As I’ve said many times on this blog, I’m a skeptic. And this applies to my views on morality. I don’t believe it’s possible to know with 100% certainty what the right thing to do is in a given situation. But when faced with a problem, something needs to be done or it’s never going to get fixed. So whenever I do anything, I have to face the fear that I might be wrong. And that fear can be paralyzing. Because my greatest fear in life is being wrong especially when that leads me to harm another person. But it’s a fear that must be overcome because inaction can also be harmful.

Democracy is difficult. I think it's telling that, as much as so many people claim to value democracy, there is not a truly democratic country in the world. Every country we think of as a democracy is really some form of representational republic. There are very good reasons for this; the public is not very well-informed and, ironically, the very rights that are necessary for democracy need to be protected from the very people those rights are protecting.

It's often said that knowledge is power. However, at least politically and socially, this does not always appear to be true. It's easy to find instances of our public officials spreading mistruth and, more than ever, blatantly lying to us. Certain social groups may dominate a society and be ignorant of (or manipulate) how the system works in their favor.

As human beings, we have very little control over what goes on around us. We are subject to the laws of nature and the whims of man. Much of what we do is dictated by circumstance, and luck plays a far greater role in our lives than many of us want to admit. Life throws things at us and we have to react as best we can. And sometimes it seems like we don't have much choice. If a boulder is rolling down a hill towards us, we have to move out of the way or get crushed.

What is justice and what is the purpose of our justice system? According to Merriam-Webster, justice is “the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments,” where in this case, “just” means righteous. In other words, rewarding people for doing good and punishing people for doing wrong. 

What is mental strength? Physical strength is easy enough to understand, it's a measure of how much a person can lift or push or physical strain they can endure, but mental strength is harder to characterize. Among the definitions of strength on the online OED that might apply to people, we have, "the influence or power possessed by a person," "the emotional or mental qualities necessary in dealing with difficult or distressing situations," and "a good or beneficial quality or attribute of a person." The first definition is fairly straight forward, and the last definition of which is so broad and open to interpretation, one might wonder how useful it may be. So I'm going to be talking about strength as a quality for dealing with the difficulties life presents us.

No one likes being uncomfortable. More or less by definition. People will go to great lengths to comfort themselves when they are confronted with conditions they don't like. If we're cold, we grab a blanket. If our roommates give our dishes in the kitchen sink a side-eye glance, we wash them. And if we feel guilty, we may shift our entire worldview so that we believe our actions were actually justified. What is a sink for, if not for dirty dishes?

The freedom of speech is one of the most important rights a human being can have. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Since the Bill of Rights was passed, the First Amendment has protected Americans’ right to free speech. Yet those protections are constantly evolving. Despite its claims that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” the First Amendment has never and will never protect all speech. We have other rights and values that often come into conflict with our freedom of speech, and these interests need to be balanced.

Listening to other people is one of the most difficult, but important things, anyone ever has to do. Almost everything we learn, we learn from other people. Our parents, our teachers, scientists, our religious and political leaders, television, radio, magazines and newspapers, and now the internet. So trust is essential for learning.

The most valuable skill anyone can learn is how to listen. The world, and especially the internet, is full of people more than happy to tell you what's exactly on their minds. Most of them, of course, have no idea what they are talking about. This includes me. The trick then is to figure out who does know what they are talking about. And you can only do that by listening.

Fear is our greatest opponent. In many ways, it's our most basic emotion, fight or flight, hate or ignorance, wickedness or weakness, and when we see the evil that men can do, and we ask how they could have done it, the answer is often: they were afraid. So fuck fear.

Human beings are animals. And like all animals we compete for resources. Human beings are also social. And like all social species we cooperate with each other because there is strength in numbers. This creates a necessary tension between the interests of individuals and the interests of society in general. How we balance these concerns is the defining struggle of the human species. We cannot make the mistake of overly favoring one over the other.

I believe that some people care too much about politics. In these turbulent times, that may sound like a funny thing to say. Politics can have severe effects on people's lives. I don't mean to downplay the importance of politics. It's just that when people focus solely on politics, they are missing the larger piece of the puzzle.

Probably one of the hardest things for people to do is to admit that they are just like everyone else. We're strongly biased in favor of ourselves, that what we think is true and what we believe is right. That those who disagree with us must be mistaken. But, as a skeptic, I believe true knowledge is beyond our grasp. Whether or not there is any truth in the world, our imperfect senses prevent the certainty required for knowledge. I've written about my skepticism before, but there is another consequence of my skepticism - my belief in human equality.

I'm going to teach you how to cook in a few paragraphs. Despite what you might think or what some idiot out there may tell you, it's easy. You just need to understand a few basic principles. And to be clear, I'm talking about cooking, not baking. Baking is a science and you need to get that shit right and it's not worth the effort.

I love hip-hop. Whenever Run the Jewels or Kendrick Lamar drop a new album, I don't listen to anything else for weeks. That's not to say I'm an expert. I love all music too much to really concentrate on any particular genre. But the proportion of music that I listen to that's hip-hop grows every year. It's visceral and authentic, but most importantly, hip-hop teaches me things about the world I never would have learned otherwise.

On this blog, I tend to write about a lot of serious topics. If I'm being honest with you, it's exhausting. I think way too much, and I'm not really playing to my strengths as a writer. If you've met me (and if you're reading this, it basically means you have), you'd know I'm not as serious a person as my writing in this blog might lead someone else to believe.

Human beings have a tendency to oversimplify what they believe is going on in the world around them. Unfortunately, this is quite necessary. No single person is capable of analyzing all the complex scientific, moral, cultural, social, economic, and political (or whatever else) systems in which we find ourselves entangled. We need to take mental shortcuts for any of what we see to make any sense. 

Tolerance is often said to be a virtue. I wonder whether that is true. It doesn't seem like there's much tolerance these days, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. But in order to get an idea of how much tolerance even exists or whether or not it is a virtue, as always, I need to tackle the tricky job of defining an abstract concept.