There are three ways to approach other people: with kindness in your heart, with cruelty on your nerves, or with plain old indifference. The most popular of the three is the latter, but there’s not much story in indifference. Like the great Heartiste says, the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. You just don’t give a damn about the person in question. They are dead to your heart.

In terms of kindness versus cruelty, there’s no question where Machiavelli stood: he was hands-down in favor of cruelty. In his words, “it is better to be feared than loved.” Love is so ephemeral. You have to do so much to get it. Cruelty, by contrast, is simple, straightforward, and vicious. It comes at you like a blade from the dark aimed at your eyes.

Look at the gorillas of Africa. There, only the strongest male gets to have the females. He has a harem and they docilely accept this. The alpha male gorilla is going to get viciously barbaric on the ass of any lesser gorilla who dares to challenge this order.

You could argue all of Nature is inherently cruel. There is no retirement program for the gazelle. It only gets slower with age until the predators of the wild take it down.

Women are certainly cruel. It is impressive that they have the power to give sexual release, yet never find it in their hearts to bestow this gift on suffering males. You can rest assured that if a woman is taking off her clothes for you and you’re not paying, she wants it — the D. from you.

The business world is a cruel place. The customer will walk away from you to save 10 bloody cents on a product, unless you have what Warren Buffett calls “a moat” around your product, something special that’ll make Joe Blow walk across the street to find you. And the businesses? They’re just waiting for the chance to shaft the consumer. They’ll go through any number of shenanigans to hoodwink, bait ‘n switch, ripoff, sell shoddy products, form antitrust protocols, and more… all for the cruelly gleaming gold coin of profit.

And yet kindness is mighty too. The lost child weeping on the street is sure to get aid from a stranger. The woman who needs $20 for a taxi ride home will probably get it from someone at the party she’s at (I’ve heard personally of those who had this happen to them). Food banks keep operating, day in and day out, because someone out there gives a damn about his fellow man.

Perhaps there is an eternal tug-of-war between kindness and cruelty. Indifference, the grand champ, is rooting them on.

edm

Dance music makes sense esthetically, not only because it is the most powerful of music genres, but also because the synthesizer makes everything sweet. It is the arrival of a powerful, new, postsonic medium like dance that celebrates music history, and the intention of listeners everywhere is to soak it in — sonically, spiritually, and subwooferishly. The listeners care about this genre, not only for selfish reasons, but for reasons that have nothing to do with music. The synth is the future. Only through it can the future be reached. (It isn’t cruel.)

continue reading:

|| alignment / dollar / moon ||