Riding the donkey backwards

It is better to do the wrong thing whole-heartedly than the right thing half-heartedly. Earnestness is the key. “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise,” promised the mystic William Blake.

Asleep at the wheel

Gurdjieff had the view that humanity exists in a near-perpetual state of sleep. “Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.” On the evidence—climate change, consumerism, ceaseless warring and the wanton destruction of the planet—the Russian mystic wasn’t wrong.