{"id":1058,"date":"2026-04-24T15:09:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T22:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/?p=1058"},"modified":"2026-04-24T15:09:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T22:09:05","slug":"lecture-to-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/?p=1058","title":{"rendered":"Lecture to Myself"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bad people have good ideas, and good people bad.<\/p>\n<p>The evil done on purpose (or in spite of the knowledge that it is evil) tends to be venal and relatively harmless.\u00a0 The really horrible sins are usually committed by those who sincerely belive they are doing God&#8217;s work, acting in the best interests of Humanity or Earth or some entity more important to their own souls.<\/p>\n<p>It is therefore more terrible to be wrong than to be bad.\u00a0 And wrongness is not usually a matter of opinion.<\/p>\n<p>The Canadian politician who decided it made no economic sense to buy Alaska from the Russians was wrong.\u00a0 Objectively wrong.\u00a0 Demonstrably wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Our greatest <em><strong>moral<\/strong><\/em> duty is therefore to cultivate and refine and develop <strong><em>wisdom<\/em><\/strong> &#8212; the integration of knowledge with experience and critical thinking with creativity.<\/p>\n<p>Relativism, ignorance and mental laziness are the principle allies of evil.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h6>(<em>Written on a long flight, probably from Alaska to Tokyo in 1983<\/em>.)<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bad people have good ideas, and good people bad. The evil done on purpose (or in spite of the knowledge that it is evil) tends to be venal and relatively harmless.\u00a0 The really horrible sins are usually committed by those who sincerely belive they are doing God&#8217;s work, acting in<a href=\"https:\/\/jick.ca\/?p=1058\" class=\"read-more\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1059,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/1059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}