We stand at Armageddon and we fight for the cerebral over the hormonal
The heartbeat of civilization is the subservience of hormonal gratifications to the grandeur of the mind and moral philosophy
Lord Chesterfield advised his son: “A strong mind sees things in their true proportion; a weak one views them through a magnifying medium; which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea; magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones.”
A cursory glance at history and the contemporary world is sufficient to prove with scientific certainty that the greatest scourge of mankind is the hormonal lust for power over others as the cornerstone of their self-esteem to distract from the torture of philosophical emptiness.
In all cultures, the armored knight struts across the pages of poetry and romance and elicits the swoons of damsels, the adulation of youths, and the wild cheers of the crowd. The thinker is marginalized like an extra in a Cecile B. DeMille cinematic spectacle.
The lust for power begets war for the sake of war—commonly over straws. War legalizes first-degree murder ordinarily punished by death. “War is hell,” said Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was not squeamish about killing.
The hormonal craving for power and scorn for the civilizing cerebral faculties should ceaselessly be assailed and defeated to escape species extinction through weapons of mass destruction. It should be our preoccupation in words and in deeds.
But instead, we are fixated on hormonal drivel like Beyonce’s songs, Tom Brady’s football miracles, Taylor Swift’s next album, Ye’s unhinged ravings, or Elon Musk’s juvenile antics. These fixations compound rather than diminish the civilizing struggle to subordinate the hormonal to the cerebral.
Justice—making each person’s standing in life turn solely on character and accomplishments—is the end of civil society. To the extent we devote our lives to furthering justice, to that extent we are human and not beasts. War, i.e., the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, is the chief enemy of justice. Except in self-defense in response to an actual or imminent attack, war must be adamantly opposed to safeguard justice.
But the species will only come to find the highest gratifications in wisdom and benevolence over power through unwearied education always remembering that a person who does not grow wiser by the day is a fool.
The strong mind recognizes this urgency. The weak mind wanders into the vast hormonal domain neither asking nor answering, “Why do I exist?”