210128 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

All things arise from Tao. 

They are nourished by Virtue.

They are formed from matter. 

They are shaped by environment. 

Thus the ten thousand things respect Tao and honor Virtue.

Respect of Tao and honor of Virtue are not demanded, 

But they are in the nature of things.

Therefore all things arise from Tao. 

By Virtue they are nourished, Developed, cared for, 

Sheltered, comforted, 

Grown, and protected. 

Creating without claiming, 

Doing without taking credit, 

Guiding without interfering.

This is Primal Virtue.

From The Daily Stoic: 

 

Find. Your. Cato. 

Cato, the iron man of rome. Moral exemplar of antiquity. He refused — refused — to bend his morals no matter the situation. He knew virtue and followed it though it meant opposing Caesar (the literal, actual Caesar) and cost him his life. 

There is someone in this world you can look up to. Someone whose example you can follow. Someone of whom you can ask yourself in times of trouble, "What would they do?" 

Find that someone. 

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Persuasion and Coercion 

Coerced conversion is effective. People are cowed into acceptance and subsequently need a psychological reason to justify their inability to resist the coercion. 

It's as if they think to themselves, "I am doing these terrible things. It must be because these things truly are necessary, not because I am cowardly and impotent." 

...the terrorists of the French Revolution that the more blood they “shed the more they needed to believe in their principles as absolutes. Only the absolute might still absolve them in their own eyes and sustain their desperate energy. [They] did not spill all that blood because they believed in popular sovereignty as a religious truth; they tried to believe in popular sovereignty as a religious truth because their fear made them spill so much blood.”

...

Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.

... 

It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

(The True Believer, XIV-83)