Ages ago the marvelous @waphilip aka Spider Blogger challenged me to tell the story behind my Steemit username.
It's a great topic, and I had to be ready for it, and now I'm ready.
The inspiration of it goes back to the TV series Breaking Bad. Walter does some messed up criminal thing, but it wasn't complete. It was tentative, and ended up being the worst of both worlds, where it riled the enemy but wasn't actually a way to stop them. It would have been better to do nothing. And Mike then famously warns him no more half-measures, Walter.
These things come up sometimes, where doing something tentative is worse than either extreme.
The Breaking Bad universe is hectic and violent, and we're not trying to be like them. But it doesn't mean you can't take a kernel of insight.
I believe progress is paved by full strokes of what you really believe. Some will miss, and that's fine. But that's actually how we get balance.
Balance and the smooth temperate kind of world we all want to live in is what happens when you combine all the isolated spurts. You don't want to try to be or embody the average cross-section of everything. You want to be the complete expression of what you believe, and that's the best way to help balance the world.
It ties into why I love the non-aggression principle. It's more than just a tool to win arguments against statist dummies. It's the foundation of what you can and can't do. Don't initiate violence. And once you really appreciate that, it's liberating to realize that you can do everything else.
If you're not hurting anyone else, then life is your video game and you just do whatever you want.
When you believe it's okay to hurt others, then (I speculate) your moral intuition is trying to fill itself in some other way, and now you'll also think it's not okay to do things that actually you can be doing. You'll put unnecessary boundaries on yourself.
You ever come across those people who think it's like a badge of honor that their beliefs are moderate? Two people disagree about something, and they think being somewhere in the middle is the necessarily good or noble thing to be proud of. As tho that was difficult to do? As tho anyone couldn't just do that? What's the point of you being here?
If everyone tried to be the cross-section of what other people believe, we'd quickly be swallowed up by one bad actor with enough inspiration. It's a paradox where the real way to have balance is to be unbridled and true to what you think is right.
Be one true spurt, is the best thing you can do. Be a dart. Don't try to be the collection of all the darts.
I respect people who are wrong way more than I respect people who are actively trying to be the moderate belief, or to be censored and ordinary.
Hence, "full-measure".
I believe this is the ideal we should be striving for.