The Universe doesn’t care because:
It isn’t aware. Of anything.
It isn’t aware of us.
It’s a jerk.
Or the Universe does care but it’s us who are not aware…
Archives for category: teleology
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Have you left no sense of decency?”
Joseph Nye Welch, 9 June 1954,
replying to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
As an European, I’m fascinated with how intense the Americans are.
‘knows nothing (nor cares) about Kommunism’…
As if Joe McCarthy had never existed – btw, he was a fascist – and Kommunism had been a German thing. All other languages use “c” when spelling the word, you know…
As a Romanian – who had spent the first 30 years of his life under the yoke – I can pretend to know a thing or two about the subject. Given the fact that Romania had been subjected to both fascist and communist rule. 1938-1945 and 1945-1989, respectively.
Apparently, and declaratively, those two are at the opposing ends of the political spectrum.
In the day to day practice, both belong to the totalitarian mode of controlling a society/country.
Before going any further, I’m going to mention a few traits shared by both modi operandi.
Communism had been first formulated – by Marx – and only then put in practice.
Fascism, like most other political ideologies, had been first practiced and only later put into words.
As far as I know, for communism to be successfully instated in a country, that country had to have had experienced a bout of fascism. Even if it had not been declared as such. This is a necessary condition but it isn’t sufficient. Fascism had been invented – declaratively – in Italy, but Italy hasn’t – not yet, anyway – become communist.
All communist and fascist regimes had ended in abject failure.
While all communist regimes had been instated in former fascist(oid) countries – to the best of my knowledge – fascistoid regimes may be, and already have been, reinstated in former communist countries.
There are also a few notable differences.
Communism pretends all property belongs to the entire people while fascism allows individuals to retain the ownership of their ‘belongings’. But only theoretically and subject to various limitations.
Under communist rule, the ‘democratic process’ is used exclusively to rubber-stamp whatever decisions had already been made by the current dictator while some fascist regimes use the electoral process to gouge the ‘social temperature’ of the ‘political organism’.
While the communist regimes tend to crumble under their own weight, the fascists usually grow too big (cocky) for their own good.
Before ending, I must mention the fact that both China and Russia have become fascist countries, despite China’s leaders pretending their country, literally their country, continues to be communist and despite Putin pretending Russia is a democracy. A democracy which attempts to denazify Ukraine…
“that which is divinely natural,
but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.“
Mary Baker Eddy
Well, we are indeed in the presence of a miracle.
In the presence of a wonderful miracle!
In spite of the entrenched obstinacy of some ‘infallible’ and very powerful agents – who had Giordano Bruno burned in a public square for maintaining exactly the same thing – we have finally accepted this as a fact.
Some of us, at least…
Biden led Trump 37% to 35% in a hypothetical matchup, with the remaining 28% saying they weren’t sure who to pick or would vote for someone else or no one at all.
Neither Biden nor Trump were widely liked by people outside their parties. Just 31% of independents had a favorable opinion of Trump and 32% thought as much about Biden.
At 80 years old, Biden is the oldest U.S. president ever to sit in the White House, and 63% of Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that he was too old to work in government. Thirty-seven percent disagreed.
Still, Biden leads the Democratic contest by even more than Trump leads the Republican field, with 63% of Democrats’ support compared with 15% for anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
What’s going on here?
What happened with/in the greatest/most powerful democracy on Earth?
Why has the American People allowed itself to be split in half? Each of those halves bowing to its own idol…
Only because ‘they had avocados’?!?
And what about Reagan? He was right, after all… Trump was the government, wasn’t he?
Reagan was incomplete.
Government is nothing but a tool. A tool for the society to govern itself with. “of the people, by the people, for the people“. But also a tool for a dictator to exploit a country.
Blaming the tool never takes the blamer out of the ‘unpleasant’ situation.
A more complete statement would have been:
‘Any unchecked government tends, sooner rather than later, to become a problem.’
