Hotheads and Nicodemites

Martin Luther was a hothead^[2]. Desiderio Erasmus apparently tried to get him to cool it and work behind the scenes but what fun is there is that for a hothead? Let's pick a fight! Since what really interests the people in power is not dangeruos ideas but stirring up the masses with them, we want to stir up the masses instead of just quietly entertaining and further elaborating dangerous ideas. We have ants in our pants. We like to cause what others consider to be trouble because it's our kind of fun. They don't matter!

I think hotheads whould have complete liberty to harm themselves, but I, for one, want to live in peace and I oppose them disturbing me living out my live in uninteresting times. I won't bother them if theu won't bother me. But that's not what they want. They cannot be satisfied with themsevles but need to annoy others. Hotheads are selfish, including when they say they are being selfless like going on publicly advertised hunger strikes for whatever Good Cause stirs them up today. Starve yourself, OK, but don't publicize it, please; that stirs up the masses and that's their whole point, to stir up trouble.

A hothead is usually not straightforwardly suicidal. What he hopes for is that by threatening to kill himself somebody else will kill themself so that he can get on with living his life as he wants. Shame on you if you let me kill myself! How selfish of you to not sacrifice your whole life for my petty whims!

Why not conduct an experiment: Take the hothead and a cannon ball both to the top of the Leaning tower of Pisa and drop them off at the same time and see if the hothead's virtuous beiefs make any differnce in their rate of fall. Or maybe the hothead's virtue will cause him to drop up: toward heaven, instead of down toward the earth? We could try it, for instnace, with Mr. Alexei Navalny who was so eager to get himself into the Gulag that after Dr. Putin tried to poison him and we in The West saved him from dying, he raced back to Russia. We'll even give you a head start if you'd like, Mr. Navalny, although that would seem to potentially vitiate the experiment.

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So let's imagine a social world with no hotheads and where all intellectuals are nicodemites who publicly aver that the sun goes around the earth like the masses need to go around their masters. Secretly, the intellectuals all know the rituals and sacraments are worthless, and continue to develop post-Keplerean astronomy but don't tell the masses anything that might stir their hormones. Science continues to advance. The masses are actually happier. And the rulers are happy too, since the masses are revolving around them as they must.

Has anybody lost anygthing? Surely not. The masses don't uderstand how the planets move no matter even if they move; the only orbs they care about are on soccer pitches, which are agnostic to astronomical models. Science cotinues to advvance. And the rulers don't persecute the intellectuals.^[1]

The only loss is that hotheads can't get off on causing trouble. Are they really that selfish as to spoil everything for everybody just for the fun of spoiling everything up for everybody? Can't they just masturbate in private, or if that's not enough for them, nosh on their own bodies maybe starting with their fingers which are the most easily accessible parts? If they ate their hands they would have more trouble writing theses and nailing them on church doors.

Fig leafs and codpieces

There are or at least used to be people who wore codpieces and there were and still are people who cover human genitals on statues and paintings with fig leafs. I was childrearended by a bunch of figleafers.

The codpiece emphasizes male genitals as, for instance, an armani suit and also blue jeans, do not. A fig leaf nominally hides genital organs but just makes them smutty for the titillation of people who get off on repressing persons' sexuality, especially the sexuality of young persons.

For each person what he likes is what he likes and what he does not like is what he does not like

Each person likes what ht likes and dislikes what he dislikes. One man may like to starve himself to death, that is what he likes. Another may enjoy eating. That is what he likes. Starving oneself and eating well are the same thing: what a person likes. There is no difference.

A problem arises, however, when one person wishes to make what he likes be what another person who does not like it gets. If the person who enjoys eating tries to force the starvationist to eat, that is a threat to the latter. Similar, if a person who likes to starve tries to get the person who likes to eat to starve, that is a threat to the latter. And in practice we know that persons who enjoy enjoying life rarely try to coerce ofthers to enjoy life, but those who enjoy suffering often do try to make others suffer. That is a problem for those who do not like suffering. If howheads would leave persons who want to live in peace to live in peace, and if figleafers would only affix figleafs to their own bodies, there would be no problem (in this case, however, persons who enjoy their bodies should not flaund their nudity in public like some persons do today, because that infringes on the with the figleafers' right to hide themselves from sex organs, like force-feeding starvationists).

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