The Spartan Mind – Unsparing and Uncompromising!

This blog is dedicated to me – Why? Cos, I love an intelligent argument!

On a random visit to one of my own blog entries - The Indulgent Mind - So More and No More!, it stuck me to reason as to, what a counter argument to this can be?

Hidden deep in the recesses of layers of experiences accumulated over the years, as a result of learning, un-learning and re-learning, is a strong impression of a set of rules that need to be honored, zealously safeguarded with spite to anything that remotely suggests indulgence.

The lines are teased, the lines are crossed, and the lines are broken – from when did one take ‘indulgence’ to be a way of life? – It’s the discipline in the now what would define the tomorrow! If the lines were drawn, they had a purpose to it.

As G.K. Chesterton pens it down - “Before you pull any fence down; always pause long enough to find out why it was put there in the first place.”

That brings us to the question – It’s about expanding the horizons that really defines and refines us as we traverse the path of progress. So, what wrong with indulgence?

The milestones along the way, the fences that you see, and the very lines that are crossed, are the ones that were put in place by someone, somewhere, somehow to give a reference point. So, if we uproot the very thing that lends itself as a reference point (good or bad), we will be left with nothing to compare against anything. That would kill anything called ‘indulgence’ – in simple words; it’s a self defeating argument!

Quoting G.K Chesterton again- And the fact that [the revolutionist] doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it.

As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and
then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.

The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.

By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

That’s brings to the last point – is there something that exists, which we can call as the “indulgent mind”?

It’s the interplay of the will, the mind and the heart at a slice of time that really defines the moment! – Did I say, define – The Spartan Mind smiles!

To life - Gyaani