anarchonomicon.substack.com
A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.
The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.
Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.
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Notes -
This is more a paean to the general problem-solving ability we call “intelligence.” An insect dedicates its whole life to one of these tasks. A human, says Heinlein, can achieve specialist-level competency in a generalist’s number of skills. Animals lack civilization—but insects don’t even have self-reliance.
Heinlein is coming at this from a very American flavor of rugged individualism. But it’s a sentiment following from Kipling. They are praising the pushing of boundaries.
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