I’m tired of hearing about plagiarism. I don’t give a crap about it and 99% of the time it’s some narrow academic definition of plagiarism that means nothing to anyone not in academia.

OH NOES he plagiarized his own work! She doinked some boring speech that was itself a rehashing of a billion other crappy speeches! It’s the end of the world!

In a hundred years, this era’s obession with originality and plagiarism will seem positively bizarre after culture changes again.

Interesting topic for further research: how and why plagiarism of the minutest variety came be to be such an obsessional topic for so many, when through much of human history the concept as we define it wouldn’t even have made sense to anyone.

“The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.”

-Peter Watts, Echopraxia

Rationality — to the extent that we engage in it — is our hoodwinking engine being repurposed from deceiving, manipulating and managing others to an attempt at understanding the mind of the universe. (And no, I don’t mean some wishy-washy conception of “universal mind.” I mean that our minds are engaging in animism about the universe as a cognitive tool.)