Commandments, and Jesus gave the Beatitudes and His Golden Rule. This parallel becomes apparent when the list of parallels are presented by Spong. Without his observation, I wouldn’t be making this one, but the Beatitudes is an ascending scale presented to help people move from a lowly state of meaning existing in God’s Heaven on Earth up a staircase of grander skills and responsibilities until they themselves were in a Heavenly state created by their own actions.

See the development of this idea in previous posts on the subject of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

A strategy for human goals

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Human goals

A Strategy for Human Ideals and Goals

We seek to be fully functioning human beings who respect all life and search for ways to help all beings find and fulfill their potentials. We recognize that we live within a world of natural struggles between all creatures who strive to achieve their personal survival, health, freedom of action, and the possibility of their forming a family for themselves. We also realize that we humans are presently the dominant life force here on Earth and because we are conscious of the powers we have, we are responsible for the health and well-being of a self-sustaining living planet. We seek to be stewards of a healthy world and not destroyers of it by our overconsumption of the Earth’s natural resources.

We seek to understand how the world works so we may live in greater compliance with what it offers to us for our well-being and we choose to avoid ideas that are not founded in the reality of the natural world because false ideas will bring more difficulties than help to our lives.

We choose to accept our lives as being part of the natural order of the Universe and that we are only a tiny part of the whole, but we as individuals and as humans are infinitely important to one another while we exist. Until modern humans existed, life was guided by nature selecting for reproduction those beings that best fitted the local environment. But, with modern genetic manipulation techniques now available, we must take responsibility for guiding the future of life forms. We can choose to create an environment that will be kind to all of its beings including our future human beings.

Our ethical values naturally expand from our own needs, to those of our family, our community, our humanity, and to the whole living system here on Earth. Each living thing is an important part of the whole interactive and dynamically balanced system,  in which when even the tiniest thing is changed the whole system is changed, in a tiny way, in response.

Our lives become more meaningful when we can find personal ways to interact helpfully with other people and living things. We all have talents which we use to expose the wonders around us and those new visions of reality make each of our worlds more vivid and exciting. Our total human society is brimming with meaningful discoveries and talking with a person from a totally different culture can be a joyful revelation of new views of old things.

We can be careful when relating with children, and adults too, to make sure they are not exposed to dangerous and painful ideas that distort their lives. People who have been injured by other people’s destructive behavior tend to spread those injuries to others around them. However, we can choose to be kind and helpful to other people at every encounter. Sometimes it is impossible to be helpful in a given situation and the best action is to quietly walk away and find someplace where we can be kind and helpful.

Being kind to others becomes a habit and it returns to the person because then they become kinder to themselves. Unfortunately, the people who treat others badly each live inside a person who treats themselves badly too and they can not help but feel miserable. Being kind to others teaches a person to be kind to themselves.

When a person works to benefit all society, then all society benefits and the doer of the good works has the satisfaction of knowing they are being a helpful person on a grand scale. It may be difficult to know what the best thing to do is in a given situation, but it is always clear what a hurtful action is and it is easily avoided by choosing to be kind.

We can choose to make the world a better place by choosing to do kind and helpful acts for other people and for the whole world.

 

What do you want? Truth? Beauty? Health? Happiness?

Tags

Beauty, happiness, Health, truth, Utilitarians, What do you want?

Truth is beauty say some. Health is happiness say others. I have for years sort of gone along with Hume and Smith and sided with the Utilitarians and tried to apply those kinds of concepts to them and their kind in the form of kindness. That is, intellectually at least, to treat other people better than I treat myself. That’s a low bar you might claim because I don’t treat myself particularly well.

The Utilitarians claimed they were seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number. That’s okay for a brief statement, but as with all definitions, it doesn’t go far,  and certainly in the case of kindness not far enough. If we are to be kind, must it be limited to those with whom we interact or must it be granted to all humankind, and can we include our personal pets? If we are to be kind to all humanity must that include the as yet unborn? Does it include those who won’t be born for ten thousand years? If humanity is approximately halfway through its population journey, then we have about a hundred billion people yet to offer our kindness to. Is that a realistic use of our time and adaptive energy?

Can’t we just all get along? Apparently not, and I can’t even decide what truth, beauty health or happiness really are. Can you?