No matter how close we are to others, we can never truly understand what it means to be them. Although the single may envy content couples, two never completely become one. At any point, the person who felt so embraced and loved may be left alone again, be that by accident, illness or unpredictable changes in feeling. How often do we see people baffled when they find themselves betrayed by someone they thought they knew and could rely on?
ReadLike many, I suffer from a mild form of imposter syndrome: the persistent or recurring feeling that one day I will be exposed as an incompetent fraud. I say “suffer” but actually I think some kind of fear of fakery is entirely healthy and appropriate. More often than not, people are where they are by a combination of talent and hard work, aided by a dash of luck and chutzpah. How can we be sure that in our own cases, what ought to be the dashes are not in fact the principal ingredients? …
ReadWhat I think many religions have got right is that we are, in a sense, terminally inadequate. Even the best fall short, which is why there is a whole industry devoted to knocking so-called saints off their pedestals. And it is important that we recognise this: it is impossible to do better if you are under the illusion you’re already the best.
ReadABSTRACT: Concerns about making character formation a strand of public policy centre around both doubts about the empirical basis of such policies and the appropriate role of government in shaping and directing private life. To address both sets of concerns it is helpful to think of two key aspects of character in terms of their “thickness”. First, research in psychology has suggested that many aspects of character are highly variable according to situation. We can call these “thin” character traits are opposed to “thick” traits which are more robust. Second, some of the aspects of character being advocated as the appropriate object of public policy are based on capabilities and are normatively “thin”, in that they are not tied to any specific substantive conception of the good life. Some character traits, however, are normatively “thick”, and so their promotion would be tied to a substantive ideal. In both cases, thick and thin are matters of degree and there is not sharp distinction between the two. Nevertheless, the distinction is important and I will argue that a basic liberal position is that state policy should, in both respects, be as thin as possible, and I will attempt to sketch a means of determining what this is.
ReadIt’s not difficult to make people invisible. Just pan out so far that they become the smallest of blips in the immeasurable vastness of time and space, or zoom in so close that they become reduced to bundles of atoms, blindly obeying the rules of physics as purposelessly as space dust. One way reduces us to the particles of which we are made, the other to particles from which the universe is made.
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