The Magic of Serendipitous Reasonableness

Behaviour is either reasonable or unreasonable.

Only reasonable behaviour is good.

Who should decide what is reasonable?

Who should decide what is good?

What is your acquaintance with the meaning of reasonableness and appropriateness in various contexts? 

When do you know a possibility for career advancement and/or financial gain encourages people to behave inappropriately?

Much cruelty in the world is a reflection of frustration, whether it is associated with bureaucracies or powerful families or otherwise.   

When no-one in a position of power does anything of any substance to address the hypocrisy and cruelty in the world, what hope is left?

How do you know your actions are compatible with reasonableness? 

How do you know you are not escaping your responsibilities?

If you are a reasonable person, you will attempt to make sense of your experiences by questioning your assumptions, and possibly even by inviting other people to do so.

What do you know about the senseless, the desperate and the irrecoverable in various parts of the world, and how did you acquire that knowledge?

What do you know about the sensible, the delightful and the remarkable in various parts of the world, and how did you acquire that knowledge?

What do you believe enlightened being means in practice?

What do you believe enlightened beings do in practice?

Are you a practitioner of enlightened creativity? 

Perhaps your expressions of frustration influence, and possibly even coerce, people to behave unreasonably.

An essential starting point for good leadership is being able to distinguish clearly between unreasonable fears and reasonable ones. 

Politicians in power use the false positivity of hype to hide their falsehoods and cruelty.

Politicians not in power use hypocritical negativity to hide their own lack of credibility.

The intelligent identification and definition of substantial mysteries helps the reasonable mind to distinguish clearly between the known and the unknown. 

The joyful exploration of morally-appropriate responses to difficult problems helps the reasonable mind to maintain equanimity when examining ongoing societal and political conflicts.  

What do you know about reasonable and unreasonable interpretations of the Golden Rule?

If you are confused by the magic of serendipitous reasonableness, even as a concept, that is reasonable in itself.

Where do you usually go when looking for differing interpretations of a situation?

Where do you look for advice on all sorts of important matters?

Where do you usually locate useful information when seeking advice on planning?

How well do you prepare when seeking to identify accurately, and solve successfully, difficult societal problems?

Do you ever associate enlightened kindness with exploration?

Are you sure you are adequately kind and enlightened?

Are you sure you are adequately loyal to enlightenment?

Perhaps you already have a considerable acquaintance with the magic of serendipitous reasonableness.

What do you know about the behaviour of crowds? 

What do you know about dehumanisation?

What do you know about the evil caused by acceptance of unjust social hierarchies?

What do you know about the evil of unreasonable conformity?

What do you know about the stupidity, selfishness and cowardice embedded in groupthink?

What do you know about reasonable and unreasonable reciprocity?

How consistently and reasonably do you practice peaceful resistance to unreasonableness?

What do you know about bureaucratic cruelty?

What do you know about group dynamics?

In your own view, do you have a selfish or unselfish attitude towards peace, happiness and prosperity? 

True leadership is always practiced through moral reasoning.

To be truly moral is to practice problem-solving through reasonable, evidence-based decision-making.

What do you believe you already know about reasonableness, and how do you know it?

How do you distinguish between the reasonable and the natural?

Compatibility is not necessarily associated with reasonableness or goodness, with or without a cauldron, a coven, and/or hundreds of cousins and/or nephews and/or kleptocratic friends.

What do you know about your subpersonalities and how they interact with your various environmental and social experiences, your thoughts, feelings and impulses?

What do you know about alter egos?

What do you know about psychological trauma including secondary trauma and vicarious traumatisation? 

Perhaps you attempt to hide your emotional distress behind a cheerful and/or confident persona.

Perhaps you do not hide your emotional distress at all.

What do you know about psychological energy, compassion fatigue and emotional exhaustion? 

What do you know about psychological manipulation, psychological abuse and psychological torture, especially in terms of gaslighting and bullying?

What do you know about double lives and double standards?

An expression of frustration may be reasonable or unreasonable.  Yet cruelty is never reasonable.

An expression of social influence may or may not be reasonable. 

When do you know perceptions of normality are associated with unreasonable practices rather than reasonable ones?

What do you know about reason?

How carefully do you think about, and express, the reasonable?

A reasonable person can tell the difference between pseudoscience and applied science. 

A reasonable person is also aware that it is common to acquire money through the practices of pseudoscience and applied science.

If you are perceived as a threat by people in possession of faulty reasoning and faulty morality, they may even regard you as different from themselves in various ways.  They may have no respect for your good intentions if those intentions are an obstacle to their goals.

Biased people often view their initial assumptions as their unchangeable conclusions.

Reasonable people view their initial assumptions as starting points for appropriate assessments of circumstances and possibilities.

Biased and/or lazy people prefer to accept propaganda unquestioningly if it mostly matches their own point of view.

Gullible people accept a biased point of view if it is the opinion of someone they view as authoritative.

