{"id":27963,"date":"2015-09-01T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27963"},"modified":"2015-08-23T11:51:35","modified_gmt":"2015-08-23T15:51:35","slug":"qotd-question-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/09\/01\/qotd-question-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Question everything<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a fairly big believer in the idea of Questioning Everything, and the absolute first thing on the list of Everything to be Questioned is the self<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Why do I think the way I do? What bigotries lurk in my heart? What cheap rationalizations do I comfort myself with? What petty vanities do I sustain despite all evidence, and what contempts and condescensions do I offer others to sustain those vanities?<\/p>\n

What myths and lies do I consciously believe in — and which do I subconsciously believe in?<\/p>\n

I don’t want to be all Mr. Liberal here — and I certainly don’t want to lecture self-alleged Liberals on Liberalism 101 — but I think those are reasonable questions that all thinking Men or thinking Women should ask themselves every once in a while.<\/p>\n

Self-serving answers shouldn’t be trusted. Self-serving answers may<\/em> actually be correct, but they should never be trusted, and certainly never accepted at first blush.<\/p>\n

We’re taught to be suspicious of flattery from our very first Aesop’s Fable. We know other people<\/em> may flatter us in order to bend us to their own interests.<\/p>\n

The most insidious flattery of all is self-flattery, because we never suspect ourselves of having any ulterior motives.<\/p>\n

But of course we all do. We all want to feel superior to our fellow man, and especially those of Other Tribes.<\/p>\n

And we will flatter ourselves until we feel just that.<\/p>\n

Those who only question other people’s<\/em> notions are not really questioning anything at all.<\/p>\n

Ace, “Breaking: Cult of Intellectual Insecurity Reacts to Threat to Intellect in an Insecure, Cultish Way”, Ace of Spades H.Q.<\/em><\/a>, 2014-09-19.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a fairly big believer in the idea of Questioning Everything, and the absolute first thing on the list of Everything to be Questioned is the self. Why do I think the way I do? What bigotries lurk in my heart? What cheap rationalizations do I comfort myself with? What petty vanities do I sustain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41],"tags":[86,576,139],"class_list":["post-27963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-criticism","tag-philosophy","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7h1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27964,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27963\/revisions\/27964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}