The simple truth is always the best

[queueball]

My hang-up probably isn't really about virtue and selflessness at all. It's probably just obsession with the importance of an intelligent human being having thought about First Things, having asked why, having arrived at an answer (thoroughly turned over and thought through, however incomplete and groping), and then making subsequent decisions

Comments

[anarchomo]

This rabbit hole gets even curiouser when you ask why you don't trust the assumptions that everyone else does. I suspect there's more to it than just being a deep thinker by temperament. I think it has to do with Normal being painful for some of us. That makes us question.

[queueball]

I have this strong sense than nyuanshin, when he was still inhabiting LJ, asked a very similar semi-rhetorical question.

Yeah, it's probably both, and other reasons, and more one thing in one case and another in another. We probably think a lot about identity (including the definitions that serve as axioms for identity) because of Normal being painful; maybe we perceive willfully violent agency where others perceive mere nature both because Normal is painful and because of a natural inclination to drill down to premises; and then, sometimes, you just are perplexed at why someone treats "illegal" or "God" or "left-wing" as well-defined terms.