by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Diogenes of Sinope (lead image, centre), the still famous philosopher of ancient Greece, had an unusually long and exceptionally miserable life between 412 and 323 BC.
There’s no telling whether he inherited the profits of his father’s money manipulation business, but by the time he was captured by pirates, enslaved, and then put up for sale, he had nothing with which to pay the ransom. He was not the first crooked banker’s son to end up in poverty. He was the first, and possibly the last crooked banker’s son to make a virtue of poverty, and to demonstrate this in his lifestyle – living in a barrel, sleeping rough, going naked in the street, and declaiming rude jokes about the rulers and institutions of Athens, the state in which he lived.
There is some dispute over whether Diogenes’s barrel was in fact a large wine or oil storage jar; and whether the cause of his death was suicide by self-suffocation, gastroenteritis from raw octopus, or manslaughter by a hungry dog.
There is no dispute over the fame Diogenes continues to enjoy for his subversion of the powerful, wealthy, and gullible of his society, and for the wit of his apothegms. They are all hearsay; next to nothing Diogenes wrote has survived.In the truth and in truth-telling, it’s certain that Diogenes was a believer. But excepting himself, towards truth-tellers in particular – journalists, lawyers, University of Chicago professors, and veterans of the US Marine Corps and CIA – Diogenes was more than cynical. He illustrated this point with his habit of walking about in the bright sunshine with a lighted lantern. Asked what he was doing, he quipped that he was looking for an honest man.
Let’s celebrate in Diogenic style and with his two convictions — that pursuing the truth is no laughing matter, and that pursuing the truth in hope of making money, power and celebrity is a joke: those who do so are masturbating in public as Diogenes used to do but for an altogether different, selfless reason.
For the coming 2025 I wish you, dear reader, will catch a glimpse of the truth – enough to keep us in good spirits until the Moscow office reopens in mid-January; and then to slow down our arrival at the destination Diogenes recognized as inevitable for all truth-tellers – the empty barrel.
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