God is a brain mutation

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 377

They know the dawn will come

We Humans must labour to believe, as the other Creatures do not. They know the dawn will come. They can sense it – that ruffling of the half-light, the horizon bestirring itself.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 279

The life according to reason is the happiest

If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advice us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. And this would seem actually to be each man, since it is the authoritative and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of himself but that of something else. And what we said before will apply now: that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 195-196

Happiness does not lie in amusement

Now, as we have often maintained, those things are both valuable and pleasant which are such to the good man; and to each man the activity in accordance with his own state is most desirable, and therefore to the good man that which is in accordance with virtue. Happiness, therefore, does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself. For, in a word, everything that we choose we choose for the sake of something else – except happiness, which is an end. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

The happy life is thought to be virtuous; now a virtuous life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 193

It would seem impossible to be a great friend to many people

As regards good friends, should we have as many as possible, or is there a liit to the number of one's friends, as there is to the size of a city? You cannot make a city out of ten men, and if there are a hundred thousand it is a city no longer. But the proper number is presumably not a single number, but anything that falls between certain fixed points. So for friends too there is a fixed number – perhaps the largest number with whom one can live together (for that, we found, is thought to be very characteristic of friendship); and that one cannot live with many people and divide oneself up among them is plain. Further, they too must be friends of one another, if they are all to spend their days together; and it is a hard business for this condition to be fulfilled with a large number. It is found difficult, too, to rejoice and to grieve in an intimate way with many people, for it may likely happen that one has at once to be happy with one friend and to mourn with another. Presumably, then, it is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purpose of living together; for it would seem actually impossible to be a great friend to many people. This is why one cannot love several people; love is ideally a sort of excess of friendship, and that can only be felt towards one person; therefore great friendship too can only be felt towards a few people. This seems to be confirmed in practice; for we do not find many people who are friends in the comradely way of friendship, and the famous friendships of this sort are always between two people. Those who have many friends and mix intimately with them all are thought to be no one's friend, except in the way proper to fellow citizens, and such people are also called obsequious. In the way proper to fellow citizens, indeed, it is possible to be the friend of many and yet not be obsequious but a genuinely good man; but one cannot have with many people the friendship based on virtue and on the character of our friends themselves, and we must be content if we find even a few such.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 179-180

It is by doing just acts that the just man is produced

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 28

Virtue comes as a result of teaching or habit

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is on that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, not can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 23

To virtue belongs virtuous activity

With those who identify happiness with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity. But it makes, perhaps, no small difference whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well. And as in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete (for it is some of these that are victorious), so those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 13

Går det över huvud taget att fördela pengar?

Går det över huvud taget att fördela pengar? Vardagserfarenheten svarar ja: vi kan samla kontanter i en hög och dela ut dem på nytt. Men en omfördelningspolitik för större rättvisa kan inte nöja sig med kontanter utan måste även omfördela illikvida tillgångar – sådant som fastigheter, fabriker och fiberkablar. Det intressanta är då inte penningvärdet, utan det materiella innehållet. Går hotellet att använda som flyktingboende? Går golfbanan att använda som betesmark? Rymmer kolkraftverket någon utrustning som kan användas till legitim verksamhet?

Det är möjligt att de miljarder dollar som bokförs av aktieägarna till Spotify inte går att omsätta i äldreomsorg. Vad pengarna representerar är i huvudsak immaterialrättsliga tillgångar: patent, affärshemligheter, databaser och anställningskontrakt som begränsar de anställdas rätt att använda sina kunskaper. Sådana tillgångar kan förvisso “omfördelas” genom att de immateriella rättigheterna helt enkelt upphävs, precis som tomma fastigheter kan “omfördelas” genom husockupationer.

Att använda pengar som medium för omfördelning är inte omöjligt, lika lite som det är omöjligt att se teaterföreställningar på Youtube eller chatta med hjälp av brevduvor. Men med varje medium följer vissa begränsningar. Detta gäller även för pengarna. Det abstraktaste av alla medier verkar helt enkelt vara illa ägnat för konkret omfördelning av makt och resurser i ett samhälle.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Kan Pengar Fördelas?' on RasmusFleischer, https://www.rasmusfleischer.se/2016/09/kan-pengar-fordelas/ (09/2016)

Mynt ≠ Allmän ekvivalens

Att mynt har cirkulerat i ett samhälle kan konstateras empiriskt, men detta är inte tillräckligt för att dra slutsatsen att samhällets invånare var marknadsaktörer som resonerade i termer av allmän ekvivalens.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Kan Pengar Fördelas?' on RasmusFleischer, https://www.rasmusfleischer.se/2016/09/kan-pengar-fordelas/ (09/2016)