Viscerally Visceral, by Robert Gore
The dictionary defines “visceral” as: “Relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect.” I was trying to get the woman to define the principle supporting her assertion and perhaps extend it to other issues. She had a deep inward feeling, that’s all, no principle, a product of the intellect.
It was some years before I realized that “visceral” was a key to understanding the world. Its definition is not just a definition, it’s a description of how most people perceive and interpret reality most of the time—with their emotions rather than their intellects.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
It was some years before I realized that “visceral” was a key to understanding the world. Its definition is not just a definition, it’s a description of how most people perceive and interpret reality most of the time—with their emotions rather than their intellects.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
Previous comments... You are currently on page 2.
An observation of the herd tells me that the hope for their permission to live objectively and free is almost nil. The best we can do is live unobserved. It was after all the quest of 'the Gulch' to live where others could not observe them and employ the use of government violence to extort the property of others.
Not that the beginning is at all less cogent, but that most audiences these days are only interested in hearing about the "latest" exciting "disaster" to emote about, and don't care or even think about abortion until somebody shoots up an abortion clinic. THEN that will come to the forefront again. Pillar to post....that's what this new young audience does....from one thing to another, kind of like a pinball machine.
[snip]
Collapse will have its compensations."
When you said this before, you said it jest. Given the path irrational fearful reactions to a monetary crisis can take, though, you have a dark sense of humor I don't get. I might get the joke if you wrote "---Adolf Hitler" right after "Collapse will have its compensations," but it's too soon. In millennium it will be like the Punic Wars or something, but it's still within living memory.
If her visceral reaction were one's right to one's body, life, mind, and everything they create were absolute and the person used it as a starting point, this is consistent with how I see things. Ayn Rand fans tell me if I had understood Virtue of Selfishness, I would understand that human rights are not an axiom but rather flow logically from reason. I'm really fascinated by this because I don't follow it, but I like the notion. I like the notion that my belief in human rights are given by our creator or my visceral feelings but rest on reason.
Many people who know how to derive the origin of rights think people like me who hold them as axioms are contemptible philistines. If the less philosophically sophisticated of the world just took human rights to heart for unsound reasons, that would be an improvement.