Dear Friends,
It seems to me, a flower is beautiful but if you trap it in the flower state, you will have foiled its purpose. A flower attracts bees, who pollinate it, and gives way to fruit. Without the flower there is no fruit. Without fruit there is no future. Rather than abort the fruit to maintain the flower, why not increase the number of flowers? If one so loves flowers? The foundational philosophies of post modernism progressivism all have this flaw. They would cut the flower, and preserve it for a week or two, then throw it out for another. Since science advances along with philosophy, and our philosophy has stagnated due to our childish fixations, this philosophical innovation would enable greater advances in science as well.
There is a time for everything and everything has its time. The world would be pretty crowded if every flower that ever existed was still here. Indeed they would lose their beauty. Moreover, if the fruit they bore was aborted… the animals they fed would starve, and the plants they begot wouldn’t sprout, so the world would have died long ago. Each generation of flowers generating fruit, which in turn created more flowers, that created more fruit. Of the two, the flower or the fruit, one could argue the fruit is the more important. Except that the fruit requires the flower as the flower requires the fruit. Eliminate the fruit to protect the flower and there will be no more flowers. Proving, aborting the fruit is like when the CCP killed all the bees, and now the Chinese have to hand pollinate their plums.
Our culture has become mesmerized with the idea of trapping flowers in their flower stage. The younger the better. Our elites have no interest in fruit… they only like flowers. So our cultural elites push permanent flower-hood as the utmost ideal. Those flowers that are no longer pretty are discarded for new ones. While our government subsidizes aborting the fruit so the flower can remain fresh. Even passing laws to make it easier to abort the fruit. Everywhere there are advertisements how a flower can stay young looking. We have eschewed the fruit for the flower in a childish lust for beauty. Not seeing the beauty in the fruit, the tree and the soil. We’ve become fixated on our immature notions and so we’re stuck. Trapped in our own idealist phantasm of the ideal.
Before we can move on as a culture, we have to leave behind those childish notions of trapping flowers, and embrace the fruit stage of life. Some attributes are pleasing while others aren’t. Nevertheless, all attributes that are good should be embraced while those that are bad should be avoided. How do we know the good from the bad? Pragmatically. The pragmatist sees the beauty and value in the fruit while the idealist only wants to admire the beauty of the flower. In the past we as a species have had to put behind us some pretty pernicious and pathological notions… before we could move ahead. Human sacrifice, bloodletting and the magic of a severed chicken leg for example. Our fixation on the flower at cost to the fruit is just such a notion we need to give up.
Our technology has opened up vast realms of possibilities for us… those possibilities are only available if we wise up as a species, and start loving all stages of life. While the connection may not immediately seem apparent, the connection is a hard shunt. Just as without language, arcane ideas can’t even be imagined, and lacking the scientific method science retrogresses, and without a rational pragmatic view of the world, further advancement is unthinkable. We see it today. Science isn’t what it used to be under the modernist paradigm. Thousands of unreproducible papers a year have to be retracted from prestigious journals. Why? Because science has become idealistic and not pragmatic. How can we tell? Our expert’s fixation on maintaining flowers at cost to the fruit. That’s how.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
