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“All of you welfare preachers—it’s not unearned money that you’re after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I’m a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers . . . it’s the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean—the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without . . . the necessity . . . of being.”
The goals were power and wealth; the cultural capital that could secure those goals was courtly elegance or refinement (miyabi). The more elegant the person, the more desirable. An expression of that courtly elegance was an enhanced sensitivity called aware, later commonly expressed more fully as mono no aware. Deriving from a common exclamation meaning “ah!,” it signals coming across something striking. Mixed with attentiveness to the ephemeral, aware transformed the traditional Buddhist resignation toward impermanence into an aesthetic of poignancy. The cherry blossoms, for example, are all the more stunning because they bloom for such a short time.
Engaging Japanese Philosophy – A Short History
Thomas P. Kasulis
The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
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