Asher's Maxims

The universal commonality among people is the lifelong quest for answers to four questions: Who am I? What is the world? What is my relation to the world? What do I do now? or put another way, the questions of: identity, understanding, meaning, and vocation.

It’s a logical imperative that the quality of an opinion will not exceed the quality of the information on which it is based.

If not for the essential loneliness we feel in estrangement, we would never seek friendship with our enemies.

Walk softly on the earth.

The most offensive thing you can say to the conservative is that you answer to absolutely no one and feel no subordination to anything. Not accountability – all honorable men feel accountable – but no sense of authority. (the offence of insubordination)

The liberal minded are most outraged if you feel nothing at all in common at a basic human level with anyone – at least if they think you mean it. (the offence of alienation)

Draw a circle around whatever you call the world, and I’ll draw a circle around that and say the world is bigger. (the big world analogy)

Real anarchists don’t spend their time thinking about politics.

Murder is always in purity’s back pocket.

Capitalism was a Ponzi scheme until they made it legal.

National emergencies and national spectacles always continue until replaced by a more useful emergency or spectacle.

We’ve already established that elections are for sale; now we’re just haggling over the reserve price.

When a military turns on its people, it becomes a force of foreign mercenaries.

It’s much easier to be brave facing a minivan with a tank.

We battle over schools, because alternatives require greater effort.

Enjoying someone’s illness is a sign of greater illness.

Superpowers will always prefer tyrants, because dealing with a million peasants is too expensive.

Ideology is to groups what LSD is to the mind.

If you and I can think of and plan a conspiracy, with our own resources, then it’s even more tempting to those with more at stake.

People who make fun of conspiracies have simply never conducted one.

In the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on a civilian population, all discussion of genocide is an act of amnesia.

If you’re going to hurt me, leave a mark, so at least I know I’m alive.

If the U.S. is a Christian nation, we’re better off with the antichrist.

Marriage, in the vernacular, is a feudal contract exchanging property rights for exclusive sex. (Austin’s Maxim)

Blood is on all hands. Even an infant kills, before his first breath.

The reason idiots get away with being idiots is that they’re more intelligent than the average person.

Kindness is relative; if you’re kind to me but persecute immigrants, subjugate foreigners, and deny care to the sick and relief to the poor, it makes you an unkind person with preferences.

People who reject objectivity are always its biggest fans.

Ideology makes intelligent people into functionally unintelligent ones. (law of mitigated IQ)

It’s not true that corporations pursue the bottom line above everything; corporations, on the whole, will prefer the ideology of power over success.

Corporations, by nature, will choose whatever is the most foolish course of action at least half the time. (law of corporate inefficiency)

You can be wrong, even when you’re right, if you’re right for the wrong reasons.

The “people” are always wrong.

All solutions create undesirable problems.

There is no such thing as a nation.

If man can conceive of any evil thing, no matter how monstrous, it will be carried out eventually by some man somewhere. (law of human depravity)

You can’t argue with belief.

The twin vices of the writer are the intention to change the world and the desire to be known.

Pretty women drive nicer cars.

Nothing is “just” what it is.

Anything can be a story.

When you lie, you still tell the truth about what you want someone to believe.

We’re all naked.

None of us ever stops communicating, even when we sleep.

Everything is sexual.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work.

The secret to being right all the time is: the moment you know you’re wrong, change your mind.