Which would you have, wise madness or foolish sanity?

It comes back to that old line from Ecclesiastes about how he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. On the other hand there is the one that goes like:

“If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

Every so often, I remember that there was a purpose behind that idea of developing critical thinking and growing into the space it creates, which is not always comfortable and often affirmatively discomfiting. And that purpose wasn’t to charge someone money for a service. Or to be the equivalent of an intellectual mechanic.

also:

I think of things like the subjugation of women, drone warfare, neoliberal capitalism, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, massive wealth disparity, corporate sovereignty, the weapons industry, the fossil fuel industry, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, population explosion, factory farming, and the destruction of wilderness as opportunist infections.

- from ahnoni, the creative independent interview

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I was in rural Japan at a workshop on data collection, surveys, and research and the quite charismatic host was attempting to address the idea of whether it was compromising to do interesting work on behalf of large corporations. And he made a persuasive case that of course it is but that is no reason not to use it as a launching pad to do equally interesting work that might leverage a social good. Maybe this is an apologetics in form but in its delivery it was not in anyway blinkered or sooth-said.

Cui Bono? I would assume everybody who is anybody and everybody who wants to be somebody. Be a nobody, though, a traveler of gravel roads and a liver of a life that speaks sui generis, and you might just end up somewhere new. That is its own kind of apologetics - the self-enobling notion of go it alone.