1. Do unto others as you would be done by.
It's the underlying concept of just about every single judicial system ever. They all exist to make people follow this absurdly simple rule.
2. You're not that bloody clever.
Someone, usually a couple of billion someones, is more intelligent than you. Sometimes they hide it, and sometimes they don't sound like it, but you get cocky for a second and they'll flatten you. You will look stupid as a result.
3. Don't rip the piss out of the ones that definitely are stupid.
Unless they can't hear you. Then it's okay You've got little enough to proud of as a human being, so take what gloating rights you can. They, on the other hand, are having a hard enough time of it without you reminding them of their disability.
4. Never confuse ignorance with stupidity.
To misquote Neal Stephenson: Ignorance is merely lack of facts. The test of intelligence is how one deals with subtlety and contradiction.
I liked the sound of this so much that I set about seeking out contradictory subtle things to rub my crenelated brain over.
5. The words "definite," "certain", "fact" and worst of all "absolute" are to be treated like plutonium.
You're only human, and in any case even if you weren't, the Heisenburg tells us certainty is impossible. This, however, merely shows us absolutism is factually incorrect.
The implications of this have a more practical significance for us human type. Never cling to a fact unconditionally. It provides a leverage point of complete immobility around which a suitably Machievellian adversary can bend your mind to his will.
6. National, racial, gender-based, sex-orientation-based pride are all full of shit.
Every time I hear someone say how they're proud to be Scottish, or proud to be black, or proud to be a gay Jewish woman or whatever, I hang my head in despair. Did they have to sit an exam? Is there some painful ritual one has to go through before becoming whatever they are? I suspect not.
"I'm gay!" "What do you want? A fucking medal? I'm "straight." Deal with it."
By all means take pride in your own achievements. Being born is not your achievement. Your Mum did the work.
I'll admit we get into murky territory here, as being born the "wrong" race or the "wrong" sexual orientation requires considerable strength of character, if you live in the scandalously common benighted societies where people still give a monkey's fuck about such trivialities
7. There's no such things as "straight" or "gay."
The words are shorthand for "Weighted heavily towards the opposite sex", and "Weighted heavily towards the same sex"
Most people fall into the first category, and the wonders of societal conditioning and that splendid stigma attached to homosexuality, mean that, men particularly, never do anything about the wee bit that wants to get down and dirty with some full-on hot cock
action. If you're in the least bit concerned, which in the world that is approaching whether you like it(hooray) or not(you cunt), you shouldn't be, I'd describe myself as straight. I just haven't met the right man.
The poor buggers that are gay usually try to hide it, often from themselves, and almost always from their family. Cue around fifteen years of sexual frustration and disastrous straight relationships.
This is why that bigoted cunt Brian Souter deserves an extremely thorough kicking. For the benefit of those abroad, he's the nob jockey that runs the equivalent of Greyhound coaches in Scotland. He's currently trying to block the long overdue repealing of Section 28. This prevents teachers from "promoting" homosexuality as a valid lifestyle in schools in Britain. Now what "promoting" means is saying that being gay won't actually cause you to explode, or instantly drop dead of AIDS, or make you an evil agent of the Devil. I assume our Brian gets his jollies from fucking up other people's lives because they popped out of Club Amniotica with their love monkey barometer aligned in a way that the medieval religious cult he's a member of finds abhorrent. This makes him evil.
8. Political Correctness is only half full of shit.
I'm nicking this wholesale from Christopher Brookmyre, so if you're reading this, don't sue me please, you shortarse washed-up ex-hack excuse for a writer.
PC's been used as a target for ages by the forces of cuntiness, since it is forever wandering into bloody stupid territory. They use these frequent cock-ups as proof that it's some kind of temporary fad, and that they'll soon be back fucking over niggers, bitches, cripples and arse bandits they way they used to. Being inherently conservative, they don't realise it's the effect of the world moving, as if on Atlas' shoulders, towards a state of increased understanding, which leads to tolerance of mankind's wee quirks, and thence onto celebration of them.
The stupid linguistic psuedo-fascists that we see so much of, are wee marbles that get caught under Atlas' feet and cause him to wobble like buggery.
Fascists are people who run around telling you what you can and can't read, think, watch and say, and they claim the authority to do this from their self-assesed position of greater idealogical purity than you. The crap PC people run around telling you what you can and can't read, think, watch and say, and they claim the authority to do this from their self-assesed position of greater idealogical purity than you. A minor difference, you'll agree.
The PC types are still miles better obviously, since they only sing tiresome songs and weave baskets, or in extreme cases throw hummous at you if you disagree, which beats the shit out of firing squads.
The fact they get a suspicious amount of pleasure from the power involved in being able to control people like this is picked up on by the nasty types who want everything to be the way is was, and have succesfully used it to discredit them. The don't get the contradiction inherrant in the fact that the crap PC types still are genuinely concerned about stamping out the cancer that is bigotry, but have been seduced by the dark side of the Force, and are now pompous bastards. And what does point 4 say about people who can't deal with contradiction? They're stupid. Hooray!
I wish this was more true. There's just a lot of screwed up bastards who like shitting on anyone that isn't the same as them. Some of them are just as intelligent as anyone else, barring this blind spot
9. A wise man can never be offended.
If what is being said is a lie, it is of no consequence, and cannot offend.
If what is said is true, it can cause no offence, since a wise man should never be offended by the truth.
10. You don't matter.
You have a mass of around 10^2 kilogrammes. The planet you sit on as you read this has a mass of 10^24 kg. The star it orbits is 10^30 and there's another 10^11 of them in this galxy alone. There's 10^10 or so galaxies, most of comparable size to ours. The Universe is a big fat bastard at 10^(60-70) kg.
You're going to live for around 10^2 years. The Universe has been around for 1.8 x 10^10 years, and probably will exists for at least that long again.
You can get as smug as you like in terms of your abstract intellectual achievements, but don't forget you're about as physically significant as a single full stop compared to every book on the entire planet. And you'll be around for less time than the Spice Girls would be if I ever got my way. The upside of this is that whenever anyone else is getting too full of himself, you can laugh to yourself about his entirely misplaced sense of self importance.
11. You do matter.
Comparing yourself to the Universe is pointless, since it's not concious. You are, which is vastly more significant than something crude like size or longevity. You can't subscribe to a scale as big as the Universe's anyway. You'd go daft. You need to compare yourself to your peers. These are called people Within this context you can do a big old shitload of important stuff that everyone will notice, if you can be arsed putting in the work.