The Philosophy Rock & Other Thoughts
Every few months or years or so I go and find all the old junk I wrote in my formative years and read it over. I love it. Nothing rocks the ego quite like reading something you wrote–it’s GREAT to agree so fully with something you read, and it’s also great to know someone is totally agreeing with something you wrote. Unfortunately I’ve run into some lameness: I’m static. My philosophy (as concerns Life, the Universe, and Everything) over the years doesn’t seem to have changed, it’s a big giant rock that just sits there.
Live and let live is the gist of it. Maybe I need to suffer more and lose some faith in humanity to get a different view. Or maybe I need to witness something amazing to get that faith to go up. Right now humanity seems, as I think it always did, neutral. Maybe not a mistake, but no guiding principles pointing us toward good or evil. Like The Comedian of Watchmen, it all seems a joke. No matter how ‘good’ someone is, random (or not) events are going to warp the mammal minds of those still learning. It can happen for good, too, of course; “And that’s the moment I knew I wanted to become a doctor and help people.”
We can’t control the human mind for the benefit of its owner. “We’re going to let you grow up in a perfectly safe environment where nothing TERRIBLE happens, but you learn to cope with loss, how to communicate properly, how to respect the opinions of others (etc., etc.).” So in the meantime we’re stuck with the chaos of life, and the horrible fears that brings to parents all over the world.
Humans are not good or evil (if we can even say words like good or evil really have any meaning–I argued recently about just such words). Humans tend to be selfish, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing all the time. Humans tend to protect that with which they are comfortable. Again, neither good nor evil, but it sure gets under people’s skin when the conservatives wish things would stop changing. Evil? Nah. Selfish? Yup. It would be ideal if everyone had the capacity to view what lay beyond their eyesight, but just because Group A can’t see Item X that happens to be SUPER important to you (never mind all the stuff you can’t see) doesn’t make Group A “evil.”
I was speaking of this to a friend recently. I’m more conservative than most people I know, though socially speaking I lean left. Almost all of my peers are absolutely more liberal than I am, and I think it’s giving me a negative view of “the liberal folk.” People bitch and moan and complain (I do it all the time), but sometimes I don’t have the ability to filter it out. Given the fact that most of my peers are liberal when it comes to “complaining about politics” I pretty much *only* ever hear people complaining about all the horrible things the right wingers are doing. The fact that I tend to hate politics means the complaints usually rub me the wrong way, but I’m only ever hearing liberals complain on account of my having like 2 or 3 conservative acquaintances (and they, also knowing my liberal friends, usually stay quiet out of fear of being gang-beaten into submission). Am I empirically headed down a path of looking down on liberals but being mildly indifferent to conservatives?
This is getting way more political than I wanted. Politics are dangerous for me because I know nothing about them. This is yet another thing that has remained static throughout the years. My political beliefs tend to stem from that philosophy rock. If I can work things out in my head that’s how I think things should be. If I can’t work things out in my head it’s probably because thinking about them hurts, or because I’m blissfully unaware.
Some time ago I thought often on human nature and what drives people to be who they are, and what drives societies to be what they are. In the end I came to a conclusion and revisiting those thoughts never really seems to alter that conclusion. People are products of that which goes into ‘em (quite probably including things I am unaware of at this time that fall neither within the realm of nature nor nurture), and that’s what I believe. When people DO something it’s usually for a reason, maybe to prove a point, maybe to get what they want, maybe to satisfy some base desire. And even if that desire is something along the lines of sexual gratification that comes only at the pain and suffering of another I have trouble convincing myself that they are “evil.” I cannot fathom a “human” reason for being “evil.” Or I suppose I can fathom reasons, but they’re mostly “asshole philosophies.” “Human brain likes power and that is natural; when I exert power over other people I feel invigorated. Whether or not this is evolutionarily good or bad is irrelevant. My mind likes it, I will do it.” A willful disregard for anything beyond the animal pleasure centers of the brain.
Or perhaps one can be evil out of a philanthropic desire. “Nothing inspires good in people like witnessing callousness in others. If I go through life as an antagonist for others I will strengthen those I victimize (or weed them out, for the better of the species), bring others together against myself, and make people thankful for the good they DO see in their life.” I bet that would make a great insanity plea in a courtroom :P
That said, 99.999% of the time (I’d wager) when people are dicks it’s for a far less sophisticated reason. The reason is exactly what they tell you in school and on TV growing up: they have problems, they take it out on others, they don’t think of others because it’s easier and more convenient to think only of themselves. The other .001% of the time you can chalk it up to serious and real mental issues. And the remaining 0% are the super villains who think they’re bettering humanity.