The key word here being ‘unchecked’, not government. For the same reason which had prompted ‘god’ to warn us:
Any graven image you will ever make will inevitably be incomplete. Not because of your incompetence but because of my infinite complexity. I, your god, am infinite. Hence incomprehensible. You might glimpse some, or even a lot, about my ‘true’ nature but you’ll never find out enough. Enough for you to make a ‘usable’ graven image.
A reliable idol…
‘Exploring the consequences of our limited consciences‘
A truth is, first and foremost, an expression.
A message, formulated by an observer, describing a portion of what the person expressing themselves considers to be a ‘portion’ of ‘reality’. Being a message, any truth is formulated by means of a language.
Does anybody know everything about any subject? About anything, actually?
No, nobody knows everything about anything. Hence there is no such thing as a complete truth.
Furthermore, being expressed by means of a language, a truth – any expression, actually – will never be able to convey to the person receiving the message everything the transmitter intended to say. The transmitter is never able to cram ‘everything’ inside an inherently limited message, no language is absolutely ‘precise’ and no receiver will ever interpret any message the way the transmitter intended it to mean. Hence even if anybody will ever learn everything about anything, that person will never be able to convey that knowledge to anybody else. Let alone to everybody else…
What next?
‘Never ever believe anything? Anymore?!?’
Is it possible for us, humans living in concert, to cooperate in this manner?
Knowing that nothing which is being said, one way or another, is ‘true’? Completely true?
Well, we did get this far, didn’t we?
We’ve been expressing ourselves, in the imperfect manner I described above, since we’ve learned to use language. Since we’ve learned to speak…
70 000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, is when some scientists believe we’ve started to communicate more or less like we do now. The people living then had the same genes we have now and the bones they have left us to dig up and stare at are similar to ours. Hence the only thing which differentiates us from our ancestors is our culture. A treasure of knowledge which has been noticed – bit by bit, formulated using language – message by message, and remembered, one way or another. Hence the only difference between us and our ancestors is a collection of incomplete – and imperfectly interpreted – pieces of truth.
Then again, is it possible for us – humans living in concert – to cooperate by means of incomplete and ‘misinterpreted’ pieces of truth?
Well, we came this far going (up?) this way, didn’t we?
It seems that as long as we do it ‘in good faith’ things will, eventually, ‘mesh up’ just fine!
Which leads us to ‘the truth’. ‘The’ as different from ‘A’ truth.
While a truth is a message, the truth is a state of mind.
The understanding of the fact that what we call ‘reality’ can be learned only ‘in concert’.
Only as long as we help each-other along the process. Only as long as each time we formulate ‘a message’ we do our best to ‘speak the truth’.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate
their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
I have spent the first 30 years of my life under communist rule.
Under a communist yoke, actually.
I have witnessed Trump being elected President of the United States.
Thrown out by popular vote.
Then I watched Mike Pence being spirited away by the Secret Service. Some of those convinced by Trump’s Big Lie were chasing the Vice President inside the Capitol in an attempt to…
The US Supreme Court reversed Roe vs Wade.
Prigozhin, also known as Putin’s chef – and lately the mastermind behind PMC Wagner – had become so pissed that organized a field trip. Then turned his troops around and went to Belarus.
What’s going on here?!?
The world has become a battle-field.
A political battle-field where ‘right’ and ‘left’ fight for control.
Both sides oblivious to the fact that politics is, or more exactly ‘should be’, about solving people’s problems.
Given my experience – half a life spent under communist yoke – people expect me to root for the right side of the political spectrum. Which I do.
But I’m also fully aware that the left would have had no chance, absolutely no chance at all, if those on the right had been just a tad more considerate.
And here’s the catch.
There’s no such thing as a good left but there are a good right and a bad right.
The bad thing about the left – about the entire left – is the fact they ‘know better’. All of them. The left is choke full of solutions. Whenever somebody says ‘I noticed there’s a problem with… What are your thoughts about this subject?’ somebody from the left will surely grab the opportunity: ‘we’ve already told you that this and that had to be done a long time ago in order to solve this thing before it even happened’!
