Additionally, in the United States, we define manliness in terms of aggression. I think it must be because we're frightened. We put on a show of bein… - Alan Watts

The very identity of racist Southerners depends upon contrasting themselves with those dirty black “nigras.” But, conversely, the out-groups feel that they are really and truly “in,” and nourish their collective ego with relishingly indignant conversation about squares, Ofays, Wasps, Philistines, and the blasted bourgeoisie. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas let it out that part of the blessedness of the saints in Heaven was that they could look over the battlements and enjoy the “proper justice” of the sinners squirming in Hell. All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools — that is, so long as the major kick in life is to “amount to something” or to “be someone” as a particular and separate godlet.

Enlightenment is not a reward which one can get. It is something we have in spite of ourselves.

Already man uses innumerable gadgets to displace the work done by bodily organs in the animals, and it would surely be in line with this tendency to externalize the reasoning functions of the brain — and thus hand over the government of life to electromagnetic monsters. In other words, the interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism. If we are to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.