My CMS The View from a New City

Few things are as pathetic as a billionaire who is still trying to make more money.

Young people aspire to a career. Then, after many years serving their employer, usually a corporation, they are forgotten the month after they retire, if they are not laid off before that.

At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, the Savior says, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever.”

Too bad it takes a lifetime to realize that the usual paths to power and glory are inevitable dead ends.

In her stump speech, Kamala Harris makes the point that the strength of a leader is not “who you beat down” but “who you lift up.” Some are fixated on winning—on being the national champion, on dominating the market. This stems from a philosophy of survival of the fittest as promulgated by the anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche and others. This may be ok for comic book characters and children’s games like football and basketball, but it is a terrible perversion of the real purpose of life which is learning and growing. We should rather be focused on helping God with his stated project of bringing to pass “the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39) The word man in this context means every person who is willing. We should be in the business of building up, not beating down.

[they] struggled with one another in envy, for there the power of evil rules, and envying about trifles.
Ascension of Isaiah [After being escorted to the seventh heaven, Isaiah witnesses the Christ descending into the world in which we live which he describes here.]

“To me, in this our life,” says the professor, which is as internecine warfare with the Timespirit, other warfare seems questionable. Has thou in any way a Contention with thy brother? I advise thee, think well what the meaning thereof is. If thou gauge it to the bottom, it is simply this: “Fellow, see! thou art taking more than thy share of Happiness in the world, something from my share; which, by the Heavens, thou shalt not; nay, I will fight thee rather.’ –Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a beggarly matter, truly a ‘feast of Shells,’ for the substance has bee spilled out– not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human species clutching at them! –Can we not, in all such cases, rather say: ‘take it, thou too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou wantest; take it with a blessing–would to Heaven I had enough for thee!’

Thoma Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

I had the opportunity last Saturday to ask a very smart humanities professor to make an argument for a liberal education. The best he could do was state that it was good as a hobby. I guess, in my old age, I tend to agree. Even in its hay-day, a liberal education was the pass-time of a financially independent and very small elite. Now that secondary education is a must, even to scratch out a living, it probably should focus on marketable skills. It is surprising that I was able to major in English as an undergraduate since I was as penny-less as one could be.

I served as a US Army infantryman in Vietnam in 1970-71. I was an advisor to the South Vietnamese Regional Force, Popular Force soldiers fighting the Viet Cong in Phu Gao District of the Binh Doung province outside of Saigon. I was told the United States was fighting this war to prevent communism from spreading from China to the rest of Asia and the world.

This week I returned from a trip to Vietnam sponsored by my son and son-in-law. During our trip we noticed that in May, Vietnam was celebrating the anniversaries of the Communists victories over the French at Dien Bien Phu and over the Americans in 1975. Our Vietnamese guides, both in Saigon and Hanoi told us that communism prevailed in Vietnam from 1975 until 1996, during which they both received a monthly ration of rice, like all others in the country, which was hardly enough to survive on.

During our recent visit we witnessed a booming buzzing economy with the streets filled with vehicles of every kind, the landscape transformed from jungle to farms, the English language everywhere evident and the hotels constructed with US made appliances and amenities. The cause of all this prosperity was the Vietnamese government’s abandonment of the communist economy in 1996.

I have concluded that the way to win a war is not to proceed by killing people.

I recently heard an audio book claim that in the 1600s, 20% of the residence of Florence Italy died of the plague in spite of prayers. Thinking about this, I realized that 100% of the people alive in Florence in the 1600s died. For me, this changed the book’s claim from a disturbing one about the efficacy of prayers to a boring fact about life during the Middle Ages.

Further on, the book claimed that recently, three times as many people died of obesity than died of hunger in the world. I would add that all these people died, and they all died in spite of the book’s claim of amazing modern scientific progress. Yes, amazing scientific progress since the 1600s but 100% percent of people still die, and science shows no signs of solving that problem. Maybe prayer should make a comeback?

Listening to this may be helpful:

Nibley Lectures: Time Vindicates the Prophets — Two Ways to Remember the Dead | The Interpreter Foundation

With all due respect to Sartre and Nietzsche, it is a mistake to spend one’s life seeking to be authentic. You are unique already. Rather, one should seek to find and achieve the very purpose for which one exists. Many lifestyles lead to dead ends and there are few road signs to warn those who go there. If a person had an infinity of lives to explore them all and still find the purpose of life, it might not matter. Think the movie, Groundhog Day. But life is short. Just ask anyone as old as I am. ‘Trial and error’ is not the key to success here. There is a better way.

Thoughts on reading the chapter “But What Kind of Work” from Hugh Nibley’s Approaching Zion. Eternal life is riches. (D&C 6) Everlasting dominion flows without compulsory means. (D&C 121) Seek wisdom (page 280 et seq). Maybe it is not necessary for me to work for money at my stage of life, regardless of the balance in my bank account.

I would like to repeat for anyone unfortunate enough to be reading this blog, a quotation I learned in my youth: “As you travel on through life, buddy, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole.” In a world where so many of the standard input sources–TV, radio, internet, politics, etc.–are filled with agenda driven content that spreads anger, fear and skepticism, it is important to proceed with faith, hope and charity. viewed from this perspective, it is a wonderful time to be alive. “The field is white, all ready to harvest.”