The bad thing about the right, the militant portion of the modern right, is that they’ve become just like their sworn enemies. They’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and that’s what they did. They joined the left in battle. Using the very tools they have borrowed from the left and adopting the very same attitude.
The bad kind of right are also convinced that ‘they know better’. That you have to be a moron in order to be a ‘liberal’. Or, at least, a ‘greenhorn’. “If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain”.
In fact, it’s exactly this infatuation with their own ‘brains’ which is the worst thing about the left. And about the bad right.
I see no difference between Marx’s “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” and Trump’s ‘truthful hyperbole’.
You see, Trump isn’t a self made man, as he pretends to be.
He would have never become what he is today if Tony Schwartz, a liberal, hadn’t ghostwritten the Art of the Deal.
Furthermore, Trump would have never become the 45th President of the United States of America without the support of the ‘activist republicans’. The ones convinced that Roe vs Wade must be reversed. At all costs.
The ones convinced, just like the ‘liberals’ are, that they ‘know better’.
And, by the way, this is a fake.
Something that Orwell would have agreed upon but was never actually written by him.
“As a man thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”
James Allen
Sometime ago – more than 45 years, when food was still plentiful in communist Romania – I heard for the first time that ‘many people dig their graves with their teeth’.
I was too young to understand the deeper meaning of this. That sooner or later each of us will meet the consequences of our previous decisions.
15 years ago I read a book written when I was a toddler. Almost 60 years ago.
The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann.
Nowadays, the social media is full of messages stating that the posters actually don’t care about what other people think of them.
What happened to “society is, in fact, habit”?
Have we become self-sufficient enough to live, each of us, on their own?
Really?
Do we really think like this?
Cocky enough to give the finger to everybody else?
Don’t we realize that we’re building a new pattern here? A new habit?
Will our children say that we’ve built the hell they’ll be living in by carelessly talking about it?
After all, the most dangerous enemy is that who worms its way from within.
Conceit cannot be survived!
“Propaganda machines give too much power to symbols;
they tell you the confederate flag is offensive!”
The fact that propaganda machines give too much power to symbols doesn’t mitigate the fact that some people find that flying the confederate flag is intended as an offense.
On the contrary, actually!
All people, men and women alike, are born, nursed and initially educated by their mothers.
By their mothers, inexorably women!
Some of the feminists, mostly women, act as if they want to exact revenge over their former ‘masters’.
Over men. Whom they perceive as oppressors.
Most of the feminists, from both genders, believe that women should be equal to men. That they are not yet so and that this is the most important problem which has to be solved in order for mankind (?!?) to go forward.
Being raised under communist rule – where women had been put to work, hence granted a lot of ‘equal rights’ – by a very ‘progressive’ pair of women – mom and grandmother – I grew up having the impression that men and women considered themselves partners. That being how my father and mother treated each-other.
I used scare-marks around progressive because neither my mother nor my maternal grand-mother considered themselves as such. Only behaved in that manner. Which I grew up considering to be normal.
Illusions, like always, end up being shredded.
Very soon I learned that not all people had been born equal.
And that I had been dealt ‘the better hand’…
So I didn’t waste any more time/energy to consider the matter!
For 40 or so years…
This is not the good moment to delve into details.
Enough for me to say that my quest – to understand as many as possible of the consequences ‘inflicted’ by the limited nature of our consciousness – led me to feminism. To ‘feminism’ seen as a social phenomenon.
Already convinced – since early childhood, conviction beefed up by the relation built in concert with my wife, that men and women are equal partners in the adventure called life, I was confronted by a huge dilemma:
Why on Earth so many women raise their children – both future men and future women – in the conviction that men are entitled to be served and women are meant to indulge their wishes?!?
Is it an attitude imposed by the overbearing men?
Hence easy to unlearn?
Or is it an evolutionary thing?
Hence harder to leave behind…
I continue to be under the impression that my most important break-trough to-date is that each individual conscience is primordially concerned with its own survival. Not as much with its ‘physical’ survival as with the conservation of the good impression it has about itself. With maintaining its self-esteem!
