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by now you've realized that you're not part of the herd. you can acknowledge that you're free from the opinions and motivations of the masses. but you also know that what you think and understand doesn't convince any members of general society. it's a curse. it's the ability to say something fundamentally, and understandibly, right, and have that statement rejected. it's frustration. it's life.
so i've decided, with the help of friends, to outline my curse, my view of the workings of the world free from society, and my views on various issues.
where to begin? i've always thought that the most fundamental of questions were always the most irrelevent ones. so when i hear people claiming, 'the existence of god [sic] is crucial to our understanding,' i get unnerved. i don't believe in any god, gods, deity, force, whatever, because i don't think it really matters whether i do or not. my living of my life can be just as fulfilling or "good" without the knowledge of a god. i can also continue living in the absence of that knowledge. i don't care if when i die i don't elevate to some greater plane of existence, because there is only one plane of existence in my understanding. (and i also don't believe that anything could possibly be beyond the whole of humanity's understanding, no matter to what lengths we go to understand.) further, i can't bring myself to accept that there is hierarchy. this topic should be discussed in great length later. in all honesty, i think god is irrelevant, and i don't really care to discuss a null issue to any great length.
i don't propose an alternative, as it were, to god. nor do i propose an explanation for all this. i don't care about where it came from, or whether it was created by god or by chemical interaction. the knowledge i do have for certain is that i'm existing in a world "controlled" by social beings. control is such an awkward word to use for this idea, but i mean that this world is filled with, and dominated by, the ideas of humans. quite clearly this seems like an obvious statement, but i think it's much more complex than it seems. filled with the ideas of humans... in other words everything, since the unknown point in time when australopithecus became homo, took on a second face. this new animal, the man, homo, dilineated himself from nature. he separated himself from nature, for whatever reason. and as a result, everything that exists in nature has two qualities: that which is inherent in it, and that which man sees.
so what does all that mean? all that dilineation? it means that when a human looks at nature he looks at it differently because, as he sees it, he is not a part of nature. well that sounds pretty dumb, everyone knows that he or she is an animal. yet humans will also say we're different from all the other animals. we have nuclear power, tools, laws, etc. we are humans and they are just animals. just animals. we maintain that our technology seperates us from the animals. it breaks us away from being their 'equals.'
i hold that humans are part of nature and are animals. i hold that our capacity to formulate laws and wield the power of thought does not make us better than animals. i agree that we are different from animals in that respect. but i refuse to think that humans are better than animals because we could kill them, eat them, make bombs, or genetically engineer them. these are all just human abilities. the reason we say that these abilities make us better than animals is incorrect. the fundamental assumption behind our justification for our being better is that there is something called good. we are more good, in other words, 'better,' than animals because we have given certain values to everything. we have given the value of good to the ability to make nuclear energy. we have given the value of good to the existence of morality, the state, and technology. we have given the value of good to everything we view good. i am saying that humans only consider themselves to have more 'good' things than rabbitts do when, in nature, there is no such thing as good.
could it truly be that humans have really invented good and evil? why is that such a ground breaking concept? is it not clear that nature has no concept of good or evil? just look around. lightning doesn't care if it strikes a rock, or a human, or a fluffy mammal, or a tree. nature doesn't put value to life. the lion doesn't justify and rationalize its killing of a gazelle. it just kills it to eat. only humans consider the lions' destroying of the weak is cruel and bad. yet we acknowledge it as being 'natural.' nature does not have reason for its actions, nature has reason in its actions. humans are the ones who give actions meanings. nature just acts. is all this clear? there are no inherent values in nature.
just because we are human does not mean we are required to make value judgements. that is to say, being human does not force us to attribute values to things. our being human is independent of the reason we give values to things. for one, we have been simply taught to think in those terms which humans have created. society teaches small children an almost infinite number of values: stealing is bad, god is good, death is bad, mommy and daddy are good, hitting is bad, rules are good, and so on. society continues to require that such knowledge of good and evil be readily available among all its members. additionally, society likes to think in terms of things that have value added to them. it is much easier to say that 'death is always bad' and create laws (which are always assumed to be good by the multus) based on that definite foundation than it would be to say 'death happens' and dismiss murder as common occurance. unfortunately, it really can't be said what would happen in a society that does not ascribe values to things. like i said in the opening paragraph, whether something is correct or not is irrelevent, because, once it's seen as 'not acceptable,' it is rejected without regard to merit. in any event, humans decided to make value judgements, when they really didn't have to.
but what's the harm in making these value judgements? how could murder possibly be not bad? what's the matter with saying hitler was evil? while all these are very good points, i will remind you that within society, human value judgements are very real. i will also remind you that i never said anything was bad about humans placing values on things, i just said it was incorrect. In other words, hitler's actions were not inherently evil; however, since he was part of human society, and his actions according to human society were bad, his actions were bad.
i can tell that this idea is difficult to understand. it requires a certain degree of openness in order to detach oneself from his or her social upbringing and step out of the scene. once we have stepped back from the scene, no longer influenced by social teachings, we can see the difference between humanity's perception of things and the reality of things. i'm not saying that either is better than the other, i'm plainly stating that this is how it is. once you see that 'death just is' instead of 'death is bad,' you will begin to realize the difference between what is and what we think is.
remember above that i said human thought filled and dominated the world? we've discussed filled to some extent, now i want to explain dominate. this is extremely obvious, in fact. what i meant was that there is no competition on this planet for human value establishment. that just means that until human society changes, we will continue to view the world in our value terms.
how does one go about not making value judgements? quite simply in fact. it's a two-step process: recognize the value judgement, then realize that it is a social construction. this doesn't mean you will live your life any differently, though you may view everything in a new light. the best way to fully expose anything that might have a value judgemnet placed on it would be to play devil's advocate. try challenging core assumptions: 'why is death bad?';'what makes murder bad?';'what's the good in following laws?';'what's so good about personal property?' all these questions don't have firm foundations, but all of society holds them as unbending.
i'd like to say that even with the ability to not make value judgements, and recognize them when they are made, i'm still part of society, and i'm still bound by the laws and assumptions that everyone else is, whether he is aware of human created values or not. since i'm part of society, my positions with regard to civil rights, etc. must be argued on those terms. what this means is that just because technically death isn't an inherently bad thing, i am going to go around professing that hitler did what he had to do, or that murderers are just being natural. these things they did are seen by society as bad, in the terms of society, and therefore they have been constructed as bad by humans. there is no place for non-social terminology in social circumstances, just as there is no place for social terminology in non-social circumstances. in other words, society is not right in saying that a lion murdered a gazelle because he killed it while it was being happy, or whatever.
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