Sci-Philosophy IV

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name.

Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?

Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is what the Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is self-regulating. Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

Sci-Philosophy III

Casual acceptance demonstrated how easily rational thought could be directed by wishful thinking. This was a common susceptibility of all sentients.

The play of words can lead to certain expectations which life is unable to match. This is a source of much insanity and other forms of unhappiness.

But the dreams would be gone, lost in that season of death. There would be a special kind of silence: no more beautiful speech strewn with arrows of meaning. Who could console the universe for such a loss?

Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking to filter what the eyes see and what the ears hear.

It is impossible to see any absolute through a screen of interpreters.

One species can, all by itself, produce infinite varieties of experiences. The interaction between many species creates the illusion that infinity has been enlarged by several orders of magnitude.

Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments founded in wishful thinking.

If you believe yourself sufficiently hungry, you will eat your own thoughts.

Any conversation is a unique jazz performance. Some are more pleasing to the ears, but that is not necessarily a measure of their importance.

If words are your symbols of reality, you live in a dream world. Frank Herbert, The Whipping Star

Sci-Philosophy II

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. These idea systems are limited by language. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts must move. If we seek new validity forms, we must step outside the language.

What was instinct? An innate pattern impressed on the nervous system.

To remove a man's delusions is to create a vacuum. What rushes into that vacuum?[...] It's normal to share the delusions of one's society. It's abnormal to develop private delusions.

Societies don't believe they can die. It must follow that a society, as such, does not worship at all. If it cannot die, it'll never face a final judgment.

Every system and every interpretation becomes false in the light of a more complete system. I wonder if that's why you're here -- to remind us no positive statement may be made that's free from contradictions. Frank Herbert, - The Santaroga Barrier

Sci-Philosophy I

The sweeping passage of shoreline caught her eyes hypnotically: fused movement. It was like time -- the immediate past never quite discarded, no fixed starting point for the future -- all one, all melted into one gliding, stretched-out forever. . .

The humans were very difficult to understand with their gods and their accumulation patterns. [...] The brain thought then how strange it was, this thought-mode of existence, this transference of internal energy to create imaginary visions that were in fact plans and schemes and that sometimes must move for a way along non-survival paths. How curious, how subtle, yet how beautiful was this human discovery which had now been copied and adapted to the uses of other creatures. How admirable and elevated it was, this manipulation of the universe that existed only within the passive confines of imagination.

Decisions -- conscious decisions, the Brain thought, these are a punishment inflicted upon the single-self by consciousness. There are conscious decisions that can fragment the single-self. How can humans stand up under such a load of decisions? Frank Herbert, The Green Brain

Escolha

Não se pode evitar que a política se mova no seio de uma religião ortodoxa. Esta luta de poder permeia o treino, a educação e a disciplina da comunidade ortodoxa. Por causa desta pressão, os líderes da comunidade inevitavelmente terão de defrontar aquela questão derradeira: ou sucumbir ao completo oportunismo como preço para manter o poder, ou arriscar-se a um sacrifício pela sua ética. - Frank Herbert

Metas

Human societies have seldom been accustomed to long-range planning , reluctant to think of the generations. The unborn, the unconceived do not vote on current affairs. We conform our researches to immediate conviction, our projects to immediate desires. Where is the voice of the yet to-be? Without a voice, they will never be. - Frank Herbert

A linguagem privada da Injustiça

"[...] Romanized governments dismay us. They always resolve themselves into widely separated Ascendants and Subjects, the latter being more numerous than the former, of course. Sometimes it's done with great subtlety as it was in America, the slow accumulations of power, law upon law and all of it manipulated by an elite whose monopoly it is to understand the private language of injustice." - The White Plague, Frank Herbert