I make notes for myself all the time, but sometimes what was crystal clear at the time gets foggy later, so I have to riff anew, and hope I recapture whatever it was I was thinking then, or maybe even improve on it.
One of these notes is that Prince and Principle, in my understanding, both come from Principium, which means “that which is first.”
Here is what I will say: it seems to me there are three ways to run your life, by principle, by habit/ritual, and reactively in response to whatever happens to be socially or otherwise easier at any given moment.
The second would in many respects be traditional. This is the religious temperament. It is behaving in a certain way because your people have always behaved that way, or for that matter, because you have adopted a culture–say Christianity–and chosen to adhere both to its beliefs and its ritual behavior, whatever it is.
To me, though, the purest way to live is by principle. A principle becomes a sort of magnifier that helps you see the world in ways which may not occur if you were simply rotely going through the motions. You have to stop from time to time, look around, and determine if what you are doing makes sense according to what you yourself have determined to be the best way to do things.
A principle comes first.
I know I had more to say, but I have no idea what it was. It may come back. I have a large volume of notes I should do something with, but not just yet.
To my mind, though, it is simplest to have broad principles that give you flexibility, but not to the point of allowing and accepting everything.
As I have said, my three are rejecting self pity, perseverance, and curiosity. I think you can build a lot of good things from these three–including courage, fidelity, loyalty and even kindness–without getting stuck in unnecessary and silly complications. This would work in all religious frameworks, I think, at least within broad bounds. And if everyone embraced them, I think the world would be a much better place.
I think in particular what America is lacking, especially among our Anti-Liberal segment of the population, is curiosity. It’s not that they can’t understand people like me: it is that they don’t want to, and find the idea repugnant. Their morality stands on a house of cards that would tumble the moment it were subjected to honest and sustained scrutiny, and most of them intuitively know it.
But what this does is force you to be relentlessly aggressive, and the worse your behavior becomes, the more you HAVE to blame the Other. It’s a self reinforcing, nasty cycle that seemingly gets worse every month.
I would question where any President has made a more divisive speech than the one Joe Biden just delivered. Even on the brink of the Civil War Lincoln was nothing but conciliatory. Even at the END of the Civil War he was nothing but conciliatory. I would ask: where has any President insulted so blatantly and unfairly the truck drivers, steel workers, small business owners, farmers and car mechanics of this nation, along with their families? He just called, by area, roughly 90% of the nation “semi-fascists” for wanting secure borders, election integrity, and sane fiscal policy.