Thursday, January 5, 2012

What is Lyracy?

A way of sharing responsiblity for the moraql implications of a group's actions, by putting one's own conscience at stake more. It is a discuourse that aims to hold to a happy medium by plainly stating the merits of an evil or selfish course of action as if it makes a certain sense, which it probably does,  as well as the merits of an altruistic or even religious action as if it concealed an ulterior motive, which it certainly could. The aim is only to think outside the box in practical affairs, and to keep moral consideration alive, by  always begging the question. It also helps to build group identity by including a circle of people in the best fruits of each other's thinking and the circle can always widen.
  The immediate practical effect on group action is slight if any, particularly in a workplace, but it cannot help but affect participants in a deeper way if they are willingly participating. The good and evil of a person's nature can begin to rest on a very broad base.
   I'm going to trim my little essay a lot here so the thoughts may be a little choppy. Sometimes being misunderstood is the most effective way to get your ideas out there. (Yes, I want to be famous more than I want more money.) Tu Wei-Ming of Harvard University wrote a book called "Confucian Thought: selfhood as creative transformation" and I need to credit him with a lot of inspiration credit for what I'm writing here. It's a very good book, if hard to read and using specialized philosophical language. It was worth my time to read the whole thing.  Anyway, events sometimes suppress any kind of real historical dialectic from happening, even a material one and even an idealistic one, but in times of greatest ideological homogeneity people can still clown around about the right and wrong ways of accomplishing practical things and lyracy is the exaggeration of that process.

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