31/7

A reminder that stupidity and misery are contagious

Beware Infection; Avoid the Unhappy and the Unlucky

- Robert Greene

كَذاكَ المُلكُ مِن وهمِ الرعايا
ولا مَتبوعَ مِن دونِ اتّباع

إذا الإنسانُ أرعى الشاةَ عُشبًا
ليَذبَحها يقولُ الناسُ راع

— تميم

This reminds me of a very intriguing idea:
That most of the foundations of human society are not grounded in Reality. They are works of the mind, created and imagined by it, and then collectively agreed upon.

Take for example the idea of Ruling and kingship: it's an idea that's been adopted by enough people until it became "materialized" and "Realized" in the physical, Real world.

Same applies to human rights, religion, tradition, economy (money specifically), the legal system, and everything else that keeps us in order. They are "protocols" that coordinate the behavior of the human crowd.

It follows that humans don't live in a purely material world, but in an intersection (interstice) between the material and the mental.

If you take the mental aspect of the world too seriously and literally, you'll be a fanatic for ideas (religion, ideology, or philosophy). Those who call themselves "spiritual" are like this.
But if you take the material too seriously and discard the mental, you'll reach scientism, and beyond; into nihilism. You will be in ignorance of the drives and systems that govern the world of man.

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I recall that Y. N. Harari expounded on this in his book, Sapiens.
Wittgenstein did too (and Nietzsche), only in so many words.
And pretty much the whole field of economics

By Leonardo da Vinci

The vessels of the liver,
By Leonardo da Vinci

تصويره لأوردة الكبد جان كلش دقيق
ربما ضخ الشمع بالأوردة حتى يحصل على cast ويشوفهن بشكل واضح بعدها، مثلما سوة وية الـ ventricles.

بالمقابل، ليو ارتكب نفس الخطأ اللي ارتكبوه معاصريه ومن قبلهم: جان يعتقد أنّ الكبد يتكون من 5 فصوص. هالمعلومة غالبًا انتشرت ومحد شكك بيها لأن Galen هو اللي كالها، ونادرًا ما أحد يشكك بـ گالين بالعصور القديمة.

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Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

- Slavoj Zizek

*هدية من البوت*

وما مِن كاتِبٍ إلا سيَبلى
ويُبقي الدَّهرُ ما كَتَبَت يداه

فلا تَكتُب بِخَطِّكَ غَيرَ شيءٍ
يَسُرّك في القيامةِ أنْ تراه

- ألف ليلة وليلة