Tag: Toughness

• August 26, 2015

  Contest 2: Charging. Toughness Training

  I believe enduring something that threatens your life or what you care about is easier to do than charging into dangerous territory. This is why the first contest–the easiest–associated with learning toughness would withstanding. Will you withstand or will you cave in, give in? Now we come to the second contest: charging. And the question is:…
• August 21, 2015

  A Defense of Boasting

  We now have a very low estimation of boasters. They are loud-mouthed, arrogant, sometimes self-deceiving, and, while boasting especially, very inconsiderate of others. Such a level of self-importance disgusts us, the non-boasters. We have the presumption that those who are properly confident have no need to speak of themselves, let alone to sing their own…
• August 3, 2015

  William James on “The Moral Equivalent of War”

  William James, a committed pacifist, lived through the Civil War and the Spanish-American War and died during the run-up to World War I. In an incredible essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” first delivered as a talk at Stanford and later published in 1910, the year of his death, James observes that though everyone would…
• July 22, 2015

  The Predominance of Softness

  I am trying to investigate the prevalence of softness and the rarity of toughness because I believe that we have learned to be soft when it is time to get, and be, tough. Can we find another way into the predominance of softness? It has often been observed that ours is an Age of Anxiety or,…
• July 20, 2015

  Aristotle on Toughness

  We have become soft and it’s time to get tough. Aristotle says that “it is softness to fly from what is troublesome” and so the coward does. But then most of us are flying from what is troublesome. Can we even recall what courage is? Aristotle: The coward, the rash man, and the brave man, then, are…