A Russia Author Explains…Why EVIL Takes a lot of Practice
Nobody Reads
I found a book at a book sale, for a quarter…a novel called The Yawing Heights. The author’s name was Alexander Zinoviev. He was born in 1922, and he was a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for 22 years in Moscow. He moved to Munich and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in September 1978.
While I was wondering today how SO many liars, criminals, extortionists, and just plain evil people can walk the halls of Congress, I came upon this paragraph today in his book.
I found it interesting, and so, posted it here. Maybe you will too:
(The highlights are mine.)
On stupidity, baseness and other characteristics of the individual.
The qualities of the social individual, can be divided into the positive and the negative. An example of the former is intelligence. An example of the latter is stupidity. I wish to demonstrate that the former cannot be regarded as the absence of the latter, nor the latter as the absence of the former. Intelligence is not the absence of stupidity, nor is stupidity the absence of intelligence. This does not contradict the fact that these two qualities, beyond a certain value, are mutually exclusive. When in common speech we say that a man is stupid (or intelligence), that is an intuitive indication that the man has the attribute of stupidity (or intelligence) to a fairly high degree. When we say that a man is not stupid (not intelligent), then we mean that he does not possess the attribute of stupidity (or intelligence) in sufficient measure. Everyone knows that people can gain in intelligence. But for some reason one seems to pay little attention to the fact that people can also gain in stupidity. (Nancy?) In life, we often meet stupid people of whom we can say that are outstandingly stupid. Here we can distinguish between talented and untalented imbeciles. Stupidity must be learnt, just as intelligence is. People can attain to a really high degree of stupidity only after a long life and a great deal of practice. Absolutely the same is true of such attributes as cynicism, baseness, guile, jobbery, trouble-making and so on. The ability to be really vile doesn’t come instantly. To become an egregious bastard, you require not only a natural talent for it, but also a long and single-minded apprenticeship. So, it is not surprising that the really outstanding bastards are to be found more often among the ranks of the elderly and well educated. Moreover, where society plays a dominant role, negative qualities are not regarded as shortcomings. (Bill Clinton?) Quite the opposite, they are regarded as virtues, and encouraged by every means. Here (In RUSSIA) they are normal. An outstanding intelligence is regarded here as an abnormality, and outstand stupidly as outstanding intelligence. (Obama?) Highly moral people are regarded as amoral villains, (Trump?) and the most abject nonentities as models of virtue. (The POPE) What is in question here is not the absence of one quality, but the presence of another. As a result, a strangely negative type of personality is formed which reacts to the positive in the same way as the electron to the positron. (or vice versa)
It is comparatively rare to come across individuals with highly developed positive characteristics. (James Wood, American founders…Our President) Individuals with highly developed negative characteristics turn up in big numbers. (Our Congress) But in the great majority if cases negative and positive qualities do not reach a level where it is possible to say of an individual with a precision that he is intelligent, stupid, mean, noble, or what have you. The normal individual has, in a more or less developed form, both positive and negative characteristics (he is averagely intelligent, averagely stupid, averagely noble, averagely mean and so on). Only in a few strong manifestation’s does the positive characteristic exclude its opposite (negative) doppelgänger. For example, a person with highly developed intelligence totally lacks stupidity, or a least his stupidity is wholly underdeveloped, and a highly developed crook (Hillary) either has a total lack of nobility or possessed it only in embryonic form.
Nobody Comments: In our current progressive politicians, we can all admit that their embryonic forms were aborted. Nancy’s is still on the floor of the house. Bill’s is still on the cigar, and Hillary’s..is…in the basement of the FBI.
About
I am a nobody. If the different classes of America were color-coded, I would be in the yucky brown, one rung up from the bottom. I grew up in Naples, Florida and live near the Mississippi River now with my husband and two dogs. I am part of the slowly disappearing middle-class. I was a musician most of my life: drummer/singer/keyboards—but I retired before the plastic surgery flu hit. I have no degrees, which could be a good thing…depending on how you view our educational system. I do have three patents…but that really doesn’t make me a somebody. The one thing that is constant in my life is my OPINIONS, which i have more than perhaps even Carl Sagan could have imagined…mostly political. (yes…my ancestors were crabby buggers)
Hopefully other nobody’s will put their opinions on my site. But, if you happen to be a somebody, you’re more than welcomed to help out.
It’s my Nobody Opinion that Nobody’s Perfect, and Nobody Cares, that Nobody Knows why Nobody Wins, and when that happens, Nobody Wonders, why Nobody Flashes, why Nobody’s Fooled, but then Nobody remembers that Nobody ALWAYS Reports the truth.
You can email me at joyanna_adams@yahoo.com
Joyanna Adams
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