210210 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

Deal with things before they happen. 

Put things in order before there is confusion. 

A tree as great as a man’s embrace springs from a small shoot; 

A terrace nine stories high begins with a pile of earth; 

A journey of a thousand miles starts under one’s feet. 

People usually fail when they are on the verge of success. 

So give as much care to the end as to the beginning;

Then there will be no failure. 

Therefore the wise seek freedom from desire. 

They do not collect precious things. 

They learn not to hold on to ideas. 

They bring people back to what they have lost. 

They help the ten thousand things find their own nature, 

Yet they refrain from action.

From The Daily Stoic: 

 

“There is no more stupefying thing than anger , nothing more bent on its own strength. If successful, none more arrogant, if foiled, none more insane— since it’s not driven back by weariness even in defeat, when fortune removes its adversary it turns its teeth on itself.”—Seneca, On Anger, 3.1.5

Not much to explain here, but much to absorb. 

“Hate is too great a burden to bear,” Martin Luther King Jr.

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Action 

Mass action brings mass unity. If everyone is doing the same thing, everyone is the same. There's no differentiation between individual people therefore what one achieves, all achieve. It's a way to take credit — in a life sorely devoid of accomplishment and therefore devoid of credit — for something you didn't do or, at best, had a miniscule part in achieving. 

Ta-da! Instant person by proxy! I have power now. 

A mass movement’s call for action evokes an eager response in the frustrated. For the frustrated see in action a cure for all that ails them. It brings self-forgetting and it gives them a sense of purpose and worth. Indeed it seems that frustration stems chiefly from an inability to act, and that the most poignantly frustrated are those whose talents and temperament equip them ideally for a life of action but are condemned by circumstances to rust away in idleness.

“Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.” Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (Chicago: Alliance Book Corporation, 1939), p. 48.

(The True Believer, XIV-96)