When presented with a matter of personal advantage that would require abandoning principles, the human mind goes to work overtime to rationalize taking that advantage. Every participant must make an implicit or explicit decision with respect to whether he prefers winning ignobly over losing honorably. “For,” as famous sports writer Grant…
When presented with a matter of personal advantage that would require abandoning principles, the human mind goes to work overtime to rationalize taking that advantage. Every participant must make an implicit or explicit decision with respect to whether he prefers winning ignobly over losing honorably. “For,” as famous sports writer Grantland Rice wrote, “when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”
Practically speaking, the best that those members not devoted to advancement by any means can do—those who decline to capitulate to those in circles of power and are willing to pay the price—is to defend themselves when their integrity requires it. In refusing to sacrifice a higher value to a lower one, and in doing so often ineluctably furthering the ends of the self-indulgent “winner” at a personal cost, the moral act of the defiant “loser” nevertheless has this beneficent attribute: it does more to advance the general welfare.
Historian David McCullough, in his Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, February 2002, cited a statement by John Adams that speaks to these divergent attitudes.
“In a letter to his wife, Abigail, written by Adams at Philadelphia in what seemed one of the darkest moments of the whole story (the American Revolution), and he knew how worried she was, how frightened she was of what the outcome of all this might be. And he said to her, ‘We can't guarantee success, but we can deserve it.’
“And when I read that I thought how different that is from our time, when all that matters is success, being number one, being at the top, irrespective of how you got there, what devices, what elbows and knees and the rest you used to get there. They're saying something exactly the reverse. And when I read that sentence, I thought what a mind he had and what a moral lesson that is.”
And in reading that sentence today, and recognizing the boundaries that have been opened to the enquiring mind since John Adams penned those word, I have to wonder how our nation has been able to squander hundreds of trillions of dollars in a public education system that continues to turn out graduates unable to read, write, do simple arithmetic, or to reason from A to B to C.
When presented with a matter of personal advantage that would require abandoning principles, the human mind goes to work overtime to rationalize taking that advantage. Every participant must make an implicit or explicit decision with respect to whether he prefers winning ignobly over losing honorably. “For,” as famous sports writer Grantland Rice wrote, “when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”
Practically speaking, the best that those members not devoted to advancement by any means can do—those who decline to capitulate to those in circles of power and are willing to pay the price—is to defend themselves when their integrity requires it. In refusing to sacrifice a higher value to a lower one, and in doing so often ineluctably furthering the ends of the self-indulgent “winner” at a personal cost, the moral act of the defiant “loser” nevertheless has this beneficent attribute: it does more to advance the general welfare.
Historian David McCullough, in his Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, February 2002, cited a statement by John Adams that speaks to these divergent attitudes.
“In a letter to his wife, Abigail, written by Adams at Philadelphia in what seemed one of the darkest moments of the whole story (the American Revolution), and he knew how worried she was, how frightened she was of what the outcome of all this might be. And he said to her, ‘We can't guarantee success, but we can deserve it.’
“And when I read that I thought how different that is from our time, when all that matters is success, being number one, being at the top, irrespective of how you got there, what devices, what elbows and knees and the rest you used to get there. They're saying something exactly the reverse. And when I read that sentence, I thought what a mind he had and what a moral lesson that is.”
And in reading that sentence today, and recognizing the boundaries that have been opened to the enquiring mind since John Adams penned those word, I have to wonder how our nation has been able to squander hundreds of trillions of dollars in a public education system that continues to turn out graduates unable to read, write, do simple arithmetic, or to reason from A to B to C.
And we allow these people to vote?
Very well said.