For instance, this is the reason for so many of us having such a hard time when trying to ditch a bad habit! Because we have to admit first, before ourselves, that we’ve been wrong for so long! That we’ve been acting foolishly since adopting that habit.
Coming back to the main subject, who would like to be?
The proud mother of a highly successful man or the mother of a below average Joe?
Small wonder then that in the current cultural environment we continue to raise highly assertive men. And, sometimes, women.
On the other hand, if you’ve been a submissive woman all your life, how do you feel in the presence of assertive women? Uncomfortably? Even more so if the assertive woman happens to be your daughter?
So, could it be possible that we are stuck in the present situation because we’ve conditioned ourselves to over-value the glitzy part of what we call ‘success’?
And because we’ve not yet learned to forgive ourselves for past mistakes?
Ernst Mayr, an evolutionist, put it this way:
‘Evolution is no way about the survival of the fittest.
“Fittest” to what ?!? since evolution is about being able to cope with change…
In reality, evolution is about the demise of the unfit!’
Same here.
We can fight ourselves into the ground, chasing ‘success’.
Or we can thrive together.
As equal partners, complementing each = other.
“Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.”
The true version of the Chinese ‘curse’
too many times translated in English as
“May you live in interesting times”
Not so long ago, a presidential candidate told his audience “People… my people are so smart!….And loyal! you know, I could shoot someone on the 5th Avenue and not loose votes!”
As things happened, he was right. His people did vote for him.
He, a guy who had previously bragged about ‘grabbing women by the pu$$y’.
Four years later, the People changed their mind. And voted to send him back to Mar-a-lago…
He told ‘his’ people the vote had been rigged.
The ‘smart ones’ believed Trump to the tune of eventually chasing Vice-president Pence all over the Capitol in an attempt to convince him to ditch the result of the vote. Against all evidence, as certified by all pertinent authorities.
Currently, there is an increasing number of people floating the idea that ‘democracy’ isn’t for everybody.
The notion isn’t exactly new – see the ‘debate’ pitting ‘republic’ against ‘democracy’ – but lately its promoters have become even more brazen. They posit that since people are not equally endowed – intellectually, mostly – they should be tested before being allowed to vote.
Nothing new under the sun? The whole thing is nothing more than a rehash of the notion put forward by Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers?
Not exactly!
Heinlein proposed that full citizenship – including the right to vote – should be extended exclusively to those willing to put their life on the line. ‘If you want to decide the future, you need to commit yourself to defending the present. With your life, if necessary’.
Quite a difference from ‘I’m not OK with how you may vote so I’m going to look for ways to disenfranchise you, under various pretenses.’
The way I see this, we’re confronted by two things.
An increasing lack of trust amongst us. And an burgeoning amount of intellectual dishonesty.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“
As per the United States Constitution, Arms are supposed to be kept and borne with the main goal of protecting the free State. Which State was supposed to be governed by a government “of the people, by the people, for the people“.
Nowadays, under the pretext that ‘the government is more often the problem than the solution’, the defenders of the Second Amendment “as it was written” maintain that Arms are necessary so that the people may defend itself against an overbearing government.
Otherwise put, whenever I don’t like the outcome of an election, I need to be able to start a(n) (un)civil war. An attitude born out of a complete distrust in our fellow citizens’ ability to vote ‘right’.
And a simpler version.
I don’t trust all my fellow citizens’ ability to vote reasonably but I trust all my fellow citizens enough to let them walk around armed to their teeth. Unconditionally, in some states.
Coming back to Marcus Aurelius’ pronouncement, who is the one smart enough to determine whether those 10 000 actually have no idea about the subject at hand?
Not to mention the fact that Marcus Aurelius never actually said it…. Wrote it, more precisely.
And why do I choose to believe this guy Sadler instead of trusting the bloke who had created the meme? Because Sadler makes sense. And because Sadler had put his name forward – remember Heinlein? – instead of cloaking himself in the shadows of the internet.
nicichiarasa 