Anthology of Ideas

The United States of America has a long history of inequality, from its treatment of Native Americans to women’s rights, it has tended to favor one group over others, but it has attempted to repair the damage it caused. However, even though America is the “land of opportunity,” its formerly oppressed peoples are not equal, but what does it mean to be equal? Is equality the government saying you must have the same number of employees from each arbitrarily defined “race?” Does equality mean that people should be forced to be equal? In examining this issue, one must define equality itself.

There are three forms of equality: equality of outcome, of opportunity, and of perception. Equality of perception is the most basic: it dictates that for people to be equal, each person should be perceived as being of equal worth. Equality of opportunity dictates that all people should have the same opportunities open to them if they put out the effort – this is a central tenet of the “American Dream.” The final form of equality, equality of outcome, attempts to “level the playing field” by forcing people into certain roles and dictates that all individuals should tend towards the mean – this form of equality is evident in socialist theory.
America has enacted laws that are based on equality of outcome to attempt to ensure that “minorities” and women have access to equal pay and to remove glass ceilings, but while these programs have repaired some of the damage, paraphrasing Milton Friedman, equality of outcome leaves most people without equality and without opportunity. This is because forced equality is not equality and only hides the real issue of inequality based on perceptions.

Equality is not saying that all people are physically and mentally equal, nobody would bet an average teenager could win a game of basketball against a professional player, nor can every six-year-old be a physicist because human beings are not inherently equal.

This video that demonstrates the causes and consequences of the theory of 10 dimensions was released several years ago. However, it is still the best resource on the web for imagining the higher dimensions.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

David Hume, an 18th century philosopher, stated that morality is based on sentiments rather than reason. He concluded this after he developed his “theory” of knowledge which stated that everything we could know was observable by the senses — he was a naturalistic philosopher. He then looked at situations in which he thought that there was an obvious “wrong” and he tried to identify the “matter of fact” vice in the situation. He immediately found that he could not find the vice within the facts of the situations.

For example, let us examine a boy who steals a toy at a store. A matter of fact about this situation is that a young human male has taken an item from a store. This is what happened. The senses and reason tell us a few other things too: the toy was a plastic squirt gun; the boy used his hands to take the toy; it took only a second for the boy to do this. Hume argued that no matter what we find about the situation with our senses and our reason, we will never find the actual existence or quality of vice. So then, if morality is not intrinsic to objects in a situation, what is morality?

Hume said that morality can be found within. When you observe an immoral act, you do not find any right or wrong about the situation when you consider only the objects involved in the act. “Only when you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation” will you find a right or wrong about the situation. Hume said that this was only a feeling or sentiment though.

Therefore morality is not something of our reason, for we could not find the existence of good or bad while examining the situation with our reason. Our reason only told us facts about what happened and how it happened. Morality then must a sentiment or feeling.

Byron, intentionally or unintentionally, weaves himself into his poetry stamping it with his entire persona. His characters are part of himself; the poems are pieces of his mind; the events are based on experience. Byron’s poetry is an amalgamation of all aspects of Byron. This is truer in some poems than others: some are nearly biographical and others skillfully manipulate other’s perceptions of Byron. His poetry reveals the inner workings of his mind . Because of this, the voices in Byron’s poetry are not just the voices of Byron’s characters: they are the intermingling of the poet with the poem. One of the most pervasive and recognizable aspects of Byronic poetry is the Byronic hero who is a manifestation of parts of Byron’s own personality and thoughts. Byron’s “The Corsair” introduces the most Byronic of Byron’s heroes: Conrad. He then proceeds to emasculate him and proposes Gulnare, a former sex slave, as an alternative hero. Through Conrad, Gulnare and the entirety of “The Corsair” Byron questions the status quo by using heroic couplets with a social parasite, reversing gender roles, and ignoring conventions. In doing so, it demonstrates the multitude of Byron’s voices¹ most exquisitely.

Conrad is described very similarly to the way most would describe Byron: a man of few regrets and pleasures . He is seen by those closest to him as, “[t]hat man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile and seldom heard to sigh” (I.173-4).