Bullies tend to encourage the cowardice of polite fiction and the cruelty of whataboutism.

If you are adequately reasonable, you are likely to be fully capable of distinguishing between logical consequences and nonsense. 

You may or may not be able to distinguish between faulty reasoning and wishful thinking in various situations.

What research do you intend doing over the months ahead, and why? 

How do you know you are capable of investing in thorough assessments?

How carefully do you define the magical?  

The above questions are meant to prepare you for the magic of serendipitous reasonableness. 

Most purported magic confuses observers unless they have insight into its causes.

Perhaps you have acquired enemies by questioning assumptions, particularly when people have expressed inadequate axioms and ridiculous conclusions.

Confusing people about normality is an important duty of any reasonable person.  It is the best way to prevent disengagement from morality.

How have you been investing in the delights of adequately ethical compatibility?

You may be aware that paranoia and phobias are common, as is fearmongering.

Yet justifiable fears must be taken seriously if they are to be appropriately addressed.  

Likewise, the sources of irrational fears must be properly understood if they are to be appropriately alleviated. 

Perhaps you experience social alienation as a consequence of your reasonableness. 

You may be aware that rapid attempts at societal change, whether by democratically elected governments or self-styled enlightened dictators, or through various revolutions, tend to have unintended consequences of the detrimental variety.

You may also have observed, directly or indirectly, that even gradualism may be beneficial or detrimental, or a mixture of the two.

The creeping normalcy of unpleasantness tends to happen when people fail to observe and document problems properly.

When problematic situations are regarded as normal, they are not treated as problems.

When unjust decisions are regarded as normal, much suffering occurs.

The pleasurable experience of wonder helps the reasonable mind to contribute to seemingly magical transformations of situations, away from arrogance and antagonism and towards peace, justice and true understanding.

Magic is mostly defined in relation to tricking the senses and/or providing entertainment and/or expressing faulty reasoning and/or practicing wishful thinking.  The magic of serendipitous reasonableness is otherwise.

What is your acquaintance with the history of unreasonableness?

What, if anything, have you been learning from Renaissance humanism? 

Investing in well-informed kindness involves investing in goodness. 

A good idea is never a contradictory one. 

That is why investing in evil is not a good idea. 

But why have people, throughout history, failed to distinguish clearly between good and evil, if not for the absence of serendipitous reasonableness in their minds?

What is your acquaintance with the Medici Villa of Poggio a Caiano, the Villa di Pratolino and the Villa Medicea di Cafaggiolo?

What do you know about Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton? 

What do you know about The Three Princes of Serendip?

What do you know about the brothers Francesco, Giovanni, Ferdinando and Pietro de' Medici?

What is your acquaintance with the Uffizi, the Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti?

You may prefer to think of West European countries as the Far West, especially if you live in the Far East from a Western European point of view. 

What is your acquaintance with Eleanor of Toledo, Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo, Isabella de' Medici and Bianca Cappello?

What is your acquaintance with The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany?

What is your acquaintance with Sir Horace Mann and Horatio Walpole? 

What is your preferred approach to investing in thoughtful discussions and a thoughtful correspondence? 

Egalitarianism implies that everyone has the right to be treated fairly.  

 

Yet historical records consistently reveal that systems of the state are usually authoritarian and therefore cruel. 

All states have become failed states though most have always been failures.

All international organisations have failed to ensure states are fair.

Very few family relationships and other relationships are adequately fair. 

How do you know you are investing in certainty appropriately?

What, if anything, do you believe to be certain about the magic of serendipitous reasonableness?

What have you been reading about magic and wonder and mystery, and why?

Wonderful witches address wickedness and wicked problems through surreptitiously judicious resistance.  Their activities therefore express the magic of serendipitous reasonableness.

Why do so few people invest in well-informed kindness as a way to invest in life itself?

How do you currently prefer investing time when seeking and maintaining justice?   

If you ever feel despair, do you try to comfort yourself through experiences of art?

How well are you currently investing in elegant egalitarianism and how do you know?

How do you usually assess records of past events?

Which questions do you ask when necessary records are apparently unavailable?

What do you know about the history of art? 

What do you know about the history of technology?

What do you know about the history of writing?

How carefully have you been investing in quaternary possibilities, and how do you know?

What do you know about Joanna of Austria and her children?

What have you discovered about the history of Florence and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany?

What do you know about peace-building in relation to state-building and nation-building and trust-building?

How imaginatively and thoughtfully and expertly and philosophically have you been investing in a healthy imagination?

The magic of serendipitous reasonableness is experienced through enlightened imaginations and not through the distorted interpretations of perceptions. 

To be truly well-informed is to enjoy the mystery of wonder as a magical experience.

If you have been doing your best to transform yourself into a truly well-informed and kind person, that is wonderful.  

You will, of course, be investing in good faith.

Perhaps you are even investing money.   

You also have the serendipitous good fortune to be investing in awareness in magically reasonable ways, through this grimoire.