Regulations don’t really work unless they reflect the mindset of the majority…
And here’s how it works.
The rule about driving on the ‘right’ side of the road is observed without much need for enforcement.
Because the consequences are clear. And consistent, unless you drive a tank.
People had the same problem with condoms.
Until HIV came along…
Nowadays very few people engage in casual sex without one.
Give us time and … if SARS-CoV 2 will be around for long enough…
The first quote comes from the letter sent by the 105 pastors to the school districts in Ohio.
The second expresses Terry Firma’s own thoughts. Terry Firma being the author of the article…
Until reading his opinion I was convinced nobody else but those 105 pastors actually believed yoga could be considered a religion. Not in the First Amendment’s sense, anyway.
Here being the problem. A huge one.
By enlarging the definition of religion to encompass yoga – which is basically a practice, you end up with a wide enough definition to ‘engulf’ many other things. Science, and atheism, included.
Which, at some point, will be bundled with the items banned from being studied in schools.
What’s going on here?
Nothing much.
This is how ‘being rational’ works. You marshal all the resources you can identify towards reaching your goal.
Can the First Amendment be ‘helpful’ towards what ever I have in mind?
Does it mean that I’m going to actually weaponize it?
So what, if I’ll get a step closer to my target?
SARS-CoV 2 lock-downs have intensified the already heated discussion about ‘rights’. About “our rights”. Which have to be defended “at all costs”.
The way I see it, rights can be evaluated from two directions.
As ‘gifts’. Either gifted to us by ‘higher authorities’ or conquered for us by our ancestors.
Or as ‘procedures’. Elaborated in time by society and coined into law by our wise predecessors. Who had duly noticed that societies which respect certain rights work way better than those who don’t.
After all, societies are nothing but meta-organisms. Which, like all other organisms, function for only as long as the components interact according to certain, and very specific, rules. The ‘better’ the rules, the better the organism works.
In this sense, ‘rights’ are the code we use when interacting among ourselves. The rules we use when cooperating towards the well being of the society.
You don’t care about the society? Only about ‘your rights’?
OK, but if the society, as a whole, doesn’t work properly, who’s going to respect ‘your rights’?
Who’s going to help you when a bully will try to snatch ‘your rights’ away from you?
And bullies trying to separate you from ‘your rights’ are the most certain occurrence whenever societies cease to function properly.
Whenever the individual members of a society no longer respect each-other enough to collectively uphold their rights. Their rights.
Our rights.
I grew up under communist rule.
We studied marxism in school.
At some point, I was about 16, the teacher asked us about the relative merits of the different brands of materialism he had mentioned during his classes.
My answer was ‘dialectic materialism is better than all others because those who apply it into practice constantly gouge the consequences of their (political) decisions and fine tune policies accordingly’.
Some 15 years later the communist lager had imploded simply because those who were supposed to act in a dialectic manner had failed to put the principle in practice.
Coming back to the original question, ‘was Marx a determinist’, the answer is yes.
Marx’s dialectics is only a procedure. Meant to help the communists exercise the dictatorship mandated by Marx in the name of the proletariat. And dictatorships are determinist by definition.
Why mandate one if you are not convinced that things can be ruled?
For the long run and in a comprehensive manner?
Nothing existed before we came around. To notice.
They were there, alright. But didn’t existed, yet.
Most dictionaries do not discriminate between ‘being’ and ‘existing’.
But I still recall, vividly, those moments when – as a teenager, I tried to make myself remarked by the girl I fancied at that moment. More often than I’d like to remember, it was as if I didn’t existed at all.
I was standing there, making a fool of myself, yet I didn’t existed at all.
Simply because I wasn’t noticed.
By the significant one.
Everything which has a temporal dimension – movement, transformation or both, incurs costs and produces consequences.
From a rock sliding down a slope to me writing this.
The difference between these two being the simple fact that no rock has ever had any goal.
You see, the rock looses some energy and mass while sliding down. It accelerates at first but since no rock has ever slidden for ever.
Only rocks never do anything on their own. Something has to happen to them first.
They do bear the costs – they wear down, break, etc., yet they don’t mind. For they are not, at all, aware of what’s going on. And, anyway, completely unable to do anything about it. Hence not at all ‘responsible’ about any of the consequences produced by whatever they had been involved in. Happened to them, actually.
Fast forward to me. I’m not only alive – hence reactive to whatever happens to me, but also aware. Aware of my own awareness even.
I notice the costs I have to pay. Hence I try to minimize them.
And here’s the gist of the matter.
My awareness drives me to minimize the costs I incur during my life AND to be very careful about the consequences of my endeavors.
Theoretically, at least…
Nothing will ever happen unless:
– There’s enough, and suitable, space.
– There are enough, and suitable resources. In that place, of course.
– Something starts it.
Trivial?
Good!
What you’ve just read being trivial for you only means you’ve already figured this out.
That you cannot master anything
– which happens outside your consciousness,
– you don’t really understand,
– you haven’t set your mind on.
There are a lot of people who prod us to ‘think out of the box’.
And a few who dare to warn us about the perils of pushing it too far…
I’m gonna invite you to the next level.
Instead of sending your imagination to think outside the box – while the rest of you remains comfortably inside, let’s step outside ‘in person’.
Classic thinking outside the box does nothing but enlarges the box. Brings inside a portion of the outside. Moves the walls.
Bringing in a lot of additional clutter in the process.
By stepping outside, physically, you have the opportunity to actually see the problem as an ‘independent’ box. Separated from you and separated from the environment.
How about this for a change in perspective?
This way it will be easier for you to notice, and carefully examine, the links which exist between you and the problem. Between ‘the’ problem and the rest of the problems. Between the problems and the environment. The place where you have to cope with the problems.
The place where you live.
And that, my friend, is your biggest problem.
How to step out of your own life.
In order to make it better.
I need you to pretend a few things.
That you don’t know what a cart is. Or a horse.
That you are a logical machine.
That you are told a cart is something laden with merchandise, that the horse is what moves the cart and that the purpose of the whole endeavor is to transport the merchandise from A to B.
Then you will be asked to stack the three elements according to their importance.
How likely are you to arrange them in this order:
Merchandise, cart, horse?
It would be perfectly logical, right?
Remember that you don’t know anything else but what you’ve just been instructed.
That the ‘action’ is ‘transport merchandise M, laden in cart C – moved by the horse H, from A to B’.
Mere logic convinces you that the most important thing here is M. Simply because the whole brouhaha revolves around M. Followed by C – closest to M, and only then by H. Right?
Only mere logic is seldom enough… Each of those three has its own merits and their relative importance depends on many things.
On what the owner thinks about each of them. If all three belong to the same person.
On the relationship between the person asked to determine their relative importance and each of those elements.
The owner of the merchandise will certainly consider his property to be more important than either horse or carriage. But will consider the horse more important than the cart if the merchandise has to arrive sooner rather than whenever. Or the carriage more important than the horse if the merchandise is fragile…
The owner of a single horse will try to protect the animal. Simply because he will also need it tomorrow.
The owner of the trucking company will ask the drivers to drive the horses to their limits. Simply because he has so many of them.
And so on.
My point being that logic is almost never enough.
We must also understand what’s going on there before passing judgement on something.
Otherwise we’ll end up scratching our heads.
Click the drawing above and read what tborash has to say about the whole thing. He’s right too, you know.
nicichiarasa 